Energy Constrainted Learning: Part 6

Note: This post is part 6 of 6 in a serialization of Energy Constrained Learning.
Part 1: Introduction
Part 2: Peak Oil and Climate Change
Part 3: What’s the Concern?
Part 4: Scenario of Scarcity Industrialism
Part 5: Implications for Online Learning
 

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Reflections

Up to this point, I’ve deliberately tried to maintain the distance granted from writing with a quasi-academic style. That works well for description and explication, but eventually the most important question for each of us is “what do I really think about all this?” I’d like to end this post by making explicit my own views.

Peak oil is real. In fact, peak in all fossil fuels is real. Only the timing and rate of descent are in question. Timing, however, is sooner rather than later.

Climate change is also real and hugely serious. It should provide an immediate brake on the use of fossil fuels, but that seems doubtful. Most national leaders will pursue growth and life-as-we-know-it until a point where financial considerations dictate otherwise. Likely that will be way past the point where the transition can be managed tolerably well. Hopefully it won’t be too late.

More-of-the-same means that renewable energy sources, improved efficiency in the use of existing resources, and conservation are not likely to receive their full due any time soon. So we move out farther along the limb we’re sawing behind us.

Is scarcity industrialism our next stage? Perhaps. But what I find generally lacking in peak oil scenarios is a sense of fun and hope. I suppose this should not be surprising. Collapse scenarios can easily depict the loss of what exists today. It’s much more difficult to imagine the totally new.

Industrial society is surely unsustainable now. So I agree with both Schumacher and Greer that we humans need to see ourselves through ecological lenses, as beings both limited and liberated by nature. However, I would suggest one important addition. The minds of people are also a primary resource in the same sense as nature.

Considerable precedence exists for this suggestion. In Buddhist thought, for example, the notion of mind-nature appears prominently. It is defined by Kazuaki Tanahashi as the “foundation of all things.”^[1] Writing in the 13th century, Zen master Dogen describes mind-nature as:^[2]

… mind-nature in buddha-dharma includes the entire phenomenal world … Nothing, not even bodhi or nirvana, is outside mind-nature.

More recently, Gregory Bateson suggested “a necessary unity” of mind and nature.^[3] He bases this on the fundamental similarity of two systems, which each have a random component and a selective process so that only certain outcomes from the random actually endure. Such systems are called stochastic. In Bateson’s words: ^[4]

We face, then, two great stochastic systems that are partly in interaction and partly isolated from each other. One system is within the individual and is called learning, the other is immanent in heredity and in populations and is called evolution. One is a matter of the single lifetime; the other is a matter of multiple generations of many individuals.
…
[T]hese two stochastic systems, working at different levels of logical typing, fit together into a single ongoing biosphere that could not endure if either somatic or genetic change were fundamentally different from what it is.

In evolution there is random genetic change accompanied by natural selection. In learning, Bateson describes the corresponding stochastic process this way:^[5]

Today I would emphasize that creative thought must always contain a random component. The exploratory process – the endless trial and error of mental progress – can achieve the new only by embarking upon pathways randomly presented, some of which when tried are somehow selected for something like survival.

Yes, we do need to live sustainably within the limits of mind-nature.^[6] Mind deserves the same care and nurturing we give to other natural resources. Today this is far from the case. The world’s people lie woefully fallow.

At this crucial point in time, a huge need and opportunity exist for all people to fully engage their creativity, to experiment with new learning forms, to fail and adjust and try again, and ultimately to help drape tomorrow on learning.

I cannot conceive of what learning will look like in a hundred years. But I feel certain it will not look like education. Getting there requires lots of imagination. It also requires an abundance of gentleness.
 

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Notes

1. ^ Kazuaki Tanahashi (ed). Moon in a Dewdrop: Writings of Zen Master Dogen. New York: North Point Press, 1985, p307.
2. ^ Ibid. p154.
3. ^ Gregory Bateson. Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, Inc., 2002.
4. ^ Ibid. p141.
5. ^ Ibid. p172.
6. ^ Note that this differs fundamentally from the tired economics notion of human capital, which is used in the context of producing a good or service whose worth is determined by a market. Mind-nature is priceless.