Tipping Points: Any Cause for Hope?

I just finished reading, two decades after it was published, the book Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell. I read it at the same time that I am still trying to get through This Changes Everything by Naomi Klein, about which I wrote earlier. I realized there were things we can learn from comparing the two books.

The most noticeable thing is that Klein’s book is extremely depressing. It is also heavy with references. In contrast, Gladwell’s book (what an appropriate name he has) is optimistic, and has just enough references so that you know he is not making everything up. I read it in a couple of days. Klein’s book will take me months or years to digest.

From Klein’s viewpoint, no matter how much we do, it is not going to make any difference. Unless we totally change our economic system, the Earth is condemned to climatic warming that will exceed the ability of our civilization to tolerate. As I wrote previously, trees are out, weeds are in; this is the world of our future, and we might as well accept it.

But Gladwell’s viewpoint, as indicated right on the cover of his book, is that little things can make a big difference. Some seemingly minor event or process can push just enough on circumstances that they will begin to tip in a new direction. Also, right on the cover of his book is a match. It only takes a spark to start a fire, if the fuel is there and the conditions are right. Gladwell would suggest that we might be able to avoid global climate disaster, if something unexpected and unpredictable occurs that makes people change the way they think and live. It seems impossible, but such things have happened, though on a much smaller scale.

One example from Gladwell’s book is the Broken Windows theory of crime prevention. It would seem that, to reduce crime, which was epidemic in New York City in the early 1990s, it would be necessary to make big economic and sociological changes that would affect and improve the lives of millions of people. In parts of New York that had lots of crime, there were broken windows and graffiti everywhere. These, it would seem, are the symptoms of crime, not the causes. But a campaign to clean up broken windows and graffiti, as if they were the cause rather than the effect, seems to have caused a reduction in the crime rate. If people see broken windows and graffiti everywhere, they to not have a sense of responsibility for their surroundings, while if they see broken windows and graffiti being cleaned up, they begin to identify with their surroundings and notice when bad things happen. Criminals know that they are less likely to get away with their crimes in a neighborhood where broken windows are quickly fixed and graffiti quickly cleaned up. Treating the symptoms is a lot cheaper than addressing the root causes, which might be so large as to be impossible to address.

I have wondered why crime rates are so much lower in France, where I now live, than in America. I wonder if part of the reason is that there is a lot of effort, by property owners and municipalities, to pick up litter. There is a lot of litter in France, but about ten times less than in America (I base this statement on actual counts of I have made). The French do not, or no longer, see their local environments as places to throw garbage, or in which crime is inevitable. One fact that does not fit this interpretation is that practically every public surface in France has graffiti.

Does something like this offer any hope that we might be able to turn around the inevitable global warming? In France, it is seen as perfectly normal for people to walk and take public transit. Even mail delivery is by bicycle. It is not, or is no longer, necessary for municipalities or the government to try to convince people to not drive cars as much.

Gladwell also addresses the problem of smoking in young people, which (at least when he was writing) was increasing even while adult smoking was on the decline. American governments and nonprofits have spent billions of dollars on campaigns that tried to show young people how dangerous smoking is, without much success. I wonder if all the anti-smoking material in my biology classes made any difference. Young people do not respond very much to appeals to evidence and reasoning. Young smokers choose to smoke because of their peers. Smoking is not cool; smokers are cool—the peers whom other young people admire are the rebels who do things precisely because they are dangerous. France and Germany have used graphic images on cigarette boxes in an attempt to scare young people into not smoking, without apparent success.

But how can you make healthy behavior normal or, better yet, cool? And how could you ever get people in general to make healthy choices by making them seem cool?

Gladwell suggests one way to reduce the smoking epidemic. Since there is no way to stop young people from experimenting with cigarettes, the best we can do is to keep them from turning into long-term tobacco addicts. Most young people who play with cigarettes do not, in fact, become lifelong tobacco addicts. Gladwell suggested requiring cigarettes to be below a critical level of nicotine content, so that it would be nearly impossible for a casual smoker to become an addict. The problem is that tobacco industry profits depend almost entirely on addiction. That is how they make their money: customers who cannot not buy the product. Requiring tobacco companies to sell only cigarettes with little nicotine is requiring them to commit economic suicide. Addiction is their product. I see no way out of this problem.

The only way to prevent bad trends is to focus on your own family. That’s what we are doing. We moved to France, rather than to try to raise our grandkids in a social environment that is as wasteful and violent as America. And as for the family context, almost nobody in their immediate or extended French family smokes. Their family, and their peers, enjoy doing healthy and constructive things like taking hikes. And when our grandchildren look around them, what do they see? They see young French people who dart around on electric scooters rather than driving. They look pretty cool and they know it. Young people see their cool peers almost every day on the trams. We do not want our grandchildren to have to choose among their society, their family, and their peers. We want all three levels of influence to maximize the chances that their tipping points will be in the right direction.

All this means that, without us trying to cause it, a tipping point might be reached in which people change their behaviors away from unhealthy and dangerous ones to healthy and constructive ones. It only takes a spark.

Don’t hold your breath in anticipation, however. When a tipping point is reached, the process could tip in a dangerous direction as easily as a healthy one. It is at least as easy for good people to become violent as for bad people to become good. It all depends on who the influencers are. And influencers are very seldom the people who know the truth. A tipping point can accelerate dangerous trends as easily as preventing them.

 

Greetings. I have a felicitous essay with which you can begin your new year.

I have just finished the manuscript of a seventh book that I hope to publish next year (2026), if I find a publisher this year (2025). This is in addition to my sixth book, Forgotten Landscapes, which is scheduled for release July 2025. But right now I want to tell you a little about the seventh book, Every Plant Has a Story.

There are lots of books about botany for the general reader. But almost all of them are about why humans should appreciate plants, e.g., they are sources of food, spices, hallucinogens, etc. That is, plants as slaves of humans. But my book is about the stories the plants tell about themselves, as discovered by scientific research. I will not attempt to summarize it here, but will probably do so a bit at a time in the essays I will post in the coming year.

Every plant has a different story of success in the ruthless Darwinian world of competition. One example is that some plants grow as long-lived trees, while others are short-lived weeds. The long-lived trees (like oak trees) invest a lot of time and energy in building up for the future. They are tremendously successful, but it takes centuries for them to earn back the costs that it took them to build themselves. They epitomize long-term investment. Weeds, on the other hand, do not have a long term. They grow like crazy for, in most cases, a single year, then pour all their resources into seed production. There are all stages in between, such as short-lived trees (like cottonwoods).

Above: sequoia trees invest for long-term success, over millennia; below, weeds such as velvetleaf invest for success only one year into the future, then they die.

Weeds specialize on temporary habitats, such as an area disturbed by fire, flood, or human activity. Trees specialize on habitats that remain stable for many decades, even centuries. Since the Earth contains both kinds of habitats, stable and temporary, the weed approach to investing and the tree approach are both successful, in different places.

The analogy with the human economy is inescapable. You can either invest for the long term, building up savings and assets, preparing for the future. You can manage your life like a tree. Or you can spend quickly and go into debt, as if you have no future. You can be a weed. It is the people who live like trees who make the world a better place, who stabilize it. But there are plenty of people who live like weeds also.

Humans are, however, changing the global climate. Not just heating it up, through the greenhouse effect, but creating a climate that is wildly catastrophic—fires, hurricanes, floods, and all the rest. The entire world now has or will soon have an unstable climate, everywhere. Plants that make long-term investments, such as trees, may not live long enough to be successful. Only weeds, which often live just a year, can survive in a world where the climate changes rapidly. No longer will tree investments and weed investments both be successful at different times and places. Now only the weeds will succeed. I summarize this situation in the last chapter of my book: Trees are out, weeds are in.

Trees are out, weeds are in. This means that if you expect to see old forests with big trees, you’d better see them right away. And then prepare to live in a world in which there are no plants except those that grow and die rapidly. Someday, the giant sequoia forests of California, where huge trees live for millennia, will be regarded as part of a mythological past.

The analogy with human investments is again inescapable. Long-term investments, in which a corporation plans to be a stable force for good over many decades, are on their way out. Short-term investments, to make a killing rather than a living, will soon dominate the economy of the world. Only the long term allows a corporation to invest in reputation: we are a company you can trust for life, we want you to like us. Instead, corporations will all be rewarded for being rapacious, treating their customers like garbage, and they don’t care who knows it. Yes, we dump our wastes into the common space in which we all live; yes, we deny your insurance claims; no, you cannot expect us to actually honor our contracts.  In a truly free economy, consumers can choose to stay away from dishonest corporations. But in many cases, when a corporation treats its customers like garbage, and it starts to collapse, the government will come in and rescue it, or else it will merge with another corporation. Corporations lose their recognizable identities, so you cannot choose to stay away from them. The future of the human world, as of the natural world, will be wildly swerving among disasters, in which you cannot responsibly plan ahead.

I have been reading Naomi Klein’s 2014 This Changes Everything. She makes it abundantly clear that our world economy cannot possibly avoid climate-related collapse. Any company, or country, that invests in the future rather than in immediate profitability is swept aside. Countries, companies, and individuals who choose sustainability are usually beaten down. Unless solar energy is, without subsidies, cheaper than government-subsidized fossil fuel energy, it will be driven into extinction. The time is coming, soon, when sustainability will be essentially illegal. By choosing to spend less money, I am making myself an enemy of the consumerist economy. I am basing this view on Klein’s 2014 numbers. It is much worse today.

I was expecting that my seventh book would be a cheerful celebration of the diversity of plant adaptations even to the most challenging environments. I did not plan for it to be an activist book. The time is past when I delude myself into thinking that any book I could possibly write would change the views of any readers who did not already agree with me. But, despite my plans, my seventh book has become an activist book, a voice of a prophet in the wilderness, from what the short-horizon leaders of the world economy think of as the extreme left.

This represents an almost complete departure from everything I wrote in previous years. Before, I was hoping to help change the world. Now, I just want those of you who care about the long-term well-being of humankind to feel a little better about the way you are living.

Trees are out; weeds are in. Happy New Year.