The Greatest Story Ever Told (the remix)

If you keep spinning it, they might eventually dance to it

You don’t have to look far to find a half-baked rant about how we must keep ramping up energy use in the name of “progress.” Much like the biblical narrative that spawned the famous 1965 film ‘The Greatest Story Ever Told’ (GSET), faith doesn’t bend to reality. It’s as if our low-intensity evolutionary path—remember the one where we went from swinging in trees to populating the world at the top of the food chain—all this prior to fossil fuels—didn't count for anything.

But let’s pause and rewind a bit. The evidence suggests our evolution was less of a master plan and more of a trial-and-error process—throwing ideas (and species) at the wall to see what stuck. Hominid species came and went, an evolutionary revolving door, until H. sapiens was left holding the keys. Even then, the experiments didn’t stop. We tried countless ways to figure out how to live sustainably on this planet. Sure, there were some missteps (like those human-induced megafauna extinctions, woops!), but plenty of these cultural experiments succeeded, adapting and surviving into the modern era with roots going back thousands of years.

These other paths shouldn’t be romanticized or treated like museum exhibits, but they also shouldn’t be dismissed. They represent time-tested alternatives to the energy-guzzling trajectory we ended up on. Yet here we are, products of a system that’s systematically crushed, absorbed, or sidelined every other way of doing things. When that’s your legacy, it’s easy to lose perspective.

A GSET basic principle is to take a particularly low reference point and map the positive change since. The refrain is remarkably consistent and goes something like this:

Could one imagine radical advances in the fitness of the human species experienced over the past two centuries without fossil fuels and the resulting emissions? Frankly, no. The steam engine, and the internal combustion and diesel engines, combined to enable the modern productive human enterprise, and all rely on coal, oil, and/or natural gas. Cement, concrete, asphalt, steel, plastic, and fertilizers also require fossil fuels not just for energy but as chemical inputs. The steam, heat, locomotion, and material outputs of fossil fuels radically exceed the outputs that could be achieved by bioenergy or human and livestock muscle, providing an economic surplus that has been turned back into higher-order human pursuits, such as universal education, scientific research, a Cambrian explosion¹ in technological capabilities, the arts, leisure, and, indeed, conservation of the natural world. Alex Trembath, The Breakthrough Journal

The idea that this view has any grounding in an evolutionary understanding should, by now, be laughably obvious to anyone who’s been paying attention to Financing the Anthropocene. It takes a special kind of hubris for GSET zealots to sit around and declare that the ‘fitness of the human species’ has somehow improved. Meanwhile, the kind of grinding, desperate poverty that we escaped was practically nonexistent in most indigenous alternatives. And even in some early cities. But sure, let’s call our progress the litmus test for the species; makes for a stronger story, right?

Also, managing to find praise for our conservation efforts while we’re busy orchestrating the'sixth’ extinction is like calling the cup ½ full when its ¾ empty. Of course, it’s not like we can ask other species how they feel about it; I doubt they’d be handing us any awards. Anyway, stay focused; this story is not about them, is it? Watch Avatar instead if you’re touchy-feely!

How Deep Can You Bury Your Head?

The argument also conveniently ignores the mountains of archaeological evidence for “high-level” human pursuits that had nothing to do with amassing economic surpluses. We’re talking about 290,000 years or so of improving ornamentation, symbolism, religion, and art—things that existed not as afterthoughts but as integral parts of human life. When Picasso was in awe of Spanish cave art, it was because he realized how rich and ancient the human legacy was and how narrow our version of it was. Add to the archaeological record all the anthropological studies and indigenous oral histories, and it becomes clear that defining progress purely through our pathway of material accumulation seems, well, religious.

One of the most compelling studies on this topic comes from Professor Richard Lee, whose classes I had the privilege of attending at the University of Toronto. Lee’s work with the !Kung Bushmen revealed something profoundly inconvenient for proponents of so-called “developed” societies: the !Kung spent significantly less time “working” or being “productive” in the economic sense than those in industrialized societies. In fact, they carved out an ecological niche so sophisticatedly simple that their average working day was under three hours. The rest of their time? Dedicated to things that foster a sense of well-being and belonging—you know that stuff we fit in on weekends in retirement or are sadly sold as part of work ‘culture’.

To ignore these insights—and the flood of similar studies from the past 50 years—isn’t just an oversight—that's getting off way too easy; it’s recency bias at its most damaging, reshaping human progress through the narrow, myopic lens of the "complexity brain." This mindset, crucial to GSET, labels any cultural experiment that manages to sustain ecological stasis as “primitive” and “simple,” unworthy of serious attention. Without monumental inequalities or towering symbols of power, these societies are deemed irrelevant and therefore erasable. So kudos abound for these complex hierarchical experiments that failed, like the Aztecs, but tribes that survived? Not so much. On a planet that probably hosted 100,000 languages and histories, we are hell bent on supporting one story line, ideally in English.

Species Fitness?

Evolutionary biology suggests that a species’ fitness can only be measured over millennia, not decades or centuries. Sure, our cultural experiment has delivered “progress” over the last few hundred years—progress from some of the most miserable conditions that humans have ever endured. But to be clear, not everyone was wallowing in the morass of medieval Europe, waiting for the economic and cultural salvation that 1492 brought. That year marked the beginning of the end for the other experiments that had managed to that point to avoid being subsumed into ours. Since our experiment meant gutting the earth's cultural and natural richness through an increasing concentration of wealth, it was hardly a ‘Cambrian explosion’ for our species.

Don’t get me wrong, I love 24/7 power, a longer life, and Netflix as much as the next person—saying there is no going back is stating the obvious. But to be clear, criticizing our definition of progress doesn't make you a fatalist. We are not in an existential crisis. Seriously, can we retire that phrase? It’s not helping anyone. Humanity isn’t about to vanish, and the Earth will bounce back, no matter how badly we mess things up.

The real issue are the effors to elevate our particular cultural experiment—one that’s completely unproven as an adaptive mechanism—to God’s plan. And then label any critique as being anti-’humanist’. Maybe it’s time to cut the BS and actually think about how a broader perspective could help us out here. As I’ll cover in later notes, you can’t plot any reasonable trajectory for our species that ramps energy use forever. If that thought is embedded in our definition of progress, things are going to get interesting.

When popular GSET preachers pitch visions that—if we’re really lucky—might scrape by for the next generation, you know there’s a problem. Take those nuclear dreams, for example. Sure, they sound great, until you consider that uranium deposits run out in about 100 years. Details…

Maybe we’ll even manage to lift 3.5 billion people above $7-a-day incomes. Maybe. Or that our energy ramp will allow the 2.3 billion cooking over open fires to switch to cleaner fuels. Maybe. Or benefit other species. Because, of course, history shows that more energy consumption always leads to flourishing biodiversity. Umm, maybe not?

Apparently, the grand plan here is just to keep doing what we’ve been doing—only bigger, faster, and with a lot more Trumpism. Indiginous concerns slowing down resource development? Clearly, they haven’t been listening! Because nothing screams ‘God’s plan’ quite like doubling down on our current trajectory.

How does sustainably investing fit in? Uncomfortably, to be honest. Sort of like a footnote in the GSET textbook. Suffice to say the bedrock of the last decade—globalization, liberalism, and collective action are being ripped out from underneath as we speak, so the sustainable investing crowd is in need of a pretty darn good replacement story.

I’ll be looking at some basic tenants of this in future notes: the physical limitations of current energy and return expectations; biases against applying accepted principals of corporate lifecycle to GSET. In other words, a compelling story will involve less talk (sorry, ‘engagement’) and more Trojan horses.

1. The Cambrian Explosion refers to a significant event in Earth’s history, occurring approximately 541 million years ago during the Cambrian period. It was a rapid evolutionary burst during which a remarkable diversity of life forms appeared in the fossil record over a relatively short geological time span of about 20–25 million years. Chatgpt