In ‘Innovation, technology and change 1‘ I was considering whether mappa mundi was a technological innovation. I concluded that what might be innovatory about our project was the way we were combining digital technology with creative processes. It may be true that original combinations of already existing technologies are in effect technological innovations.
All technological innovation is developmental and dependent on already existing levels of development. Stephenson’s Rocket would at first glance count as an innovation but if you look more closely you can reckon that the wheel, the rail track, the metallurgy, the mining technology, the steam engine, the control of fire and heat pre-existed it. The key innovative component was the way in which the power produced by the steam engine was transferred to the wheels. There may even have been precedent technology for this function.
Innovation relies on complex convergences of problem construction, available preceding technology and knowledge. Human inventiveness and how knowledge and skills are retained, communicated and adapted are connected. These processes are also connected to the dispersal of basic skills, literacy and numeracy. The co-ordination of human activities is a key driver and and outcome of language development. The communicative space of information technology facilitates the distribution of images of the human species as well as the convergence and standardisation of production.
The content of the ‘uploaded videos’ of which the interactive mappa mundi space will consist is ‘change’. Of course there is a resonance between these ‘micro’ story/images of change and the ‘macro’ changing map. We are creating a collective image of a changing world through collecting stories of human change. Through the systematic organisation of these story/images in the interactive online space we are engaging with an image of a complex system. However, what is this ‘change’ that we are asking people to express and engage with?
Not only is there a possibility that mappa mundi may constitute a technological advance and also engage with personal and social change, it may deliver social change. Or is it just an elaborate game carried out by people who are a part of an exclusive club of those ‘in the know’ for their own benefit and affirmation?
Human change, change to and through human beings, is continuous. We are born, grow old and die. We witness birth and death. We accompany the human beings around us in the struggles that we undertake for meaning, identity, justice, security, wealth and pleasure (to cover just some of the general categories of aspiration). The structures of our social groups change accordingly. These larger more populous entities are structured by gangs, interest groups, elites, classes, national projects that hold conflicting aspirations and motivations. People will observe that human beings never change, that their basic nature is fundamentally stable; they may associate this stability with a god or with our identity as an animal. The natural history of humanity merges with the developmental evolution of the species and the perspectives gained in seeing this continuity can become vantage points to look at the human story in a closer time-frame and in this way particular and more recent features are seen more clearly.
Charles Darwin could only have made his ‘discoveries’ about the evolution of species at the time that he did. They were connected to circumstances when the British Imperialist project was at its height, affording a new global perspective derived from the cultural interactions that imperialism had brought about. This reminds us that all views are relative and even views of history are historically relative.
We don’t experience changes in our own lives from the perspective of species history. There is always a disconnection between how we experience personal change and how circumstances beyond our control change. However this disconnection is a part of a process of consciousness and recognition and being conscious of it is a stage in our ‘processing’ of change, of how we accept it and struggle for or against it.
mappa mundi draws our attention to individual change, or change as its experienced by the individual because in the dramatic space, one that is animated by characters, this is a crucial creative focus, a focus necessary for creativity. It does not make this focus obligatory.
As a consequence of industrial development – and of the agricultural development that preceded it (particularly through deforestation) – human beings have altered the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. Due to its peculiar properties carbon reflects back heat at the infra-red wave-lengths that the Earth radiates heat it does not do so in the ultra violet spectrum that the sun radiates. This means that the biosphere is retaining more of the sun’s heat and the earth’s average surface temperature is rising.
At various stages of industrial development people have been aware of pollution and how the air quality has been affected relatively near to plants engaged industrial production and latterly, with the discovery of acid rain, the relatively long distance impact. It has only been in the last 40 years that measurement has been possible that makes it clear that the impact of carbon fossil fuel consumption has altered the atmosphere. This change can be dated back to the beginning of the industrial period.
The key factors here are the invisibility of the carbon particle increase, the fact that it is dispersed throughout the whole atmosphere (not just local to the source) and the long duration of its residence in the atmosphere and therefore its cumulative impact.
So things are changing. Uncertainty surrounds the nature of these changes and their impact over time. It is through computer modelling that the data from the measurements of sea level rise, of oceanic warming, of changes in oceanic circulatory systems, of cryospheric depletion, of weather system heat transmission are collated and put into formulaic relationship. The computers used are the largest available. The research is restricted and structured by the number of times highly complex scenarios can be run through the assemblies of computers. They are the perceptual instruments of projection and forecasting. Likewise the potential social and economic consequences of these biospheric changes are subject to investigation by the construction of scenarios that use broad categories of potential change: economic convergence or divergence, technological development and population growth. These factors in turn influence projections about atmospheric pollution and average temperature increases, because , of course, these three key factors impact on continuing carbon emissions.
The largest collections of scientists from a widest variety of disciplines ever assembled are those gathered in the study of climate change by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. They of course have to investigate impacts and adaptations. The adaptations that people make to protect themselves from the impact of change, from decisions about coastal erosion to the introduction of saline-resistant rice crops, are stories of human change. Eventually these adaptations are decided upon by human beings in the midst of complex social pressures.
The use by the IPCC of the word ‘adaptation’ and the distinction drawn with ‘impacts’ is strategically important. An impact must be perceptible. It must be capable of being experienced. It may provoke adaptive strategies. You can’t help being reminded of Darwin’s use of the word adaptation. This concept was used by Darwin in relationship to environmental interaction and selection of characteristics determining species survival.
Development of computer modelling has enabled us to look at the relationship between economic growth and the consumption of natural resources. One of the first uses of modelling to project global development was in the Limits to Growth project in 1972. The use of ‘feedback loops’ in the simulation of natural and economic processes was decisive. The General Circulation Model used then is also the basis for those used in Climate Change work.
Looking at material flows and inter-sectoral interactions (e.g. between population, housebuilding and brick making) and building complex simulations of economies have also been constructed through input-output models. This work is based on matrix mathematics and was first developed by Wassily Leontief. It is this modelling that is being used by the Stockholm Environmental Institute at the University of York in its Resource and Energy Analysis Programme. It is this modelling that is capable of simulating specific sectoral interactions (e.g. between shipping and detergent consumption) and relates consumption trends to production and environmental impacts. It can simulate the amount of carbon embedded in products and so can give an estimate of ‘western’ consumption impact on ‘developing world’ (e.g. Chinese) production. The focus on consumption-based analysis of carbon emission has blown the cover off the pretence that the West’s carbon emissions are in relative decline because carbon-emitting production has been exported. This modelling is also the source for information on carbon and/or ecological foot-printing. It thus relates individual consumption choices to global consequences. This brings us back to considering the relationship between individual change and social change.
People have been changing their lifestyle, their personal habits, their behaviour, their social life, their political views, their image of themselves, their image of humanity in response to environmental change. Recognition of the dysfunctionality of the economic system and the crisis of growth is a complementary and related driver of these changes. Not all are towards activism or even towards environmental sustainability. Some people will have taken defensive, protective, private actions. It goes without saying that people living at a distance from the regions of the world that are being immediately affected by environmental change (by sea level rise or the increased likelihood of extreme weather events, droughts or intense precipitation) will be responding differently.
The knowledge that these new environmental conditions may have been caused by industrial development connects sometimes, in people from the old industrial areas of the world, with a feeling of a loss of the land, or of a pre-existing more organic connection to the earth, or with a regret at the loss of bio-diversity. Even if people believe that the environmental changes are not attributable to anthropogenic factors or that the accuracy of the measurement of increases in average surface temperature are uncertain, they cannot deny the actual changes experienced by people living in tropical Africa, Andean South America or the great Asian river deltas.
What might be manifested as a sense of responsibility in the industrialised part of the world is related to the evidence that, although China may currently have the fastest growing Carbon emissions, it is the developed world that is overwhelmingly responsible for the amount of Carbon particles in the atmosphere (this is to do with the residence time for atmospheric carbon dioxoide particles mentioned earlier). Furthermore it is still demand in the West based on borrowed funds that is the main driver for Chinese industrial output.
So responsive change here in the West could be said to be driven by a mixture of information and intuition. Whether it is the impact of economic dysfunction, or perception of inequality, or actual impacts of environmental change that are the main ingredient of change depends on individuals and their social interactions. How far people in the parts of the UK that have been affected recently by flash flooding have been becoming more aware of global climate change or have simply been concerned with flood protection and insurance is difficult to assess. There is no set recipe for the cocktail mix of change.
How much these changes relate to evolutionary species adaptation is entirely subject to speculation and imagination. If the human species is undergoing an evolutionary adaptation is it possible that this would be seen within a generation? A major part of Darwin’s research was carried out on pidgeons because of the rapidity of their breeding cycles.
The keynote for mappa mundi is that it is in the stories that people tell that the relation between these different impacts may be discerned. Also, the project doesn’t rigidly insist on people interpreting change from the point of view of the environment or the economy. Anyway, as was implied earlier, these changes happen through people and not apart from them. This means that they happen in the midst of other life changes; they echo, play against and are sometimes precipitated by these individual factors.
In order for a group participating in the mappa mundi project to find a common story or image of change with which they can all identify or that they recognise they must first of all come to terms with their own individual story. Our mappa mundi toolkit will elaborate ways many stories can be accumulated into one story. In this we will be using ideas derived from Augusto Boal’s work in The Rainbow of Desire.
People make choices, however circumscribed the choices appear to be. They don’t choose the choices they make but those choices, irreversible and characteristic, based on retreat, defence, fear, resistance, activism, solidarity, are the lineaments of human freedom. It is when people begin to take possession of their own history, when they begin to tell their own stories and recognise that they are at the centre of their own lives that they move the human story forward.