Why Lifelong Learning in the Anthropocene?

An introduction to Pondercraft

My overall life goal these days is to try to be a good human in the Anthropocene. It’s clear to me — if not to the geologists! — that we’re in a new planetary era whereby human impacts have become the dominant force over the entire earth.

A Layperson’s Take

I hold neither apocalyptic nor doomerist views about this situation. I don’t think we should “party like it’s 1999” and cruise off to see Antarctica before it melts or the Great Barrier Reef before it bleaches completely. (Please don’t do that.)

I don’t think fossil fuel companies, who surely now see the writing on the wall, should eek out every last drop of oil or gas before the moratorium falls — and yet, in any case, humans worldwide at present are in no way capable of meeting still-growing energy needs via purely renewable sources. (I root for the energy transition, technologically, corporately, in markets, and via smart regulatory incentives.)

I’m skeptical about the ability of elite international conclaves (like COP) to effect mitigation, i.e. to successfully persuade or incentivize or bully the world’s nations into curtailing carbon emissions sufficiently to keep global warming under the Arch-Limit of 1.5 degrees. (I’d propose these meetings be allotted a strict monetary and carbon budget for the meetings themselves. The hypocrisy… 😠)

Somewhat like terminal patients eventually move off from active medical treatment with the goal of cure to hospice, working toward a “soft landing” where downslide is inevitable, mitigation needs to combine with and transition to adaptation. Yes, absolutely, let’s continue to level off and reduce carbon dependence. Fossil-based is dirty fuel. But we need to ramp up measures towards adaptation and a softer landing, and not just for the wealthy. To be good humans, there needs to be a special focus on the poor, who are least to blame, will suffer most, and have the fewest resources to navigate change. The poor includes non-human creatures and species that are being catastrophically lost. (I’m far more apocalyptic about the loss of biodiversity than climate change per se.) What humans do best is to adapt; the same is not true for our fellow travelers on the planet.

How do I come to all these assessments? They’re tentative. They’re a layperson’s take. They come from recent learning over the last many years, building upon a lifetime of learning that gives the foundation.

The first most important thing any human being with minimal time and resources can do to be a better human in the Anthropocene is to start and to keep learning, for the rest of your life. And then to adapt, first yourself and your own life, and then help others as you gain experience and wisdom.

The first most important thing any human being can do to be a better human in the Anthropocene is to start and to keep learning, for the rest of your life.

Travel as Microcosm

After I left academia and teaching (and so much admin) during the pandemic, I first played with the idea of teaching online. Quickly, I realized I was burnt out, and I no longer had confidence in the subject matter, or in myself to teach it compellingly, or in the usual methods, or even in the students. The pendulum swung to trying to do something completely different. In the middle of a pandemic when the entire world stopped moving and the travel industry completely tanked, I thought to start a little travel agency. — It wasn’t that crazy, since I knew I needed time to learn and figure things out, and I immediately saw that travel would undergo massive changes, and there might be opportunity in that.

During the year and a half that I focused on travel advising — for educational travel, sustainable travel — I learned about the travel industry. I learned how huge it is (roughly 10% of global GDP), how relatively independent it is of regulation, how dependent much of the world is on tourism and hospitality jobs (10-11% of all jobs), how whole countries’ economies are based in part or virtually in toto upon it!¹ I also learned how archaic it is, how backwards its technologies, how conventional its clientele and service structures; in gross terms, how unsustainable it is, both in terms of the vast hordes of tourists now sweeping the earth, how disrespectful they can be, how disruptive they can be to local inhabitants, all regardless of how much money tourists bring into destination and how much they spend. Economic spoils, in many cases, are not worth the cultural, social, and environmental destruction that so easily ensues — say many destinations.²

Another lesson I learned, as travel began to “build back” after the pandemic, was how some people in the travel industry definitely wanted to build back better. And yet, almost every single effort made — I do applaud them — was focused on the “supply side” amongst tour operators, hotels, airlines, destinations. As a travel advisor, I wanted to focus on the travelers themselves, on the “demand side.” For them, all I saw was “tips and tricks”: how to be a more sustainable traveler. Or I saw marketing surveys from customer facing OTA’s (online travel agents, like booking.com or expedia.com), who wanted to see IF consumers were interested in sustainability as a product feature, and IF they would be willing to pay more for it.

Capitalism at its finest.

What I saw almost nothing of was any systematic attempt to help travelers, real people, non-experts, laypeople who wanted to see the world (or merely “recreate” in it, on a beach somewhere…) become genuinely better travelers and world citizens.

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From Travel to the Anthropocene

Just like Plato took the small-scale analogy of the soul to try to understand justice writ large in the city, I am realizing that the same lesson about where the most effort has been targeted, holds true for the Anthropocene. The case of making travel sustainable is small-scale analogous to the problem writ large of humans becoming better citizens of the Anthropocene.

Travel remains a robust test case — and a contributor in its own right — to the larger cause. Just as well-balanced souls for Plato bode well for justice in the city, so too does good travel bode well for lifelong learners becoming good human sojourners in the Anthropocene.

But let’s drill down a bit into the analogy. As with travel, there are all these official, large-scale, institutional, regulatory, government, and expert approaches to tackling Anthropocene issues, with climate and sustainability at the forefront. One only needs to look to the SDGs as the framework driving the UN’s agenda for economic and social affairs to see how it works.

There are definitely some efforts (a bit more sophisticated compared to travel) focused piecemeal on changing “consumer behavior” or “making better choices” in terms of domestic consumption, home engineering (install solar, conserve energy, smart water use, upgrade building materials), or lifestyle modification surrounding food (eat less beef, avoid plastics!), clothing (avoid fast fashion!), or transportation (buy an EV!).

But it’s still a lot of “tips and tricks.”

What I learned from travel about the sad lack of attention to the traveler side of things magnifies to the lack of attention paid to all humans as lifelong sojourners on Planet Earth in a new era named just for them.

What I learned from travel about the sad lack of attention to the traveler…
magnifies to the lack of attention paid to all humans as lifelong sojourners
on Planet Earth in a new era named just for them.

Why is lifelong learning in the Anthropocene the first and primary way to become good (better) humans going forward?

Because our species genius is to adapt, and the problem is complex, and change is rapid. What we learned in K-12 or college, or even graduate or professional school is woefully insufficient. We can’t run with it as is. Not to mention, we were such kids then. Now we (grown-ups) need to become the adults in the room, even as non-experts, as laypeople.

Because the experts, detail-oriented, narrowly focused, radically specialized — as experts are in this scientific and technological age — are not generally wise. They are no more good humans than the rest of us. They are beholden to their training, their interests, their ideologies, and are just as overtly politicized — yet they feel more empowered to tell others how things should be. Leaving everything to experts and scientists is not the answer — however much we can indeed, and should, learn from them.

From lifelong learning will fall out naturally all the required changes in how we live day to day, as Live Susty (my daughter’s blog) advocates. She provides deeply researched advice geared nevertheless to everyday people. Her craft, cultivated for Anthropocene living, is to learn, to experiment, to model through her own efforts, and then to share. Not “tips and tricks” but systematic, actionable breakdowns of major life areas.

From the learning will also fall out naturally ways potentially to change work, career, and professional life. Are you looking for sustainable career pathways?

From learning will fall out improved community, civic, and political participation. Lifelong learners in the Anthropocene will become the natural leaders of the future. As a parent, as a colleague, a neighbor, parishioner, or citizen, the positive impact you can have in small ways, locally, is vital (life-giving) and increasingly rare. You might even help save democracy!

Learning may seem, first off, to be merely an intellectual thing, even as it includes deeply experiential self-education through travel or via concerted private efforts to adapt your everyday life on the small scale, your domestic consumption, home engineering, and lifestyle changes. Intellectual study and experience, as ways to “think what we are doing,” become action soon enough, and right there lies the path to introduce something genuinely new into the world — which is the human condition.

Stay tuned for what lifelong learning in the Anthropocene might actually look like in practice.

the Pondercraft owl — eyes open, a little skeptical, looking for wisdom — image generated by Substack

1. You can explore data for economics and impacts of the travel industry at the World Travel & Tourism Council (wttc.org).

2. A quick google of “bad tourism” will bring up dozens of cases and reports. It is noteworthy that national interests in tourism-dependent countries push tourism for the sake of overall GDP. They like to measure in number of tourists — rather than more sustainable measures like length of stay or the trickle down of tourism dollars into second, third, and lower tier businesses in destination. (How many days do you spend in Paris? What do you go to see besides the Mona Lisa at the Louvre?) Local interests in destinations, by contrast, bear the brunt of costs, from rising housing prices to infrastructure costs to water and resource depletion, to environmental pressures on parks and wildlife habitat. If tourism businesses are primarily not local — like airlines, global hotel groups, international tour operators — the local people themselves may see only a (tiny) fraction of the proceeds of tourism spend.