Lessons from unsustainable technology [John Lienhard, ISSS 1998 Plenary Session, July 23/98]

These notes are a rough transcription, prepared as each individual presenter and/or commentator spoke at the ISSS 1998 conference. Gaps and errors have likely occurred. For more accurate citations, please consult the original presenters. These notes have been contributed to the ISSS by David Ing, of the IBM Advanced Business Institute (sabi@systemicbusiness.org).

John Lienhard

• Professor of heat science at U. Houston
• Radio show: engines and ingenuity, written > 1300 episodes for NPR

• Today, would make more money on interest, rather than continued whaling.

• e.g. How fast to mine the ore?
• Idea of maximizing sustainable yield.

• Then lost the guano industry.

• Hotelling's model is too simple, because cost will be in another species.

• Dionysis Lardner wrote textbooks in 1828.
• Eventually textbook included coal, and shareholders.
• First dramatized new engines.
• Then enormous appetite for coal.
• Some assurance by miners that would supply demand for 1700 years in England, and 2000 years in Wales.
• Not even enough for England today.

• Is ingenuity unlimited?

• Some day, the coal mines will be empty, and furnaces will be cold.
• Saw trap in coal question.
• Didn't need to know that steam engines reaching thermodynamic limits.
• Use of steam spread, because engines were more efficient.

• Drove more coal.

Industrial frees us to find other things to work on.

We have to choose to save the world, each personally.

• Population pressure.
• Human generosity:

• Demographer Joel Coen:
• Hunting deer: ecologist 5 years in front of deer, economist 5 feet above, statistician said we got it.
• Not good enough.
• Zero growth population is still not enough.
• 18th century number, but then inclined to technological procedure.
• Today, look at quality of life.
• Culprit isn't religion or race:
• Primary drivers are poverty and denial of education for women.

• Anarchy as the solution for sustainable.
• Croprotkin: Russian prince, born 1842, read Darwin.
• Geography in Siberia.
• 1870 to Europe to study anarchy.
• Anarchies: individuals organize society by working together cooperatively.
• Not like by imperialists.
• Darwin: survival of the fittest.
• Croprotkin instead wrote that cooperation was the approach, instead.
• Acts of mercy
• Book: Mutual Aid, 1902.
• Marxists turned up their own Darwinian rhetoric.
• Letter to Lenin: Society which organizes itself without authority is like a seed underneath the snow.
• Leadership is an illusion. We each determine our own future.

• Fly around, come back with 100 others.
• Scientists can't explain: survival of the group for the species, not the individual.
• System based on trust.
• Coprotkin: Greek story similar.

African Lake: cyclids -- 200 species, only lips jaws and teeth are different.

• Some eat worms, some eat snails.
• Why haven't humans splintered and specialized?

• Our sharing goes beyond food.
• Taboos about mating across race, but we break them.
• We share the techniques of getting food.
• Cyclids have to evolve, can't share knowledge.

Sustaining power of technology change:

• Australian brush fires: complex fruit of human interaction.
• Bushmen live sparsely, fire became their friend.
• Eucalyptus trees have deep roots, can live through fires.
• White man changed environment.
• Shakespeare referenced birds, thought New York should be home for the all varieties of bird
• 1890 released starlings into Central Park
• 1942 to California
• Descend on potato fields.
• Causes plane crashes.
• Have tried everything, can't get rid of them.

• Serengeti plain from farmers clearing 2000 years ago.
• Starlings stay with us.

Questions

• Leinhard: Levenhock's number of 13.4 billion is frightening.
• The world might sustain that many, if could maintain consumption.
• Today, some funny dynamics in population.
• Europe is in decline.
• Where woman are not receiving education, birth is booming.
• Feyn: People have no idea of how many people.
• People don't matter as much as consumption: have to preserve the capital and live on the interest -- annually.
• Calamities will stop processes: e.g. wars.
• Lam: efficiency is also an issue.

• Giving a dollar, versus giving information.
• Also addictive versus non-addictive needs, e.g. power
• Not all addictive needs are harmful. Science may be an addictive need, but not harmful.
• (Planet Earth): If the addictions become wholesome addictions, then the human psyche can be redirected.