Stranger Than We Can Imagine

by John Higgs

  The work of Lovelock and his colleague, the microbiologist Dr Lynn Margulis, led to Gaia Theory. They argued that our planet could be considered to be a self-regulating organism that altered its physical state in order to maintain the necessary conditions for life. Life on earth was generating the conditions needed for the existence of life on earth, in other words, and the magnitude of its complexity had created an extraordinary amount of stability. The planet was behaving like a living thing. If you damaged it, it would heal itself – assuming, of course, that the wound was not too severe. This was still a chaotic system, after all, and there was no reason why it could not be pushed out of its stable equilibrium into the chaotic states studied by Lorenz. This is the fear that keeps climate scientists awake at night: not gradual climate change, but runaway climate change, where the natural rhythms of the planet tip into unpredictable chaos and the goal of growing sufficient food to feed 7 billion people becomes impossible.

  Gaia Theory was naturally controversial, especially among those unfamiliar with non-linear mathematics. Scientists of the calibre of the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins and the biochemist Ford Doolittle criticised it on the grounds that they could see no mechanism whereby individual natural selection could allow for environmental-level concerns. But stability seemed to be an emergent property of nature. It was just something that happened, in a similar way to how life was something that just happened to matter, or consciousness was something that just happened to life. This idea made many scientists deeply uneasy. They understood that Lovelock was employing a metaphor, and that he was saying that the planet was acting like it was a living thing. But few wanted to be drawn into the problem of defining the difference between a system that was acting like a living thing, and one that actually was one.

  Lovelock’s ideas gradually became accepted, but only after some very specific definitions were put in place. They are now studied under the name Earth Systems Science, which differentiates itself from Gaia Theory by being extremely clear that it in no way suggests that the planet is regulating itself consciously.

  The name ‘Gaia’ had been suggested to Lovelock by the English novelist Sir William Golding, the author of Lord of the Flies, and it proved to be something of a double-edged sword. It helped popularise the idea among the general public, but it also scared away many members of the scientific community. ‘Gaia’ was the ancient Greek goddess of the earth, and scientists were cautious about anything that might encourage the idea that the earth was some form of conscious deity. This was a sensitive area because, as the twentieth century progressed, a lot of people were indeed coming to view the earth as some form of conscious deity.

  One of the more surprising aspects of twentieth-century Western spirituality was the growth of a wide variety of broadly sympathetic practices that are most simply generalised as pagan or neopagan. Paganism is focused on respect for the natural world, which it views as both living and divine. A prominent example would be the Wiccan faith founded by the Crowley-inspired English witch Gerald Gardner, which has grown to the point that it is now recognised by organisations ranging from the US Armed Forces to the UK’s Pagan Police Association. Gardner’s faith is largely unique in British history, for while Britain has a long history of giving the rest of the world stories, inventions, sport and music, it had never before given it a religion.

  For those familiar with the power and influence of organised religion, it was easy to be unimpressed by paganism and its grass-roots, distributed nature. In the eyes of religions which claim authority from a central divine text, the sheer unstructured and contradictory variety inherent in paganism, and its focus on personal experience, rob it of any credibility. It was obviously all just made up. In the eyes of the pagans, however, it was the ‘People of the Book’ who lacked credibility. The notion that a single text could function as an ultimate authority in a post-omphalos individualist society appeared naive in the extreme. Individual personal experience, to a pagan, was the only authority they needed. This was the clash between the hierarchical imperial mind, in which a person is defined by their service to a higher Lord who takes responsibility for their protection and threatens them with punishment, and the individualism of the world after Einstein and the First World War.

  Resistance to the ideas of Lovelock, and to the discoveries of climate science in general, has been particularly strong among the American religious right. As previously noted, American Christianity did not undergo the church-emptying declines of European Christianity. Its perspective was similar to that of Mother Teresa, who in 1988 said, ‘Why should we care about the Earth when our duty is to the poor and the sick among us? God will take care of the Earth.’ Here God is the ‘big man’ of the tribe who offers protection in return for service. Accepting that the climate could spiral into chaos is accepting that such protection does not exist. This makes working to prevent climate change ideologically problematic.

  Before Apollo, those who had imagined looking back at the earth assumed that they would see what their prejudices expected to see. In D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the bitter gamekeeper Oliver Mellors wonders how he can escape the sense of doom he feels about mankind. Even travelling to ‘the moon wouldn’t be far enough, because even there you could look back and see the earth, dirty, beastly, unsavoury among all the stars, made foul by men.’

  But the idea that the earth was a single, integrated entity grew in the public imagination after the crew of Apollo 8 returned with a photograph of earth taken from outside its orbit. Images such as this became a catalyst for the emergence of the environmental movement in the 1970s. It is unsurprising that this affected humanity on a religious level, especially given the sheer beauty of the planet. As the great American science writer Carl Sagan wrote, ‘Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light [the image of earth from space]. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.’

  The Apollo 12 astronaut Alan Bean said that ‘I find it curious that I never heard any astronaut say that he wanted to go to the Moon so he would be able to look back and see the Earth. We all wanted to see what the Moon looked like close up. Yet, for most of us, the most memorable sight was not of the Moon, but of our beautiful blue and white home, moving majestically around the sun, all alone in infinite black space.’ That sight profoundly changed Bean and many of the other Apollo astronauts. Bean became a painter and a number of other Apollo astronauts became religious or spiritual.

  This shift in personal perspective, caused by seeing first-hand how frail, beautiful and alone the earth is, is known as the ‘overview effect’. It was most noticeable in crew members who had no major responsibilities during the flight home, and who could spend the journey looking out of the window at their home planet. It was a view that, once seen, changed them for ever.

  Wall Street, New York, c.1960 (Neil Libbert/Bridgeman)

  THIRTEEN: GROWTH

  Today’s investor does not profit from yesterday’s growth

  The Golden Toad was a sociable critter, at least during mating season. Male Golden Toads were a couple of inches in length and congregated in large numbers on the mossy floor of the Costa Rican rainforest. They were a bright golden-orange colour. Female Golden Toads were a little larger and dark olive with small, yellow-ringed red blotches. Mating season had the air of a particularly decadent Day-Glo amphibian rave. When the American biologist Jay Savage first saw a Golden Toad he could not quite believe it was real, and wondered if someone had given it a coat of enamel paint.

  We did not know the Golden Toad long. They were first discovered in the 1960s and were declared extinct in the 1990s. There are many other animals that became extinct in the twentieth century which we eulogise more, such as the Tasmanian Tiger, the Barbary Lion or the Baiji River Dolphin. The Golden T
oads are simply one name on a very long list of plant and animal species that we’ll never see again.

  Estimates of the exact rate of species lost in the twentieth century range from the terrifying to the horrific. Extinctions are currently occurring at between 100 and 1,000 times the normal background level, and increasing. Primates, amphibians and tropical birds are being hit particularly hard. This is significant on a geological timescale and has become known as the Sixth Extinction. To put it in context, the fifth great extinction occurred 65 million years ago, when a comet or asteroid collided with the earth and wiped out 75 per cent of plant and animal species, including the dinosaurs.

  Some geologists now call the recent past the Anthropocene, a new geological term which recognises the extent to which the actions of human beings have impacted on the natural world. It is we who are responsible for this increased rate of extinction. There are a lot more of us now.

  In 1900 the population of the world was 1.6 billion. Over the following century it quadrupled to over 6 billion, an unprecedented rate of increase. The economy also exploded. The Gross World Product, the sum of all economic activity in a particular year, was a little over a trillion dollars in 1900 but had grown to 41 trillion by 2000. The energy needed to fuel this growth increased by a factor of 10, with world energy consumption expanding from around 50 exajoules in 1900 to 500 exajoules by the end of the century. An exajoule is a quintillion joules, and a quintillion is even bigger than it sounds.

  The sudden arrival of 4.6 billion people who need to consume an extra 450 quintillion joules and create 40 trillion dollars should really be the headline on any account of the twentieth century. Nothing else is remotely as significant.

  For those familiar with chaos theory and the nature of complex systems, rates of change like this are truly alarming. Under normal conditions an intricate system such as our biosphere should tend towards stability. Exponential rates of change like these suggest that the normal system of self-limiting feedback loops has stopped working. Some factor was forcing our world into dangerous and unpredictable territory.

  A good starting place to identify that factor would be the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States constitution.

  The Fourteenth Amendment was ratified in 1868, following the Civil War. It stated that ‘All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.’

  The intention here was to ensure that the rights of former slaves became enshrined in law. In practice, the law was used very differently. The segregationist Jim Crow laws were one example of how the Amendment failed to achieve its aim. Of the 307 Fourteenth Amendment cases brought to court between 1890 and 1910, only 19 were brought by African Americans. The remaining 288 were brought by corporations.

  Historically, corporations were organisations created by charters granted by monarchs or governments. These charters permitted a group of individuals to pursue a stated aim, such as building a school or a railway. These charters were restrictive, in comparison with partnerships or trusts, because the corporation’s goals were limited and shareholders could be liable for the corporation’s actions. But during the nineteenth century the shape of corporations began to change, and their power started to grow.

  A key moment in this change was the landmark American case Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward in 1819, which declared that the college’s original charter, which had been granted by King George III of England in 1795, could not be overridden by the state of New Hampshire. This created a precedent which legally limited the power of states to interfere in the affairs of private corporations.

  Following this decision, corporate lawyers began to look for ways to increase their powers further. What corporations really needed, or so those lawyers thought, was the type of freedoms guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment. When they looked at the wording of this amendment they saw that it granted rights to ‘all persons’. And so, in one of those inspired flights of human imagination that suggest the involvement of alcohol, lawyers stepped into court and argued that those rights also applied to corporations, because a corporation was really a person.

  There was actually some historical support for the idea. The legal status of monasteries had been awkward in the medieval period. They were often run by monks who had taken vows of personal poverty, and hence could not admit ownership or take legal responsibility for the monastery’s infrastructure. To get round this headache, Pope Innocent V decided that the monasteries themselves could be considered as legal persons, and hence have some form of official existence. Crucially, he defined the term to specify that a legal person did not have a soul. By not having a soul, a legal person was exempt from the usual liability and ethical considerations that regular soul ownership conferred.

  Corporate lawyers won their strange argument, and by the 1880s American courts, perhaps for the sake of a quiet life, routinely confirmed that corporations were individuals. They were, therefore, welcome to all the freedom and protection that the Fourteenth Amendment granted. It was a neat legal solution, and one which gave corporations the right to borrow money, buy and sell property, and take each other to court. But a corporation, plainly, wasn’t an individual. An individual can be sent to jail for breaking the law. A corporation cannot, and the threat of imprisonment is an important limiting factor in the behaviour of individuals. Another difference is that people eventually die. A corporation could theoretically be immortal. Death is a necessary part of natural ecosystems, in part as a means of stopping things from growing too large.

  Corporate shareholders had only limited liability for what the corporation did. They couldn’t lose more than the value of their stock. This system made shares easy to trade and increased participation in stock markets, because the credit-worthiness of the stockholder was no longer a concern that the market had to take on board. Corporations, it seemed, had been granted the great dream of the twentieth century: individualism without responsibility.

  But corporations did have a responsibility, and this strongly bound their actions. They were required by law to put their shareholders’ interests above everything else, and that included the interests of their employees, their customers and the public good. Those shareholders’ interests were almost entirely concerned with making money, so those corporations were legally bound to pursue maximum profit. Corporations had no choice but to become undying, unjailable profit-taking machines.

  And as the wealth of corporations grew, financial quarter after financial quarter, so too did their power. Corporations started to catch up with, and then overtake, nation states. Of the one hundred largest economies in the year 2000, fifty-one were corporations and forty-nine were nations. Organisations such as General Motors, Exxon Mobil or Wal-Mart had become economically larger than countries like Norway, Saudi Arabia or Venezuela. And as their economic strength grew, so did their influence. Corporations took over the funding of politics and the media. There would be no attempts to control corporate growth from those directions.

  The largest corporations demonstrate legal and financial superiority over nations. In December 2012 the US Justice Department was unable to prosecute the executives of the British bank HSBC on drug- and terrorism-related money-laundering charges, beyond a token fine. As Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer explained, ‘Had the U.S. authorities decided to press criminal charges, HSBC would almost certainly have lost its banking license in the U.S., the future of the institution would have been under threat and the entire banking system would have been destabilized.’ The corrupt bankers, in other words, were too powerful to be subject to the law of the most powerful nation on earth.

  The reason why corporations were able to achieve such remarkable growth was, in part, due to externalitie
s. An externality is the financial impact of an action which is not borne by the organisation that caused it. Externalities can be both positive and negative, but those created by organisations looking to reduce costs and increase profits tend to be negative. If a factory took so much water from a river that farmers downstream were no longer able to irrigate their land, then the farmers’ financial losses would not be on the factory’s balance sheet. Those losses, according to the factory’s accounts, were an irrelevant externality. Other examples of externalities include noise pollution, systemic risk to the banking system caused by irresponsible speculation, and the emission of greenhouse gases.

  An externality, in other words, is the gap between accountants and the real world. It is the severing of an important feedback loop, which could otherwise keep a complex system sustainable, ordered and self-stabilising.

  One way to deal with the problem of externalities is through environmental laws and industrial regulation. But as the constant stream of corporate malfeasance cases shows, it is often more profitable to ignore these constraints and pay a fine should they get caught. The efforts of tobacco companies to cover up or cast doubt on the link between smoking and lung cancer, which was first established by the English epidemiologists Austin Bradford Hill and Richard Doll in 1950, was one example. Another was the refusal of Union Carbide to properly clean up after the 1984 Bhopal disaster, when thousands of people were killed by poison gas in the worst industrial accident in history. These are examples in which corporations chose to act in ways that would increase their profits but cause people to die. Pope Innocent V may have been showing great insight when he declared that an organisation with the status of a legal person did not possess a soul.