for: The Great Simplifcation, Nate Hagen, The Great Complexification, The Great Alienation, three great separations

comment

• Last night, I had a thought about Nate Hagen's "The Great Simplification" project. Seeing Annilina's post this morning made me think of a recent film I annotated on the isolated Jarawa people living on a once desolate island off the coast of India
  • https://hyp.is/go?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdocdrop.org%2Fvideo%2FNdvlO6bPG60%2F&group=world
• Watching the events of modern Indians exploited the Jarawa is like watching colonialism unfold in realtime.
• The Jarawa people interviewed said how they are happy with the life they have lived before modernity discovered them.
• Progress, especially the Western flavored one beginning with Colonialism, the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution has set a trajectory for what we might call "The Great Complexification".
  • Remember when watches and clocks were all mechanical spring and windup? Now billions of them depend on batteries. Do we really need to modernize everything? It simply creates more waste and greater demands on nature for natural resources. Do we really need exponentially increase stuff with an Internet of Things?
• Western influenced progress has led us into multiple progress traps, which now make up the many threads of the current polycrisis.
  • https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?max=100&expanded=true&user=stopresetgo&exactTagSearch=true&any=progress+trap
• Along with the Great Complexification, we also have the Great Alienation. John Ikard writes of the "Three Great Separations":
  • the agricultural revolution
  • the industrial revolution
  • the industrial agricultural revolution
    • https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Finthesetimes.com%2Farticle%2Findustrial-agricultural-revolution-planet-earth-david-korten&group=world
• These created successively more alienation. As progress marched towards modernity, we created more and more technology that broke apart community and making us dependent on transportation and communication technology to maintain it or some proxy of it. Today, we live in cities teeming with millions, yet there is widespread alienation in the mere act of walking or driving down a crowded street.
• It is the irony of modernity that it packs so many people into small spaces, and yet we are all estranged to each other.

• The Three “Great Separations” that Unravelled Our Connection to Earth and Each Other

• John Kkerd

• earth-friendly, justice-supporting consumers cannot translate their values into meaningful impact.

• producers up and down a supply chain can hide the negative social and environmental impacts of their operations, putting conscientious consumers at a disadvantage. //

This set the conditions for opaqueness that have plagued us ever since. //

time constraints, competing values, and everyday routines together thwart the rational intentions of well-meaning consumers (Røpke 1999)

This can be broken down into three broad categories of reasons:

• Rebound effects
  • https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?max=100&expanded=true&user=stopresetgo&exactTagSearch=true&any=jevon%27s+paradox
  • increases in consumption consistently thwart effciency-driven resource savings across a wide variety of sectors (Stern 2020). -sustainability scholars increasingly critique “effciency” both as:
    • a concept (Shove 2018)
    • as a form of“weak sustainable consumption governance” (Fuchs and Lorek 2005).
  • Many argue that, to be successful, effciency measures must be accompanied by initiatives that limit overall levels of consumption, that is, “strong sustainable consumption governance.

• Attitude-behavior gap

• Behavior-impact gap