More from the Ingenuity Gap

In commenting on the haze that is experienced all over the world, Thomas Homer Dixon observes:

Why am I so concerned about haze?  To me, it signifies something more general than just pollution or atmospheric processes.  As haze cuts us off from vivid skies and landscapes, it attenuates our ties to the wider, external reality in which we are embedded.  It is just one of the many ways we are constructing - inside that wider reality - an artificial and self referential world.

Increasingly, only the collective human ego - what I call "the Big I" - bounds and defines this constructed world.  We subordinate, alter and reinvent almost everything around us according to our own interests, from the mounts of Vancouver Island to the Isle of Dogs and the very sky overhead.  Seduced by our extraordinary technological prowess, many of us come to believe that external reality - the reality outside our constructed world - is unimportant and needs little attention because, if we ever have to, we can manage any problem that might arise there.  And, in any case, as the pace of our lives accelerates, we have less time to reflect on these broader circumstances.  All these trends can push us into narcissism, as they weaken our sense of awe at the universe beyond our human ego; and what is perhaps more important, they also weaken our receptivity to critical signals from the external reality that might awaken us to our deep ignorance of the potential consequences of our actions, and warn us against hubris.  Without this awareness we have a less accurate understanding of how much and what types of ingenuity we will need to meet the future's challenges.

I think part of why this is important to me revolves around a point of contention I have with someone in know about community gardens.  He is perturbed at the fact that developers that lease land to community gardens do not have to pay property taxes for that land.  He argues that community gardens won't feed the city anyways and the property taxes would buy more food.  From my perspective, he fails to see that eating the food is often a side benefit of a community garden.  Community gardens allow individuals to connect with what Dixon terms the external reality.  The benefits of community gardens are well documented and it goes beyond the food.  But I'll leave it at that because food issues are dealt quite well by others.