One of the most delightful elements of being a visitor at Williams College is the other visiting professors I have the fortune to meet. It is easy to do, as many of us are located in the Center for Environmental Studies.

One of those visitors is Bill Vitek, Professor of Philosophy and chair of the department at Clarkson University. Bill is a delightful human being, with deep insight into the moral and cultural dimensions of sustainability.

Bill recently shared a talk with our program on his philosophy of limits. It sums up his principles for shifting our discourse and way of life towards one that is Earth friendly in every respect. What immediately caught my ear is his epigram — No Harm, No Hubris, No Hurry. Wouldn’t our lives be better if we lived by these maxims each day, a?

Bill has kindly agreed to share the talk on Ethos.

Cheers, Bill

~~~

Toward a Philosophy of Limits: No Harm, No Hubris, No Hurry

by Bill Vitek, Ph.D. (Philosophy, Clarkeson University)

We live in an increasingly interconnected global system the merits of which are touted with the intensity of American TV ads for beer and pick-up trucks. The costs are rarely mentioned and just as loudly discounted. And while it may go against the grain to say so, what we commonly call “progress” has produced some of the very problems we expect progress to eradicate. Advances in agriculture and medicine have led to the exponential growth of the human population, and that has put increased demands on top soil and fresh water. Technology has made more and more of the world’s fossil fuels accessible, leading to increased consumption and an increase in atmospheric carbon, leading to increased global temperatures. Worse, many of the solutions to these monumental challenges depend upon the logic of plenty: finding more oil, increasing soil and seed productivity, promoting economic growth and material consumption, utilizing more land for human food production, and even increasing human population. Each calls forth a faith in the unbounded human spirit to rise to any occasion, to conquer any foe. The recipe for success is simple: unleash human ingenuity; utilize it to harness and commodify nature’s immense and complex forces; enjoy the new and improved world that results; deny, repair or accommodate damage; repeat.

Considering how many of the problems that threaten to overwhelm us are the direct consequences of this Herculean paradigm, it is not unreasonable to reject outright the many attempts to tinker and jigger, and to offer an altogether alternative approach. It begins with a statement of limits and three propositions that follow from it. Both the principle and the propositions are well-established and form a foundation for thinking differently about ourselves and the world. They may sound shrill to those raised on the sign-song optimism of human “know how.” But were they to be applied collectively to our daily lives, and incorporated into the leading social and cultural “operating systems” of the modern world, it is more than reasonable to imagine a future in which the second hand of the doomsday clock moves slowly in reverse.

The Limits Principle:

Prosperity in all of its forms requires limits, broadly construed.

Limits Propositions

No Harm: Except for planet Earth, life seems pretty rare in the universe. Thoughtlessly and willingly destroying it or limiting its diversity and co-evolution —or the “non-living” systems upon which it depends, especially at the level of species—is a moral wrong among self-conscious creatures who surely should know better by now.

No Hubris: Human beings are the unintended offspring of evolutionary processes, and as such lack any special or pre-ordained tools for divining the world’s inner workings. Because areas of certainty are small relative to the large field of ignorance, we should behave as if our ignorance will always exceed our knowledge. It will.

No Hurry: All life depends on sunlight and the complex and integrated chemical and thermodynamic processes it powers. Life needs optimal temperature, water, soils, and photosynthesis. Net Primary Production (NPP) is the technical term that describes the energic and organic material production of these ecosystem processes—the calories and biomass that life produces. NPP is constrained by many factors and cannot be improved substantially, increased or sped up over time without the addition of inputs from outside the system. For centuries we’ve been supersizing NPP by adding highly energy-dense materials (i.e., fossil fuels—the past solar income of the planet) to earth processes. Doing so, we draw down stored capital stocks created over long stretches of time by the very same ecosystemic production we seek to augment. Think of the “high density” taste of maple syrup, a gallon of which begins as roughly 40 gallons of maple sap, boiled over a very hot fire to evaporate 39 gallons. Nature provides the sap and the fire, the pans for boiling, the tools for tapping the trees, the wheat and soil fertility for the pancake flour. Not unlike the Little Red Hen in the children’s folktale, it is nature that performs all of the work, and that should get all of the credit. Our high life of consumption is brought to us both by contemporary NPP and the rapid drawdown—in mere centuries—of an eon or more worth of accumulated fresh water and highly energy-dense materials. Across the board this drawdown is increasingly noticeable in soils, aquifers, fisheries, oil and natural gas. (Along with the sources of stored natural capital being exhausted and degraded, the natural sinks—atmosphere, soils and oceans—that absorb the waste products of our consumption are filling to capacity. The necessity of theses sinks and the limits of their capacities are expressed by the second law of thermodynamics.) In the grand sweep of human history and culture, these are one-time drawdowns. In the industrial era our species has been like the college undergraduate cramming for exams who uses caffeine and amphetamines to artificially augment his stamina. Like that undergraduate we will learn that when it comes to sustainable activity, we can’t do better than nature. And if we can’t speed up natural processes, then our only option is to slow ourselves down.

No harm, no hubris and no hurry: each represents a limit on human behavior. Each requires us to think of ourselves and the Earth in radically different ways. Each sounds and feels foreign to us, and is likely to put us in a defensive and surly mood. But each is necessary for the transition that is coming, that’s already in full swing. It may help, then, to express these limits in a pledge, one worthy of repetition privately, publicly, aloud, silently:

The Limits Pledge:

“I accept The Limits Principle regarding moral behavior, the pursuit of knowledge, and the use of the earth’s material and energy productivity, and I hereby pledge no harm, no hubris, and no hurry in my daily thoughts and actions“.

Action Items
How then should we live our lives? The Limits Principle implies some general heuristics. The list below is wide-ranging and inclusive, and the reader is invited to make additions and to adapt the suggestions to specific contexts, interests, and projects.

Don’t always think you know better.

Become an Ambassador of Limits. It will strain your friendships and you will be called unpatriotic, pessimistic, the grim reaper, and worse. But all signs point to the correctness of your position.

Block unbounded faith—your own and others’—in the “No-Limits” dogma peddled by technological optimists, economic theorists, and those who believe that “the future” and “greater economic activity” are synonymous.

Offer no hope about the immense problems we face before the full scope of the challenges is clear and understood.

Insist on some sign or evidence from others that they understand the full scope of these challenges.

Help others to see why and how so many of our central paradigm’s initial operating assumptions violate one or more of the limits principle propositions.

Don’t be nasty or condescending about any of it.

Count the number of times in a given day your motivations, choices, and actions rely on the most primitive parts of your primate brain. Multiply by 6.85 billion. Update the multiplier at least every six months.

Show no enthusiasm for attempts to improve on nature’s efficiencies. Such schemes always cheat by drawing down natural capital stocks somewhere else in the system.

Acknowledge the Net Primary Production of sun-powered ecosystems as the only long-term energy-material feedstock for sustaining life on Earth.

Slow down. And when going fast (car, plane, jet ski), admit your role in the global run on the natural capital bank.

Welcome limits as one of the initial and permanent operating conditions for any life-enabled solar system.

Resist solutions to current environmental problems that ignore the size of the human population as a central factor limiting the ability of the rest of the planet’s life-community to thrive.

Resist solutions that create harm or extinction to fellow creatures.

Count calories. Not just the ones consumed, but those embodied in our everyday products as well.

Understand and appreciate the role that the so-called inanimate world of soils, minerals, and elements—particularly nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, calcium, sulfur, and magnesium—play in your life. Stop calling them “life support systems.”

Demand a public and accurate accounting of our net primary production and stored natural capital feed stocks.

Demand that losses of natural capital be accounted for in any calculation of costs and benefits.

Don’t rush natural processes, or to judgments about those processes.

Discount efficiency as nothing more than a clever way to increase consumption (the Jevons Paradox).

Accept blame yourself.

Don’t let good friends off the hook about limits.

Honor your debt to the universe by drinking a toast to its—and your—continued existence. You can do this every day.

Motivation
The Limits Principle unites individuals and institutions around a few central beliefs that, if not absolute truths, provide a foundation for a new and improved way of looking at the world. It relies on a base of knowledge describing the state of the world as we best understand it now, and suggests a range of choices and actions consistent with this understanding. It contributes to the process—and by necessity a greatly speeded up process—of curtailing the many ailments of our global home and its myriad inhabitants. The factors mitigating these ailments will be many and varied, but they will be more robust and durable if they conform to a few basic principles with which large numbers of individuals and organizations can agree, and around which corrections and adjustments can coalesce. It is difficult to think of any great social revolution that lacked a basic and common core of beliefs shared by its members. And it is a great social revolution that we are talking about here, as important as any other in human history.

Those who accept The Limits Principle will agree to sequester their squabbles over the details and fine print, and suspend their well ingrained urges to find yet more evidence for its veracity. Nor should they argue for pride of place in marshalling change. Let us agree that it is enough to say that the Limits Principle is supported by the grudging recognition in our own lives that we can’t have it all; that those who burn the candle at both ends get burnt; that too many chips and dip are bad for you and vegetables and exercise are good for you. A good example of a formal definition of the principle can be found in Aldo Leopold’s work: “An ethic, ecologically, is a limitation on freedom of action in the struggle for existence. An ethic, philosophically, is a differentiation of social from anti-social conduct. These are two definitions of one thing.” First courses in biology, physics and ecology articulate well understood biophysical principles and laws that describe and predict fertility, resilience, and diversity within strictly constrained systems. There is, too, the warning given to the first humans in the Genesis account of creation. Placed in a garden paradise they are told they can have it all, but for one tree “lest they surely will die.” We know, and live with, the rest of that story.

The first proposition—no harm—the physician’s byword, is a moral truth as old as the Golden Rule and the principle of ahimsa (the ancient Sanskrit word for, and practice of, non-violence toward all living beings). Forms of it are found in nearly all of the world’s philosophies and religions. The second—no hubris—is derived from a clear, rational, scientific understanding of our origin as a species, and the history of science, which demonstrates ably that behind every scientific discovery lies a vast field of new ignorance yet to be explored. Or as Wes Jackson observes: “human beings are a billion times more ignorant than they are knowledgeable, and will always be so.” The third proposition—no hurry—is a less well known, but an equally established understanding about the origin, nature, and supply of the energy that fuels life. “All flesh is grass,” Isaiah said, capturing the thermodynamics of ecosystems in a four-word assertion.

There’s nothing wrong with marshalling more evidence for the principles and its propositions or disagreeing out on the edges. But the purpose of the principle and the propositions is not to marshal that evidence, but to state them as truths that are now and must more generally be seen to be self evident.

To state boldly that they are self-evident does not make their conclusions easy to accept, especially for those of us who have spent our entire lives within a cultural paradigm that has lured, seduced, and commanded us to deny and transgress limits.

It is not surprising that such a perspective still powers the popular imagination in every region of the globe. Fueled by ever-increasing amounts of monetary wealth, energy, materials, knowledge, and personal freedom, it has produced marvels. The “genius” of its approach is to answer every challenge and hurdle with the call for more knowledge, more freedom, more energy and materials—a more vigorous assault on any experience of limit. It is a positive feedback loop of biblical proportions. Positive feedback loops are very powerful, but they are also potentially dangerous and unstable, and this one has created global challenges that are becoming impossible to deny: climate change, species loss, loss of essential ecosystem services (such as nutrient recycling, water purification, and climate moderation) from loss of natural capital among them.

The astonishing and flashy feats of the modern worldview make revision or outright abandonment of it seem a quixotic task. But whatever its appeal and power, the world is being shaped by a failed perspective the dangers of which now greatly outweigh the benefits. The data of our times increasingly reveal that we are nearly at the end of a line of thinking that is no longer supportable by the material and energy conditions upon which it rests. This would suggest an urgent need to dismantle the no-limits worldview before it dismantles the world.

We can, of course, continue to both deny and transgress The Limits Principle. We can deny it until kingdom come. But it can be transgressed only a little while longer. The definitive character of an unsustainable system is that it will, it must, change.

Any species in nature reproduces to the limits of its food supply—and we have not exempted ourselves from that truth even as we learned how to commandeer the niches of other species, even as we learned how to turn the planet’s vast stores of past solar income (oil) into grass and (human) flesh. If any other species or human culture were given the same access to resources and energy, a moral green light for their use, and effective techniques for blocking natural negative feedback loops, we would see roughly the same outcomes. Given continual replenishments of food, bacteria in a Petri dish will multiply until they die en masse on their accumulated wastes. We are as bacteria, with two exceptions: our flashy brains and the absence of similarly-brained competitors have made us capable of extending our reach—and consequently widening the range of our negative effects. In both we harm and destroy other life.

The Genesis creation story says as much. Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge and in that moment fell from animal innocence into conscious human life.

By becoming agriculturists Eve and Adam symbolize the first modern humans separating from nature. (The “forbidden fruit,” scholars tell us, was cultivated wheat grass; the serpent, the guardian of the granary.) For this original separation, this original sin of pride, as St. Augustine describes it, the Lord cast them from their garden idyll, and, interestingly, “to the east of the garden of Eden he stationed the cherubim and a sword whirling and flashing to guard the way to the Tree of Life” (Genesis, 3:24). The author of those words had some inkling of the need to protect the panoply of life from the destructive potential that a willful species with a well-developed frontal cortex could unleash on the rest of the world. Those who still want to hold on to the idea that there is something unique about human beings may yet be comforted if and when we learn to limit ourselves, using our stolen property (knowledge) to consciously protect the Tree of Life. If we do so, it will be an act as unprecedented as our control of fire.

Finally, it is hoped that a full-bodied acceptance of The Limits Principle will, on average, bring more lightness to its adherents than fear and loathing. Even a brief meditation on limits demonstrates their power and creativity. The universe itself operates, surely, due to the limits we call the laws of nature. Alphabets, musical notations, rules of grammar and harmony, and even the rules of chess and other games, all create limits on what we can say, think, and do; limits that provide enormous opportunities for creativity and freedom. The best accounts of social justice put limits on some so that all can thrive. It’s time to shed our despairing attitudes about the constraints expressed in the very idea of limits, and instead find in them the powers of restoration, insight, and joy.

The Gist
Properly understood The Limits Principle is invigorating rather than paralyzing. It encourages creativity, invites one to challenge institutions, friends, and family, and to imagine alternatives. Use it in your everyday life; in discussions about the news or politics; to organize clubs; to generate goals; to help resolve questions and dilemmas; to feel more at home in the world.

No Harm. No Hubris. No Hurry.
Take the Pledge.
Try to live it.
Spread the word.