Rethinking the World for Survival
Our indigenous knowledge suggests where we went wrong
by Mike Meyer ~ Honolulu ~ November 19, 2022
The scary thing about climate disaster is that it is on a planetary time scale. The fundamental problem is that it is a hyperobject beyond our grasp. Hyperobjects are too big, complex, and interrelated in too many ways to easily understand.
If you try to understand what is happening and how bad it is, you quickly discover it is a massive hairball coughed up by a galactic cat. Any strand you pull brings along the whole vastly messy thing.
This drives people who are not inclined to logical analysis and problem-solving crazy. The result is to ignore it as long as possible, give up and say we are screwed, focus on one possible solution, or declare the whole thing a conspiracy.
The nature of a hyperobject is that it cannot be simplified and solved. So that leaves those of us who work at understanding and communicating these things to better our hopes for survival or, at least, reduce the misery to be faced by our kids and grandkids forced to endlessly repeat ourselves.
The failure to grasp this hyperobject leads even knowledgeable people to the same repetition of basic scaling errors. We seem unable to break free of tail chasing…
