Whole Earth Discipline

by Stewart Brand

  Water questions are particularly revealing because they link natural and artificial infrastructure: How far do you have to travel before you reach a different watershed? Can you draw the boundaries of yours? How deep do you have to drill before you reach water? Trace the water you drink from rainfall to your tap. When you flush, where do the solids go? And what happens to the waste water?

  That leads to other built-infrastructure questions: Where is the nearest cellphone tower for your carrier? What does your regional power utility get its electrons from—coal, nuclear, natural gas, hydro, biofuels, solar, or wind? If you have natural gas in your home, where does it come from? Does your local utility have time-of-use charges that allow you to save money by using less electricity during peak hours? What is the surcharge for peak usage? What is the oldest still-occupied building in your town? What parts of your local infrastructure are overdue for maintenance? (I don’t know on that one, or on four of the others.)

  Most important: How is climate change expected to affect your region? What are people doing about that?

  The point is to build knowledge about where you live in order to better take responsibility for where you live. That’s the “gardening” this chapter is about. I like Gary Snyder’s meditation on the Buddhist version of the Conservation Pledge I grew up with:There is a verse chanted by Zen Buddhists called the “Four Great Vows.” The first line goes: “Sentient beings are numberless, I vow to save them.” Shujo muhen seigando. It’s a bit daunting to announce this intention—aloud—to the universe daily. This vow stalked me for several years and finally pounced: I realized that I had vowed to let the sentient beings save me. In a similar way, the precept against taking life, against causing harm, doesn’t stop in the negative. It is urging us to give life, to undo harm.

  Snyder also helps make the link from earth discipline to whole-earth discipline. “Like it or not,” he writes, “we are all finally ‘inhabitory’ on this one small blue-green planet. It’s the only one with comfortable temperatures, good air and water, and a wealth of living beings for millions (or quadrillions) of miles.”

  There is harm to undo in this place. Earth as a whole is the most ambitious and necessary restoration project of all.

  Live-linked footnotes for this chapter, along with updates, additions, and illustrations, may be found online at www.sbnotes.com.

  • 9 •

  Planet Craft

  After Sputnik, there is no nature, only art.

  —Marshall McLuhan

  Whether it’s called managing the commons, natural-infrastructure maintenance, tending the wild, niche construction, ecosystem engineering, mega-gardening, or intentional Gaia, humanity is now stuck with a planet stewardship role. Paul Crutzen, the atmospheric chemist who won the Nobel Prize in 1995 for his work on ozone depletion, coined a word that has resonated. “It seems appropriate,” he wrote, “to assign the term Anthropocene to the present, in many ways human-dominated, geological epoch.” We are shaping Earth so profoundly that it is evident in the geological record. The atmospheric and ecological changes we have made are expected to reverberate for tens of thousands of years.

  If humanity’s role has expanded to the point that the entire Earth is our niche, the trend of the changes we have made lately indicates we are doing a poor job of niche maintenance. The signs can be seen in any current version of the photograph of the Earth from space that sparked the environmental movement. “That icon,” Jim Lovelock wrote in The Vanishing Face of Gaia, “is undergoing subtle change as the white ice fades away, the green of forest and grassland fades into the dun of desert, and the oceans lose their blue-green hue and turn a purer, swimming-pool blue as they too become desert.” Civilization needs Gaia more than Gaia needs civilization. With the growing deserts she is beginning to shrug us off. To head off that fate, we have to engage her processes at her scale, in a conciliatory mode.

  We are forced to learn planet craft—in both senses of the word: craft as skill and craft as cunning. The forces in play in the Earth system are astronomically massive and unimaginably complex. Our participation has to be subtle and tentative, and then cumulative in a stabilizing direction. If we make the right moves at the right time, all may yet be well.

  • One emergent principle might be that deleterious elements should be concentrated. Concentrating people in cities is good. Concentrating energy waste products like nuclear spent fuel in casks is an improvement over distributing the greenhouse gases from spent coal and oil in the atmosphere. Concentrating our sources of food and fiber into high-yield agriculture, tree plantations, and mariculture frees up more wildland and wild ocean to carry out their expert Gaian tasks.

  A “natural infrastructure” approach to ecosystem services can be helpful if it doesn’t try too hard to be economically rigorous. Price comparisons do help to inform some decisions. A UN analysis of the “total economic value” of cutting trees for a coastal shrimp farm in Thailand gave the advantage to undisturbed mangrove forest—worth $1,000 to $36,000 per hectare for its timber, charcoal, offshore fisheries, and storm protection—over the shrimp farm’s $200 per hectare.

  Some comparisons, though, have to be more qualitative than quantitative. Forest ecologist Herbert Bormann has written that once we have cut down a forest, “We must find replacements for wood products, build erosion control works, enlarge reservoirs, upgrade air pollution control technology, install flood control works, improve water purification plants, increase air conditioning, and provide new recreational facilities.” That logic helps Daniel Janzen charge the Costa Rican government for ecosystem services provided by the Guanacaste Conservation Area, but it doesn’t tell what price to set. That has to be negotiated.

  The fact is that even our artificial infrastructure operates on fuzzy economics. Nearly all large-scale projects—bridges, dams, tunnels, railroads, airports, power plants, wind farms, transmission lines—come in way over budget and behind schedule, and they don’t pay out as expected. One global study of sixty projects with an average cost of $1 billion “found that almost 40 percent of the projects performed very badly and were either abandoned totally or restructured after experiencing some kind of financial crisis.” In another study of thirty-six such megaprojects, three quarters of them failed to meet financial expectations. The norm is: We make grand plans, we build stuff, we’re mostly glad we did, and the money gets sorted out awkwardly over decades.

  Excessively precise economic analysis can lead to assessing everything in terms of its easily measurable melt value—the value that thieves get from stealing copper wiring from isolated houses, that vandals got from tearing down Greek temples for the lead joints holding the marble blocks together, that shortsighted timber companies get from liquidating their forests. The standard to insist on is live value. What is something worth when it’s working? We’ll seldom get a precise valuation, but ballpark is OK.

  For some infrastructure, though, there is no ballpark. What is a stable climate worth? What would we pay to keep the one we have? Is there some amount about which we would say, “Sorry, that’s just too expensive. We have to let the climate go”? That calculation is not financial.

  • For sensitive ecosystem engineering at planet scale, what we need most is better knowledge of how the Earth system works. We are model-rich and data-poor. We need to monitor in detail and map in detail what’s really going on, and the measuring has to be sustained and consistent to get the all-important trends of change over time. As we learned with GenBank, immediacy and transparency are crucial. Systems analyst Donella Meadows laid down the commandment: “Thou shalt not distort, delay, or sequester information. You can drive a system crazy by muddying its information streams. You can make a system work better with surprising ease if you can give it more timely, accurate, and complete information.”

  In particular, we need to cure our ignorance about the ocean. “We are running on theoretical vapor,” Jim Lovelock wrote. “The ocean is truly aqua incognita. . . . It is right to build theories of th
e ocean even though we know so little about it, but quite wrong to use them to make policies. First they must be tested by long-term observation and measurement, and that I think should be our first priority.” The air we breathe comes from the ocean; so does the rain; so do the clouds that regulate the Earth’s albedo, which in turn governs the climate. Also, as oceanographer Sylvia Earle points out, the ocean “provides home for about 97 percent of life in the world, and maybe in the universe.” That life, most of it microbial, determines most of the Gaian balance of gases in the atmosphere.

  In 2009 the spectacular array of services from Google Earth was expanded to include Google Ocean. Besides displaying the best current data on the ocean bottom and on currents and temperature, it is adding Encyclopedia of Life material as it accumulates. Google Earth is being used to track the behavior of everything from polar ice to radio-tagged animals. Threatened habitat is monitored, and so are illegal logging and mining operations. In the United States, a Google Earth add-on called MapEcos flags all the industrial polluters, complete with detailed comparison with other offenders, and a service called Vulcan maps carbon dioxide emissions from fossil-fuel use.

  Another vital project is a comprehensive Global Soil Map being assembled by the International Soil Reference and Information Centre “to help informed decisions not only about agriculture, but also to monitor the effects of climate change, environmental pollution and deforestation.” The first stage is a detailed soil map of Africa. Because these maps live online in digital form, they will improve over time rather than becoming obsolete, as printed maps do. (I saw that happen with a California Water Atlas I instigated in 1979 while working for Governor Jerry Brown; the maps and diagrams in our book helped the state for only a few years.)

  Tools for sophisticated sensing are proliferating. An Australian timber importer uses DNA analysis to track every log brought in from Indonesia, to be sure it was legally cut. (Some 80 percent of the wood coming out of Indonesia is said to be illegal.) Toxicity testing of the world’s eighty thousand industrial chemicals is taking a leap forward with DNA chips replacing animal tests. Localized analysis of carbon dioxide flow is being measured in the United States by a service called CarbonTracker, by FLUXNET globally, and by a major project in India called IndoFlux. Whole regions of carbon dioxide and methane variations are being measured from space by Japan’s Ibuki satellite, launched in 2009.

  How do we make sense of what we measure? Blogger Cory Doctorow describes the growing flood of data as a “relentless march from kilo to mega to giga to tera to peta to exa to zetta to yotta.” To be of use to science, the data must be correlated, calibrated, synchronized, and updated. Wired observed that “Earth is peppered with high tech monitoring hardware from polar-orbiting satellites to instrument-laden buoys. Problem is, they’re all operating in Babel-style disconnect.” Efforts are under way to link everything in a mutually intelligible way via a Global Earth Observation System of Systems, and what are called Data-Intensive Scalable Computer systems are expanding search capabilities.

  Many of the databases welcome amateur input. For instance, reports from gardeners and students on the changing nature of seasonal phenomena (phenology) are being collected at BudWatch in the United States, NatureWatch in Canada, Nature’s Calendar in the United Kingdom, and De Natuurkalender in Holland. When do the lilacs bloom where you are? When do the first swallows show up?

  Piece by piece, we are building a digital Gaia.

  • The biggest Earth-monitoring story of the twenty-first century’s first decade is one that didn’t happen. It began in 1998, when Vice President Al Gore hatched an idea for a space camera that would provide a constant real-time, high-resolution video of the Earth turning in the sunlight, both for inspiration and for science. Its location would be at the Lagrange-1 point of neutral gravity between Earth and the Sun, a little under a million miles from here. As seen from L-1, the Earth’s disk would always be fully lit—the camera would have the Sun perpetually behind it. That location in space had already proven its value with the Advanced Composition Explorer satellite, launched by the United States in 1997. The ACE monitors the Sun, giving an hour’s advance warning of “geomagnetic storms that can overload power grids, disrupt communications on Earth, and present a hazard to astronauts,” according to the mission’s Web site.

  The Republican-dominated Congress ridiculed Gore’s idea (“Al’s screensaver”) and sent it to the National Academy of Sciences for review and presumed disposal. Instead, the scientists urged that the project go ahead with a package of sophisticated scientific instruments on board for observing Earth. Named the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR), it would measure variations in Earth’s ozone levels, aerosols, water vapor, cloud thickness, and the reflected and emitted radiation—the total energy budget—of the whole planet. “DSCOVR would offer a global, rather than myopic, perspective of the planet,” said the mission’s principal investigator, Francisco Valero, of Scripps Institution of Oceanography. (I can imagine Jacques Cousteau cheering.) It would also calibrate the instrument readings from all the low-Earth-orbit satellites that we currently rely on.

  Still Republican-dominated, Congress approved the money—$100 million—and the satellite was built, ready for launch in 2001. But between the construction and the launch there was an election. The incoming Bush administration was hostile to Gore, to science in general, and to climate science in particular. Out of spite, the new administration postponed and then canceled DSCOVR’s launch. France and Ukraine both offered to launch the satellite for free, and both were turned down. In 2008 a gathering of forty-four leading climatologists in Germany declared that an Earth observation satellite at L-1 is “essential” for climate science.

  When I wrote this in early 2009, I could only hope that the Obama administration would—as it promised Al Gore—finally launch DSCOVR (the satellite was quietly defended from the dismantlers), and that its data and grand imagery would soon be giving us Earth live. That would be a happy ending to the story. But whatever happens, we lost nine years of critical data to partisan folly. Politics trumped science.

  An editorial in Nature said, “There is only one Earth, with only one history, and we get only one chance to record it. . . . A record not made is gone for good.”

  The idea of adjusting Earth’s climate directly is anathema to most, for good reason. All geoengineering schemes look like attempts to sow the wind that are sure to reap the whirlwind. The dangers are certain, enormous, and inescapable. The imagined benefits rely on chaotic mechanisms and unproven theory. Surrendering to such shortcuts is the height of irresponsibility, we tell each other. But the tenor of the discussion is changing, and geoengineering is being taken seriously, sooner than expected, because of emerging realizations.

  Realization 1. The stupendous cost, disruption, and time required to build a low-carbon energy infrastructure—Saul Griffith’s Renewistan—is sinking in. We will contemplate the price, over twenty-five years, of 30,000 square miles of solar electric cells, 15,000 square miles of solar thermal collectors, 1.5 million square miles of algae farms for biofuel, 2.6 million wind turbines and the space they take up (about 100,000 square miles), 27,400 geothermal steam turbines, and 3,900 1-gigawatt nuclear reactors—not to mention the cost and disruption of shutting down the coal, oil, and gas infrastructure that all that Green technology is supposed to replace, nor the environmental burden of covering the natural landscape with a continent’s worth of hardware.

  (The day I wrote that paragraph I got a bulletin from the California Native Plant Society urging its nine thousand members to protest against eighty planned solar-energy projects that will cover 1,000 square miles of wild desert in the southern part of the state: “The potential impact of these projects to rare plants, vegetation, animals, and intact, majestic desert landscapes is unfathomable. . . . In the construction process, solar energy developments effectively denude the landscape and leave little intact habitat.”)

  Realization 2. It will become painfully
apparent that mitigation is not going to succeed. The whirlwind is coming anyway. Currently imaginable efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions do not level off at the desired 450 parts per million (ppm) of CO2 in the atmosphere, nor at 550 ppm, and probably not even at 650 ppm. Increasingly vivid knowledge of how lethal a 650-ppm world would be will motivate a frantic search for alternative paths.

  Realization 3. Minds change with events, though usually it takes several in succession. The war in Darfur has not been seen as the drought-driven resource crisis it is. The death of 35,000 in Europe’s heat wave of 2003 was considered an anomaly rather than a window on the future. But more such events will pile up. Cyclone Nargis, which hit Burma in May 2008 and killed over 150,000, was the seventh-deadliest cyclone of all time; another climate-derived cyclone making landfall slightly farther west would simply drown Bangladesh. As the Tibetan Plateau dries up, the reduced flow in the many rivers it feeds will set downstream nations at war with those upstream. Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Laos, and Burma could ally to fight China (or one another) over control of the dwindling water in the Mekong River. Nuclear-armed India might cut off the flow of the Indus River into nuclear-armed Pakistan, which would surely bomb in response. Climate change will kill some people directly, but most will die at the hands of other people made desperate by climate change. When that happens, there will be demand for action on climate that shows immediate results.

  Realization 4. News from field climatologists will keep getting worse. When one positive feedback—such as a “gigaburp” of methane released from melting permafrost—takes off conspicuously, a sense of public emergency will take off with it. Already temperatures in the Arctic have gone up over 4°C since 1950. The suddenness of a self-accelerating phenomenon invites proportionally immediate response.