Humanity's Blind Spots | Olivia Lazard

Entangled World explores the interrelated, existential social, economic, ecological, and technological risks we face, their underlying drivers, and how a more beautiful world might emerge.

My guest today is Olivia Lazard. Olivia is a research fellow at Carnegie Europe where her research involves investigating how to support a move towards regenerative foreign and security policy within the European Union. She also leads projects at the University of Exeter on the ecological costs of the energy transition. Essentially, Olivia works on the geopolitics of climate-disrupted futures and ecological breakdown. With a background in conflict resolution, and deep field experience in some of the world's most fragile contexts, she now focuses on preventing and mitigating the risks associated with a global competition over specific renewable and non-renewable resources. Her work tackles the decarbonisation-regeneration nexus, the core pillar for the future of global security and peace.

In this conversation, Olivia and I discuss the major “blind spots” of the energy transition and how competitive resource extraction is likely to lead to conflict, violence, ecological destabilization, and the dangerous potential of simultaneously compromising multiple major ecosystems for the sake of resource extraction. She describes how COVID and the Ukraine War revealed some important vulnerabilities in our interconnected systems and how resources can be powerfully weaponized by those who control them. She puts the Ukraine-Russia conflict in context as part of a larger story that has major implications for the future; a possible future in which Russia may be able to use its control over energy, critical minerals, agriculture, and other natural resources to threaten the stability of other increasingly dependent, destabilized nations.

We also talk about how China has perfected the verticalization of supply chains for several critical minerals needed for the advanced tech revolution, particularly the development of AI. China has become not only an industrial heavyweight leading in manufacturing but also a technological heavyweight, which has massive geopolitical implications for the global balance of power

We also discuss the history of industrial revolutions and their relationship to human conflict, with a particular eye to what history’s lessons may portend for the industrial and technological shifts that are now underway. We explore the rationality behind different realms of human conquest throughout history, from colonialism to the nuclear age, highlighting how these revolutions came about in response to needs and threats in key historical moments. We discuss historical cycles of attempts to control, extract, expand, and conquer, and the resulting long-term consequences. In other words, how our current problem-solving approaches works to solve narrow goals while externalizing harm in other places.

Olivia shares about her experience staying with an Indigenous community in the Amazon during which she had a profound spiritual experience in which she felt more connected to the natural world than she had ever felt before and it completely shifted how she thought about her place in the world. We end the conversation talking about how in reality, we are not separate from nature and to understand that is to come to view ourselves and the world in all its holistic beauty.

Olivia Lazard’s Links & Resources:

[johnflatberg]

Great conversation. Olivia is brilliant. If the Metacrisis is the problem; permaculture is certainly one of the greatest solutions. Permaculture is not just farming and gardening but looks at whole system designs and includes economics, building design, cultural integrity and social connectivity. Australia’s biggest export since the 70s. Look at Andrew Millison’s work documenting large scale permaculture. Keep up the good work. Love your podcast.

[edgeman]

This is tremendous, thank you when talking about the Roman Empire at around 1:15 in we see Overshoot as a cause of their exploits. Pretty much all wars are resource wars.

[timcoombe]

This was enlightening, frightening and inspiring. There can’t be many people who grasp all of this as well as Olivia Lazard.

I can understand the overwhelming emotions too. It can be hard to accept the level of violence some people are prepared to go to.

[TennesseeJed]

Complex. As I understand, in the early parts of the first two world wars they didn't know it was world war yet.

[AKrn]

What is this? We're all doomed, what's left to know? Enjoy what you have while you still have it.

[na]

1:09 How is this not simply a changing of the guards from the US -centric colonization to Russian domination? There are many things not being addressed here that feel important, like NordStream. It just seems Vlad has been thoughtfully and strategically (and I'd argue conservatively and patiently) acting while the US had been, like the adolescent country we are, acting like gangsters while pretending to be angels. And provoking Russia with violations of the Warsaw pact.

[treefrog]

Throughout ALL of human history the story of mankind has been one of the subjugation of the masses by the rich and powerful few. Read your history books.Read your bible - if you have to. The well-being of humanity itself is not the altruistic goal we have ben taught to believe in. Most of us are merely "means to an end" for a privileged few. The noble, fanciful stories we tell about ourselves obscures the rapacious venality that surrounds us ALL. I wish that I could believe in fairy tales.

[CharlesBrown-xqug]

A thought experment, an impractical device that is easy to check for mechanical workability. Its parts are large enough to act as everyday mechanisms but small enough to work well with the nanometer scale thermal motions of gas molecules.  This device hypothetically creates self powered thermal diversification:

Sketch made with keyboard characters:

COLD    ())--:PARTITION:-->> HOT   

Key
()) = Paddlewheel. 
-- = Axle.  (Continuous from end to end)
: :  = Axle tunnel going through a wall.
>> =  Lumped friction element


Please visualize two chambers full of inert gas separated by a very thin partition.  The partition is thin to delicately support billions of separate nanometer scale short axles running straight through loosely enough to rotate freely but  not leak very much heat so the chambers can hold separate temperatures.

On the left side, a very small paddlewheel is mounted at the left end of each axle. On the right side,  lumped friction elements are mounted stationary in place on the partition, one for each axle, for the right end of each axle to run through. The lumped friction elements convert the mechanical rotation of their axle into heat. The lumped friction elements do not impart Brownian motion to their axle. 

Brownian motion (a nanometer scale effect) turns the paddlewheels at random speeds randomly clockwise or counterclockwise. This random rotation is turned into heat by the lumped friction elements.   

The committed, linked, and functional roles of the walls, paddlewheels, axles, and lumped friction elements in differnt places should systemically produce a divergence in the thermal energy in the two chambers without adding external energy.

Aloha

[Cy]

One sided take on the geopolitics I hope you strive to get a different POV one that is actually not lying by omission.