The contest of ideas on today’s internet is often so heated, it is creating real conflict in the world, spreading unfounded conspiracy theories, and leading to outright rejection of fact by alarming numbers of people. Political systems of all varieties are struggling with this demotion of truth and what it means for responsible governance, fact-based problem-solving, security, innovation, and human rights.
Part of this phenomenon may be the problem of incomplete communication: Short quips are usually far too small an amount of language to allow for considered and precise reasoning. Even where not intended, they have the tendency to project certainty in a way where all other thinking must be suspect or unwelcome. The more we rely on short quips, sound bites or “headline writing” for access to truth, the more elusive (and exclusive) it feels.
Exclusivity is also part of the problem: As more voices flood the space of public discourse with short quips and hard-to-trace claims of evidence, the world begins to feel more other. Though we all have the ability to contribute our ideas to the messy mix, most people are left feeling like their values, experience, and ideas are subsumed by a flood of other voices, most of them angered by something or making sweeping cosmological claims.
This dynamic may explain why social media has not universalized a love of science and evidence, where careful, cooperative reasoning is prized and pursued, as many had hoped, but seems to have popularized a rejection of “elites” and a propensity for conspiracy theory.
There is another layer to this existential crisis—this questioning of who we are, why we cannot agree, and what we might choose, in order to save ourselves from ourselves. Human beings are not the isolated, technological masters of the universe we pretend to be. We are vulnerable, and our lives depend on the vast complexity of Earth’s biosphere. Deep ecology is the structure of reality, and we deny that fact at our peril.
What we don’t talk about enough is that the implicit effect of deep ecology is that we are vulnerable, and technocratic answers to existential questions fall short. We need science and discovery, and technology and innovation, to understand our world and to guard against danger, but that does not mean we will easily accept that a particular research paper has identified how we should live our lives.
When we parse the data from the Whole-Earth Active Value Economy (WEAVE) knowledge graph, a startling fact jumps out: Just 14 dimensions of sustainability and resilience knowledge and action contain 87.1 billion potential permutations—recombinations of the underlying categories, or variations of complex interrelationship. Adding an institution to the mix, as a 15th dimension, yields 1.31 trillion permutations.
What does this mean for the tension between social media, scientific evidence, and deep ecology? That complexity is clearly overwhelming if we aim to lay out the entire spreadsheet of relevant variables and recombinations. But, it echoes the vastness, evolutionary ferocity, and danger of the natural world. At the instinctual level, we want to remain ready for an evolving and unforeseeable threat.
Boiling all of this interactive contingency down to one neat conspiracy theory—one particular problem is attributable to one particular nefarious plot—can trigger the instinctual need for clarity about complex dangers. Social media do not provide us with reassurance that the world is simple, so messages that do spread across social media like viruses.
Deep ecology is the structure of reality, and that means we are vulnerable and dependent on countless factors and forces over which we have no control. Knowledge is our best tool, but the vastness of our persistent, underlying existential question—Why?—means we can always disagree on which knowledge is most useful. Ecology is a way of talking about how disagreements play out to shape a higher order. Competition and symbiosis are both happening at the same time.
Adding in four more dimensions to the WEAVE experiment, to ground the quest for resilience knowledge and adaptive capacity in our local experience, gives us 121.6 quadrillion permutations. That is the interactive landscape among just 19 dimensions of human experience involving Nature. Something in us naturally rejects the idea that any one assertion by others is our own whole story, because of course, it cannot be.
As we grapple with the deep ecology that still underpins and surrounds our hyper-technological culture, and the far-reaching consequences of our choices, we need to find an ecological approach to our disagreements. It is through the contest of ideas and interaction between paradigms that innovation becomes possible.
One of the most common intuitive insights, across the political spectrum, is that our institutions are not optimally designed for the complex compounding risks of our time. Science makes clear we face increasing risk from the effects of our industrial-scale disruption of Earth’s climate system and biosphere. We need not only technical solutions and innovations, and relevant policies and incentives; we also need to reconsider how we cooperate constructively from vastly different perspectives.
Nation-state governments cannot adequately serve their people without accounting for and defending the value of biodiversity, ecosystems, clean air and water, and climate resilience.
- Recognizing the rights of Nature is a critical tool for expanding the capacity of governance systems to defend human health, wellbeing, and the rights of future generations.
- Through the United Nations General Assembly, more than 160 nations have already recognized the human right to a clean, healthy environment.
- Treating access to factual information and the benefits of scientific discovery and best practices, as a fundamental right can also reinforce national governments’ ability to best serve their people and secure future prosperity.
- An expression of deep ecology is the emerging shift toward deep regenerative agriculture and landscape stewardship—where benefits to Nature are integrated to economic development and investment aims.
The institutions, ideas, and platforms for debate and discussion, which will help us manage the deep ecology of our moment, are still emerging. It is likely no single political perspective or established standard has all the answers. Part of the process of adjustment will be the discovery of new modes of value-assessment and insight-sharing.
