Rabbit Holes 🕳️ #76

From climate change time to what you do in your screen time, a 600-year old blueprint for weathering climate change, neuroaesthetics, and where have all the websites gone?

Apr 17, 2024

THIS WEEK → ⏳ Climate Change Time 🤳 What Do You Do In Your ~~Free~~ Screen Time? 📜 A 600-Year-Old Blueprint For Weathering Climate Change ➕ Neuroaesthetics 🚿 Where Have All The Websites Gone?

Rabbit Holes 🕳️

How can we build a better world? As always, here are three perspective-shifting ideas to rewild your mind and help you create a better world, plus some extras below. Enjoy!

#1 ⏳ Climate Change Time

Why am I talking a lot about our concept of and relationship with time in this newsletter and the importance of being more in sync with natural rhythms and cycles? Because it’s one of the issues at the root of shifting towards a more sustainable and regenerative world. Said differently: In order to grasp climate change not only intellectually but also intuitively, we (as in the people) need to be more in tune with the natural cycles.

“The ice sheets represent the most glaring example of a fundamental issue behind human stagnation when it comes to climate change: time. The failure to address the world’s most existential risk is at root a temporal problem. Virtually none of the timelines—of emissions, of impacts, of solutions—line up in ways that society can effectively manage. Things take too long or deliver delayed impacts. The cause-and-effect of it all is stretched thin, too thin for a species so locked into our daily existence. […]
Examples of this temporal mismatch are everywhere. Start with carbon dioxide itself: every ton of CO2 sent skyward today will remain there for somewhere between a few hundred and a thousand years. That means that even dropping emissions to zero tomorrow leaves a whole lot of warming potential up there for generations to come. […]
The sheer inertia of the climate system is another example. Earth’s heating today is a result not just of the coal, oil, and gas burned last year, but also the fuels that were burned decades ago. If, starting today, emissions were to fall by 5% every year, the rate the planet is warming won’t really begin to change until the 2040s—potentially ugly fodder for those intent on casting doubt on energy transitions and the effectiveness of solutions. […]
The asteroid is coming, but it remains too far away for enough people to care. […]
“If you need to cut emissions in half every decade for three decades in a row to get toward net zero… that’s a 7% discount rate every year,” Foley said. “Essentially that means every year you wait to deploy a climate solution you’ve lost 7% of its total effectiveness. That’s bad news. That’s like trying to save for retirement when you’re 64.”
It also means that a climate solution enacted today produces accumulating benefits across its lifespan. That could be seen as an opportunity. It’s why Foley is among those pushing hard for rapid deployment of proven solutions like solar, wind, and electric vehicles rather than the hype-driven technologies like nuclear power or direct air capture—if it can’t be built today, or even within a decade, the cost of those lost years is simply too great. […] “They also become a distraction, beyond being a useless solution.” […]
To make use of climate change’s temporal issues requires internalizing the opportunity of rapid action and the severe cost of delay. Collectively, we need a better understanding of what’s on its way—even if the worst of it is a century off or more.” […] “We have to find a way to communicate the urgency of melting ice sheets—and climate change in general—more effectively.””

» Atmos | The Time Paradox of Climate Change by Dave Levitan

#2 🤳 What Do You Do In Your Free Screen Time?

I came across this visual from a TED talk from last year, which is quite eye-opening. We know, of course, that we’re spending way too much time looking at screens and on social media, but the framing that we often take is a short-term perspective – daily or weekly screen time, for example. We rarely look at it from the perspective of a lifetime, which is extremely alarming…

from The Battle for Your Time: Exposing the Costs of Social Media by Dino Ambrosi

That’s more time spent in front of screens than sleeping. And 93% of all free time is spent in front of screens, not accounting for screen time during work and school. And these numbers are obviously calculated with today’s average screen time metrics, not accounting for the very likely increased digitalization of our future. What kind of world are we creating?

Dino Ambrosi asks the following thought-provoking questions in his TED talk:

“Imagine getting to the age of 90. Seeing this visualization of how you spent all your time after the age of 18 and thinking about all the things you could have done that you did not do because you got distracted.
And I also want you to ask yourself what do you think over 26 years of screen time would do to you? What is that an investment in? How would it change you? […]
I have never shown this visualization to anyone that actually wants to spend 93% of their remaining free time staring at a screen. So there is a stark difference between how much time we say our screens are worth and how much time we actually give them. And it is critical to realize: that is not an accident; that is by design! It's a consequence of a business model that has incentives which are fundamentally misaligned with your well-being.”

» TEDx Talks | The Battle for Your Time: Exposing the Costs of Social Media by Dino Ambrosi

#3 📜 A 600-Year-Old Blueprint For Weathering Climate Change

The wisdom we could get if we were to take indigenous knowledge and history more seriously…! The story presented in this article gives us some crucial lessons on how our response to the climate crisis should look like – including a shift towards decentralization, democratization, a culture of reciprocity, and small-scale, community-based living. Found this article via the wonderful Sentiers newsletter.

“Beginning in the 13th century, the Northern Hemisphere experienced a dramatic climatic shift. First came drought, then a period of cold, volatile weather known as the Little Ice Age. […]
Native North Americans and Western Europeans responded very differently to the changes. Western Europeans doubled down on their preexisting ways of living, whereas Native North Americans devised whole new economic, social, and political structures to fit the changing climate. […]
Native North American societies developed a deep distrust of the centralization, hierarchy, and inequality of the previous era, which they blamed for the famines and disruptions that had hit cities hard. They turned away from omnipotent leaders and the cities they ruled, and built new, smaller-scale ways of living, probably based in part on how their distant ancestors lived. […]
The cities that Native Americans left behind during the Little Ice Age—ruins such as those at Chaco Canyon and Cahokia—led European explorers and modern archaeologists alike to imagine societal collapse and the tragic loss of a golden age. But oral histories from the generations that followed the cities’ demise generally described what came later as better. Smaller communities allowed for more sustainable economies. Determined not to depend on one source of sustenance, people supplemented their farming with increased hunting, fishing, and gathering. They expanded existing networks of trade, carrying large amounts of goods all across the continent in dugout canoes and on trading roads; these routes provided a variety of products in good times and a safety net when drought or other disasters stressed supplies. They developed societies that encouraged balance and consensus, in part to mitigate the problems caused by their changing climate.
To support their new economies, Native North Americans instituted decentralized governing structures with a variety of political checks and balances to prevent dictatorial leaders from taking power and to ensure that all members of a society had a say. Power and prestige lay not in amassing wealth but in assuring that wealth was shared wisely, and leaders earned support in part by being good providers and wise distributors. Many polities established councils of elders and balanced power by pairing leaders, such as the war chief and the peace chief; setting up male and female councils; and operating under family-based clans that had members in multiple towns. […]
Underlying the structural changes was an ideological shift toward reciprocity, an ideal of sharing and balance that undergirded economics, politics, and religion across much of the continent. The Sonoran Desert–living O’odham, for example, developed a himdag, or “way of life,” that taught that people are supposed to share with one another according to what they have, especially the necessities of food, water, and shelter. Reciprocity is not merely generosity; giving away a surplus is an investment, insurance that others will help in your own time of need. […]
What if, instead of doubling down on the ways we have been living, we were to do what 13th- and 14th-century Native North Americans did, and develop more balanced and inclusive economic, social, and political systems to fit our changing climate? What if we put our highest priority on spreading prosperity and distributing decision making more broadly? It sounds unprecedented, but it has happened before.”

» The Atlantic | A 600-Year-Old Blueprint for Weathering Climate Change by Kathleen DuVal

➕ Extras

“A life-altering journey through the science of neuroaesthetics, which offers proof for how our brains and bodies transform when we participate in the arts—and how this knowledge can improve our health, enable us to flourish, and build stronger communities.”
Your Brain on Art by Susan Magsamen & Ivy Ross

“Radical politics today should not be concerned with merely averting the worst but rather with beginning again at the end. To think about the future in this way is itself a form of liberation that might incubate the necessary radical solutions we need. […] Ware recasts the most urgent issue of our times and resolves that we can only consider our collective end by treating it as a starting point.”
On Extinction: Beginning Again At The End by Ben Ware

“This [free] guide enables you to steward organizations with a mindset that fosters planetary thriving, aliveness and justice. To do so, you will learn about theories and practices on decoloniality, equity and transformation. As a result, you will learn how to better serve the regeneration of all life.”
Regenerative Leadership for System Transformation - Self-Study Guide by Indigenous & Modern

“In this study, we conducted a representative survey across 125 countries, interviewing nearly 130,000 individuals. Our findings reveal widespread support for climate action. Notably, 69% of the global population expresses a willingness to contribute 1% of their personal income, 86% endorse pro-climate social norms and 89% demand intensified political action. […] Despite these encouraging statistics, we document that the world is in a state of pluralistic ignorance, wherein individuals around the globe systematically underestimate the willingness of their fellow citizens to act.”
Globally representative evidence on the actual and perceived support for climate action by Peter Andre et al.

🚿 Shower Thoughts

“It’s a technical marvel, that internet. Something so mindblowingly impressive that if you showed it to someone even thirty years ago, their face would melt the fuck off. So why does it feel like something’s missing? Why are we all so collectively unhappy with the state of the web?”

» Where have all the websites gone? by Jason Velazquez

That’s it for this week’s Rabbit Holes issue!

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Thomas