Films from the Future

by Andrew Maynard

  But the movie also has a message of hope, albeit one that’s very human-centric. It suggests that, ultimately, humans are resilient; that even when we suffer catastrophic losses, we have the ability to collectively pick ourselves up and come back stronger and wiser than before.

  Here, The Day After Tomorrow is surprisingly optimistic about the future. But this optimism does depend on us working together to develop the resiliency that’s necessary to survive and thrive on a dynamic planet. Emerging technologies have a vital role to play here, together with social, economic and political innovation. This is where renewable energy technologies are finally beginning to compete with fossil fuels; where distributed energy-networks and battery technologies are transforming how we generate, distribute and use electricity; where water treatment and agricultural technologies are enabling us to achieve more with less; and where we’re learning to not only ensure products are recyclable, but to develop a “circular economy” where everything is reused. And this is just the tip of the sustainable technologies iceberg. Yet if these and other technologies are to be used to build a resilient future, we first need to understand what we mean by “resiliency” in the first place.

  Building Resiliency

  On September 6, 2017, Hurricane Irma devastated the Caribbean island of Barbuda. For the first time in three hundred years, the island was left uninhabited, apart from the dogs and other animals left behind by a fleeing population.

  Irma was just one of a string of powerful hurricanes sweeping through the Caribbean and across the Southern states of the US in 2017, in one of the most destructive hurricane seasons on record. And, as one storm after the next battered communities, it challenged them to think about what it means to be resilient in the face of such devastation.

  Resiliency, I have to admit, is a bit of a buzz-word these days. In the environmental context, it’s often used to describe how readily an ecosystem is able to resist harm, or recover from damage caused by some event. But resiliency goes far beyond resistance to change. In its broadest sense, it gets to the heart of how we think about what’s important to us, and how we make provisions to protect and grow this, in spite of events that threaten to cause harm.

  Long before I became involved with environmental sustainability, I was used to the idea of resilience that’s commonly used in materials science. Here, resilience is a measure of how much energy a material can absorb, and still have the ability to return to its previous state when that energy is released. Imagine, for instance, a rubber band. If it’s stretched, and as long as it doesn’t break and is not is old and weathered, it will return to its original shape once released. In this way, it’s resilient to change. But push it too far and it will snap; there’s a limit to how resilient it is.

  This idea of resiliency as an ability to return to “normality” in the face of stress is how it’s often used to describe ecosystems. Resilient ecosystems are frequently seen as those that resist permanent damage, and that recover fast if they are harmed. But in a world where change is the driving force behind pretty much everything, this turns out to be a rather limited concept. Despite change and adaptation being the bedrock of our planet’s biological and geological evolution, ideas of environmental resiliency seem too easily to slip into a mode of thinking that suggests change is bad, and should be resisted.

  This is understandable if we believe that we should be preserving how things are, or some ideal of how they should be. But it’s important to ask what are we trying to preserve here. Is it the global environment as it now stands? Is it how we as humans are currently living? Is it the continuation of life in some form? Or is it the continuation of some future vision of humanity?

  In reality, how we think about resiliency depends entirely on what we are trying to protect or preserve. And this, it turns out, is deeply dependent on context, to the extent that ideas that look like resilient approaches from one perspective may look highly precarious from another.

  In effect, our understanding of resilience depends on what’s important to us, and in this context, resilience is not necessarily about maintaining the status quo, but about protecting and preserving what is considered to be “of value.” This may be the environment, or our health and well-being. But it may just as equally be someone’s ability to make a living, or their deeply held beliefs, or even their sense of self-identity and worth. From this perspective, we can begin to think of resiliency as something we use to protect many different types of value within society, or to ensure that this value can be regained if it’s temporarily damaged.

  Thinking about resiliency in this way ends up with it being less about maintaining what we currently have, and more about ensuring future outcomes that we value. It also helps illuminate the complex landscape around issues like climate change where different, and sometimes hidden, values may be threatened. And with this reframing, we have a concept that is, in itself, adaptable to a changing world. It’s a way of thinking about resiliency that moves our focus from maintaining our environment as we think it should be to considering where we want to be, even as the environment around us changes.

  This begins to get close to a perspective on resilience proposed by Tom Seager and colleagues in 2013.170 Thinking specifically about engineered systems, they explored the idea of resilience as being about what a system does, rather than what it is. In the language of “value,” this translates to resilience being about developing systems that preserve what we consider to be valuable, rather than simply describing the system itself. It’s all about getting to where we want to be, rather than simply trying to stay in the same place.

  This broader understanding of resilience is described rather well by David Woods in a 2015 paper,171 and expanded on later by Seager and others.172 Woods describes four types of resilience. First, there’s rebound, or the ability for a system to return to its “healthy” state after being damaged. This is pretty close to the standard understanding of ecological resilience. Then there’s robustness, or the ability to withstand knocks and shocks without failing. Things get interesting though with the third type of resilience: graceful extensibility.

  Woods’ notion of graceful extensibility recognizes that, no matter how prepared you are, there will always be surprises, and it’s always good to be able to adapt to them. It’s a bit like the blade of grass bending but not being swept away by the hurricane, while stronger but less resilient trees are uprooted.

  Woods’ final type of resiliency is sustained adaptability, or a willingness to change and sacrifice some aspects of what already exists in order to maintain others. Again, this begins to frame the idea of resiliency as less about maintaining the status quo, and more about adapting to change while preserving what’s important.

  These four types of resiliency still have the feel of trying to maintain things as they are, but they do acknowledge that some willingness to change and adapt, and have some degree of flexibility, is necessary. I’d go further, though, and argue that, because we live in a world where change is the life-blood of everything, we need to understand how to live with change. This includes the surprises, failures, and changes that make life tough. But it also includes changes that make life easier, if we can just see how to take advantage of them. What’s important here is not trying to maintain what we have (or what we believe we should have), simply because we have it, but protecting what we think is truly important.

  Not surprisingly, the list of what we collectively think is important is a long and often conflicting one. But building resiliency to protect and preserve what we can agree should be protected and preserved in a changing world makes a lot of sense. And this brings us back to The Day After Tomorrow.

  On one level, The Day After Tomorrow can be viewed as a movie about the dangers of not building resilient systems. In the movie, political decision-making lacks the resiliency to prevent human-driven climate change, and infrastructure systems lack the resiliency to withstand the impacts of the extreme storms. What we see is a brittle world, collapsing und
er the consequences of ill-considered decisions.

  And yet, for all the dramatic and catastrophic change in the movie, people, relationships, and nations survive. Not only do they survive, they grow and adapt. And ultimately, they show deep resiliency in the face of potential catastrophe.

  This, though, is a matter of framing. Certainly, the developed world and its institutions and infrastructures are shattered by the catastrophic shift in global climate. But in the movie’s narrative, what is important to the central characters, including love, commitment, friendship, and selflessness, are resilient in the face of the onslaught. And because of this, despite the on-screen destruction, this is a movie about hope for the future—a hope that’s based on the resiliency of the human spirit.

  That said, this is very much a privileged Western perspective. Despite the shock we feel at seeing whole communities decimated in the movie, this is sadly not an unusual state of affairs as you look around the world. Beyond the confines of a Western middle-class existence, suffering and catastrophe are commonplace, whether through war, famine, disease, poverty, climate, or a whole host of other factors. And this is perhaps one of the more sobering takeaways from the movie; that while we might talk about the need for resiliency in the face of climate change, communities around the world are exhibiting resiliency now, every day, as they struggle to survive and find meaning in a fickle world.

  For many of these communities, resiliency is not about holding on to what they have, but about not letting go of who they are. Yet, in many cases, this is a necessity rather than a virtue, and one that should probably not be praised where it shouldn’t be needed. And this brings us to a final way of thinking about resiliency. Resiliency should not be about survival, or about holding onto life with our fingernails. Rather, it should be about having the ability to thrive in a changing world. Yet to achieve this, we need to be proactive. We need to have foresight, and to act with intention, if we want to create the future we desire, in spite of what the dynamic and dangerous world we live on throws at us.

  This means taking responsibility for changes that we can control, such as reducing the chances of catastrophic climate change that’s driven by our own irresponsible actions. But it could just as easily mean using technology to intentionally modify the Earth’s climate. And this brings us to an idea that isn’t explicitly addressed in The Day After Tomorrow, but is deeply embedded in how we think about resiliency, climate, and the future: geoengineering.

  Geoengineering the Future

  In 2006, University of Arizona astronomer Roger Angel suggested a rather radical solution to global warming. His idea was to launch a trillion-dollar light diffuser into space, to deflect some of the sun’s rays from the Earth.173 The proposal was published in the prestigious journal the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and at the time it caught the imagination of a number of us who were intrigued by such an audacious approach to planetary engineering.

  Angel proposed to send billions of small, transparent “flyers” into space to create a cloud at the Lagrange point between the Sun and the Earth—the point where the gravitational pull of each body just balances out—allowing the flyers to seemingly hover effortlessly between the two. These would deflect just enough sunlight from hitting the Earth that the cloud would act as a massive solar shade, countering the effects of greenhouse-gas-driven global warming.

  Angel’s idea was part of a growing interest in using planetary-scale engineering to manage the effects of human-caused climate change. Commonly called “geoengineering,” it’s an approach to controlling the earth’s climate that, to some at least, has become increasingly relevant as efforts to curb carbon dioxide emissions have run into rough water. Yet, despite the urgency with which we need to get a grip on our collective environmental impacts, geoengineering represents technologies and ideologies that are fraught with challenges.

  I first started writing about geoengineering back in in 2009.174 At the time, I was fascinated by the audacity of the ideas being discussed (most of which were more mundane than throwing billions of sunshades into space). But I was also intrigued by the ethical and social issues they raised. I’d been following the technology before this, but what sparked my interest in 2009 was the controversy around a particular experiment planned to take place in the Southern Ocean.

  The experiment was given the admittedly not-so-catchy name LOHAFEX,175 and was designed to see if algal blooms could be used to remove carbon dioxide from the air.176 The plan was to release six tons of dissolved iron over three hundred square miles of ocean in an attempt to feed and stimulate an algal bloom, which would remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere before sinking to the bottom of the ocean. But even before the research started, it drew criticism from environmental groups. As one of the largest geoengineering trials to date at the time, they were concerned that it represented unnecessary and even unethical direct experimentation on the only environment we have.

  Despite the low chances of LOHAFEX having any lasting impacts, these concerns put the study on hold until the funders were certain that the risks were minimal. As it turned out, the experiment, when it eventually took place, showed that ocean fertilization with iron had a small and unpredictable impact on atmospheric carbon dioxide. This was a useful finding, as it indicated the limitations of this one potential approach to carbon dioxide removal. But it also demonstrated what a contentious issue geoengineering was at the time.

  Even today, the ethics and responsibility of geoengineering are hotly contested. On one hand, this isn’t surprising. We only have one environment to experiment with, and so we can’t afford too many “oops!” moments; there’s no convenient drawing-board to go back to when Global Experiment A goes wrong. But in addition to the (albeit low in most cases) risks, there’s another concern that dogs geoengineering, and that’s the underlying ideology.

  If you believe that the root problem with the world today is human behavior, then one of your primary solutions to global warming is likely to be trying to change how people behave. This may involve reducing dependency on fossil fuels, or encouraging people to lead more energy-efficient (or less energy-greedy) lifestyles. Or it may mean helping individuals and organizations develop environmentally healthy practices. In contrast, anything that gives what you think are humanity’s bad habits a free pass is, by default, not good news—the reckless extraction and use of fossil fuels for instance, or profligate energy use. Geoengineering does not fit comfortably within this ideology. It smacks too much of developing technological fixes to reverse the consequences of “bad behavior,” rather than fixing the behavior that led to the problem in the first place.

  Unfortunately, to many people—and I would count myself here—we don’t have the luxury of sacrificing people’s lives and the environment we live in on the altar of ideology. Without question, we are caught up in a cycle of collective and individual behavior where we readily and wrongly pollute the “commons” of the atmosphere for short-term gain. It would be lovely, of course, to think that people could learn to be more responsible than this. But individuals are complex, and society as a whole is more complex still. We all have our own values, and things that are important to us that we are striving for. And in some cases, for good or bad, these don’t align with the common good of maintaining the earth’s environment in its current (or past) state. Factors like putting food on the table and a roof over our family’s head come into play, or getting out of poverty, reducing inequities, closing economic disparities, and striving for the same living conditions as others. Individuals and nations are constantly juggling a plethora of issues that are important, and while the environment is one of them, it isn’t always the most important.

  Yet despite this complex mess of conflicting priorities, aims, and desires, the cold hard truth is that our actions are already forcing the global climate to change. And as they do, we have a choice to make: live with the consequences, or do something about it. To some in the geoengineering community, the only way to “do
something about it” is to stop waiting for people to do the right thing, and to start to engineer the heck out of the problem. And this, as it turns out, isn’t as hard as you might imagine.

  Here, geoengineers have two basic options: reduce the amount of sunlight hitting and being absorbed by the earth’s atmosphere, or actively reduce the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere (carbon dioxide in particular). In technical terms, these are often lumped into one of two categories: solar radiation management, or SRM, and carbon dioxide removal, or CDR, although it must be said that, to the enterprising geoengineer, there are ways of engineering the earth’s environment that don’t necessarily fit conveniently into either of these buckets.

  Roger Angel’s solar shade spaceships aside, many of these techniques aren’t exactly rocket science. For instance, planting lots of trees is a form of CDR, as they suck up and store carbon dioxide in their wood (although it’s not the most effective form of CDR). LOHAFEX was another form of CDR, as are technologies that actively remove carbon dioxide from power-plant emissions, or artificial trees and other technologies that convert carbon dioxide either into plastics and fuels that can be reused, or into materials that can be buried in the ground.

  Many of the approaches being considered for SRM are equally straightforward: painting roofs white, for instance, to reflect sunlight, or spraying sunlight-reflecting particles into the stratosphere. This last technique borrows a trick from volcanoes, which can actually cool the earth’s atmosphere when they spew millions of tons of sulfate particles into the stratosphere. And it’s not that expensive. A country like India, for instance, could probably finance a global stratospheric aerosol SRM program designed to improve local crop yields. The problem is, of course, that such unilateral action would most likely make a lot of other countries rather angry.