One of the mental games I enjoy playing is creating extended analogies. That is, an analogy that represents a situation in multiple ways. This is one I came up with the other day.

The environmental problem that faces humanity is similar to that of an ape falling through a forest of thorns. (Stop laughing, it IS, you’ll see.)

Imagine an ape that has lost it grip on a high branch and is falling through the thick canopy. There are lots of branches it can grab, but in this forest the trees are all covered with thorns, so a hurried grab will result in injury, especially with the momentum from the fall.

This is our situation. There are solutions to climate change and other environmental problems, but most of them will be painful in some way, involving a cost to our lifestyle or economy. As we fall, we pass up opportunities for solutions because we are afraid of the thorns. Of course, intellectually we know that the scratches will be less hurtful than the eventual hard stop at the end, but we find it hard to summon up the will regardless. Besides, we keep hoping for the miraculous thorn-free branch, or at least one with less thorns.

To some extent  this is sensible. We have to grab some branches, but we may as well grab the ones with the least thorns. The trouble is that the further we fall, the higher our momentum gets (the problems are worse) and so the more the thorns are going to hurt. Also, we can’t see exactly where the ground is so we don’t know how much leeway we have. It may be that we have to smash through a few branches to slow ourselves down. Perhaps even if we grab the last few branches, regardless of how nasty the thorns are, they won’t be enough to stop the plummet. In fact it’s possible that we are already at that point, that even every branch from here won’t be enough. General scientific opinion is against this. The overall consensus is that we have more branches, but they are going to hurt.

A final tangential thought: What would the miraculous thorn-free branch look like? To me I guess it would be what I think of as the “technical fix”. A technological solution to the problem. A new invention that will allow us to keep our lifestyles and economy largely intact while reducing environmental impact. Other than the fact that this will be a number of small branches, rather than one large one, this isn’t necessarily all that far-fetched. There have already been a number of technological innovations that have done this in various ways, and there are others proposed that may do so.

A popular sentiment is that, to survive we will have to undergo radical changes in society and philosophy to become more aware of the consequences of our actions. To the extent that this happens I welcome it. But frankly that’s a very thorny branch and I just don’t see us grabbing it all that tightly. Though we may (and to some extent already have) brush it on the way down.

Any look at human reactions to previous falls (we’re a fairly clumsy ape) will show the general shape of a human solution. It will align with social forces already in power or rising, it will involve minimal philosophical change and a surprising degree of innovation. To me it seems that the likely course of events is clear. A few nasty disasters that wake us up (already had some but expect a few more), the adoption of an ecological standpoint by powerful and rising social forces (starting to happen), a solution found that is far from perfect but somehow seems to work just enough, and a burst of innovation to satisfy a general desire to mitigate the costs of the solution. Oh, and maybe a few lessons learning along the way, but don’t expect any epiphanies.