And Then What?: Using Wide-Boundary Lenses | Frankly 65
The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens
Nate Hagens
4.8 • 552 Ratings
🗓️ 12 July 2024
⏱️ 24 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
(Recorded July 8 2024)
There are many so-called 'solutions' out there that, upon first glance, seem like great ideas - yet when we look beyond the narrow scope of the immediate benefits, we discover a slew of unintended (and often counterproductive) consequences.
Today's Frankly offers a series of examples of modern issues using a "wide-boundary" lens - and in the process demonstrates the importance of asking "...and then what?" when thinking about our responses to future events and constraints.
How would incorporating wider boundary lenses into our lives change our plans and expectations for the future? What are we missing when we go all-in on plans to expand renewables, electric vehicles, and AI? Could a growing number of ecologically literate people guide us towards more pro-social policies, institutions, and infrastructure?
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Greetings. Just back from an outdoor trip up north, as they say here, with many members of my family. |
| 0:09.8 | I'm going to talk about that in next weeks, frankly, an update on my family, which will, of course, have wide boundary implications for the biosphere and the great simplification. |
| 0:23.6 | Of course it will. Otherwise I wouldn't talk about it. |
| 0:26.6 | Today I am going to talk about wide boundary implications. |
| 0:31.6 | We have an ostensible goal, but we often don't look at the second order effect, the third order effect, |
| 0:40.5 | and the, as Daniel Schmachtenberger would say, the nth order effect behind the surface goal. |
| 0:47.8 | In the 1970s, there was a famous ecologist named Garrett Hardin, who was most famously known for an essay called The Tragedy of the Commons. |
| 0:59.0 | He's less well known for his framing of numerate, which is knowing numbers, literate, which is knowing words and grammar. |
| 1:11.9 | And more important than those was being equal it or ecologically literate. |
| 1:17.1 | And he said the question that you should ask when looking at a situation is, and then what? |
| 1:26.1 | And then what is the lead-in to the ecological, broader consequences of an action, a policy, a |
| 1:33.4 | decision? |
| 1:33.8 | So today I'm going to list a few modern, relevant examples of narrow versus wide boundary thinking that we don't often enough ask and then what. |
| 1:48.9 | So first of all, a easy, simple, probably unless you live in the state of Iowa, non-controversial |
| 1:56.8 | example, corn ethanol. So 15 years ago, when oil was almost $150 a barrel, gasoline was expensive |
| 2:05.6 | and in short supply, so we started to mandate more corn ethanol, which is a liquid fuel |
| 2:14.3 | made from corn that reduced the amount of gasoline we needed, lowered the prices |
| 2:20.9 | on gasoline, et cetera, was good for consumers and voters who like things cheap. |
| 2:27.9 | That was the narrow boundary goal. |
| 2:30.3 | Of course, if you expand beyond that, corn ethanol really wasn't an energy source, very, very |
| 2:35.8 | marginally. It was more of an energy conversion. It converted corn and natural gas and energy |
| 2:42.3 | and fertilizer and energy in heating and soil, et cetera, into a different form of energy that was used in our cars. |
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