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Posts Tagged ‘philosophy’

LUCA’s descendants

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on December 16, 2025| Leave a Comment »

I read, recently, about “LUCA”, from whom, every single one of us is descended. In fact, not just every single one of we humans, but every single living creature. 

Isn’t that amazing? Yet, at some level, kind of obvious? 

We humans have a tendency to think that we somehow parachuted onto this little planet, just appearing from nowhere, with no history prior to our arrival. This kind of thinking leads us to consider that, on Earth, there is Nature, and there are humans. It’s almost as if Nature is something separate from ourselves, either a place we go and visit on our holidays, or the less important than us part of the world. 

But these two beliefs are delusions. 

We evolved on this planet, along with every other living creature, past and present. The history of our “arrival” isn’t sudden, but it isn’t disconnected from the rest of existence either. 

Advances in molecular genetics have revealed that all living things on Earth are descended from a single organism dubbed the last universal common ancestor, or LUCA, which emerged around 4 billion years ago. We also know that our planet is approximately 4.5 billion years old. During those first half a billion years, simple, then more complicated, organic molecules were spontaneously synthesised and assembled in larger complexes, eventually evolving into the primitive, single-celled LUCA. How did that happen? We really don’t know. But, then, we don’t really know what “life” is either, do we? We can’t even tell if a seed is dead or alive until it starts to change (or doesn’t). 

There are many, many “creation myths” around the world. Every culture seems to have its own. Over the last hundred years or so we’ve been introduced to new ways of thinking about who we are, and where we came from. Yet even with evolutionary thinking we have a tendency to think of ourselves as different and separate. We present Homo Sapiens as the most highly developed form of life on the planet, and we don’t really consider how we might evolve in the future. We tend to think that evolution led to the creation of we humans, and then it stopped. It somehow reached its goal. And we give less consideration to what we share with the rest of the planet. 

But, in fact, we came from somewhere, as did every other life form on our shared planet. Our ability to understand the molecules which exist inside our cells, and the discovery of how so many of the exact same molecules exist in other creatures, has opened the door to a different understanding. 

LUCA is our shared common origin, and as we begin to trace LUCA’s evolution into the abundantly diverse forms of life which we have discovered so far, we come to understand ourselves as embedded, inextricably in a web of Life on this planet we call Earth. This little blue marble where LUCA came into existence, and gave birth to us all. 

We are not disconnected. Neither from all the other living creatures, nor from each other. We share this planet. We share the same air, the same water, the same soil. We depend on each other. Despite the delusion of hyper-individualism, none of us can exist without creating mutually beneficial relationships with others, with our other common descendants. 

What kind of future could there be for us, for our children and grandchildren, if we all took that shared reality on board and put collaboration ahead of competition? If we began to rate mutual benefit over self-centred greed? If we put more energy and attention into the creation, and maintenance, of the healthy environments in which all of LUCA’s descendants can thrive? 

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I contain multitudes

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on December 2, 2025| Leave a Comment »

A recent book review in New Scientist opened my eyes to something completely new to me – microchimerics. I’m pretty sure I’ve never come across the word before. Here’s the introductory paragraph of the review, which, I believe, captures the essence of the book –

“We now know that during pregnancy, fetal cells cross the placenta into the mother, embedding themselves in every organ yet studied. Likewise, maternal cells, and even those that crossed from my mum to me, can make their way into my kids. And things might get even more chimeric – I have older sisters, so their cells, having passed into my mum during their own gestation, might have then found their way into me and, in turn, into my kids. This fascinating idea – that we are a holobiont, composed not only of human cells and microbes but also fragments of others – and its implications sit at the heart of Hidden Guests: Migrating cells and how the new science of microchimerism is redefining human identity by Lise Barnéoud.”

I’ve long been aware of the discoveries of Lynn Margulis, who back in the 1960s published “On the origin of mitosing cells”, from which she developed the theory that the component parts of our cells evolved from separate unicellular life forms collaborating and incorporating – in other word, “symbiosis”. We humans are perhaps the most complex of all multicellular organisms ever discovered, and, it seems, multicellular organisms evolved by separate, unicellular ones co-operating and collaborating. 

I was taught in Medical School, that each of us is composed of many more cells which aren’t of “human origin”, than we are of our “own” family ones. Whole communities of micro-organisms live on and inside our bodies. We’ve come to think of these communities are “biomes”, and the gut biome in particular has been shown to be crucially important in everything from our immune defences, to our emotions and, even, cognition. Quite simply, we couldn’t live without them. 

Another thing I was taught in Medical School was that all of our cells die off and are replaced, so that many times over the course of the average lifetime, we find ourselves with a complete set of cells which we didn’t have when we were younger. In many ways it’s best to think of ourselves, not as discrete, separate, fixed entities, but rather as flows – flows of cells, of chemicals, of substances, energies and information. 

So, at a biological level, we do indeed “contain multitudes”, as Whitman wrote so beautifully in his poem, “Song of Myself”. 

These latest findings about microchimeric cells are only the latest discovery into this reality….we aren’t just creatures with many facets, or features, we are creatures containing multitudes. 

All of this resonates with Miller Mair’s theory of mind which I’ve long found convincing – “instead of viewing any particular person as an individual unit, I would like you to entertain, for the time being, the ‘mistaken’ view of any person as if he or she were a ‘community of selves.’ I found this metaphor, of a community of selves, rather than a single self, to be incredibly useful in understanding both my patients and myself. It is the psychological equivalent of the biological one of “biomes”.

The “community of selves” idea came back to my mind recently when I read a post on social media where the writer said that when their father died, they lost not just him, but a part of themselves. I hadn’t really thought about that before, but it strikes me as very true. Because each of these “selves” which we experience arises within particular relationships, and we can become aware of how certain selves are only present within those particular relationships. Miller Mair describes how some of the “selves” in our “community” are short lived, whereas others persist and become more integral, or core, to who we are. I’m sure that’s the case with those who we love most, those about whom we care the most. So, there is, indeed, a part of ourselves which will be diminished, or even lost, when a loved one dies. 

I don’t know if you’ve ever encountered the story of the “air telephone” in the garden of a survivor of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan. It’s an incredibly moving story. You can read it here – https://observer.co.uk/style/how-we-live/article/wind-phone-japan-grief and it’s beautifully told in the “This American Life” podcast in this episode – https://www.thisamericanlife.org/597/one-last-thing-before-i-go-2016

The telephone box, containing a telephone which wasn’t connected to anything, became a place to grieve, by allowing survivors to spend some time speaking to their dead loved ones. This story came back to my mind the other day when I was watching the final scene of the final episode of DCI Banks, where the detective builds a small cairn up on a hill, as a place to go where he could speak to his dead loved one. 

Culturally, we’ve shifted away from graveyards filled with the headstones of those who have passed, to cremations, with the remains scattered in places of meaning, or, sometimes, behind a plaque, but, whatever we do, we need to find the special places to connect, to share some time and space, not just to mourn, but to keep alive the unique parts of our selves which those loved ones created with us. 

We do, indeed, contain multitudes. In so many ways. We are woven from such complex threads of DNA, of cells, of families, societies and cultures. We are not separate, and we are not alone. 

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Nothing begins with us

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on October 28, 2025| Leave a Comment »

“Nothing begins with us.”

“The more we pay attention, the more we begin to realise that all the work we ever do is a collaboration. It’s a collaboration with the art that’s come before you and the art which will come after. It’s also a collaboration with the world you’re living in. With the experiences you’ve had. With the tools you use. With the audience. And with who you are today.”

Rick Rubin, in his “The Creative Act”. 

This really resonates with me. Over the last few decades we humans seem to have privileged competition over collaboration. Many people even call competition, “Darwinism”, because Darwin showed the role of competition in evolution. But Darwin also showed the role of collaboration in evolution. Why don’t we give that aspect, equal, or even greater, attention. 

It strikes me that even in my lifetime here on this little planet, over these last just over seventy years, I’ve witnessed a growth of alienation and isolation. The cult of the Self, of the Ego, of the so called “self-made man” (a total delusion, by the way), contributes to this isolationism. 

We are isolating ourselves from each other, because we are blind to how connected we are….to each other, to the past, to our ancestors, to our children, and their, as yet unborn children….to the myriad of other forms of Life on Earth. 

We even think of “Nature” as something that is separate from us. We are never separate from “Nature”. We emerge within it, within this vast, complex web of relationships and billions of other organisms with whom we are in constant collaboration. The very cells of our bodies come into being from the flows of materials, energies and information which gather and co-exist for a short while to create what I experience as “me”, which create what you experience as “you”. 

If we are going to heal ourselves, heal our communities, our societies, our world, we are going to have to become more aware of our connectedness, and to build creative, collaborative, “integrative” relationships (mutually beneficial ones). 

Because “nothing begins with us”……and nothing ends with us, either. 

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Materials, energies, information flows

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on October 13, 2025| Leave a Comment »

One way to understand how deeply interconnected we are, and how change, not statis, is the norm, is to think of three flows – flows of materials, substances, atoms, molecules, and other particles; flows of energy, electromagnetic, gravitational, sounds, and other energy waves; and, information, language, symbols, ideas, and thoughts? You might have other examples for each of these three flows. You might dispute one or more of the ones I’ve chosen, but let’s stick with the general idea here – there are flows of materials, energies and information which swirl around this planet. The flow around, into and through us, for the most part, invisibly. And they flow out of, and beyond, us…changed.

It’s almost like we are a wave, or a vortex. A whirlpool perhaps, a coalescence, an efflorescence, transforming these flows into something which has self-integrity, something which appears separate, and consistent over the course of a lifetime. We, like everything else on this little planet, are transient, and exist only as a temporary flux. Some writers describe us as being like a wave which appears briefly on the surface of the ocean, a wave which can be pointed to, a wave which can located, even named. Waves don’t leave the ocean, and they don’t last for long, soon dissipating and disappearing back into the vast waters from which they came.

The chapter I read in Rick Rubin’s, The Creative Act, today, describes the idea of data, entering us, filling our inner vessel, where it is changed, not least by the relationships which from between it, and what was already there. He says these relationships produce our beliefs and stories, and, ultimately, our world view.

We can choose what we want to make with all of this – our unique stories, our art, our creations – and then we can choose to share them, where they set off, hopefully, to encounter others, other stories, other creations, other people.

I don’t like the word “data”. I’m sure it’s just a personal thing, but I have a feeling or disgust, or repulsion, when I come across the word “data”. I know, for many others, “data” is the stuff of their daily existence, maybe even what gives their lives meaning. But, I just don’t like it. I prefer the word “information”. I prefer “stories”. I prefer “encounters” and “relationships” and “patterns”. But, as I say, maybe that’s just me. I’m also not a great fan of the idea of a “vessel” inside us…..just as I’m not a fan of the idea of memory being like a filing cabinet in the brain somewhere. So, I prefer this concept of flows, flows of materials, energies and information, which we alter as they enter our inner “vortex”, and emerge changed as we breathe, or act, or talk them out into the world again.

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From infinity to this moment

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on October 11, 2025| Leave a Comment »

Rick Rubin writes –

Turning something from an idea
into a reality
can make it seem smaller.

This immediately stimulated my memories of reading the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. It’s a few years since I did that, and I’m no philosopher, so I can only share with you, what I, personally, got out of reading some of his work. One concept he described, the one which came to me when I read these lines by Rick Rubin, was that of the “virtual”. I think his idea of the virtual was pretty complex and nuanced, but as I read it, the virtual contained what he called “a multiplicity of singularities”.

A “singularity” is a specific. I think of it this way. Today, as I wake up, stretching before me are a pretty much infinite number of possibilities. The day lies there full of potential conversations, encounters and experiences. There are sights and sounds and smells and tastes and textures which I could pick up on and enjoy. As the day unrolls, I make certain decisions, choices. I have certain encounters, certain experiences. Moment by moment they are the specifics of my day. All the other possibilities that were there at the start disappear. It’s a bit like the collapse of the wave. Like how Schrodinger’s cat can be both alive and dead until we open the box, then it’s the one or the other.

It’s even more complex than that, of course, because, moment by moment new “multiplicities of singularities” emerge….ones which only come into existence because of the actual moments which have led to this particular moment.

OK, that’s spiralling a bit out of control, and I’m sure some professional philosopher will be able to point out how much I’ve got wrong about the idea, but my point is, as inspired by Rick’s words, the actual, the specific, the singular, feels like a reduction. It’s the same with every choice we make. Once we make a choice, we choose one thing, one action, and in doing so, don’t choose the others. That’s why making decisions can be difficult. We can’t help imagining all the other possibilities we are about to turn away from. We feel, perhaps, that we are making the world smaller.

But there’s no alternative here. It’s not possible to live without singularities, without specifics, without actuals. If we don’t engage, if we aren’t aware, if we don’t reflect and consider, then the choices are made for us. Because this moment does actually exist. And the other moments which could have been disappear, or morph into some potential future set of possibilities.

So, I don’t fear this phenomenon of making anything “smaller”. Instead, I choose to be aware, to be engaged, and to co-create this actual moment of my unique existence in this vast universe.

Awareness and engagement open up the universe to us. They open the doors to co-creation of this moment, at this time, in this place. Embracing that is a joy, a celebration, which stirs wonder, awe and gratitude.

What not to like?

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Tuning in

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on October 9, 2025| Leave a Comment »

“There’s a time for certain ideas to arrive,
and they find a way
to express themselves through us.”

There’s a theory about where ideas come from, and where memories reside. I’ve read this theory, or some version of it, in several places over the years. Most recently I read it in Rick Rubin’s “The Creative Act”. He suggests that sometimes great ideas come to us but we don’t act on them, then some time later we see them expressed by someone else. It isn’t that other people have stolen our ideas, it’s that the idea’s time has come, and if we don’t act on it, then someone else may.

I read a very similar view a few years ago in Elizabeth Gilbert’s excellent, “Big Magic”, where she said if we don’t write when inspiration comes our way, then, maybe somebody else will. Maybe the idea or inspiration will flow on to someone else because it needs to be expressed. Maybe we will miss our opportunity.

Iain McGilchrist, in “The Matter with Things”, explores memory and consciousness, and dismisses the idea that they lie encased in our skulls. Rather, he argues, our brains act as “receivers” which filter out some of the signals being received to present us with our experiences of consciousness and memory.

Others have argued something very similar……from Jung’s “collective unconscious”, to Sheldrake’s “morphic fields’.

So, it’s not a new idea that we have the ability to “tune in” to whatever is flowing through the universe, nor that that includes ideas, inspirations, memories, and so on. This tuning in is a bit like turning on a radio, the old fashioned, analogue kind, turning the dial, and listening as voices and music begin to appear in the white noise, first of all quiet and fuzzy, till we tune in better and it comes through loud and clear. Aren’t you still amazed that you can sit in a room somewhere, hearing only silence, but, in fact you are surrounded by, you are bathing in, a whole world of songs, stories and speech? You just need to switch on the radio, and tune it in for it all to be revealed.

That still amazes me.

But the idea that the universe is full of stories, words, ideas, images, and music, and that all we need to do is to create the space for it to appear, all we need to do is tune in, and listen….then be inspired…… then we can choose to act on these inspirations, these dreams, these ideas…..express them. Well, that amazes me too.

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Categories, labels and dehumanisation

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on October 5, 2025| Leave a Comment »

Rebecca Solnit wrote, “Categories too often become where thought goes to die. That is, there’s a widespread tendency to act as if once something has been categorised, no further consideration is required. But, often, it is.”

When I read this I thought of some of the writings of the General Semanticists, especially the phrase, “Judgement stops thought”.

We humans have a tendency to privilege the work of our left cerebral hemisphere which is our powerhouse for stripping out details, generalising what it encounters and applying labels, before setting its work into categories…..neat, separate, distinct, categories.

The trouble is, once we’ve done that, and once we start putting whatever we encounter into one of those categories, we stop seeing the uniqueness of “here and now”. We stop seeing the uniqueness of this particular person. We stop seeing a person at all.

There was a strong element of this in my training at Medical School, where they taught us pathologies before they taught us about people. Teachers and students would say things like “Have you seen the hepatomegaly in Ward 2”, or “Have you listened to the heart murmur in bed 14?” I first encountered cirrhosis of the liver in pathology class. It was in a perspex box filled with formalin so the diseased liver inside wouldn’t deteriorate any further. It was a good three years later before I encountered a human being suffering from cirrhosis of the liver (in Ward 2). This kind of thinking is still pretty dominant in Clinical Medicine. When I was a visiting a relative in hospital I overheard a nurse in the corridor say to a colleague “Have you taken blood from bed six yet?” (and I thought, good luck with that, getting blood out of a bed!)

I recently read an interview with a Paris-based oncologist, who was describing how he was using “Integrative Medicine”. He said he realised that all his chemotherapy, his radiotherapy and his surgical procedures were directed at pathology, but nothing he was doing was specifically directed towards patients. So, he began to explore, learn about, and use, a variety of interventions which engaged with the individual, unique patients, to hear their stories, to understand what they were experiencing in their lives, and to support their recovery and healing. This isn’t a new idea, but it still gets reported as if it is new.

The tendency to label and categorise seems to be on the rise. “Asylum seekers” become “illegal immigrants” become “immigrants” who should be denied the rights and privileges of those whose ancestors arrived in the country before them. In the apparently increasingly divided USA, billionaires, politicians, and evangelicals, talk about “Good vs Evil”. The President frequently applies the label “hard Left” to anyone who disagrees with his policies. Derogatory labels like “libtard” are thrown around. People are accused of being “woke”, although it seems nigh impossible to get anyone who uses that term to describe exactly what it means…..and so on. All of these terms, all of this way of thinking, tends to dehumanise….and that makes it easier to hate, easier to be cruel, easier to make life difficult for whoever is being targeted.

What’s the way out of this?

I suspect it will involve using our whole brain instead of only half of it.

The right hemisphere helps us to appreciate the whole, helps us to see connections and contexts. Looking for connections and contexts is a great way to punch holes in the labelled boxes. It’s a great way to make impermeable categories, leaky and permeable.

The reality is we are not all separate, living in entirely different boxes. We are unique, and that uniqueness arises from our individual complex web of connections and relationships. When we start to look for connections, we see the ways out of the separated boxes. We start to see humans again.

But it isn’t just uniqueness which emerges from these connections and relationships, it’s a discovery of what we have in common, of what we share. It’s a realisation that our similarities matter just as much as our differences, and, luckily, our brains have evolved to be able to handle such paradoxes magnificently…if only we would resort to using our whole brains and not stopping thought at labels and categories.

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The importance of connections

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on October 1, 2025| Leave a Comment »

This is one of the most extraordinary trees I’ve encountered. The one on the left seems to have reached out to the one on the right, then the two trees have merged to continue upwards together as one trunk. I don’t know how they did this. It’s like grafting but as best I can tell this wasn’t a forest where there was active grafting happening. I’m pretty sure they’ve managed this all by themselves.

This image is one of my favourites and it always makes me think about the importance of connections. There really isn’t any species of life where each organism exists all by itself, disconnected, as it were, from its fellows, from other creatures, and from its environment. We can only imagine that an organism could exist completely separately if we think of it as a fixed, bounded object. But, in reality, there are no fixed, bounded objects.

As we zoom in and in to look deeper and deeper into any organism, or so-called “object”, we get down to the atoms we all learned about at school. But twentieth century physics has enabled us to look inside those, previously imagined, “fixed” objects, and we’ve discovered that there is no final, fixed material in there. Rather, even atoms are interactions between flows of energy and information, sparkling briefly in and out of existence. They aren’t fixed. They aren’t separate.

Human beings have evolved to have the longest period of dependency for their young. It takes years and years for babies to learn enough to be able to survive….I was going to say, “by themselves”, but, actually we never live “by ourselves”……..independently. So we have evolved superbly social capabilities. It has been argued that we are, in fact, THE most social of all animals.

Yet we swallow the myth of the “Self made man”, of the “hero”, or “genius”, who has somehow come to be all by themselves, without the help and support over their years, of others. It’s a nonsense. The narcissistic, massively egotistical politicians we see today are totally deluded. They only have what they have because of others, because of their connections. Same goes for the tech billionaires. They didn’t create money from nowhere, they grabbed it from others. They didn’t invent and build the technologies they own all by themselves, they profited from the skills and work of many others.

Maybe we need to follow connections a bit more carefully in order to realise just how co-dependent everyone really is.

Finally, let me zoom out a bit and consider nation states. These are inventions. They didn’t drop down onto Earth from the sky, fully formed. Some human beings, some time in the past, staked out the borders and said everything inside these lines is “mine” or “ours”, then fought off any attempts by their neighbours to live on any of that land. Those borders around the nation states are way more permeable than the politicians would like you to believe. The entire planet has one water cycle. You can’t keep separate what flows into one ocean from another. You can’t keep what flows into an ocean separate from the sky, the rivers and the lakes. Same with air. We have one atmosphere around the entire planet. You can’t stop radiation from a disaster like Chernobyl or Three Mile Island spreading freely across “borders”. Same goes for most species in the world – for bacteria, viruses (remember Covid??), insects, birds, plants and many mammals. As each species is lost through loss of habitats, connections are broken, and we are all diminished. We humans are one species. It doesn’t matter which part of the map someone has drawn is where we were born, or where we live now. Our fellow humans aren’t only those in our village, our city, or even our nation state. We are inextricably connected to them all. We are inextricably connected to the entire planet.

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The limits of utility

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on June 5, 2025| Leave a Comment »

In his “A Sand County Almanac”, Aldo Leopold writes…..

The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant: “What good is it?” If the land mechanism as a whole is good, then every part is good, whether we understand it or not. If the biota, in the course of aeons, has built something we like but do not understand, then who but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts? To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.

Now, this language, from the late 1940s is too mechanical for my liking, but, actually it’s still not uncommon today. We humans are not machines. Plants are not machines. No living organism on the planet is “machine-like”. As a result of the dominance of left hemisphere thinking, reductionism, for all its results and benefits, has blinded us to reality.

A human being cannot be reduced, cannot be broken into separate, isolated parts, without, at best, ignoring the consequences of changes in the whole body which come about from changes in a part, and, at worst, without killing the individual human being. Reductionism can only ever be a stage on a journey towards an understanding. The reductionist work of the left hemisphere needs to be integrated back into the holistic perspective of the right in order to understand the connections and consequences.

The same can be said of any living form. There isn’t a plant, an animal, or any other living creature which can be fully understood except by exploring their relationships and connections with the world in which they live.

One of the most unfortunate consequences of reductionism (I don’t know if it results from it, or simply accompanies it), is a focus on utility. What use is this? What use is this plant? What use is this creature? What use is this person? Utility can, or should, only be considered as one aspect, one perspective. We know this instinctively, don’t we? We wouldn’t reduce a loved one to an assessment of their “usefulness”, unless we were suffering from some kind of psychopathy. So why do we allow that to happen when we create businesses and factories? Industrial capitalism has a tendency to reduce human beings to “human capital”, or “Human Resources”, to be weighed, assessed, and judged, only on the criteria of utility. If they aren’t useful towards to the goal of increasing profits, then they are “useless”. A sad, miserable way to view the world.

What’s the utility of music? What’s the utility of art? Of gardens, of beauty, of poetry, of stories? What’s the utility of love, compassion and care? What’s the utility of joy, of wonder, awe and happiness?

Do people think that way?

Actually, it’s not uncommon to find that they do. Have you read anything that tells you about how gardening is “therapeutic”, of how music can improve “your mental health”, of how sharing a meal with a loved one can be “good for your health”?

The thing is, a good life, a life worth living, is full of activities and experiences which we pursue, not for their utility but for joy, for love, and because they touch our souls. Don’t wait for “science” to “prove” that music is beneficial to your neurones, to your immune system, or your hormones. Don’t wait for “science” to “prove” that a walk in the forest modulates your immune system, or stimulates your vagus nerve. Live for the everyday moments of wonder, joy, love and delight. One day, “science” will catch up, and tell you what you already know…..music, nature, poetry, caring relationships, love, wonder and joy are all “good for you”.

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Growth

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on June 5, 2025| Leave a Comment »

We hear a lot about growth these days. The Labour government in the UK seems to think achieving economic growth is the answer to all our problems, and, frankly, every other capitalist country agrees. Perhaps that’s because capitalism as a system requires continuous growth to exist.

But the thing is, when I was a teenager I read the Club of Rome’s “Limits to Growth”. That scientific report caused quite a stir since it came out but then the usual suspects mounted their attacks and derided it, so, not much has happened since then. Well, I say not much, but we do have Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics, and also the de-growth movement. What I mean is the world has failed to respond remotely adequately to climate change, several governments are rowing back their “green” targets, and Trump and co are all in for “drill, baby, drill” and abandoning environmental protections. So, it doesn’t look good.

However, I come back to a point I’ve made elsewhere – growth of what, and for whom? Because the logic on which “Limits to Growth” was based is still sound. We live on a finite planet, so even if we use technologies to make “better” or “more efficient” use of physical “resources” (by which they mean the natural world), at some point, if every country “grows” every year ad infinitum, at some point, there is going to be nothing left to extract. We just can’t keep grabbing more and more and from the planet, creating more and more pollution, killing off species after species, and expect to have a planet our grandchildren’s grandchildren can thrive on. It just doesn’t make sense.

What is growing? Well, CO2 in the atmosphere. That’s growing. Microplastics in our brains. That’s growing. Insecticides, herbicides, fungicides, I-don’t-know-what-icides, in our water, our food, our bodies, even in our babies before they are born. And the wealth of the wealthiest people on the planet. That’s growing. Maybe we haven’t reached peak inequality yet, but we sure aren’t going to reach the point where really rich people think “OK, I’ve got enough. I don’t need any more than this”.

The planet, Nature, Gaia, grows. But she grows without creating waste or pollution. We see her growth in evolution, and in the history or evolution we see a growth in diversity of species. We see a growth in the interconnectedness of environments, biospheres and individual living creatures. Nature doesn’t grow exponentially in a straight line. It grows in a vast interconnected web of feedback systems, in competition and collaboration with all the other parts of that web. It grows in cycles. Cycles of seasons. Cycles of birth, development, reproduction, maturity and death.

What does healthy growth look like in a human being? Development, maturation, increased skills, abilities, knowledge and intelligence (not artificial intelligence, but the real intelligences of the mental, emotional and social kind). Are our societies doing well at fostering that in their populations? I mean, for ALL the people in their countries? Not so much, huh?

We’re going to have to take on board the basic insights of the “Limits to Growth” scientists, and to create a better system that makes better choices about what it wants to grow. Aren’t we?

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