Above, at the Momentum Institute in Paris on Friday 13th, 2017. Ugo Bardi is on the left of the photo, Yves Cochet (president of the institute) is at the center, with the white shirt.
The presentation at the Institut Momentum on Oct 13th was the fourth of a series of presentation related to my book "The Seneca Effect" that I gave in Paris last week. This one was probably the least formal one of the series. I gave some explanation of how system dynamics models can produce the asymmetric "Seneca Curve," but I concentrated on a section of the book, the one dealing with the extermination of whales during the 19th century. It is a theme related to the concept of Anthropocene: the human relation with the ecosystem.
The point that I try to stress in these presentations is that most people, including decision-makers, just don't have the concept of "overshoot", that is the tendency of consuming more resources than the system can produce, forcing it to crash down after some time. It is something that I described also in a previous talk.
The problem, here, is that not having the concept of overshoot, people happy go along the Seneca trajectory, thinking that the more resources they can extract from the system, the better things are for them. They don't realize that the more they go up, the faster they'll have to crash down. I surmised that we have a cultural problem: it is a relatively new concept that will have to penetrate culture. That will take time and it is not obvious that it will ever happen.
The comments that I received were varied and interesting. One point that found myself in agreement is that the concept of "Anthropocene" is really too narrow when it is intended as something that started with nuclear energy or with fossil fuels. The Anthropocene, really, started with the late Pleistocene, more than 10,000 years ago, when humans started having a major impact on the ecosystem causing, among many other effects, the extinction of the megafauna of those times.
From here, the discussion moved on how (and if) these concepts could move into the general consciousness of humankind. Here, Yves Cochet made a series of interesting observations. The one I think best summarizes the whole discussion is that "you cannot have a war economy if there is no war". As a former politician, Cochet understands the problem very well.
This is another way to state what I said before: as long as people move along the rising side of the Seneca curve, they enjoy the ride won't care about what's in store for them on the other side, the collapsing one. And that explains why all our efforts to alert people in advance failed, from the times of "The Limits to Growth" to peak oil and climate change. Those people who engaged into the attempt were marginalized as (to use Cochet's definition) "Totemic Circles". And this is the way the human mind works and it seems we have to accept it and enjoy life.
(about enjoying life, here is a picture of me, in Paris, drinking beer in Montmartre with the physicist Jacques Treiner)
