Life

by Tim Flannery

  Yan Fu’s phrase is now obscure and defunct, but heavens’ performance strikes me as a beautiful and illuminating way of describing Darwin’s discovery, for evolution is indeed a sort of performance, one whose theme is the electrochemical process we call life and whose stage is the entire Earth. Funded by the Sun, heavens’ performance has been running for at least 3.5 billion years, and barring cosmic catastrophe will probably run for a billion more. It’s an odd sort of performance, though, for there are no seats but on the stage itself, and the audience is also the players. Darwin’s genius was to elucidate, with elegant simplicity, the rules by which the performance has unfolded.

  One reason for the broad appeal of Darwin’s ideas in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is evident in the opening lines of his famous 1858 essay, with its reference to the Swiss botanist Augustin Pyrame de Candolle:

  De Candolle, in an eloquent passage, has declared that all nature is at war, one organism with another, or with external nature. Seeing the contented face of nature, this may at first well be doubted; but reflection will inevitably prove it to be true.11

  War of course was one of the main occupations and passions of Victorian England, and the British excelled at it—the result being the greatest empire the world had ever seen. If nature favoured the militarily triumphant, then the Englishman must be a superior creature indeed. In an imperial age and aided by the works of Spencer, Darwin’s explanation of evolution would give rise to an extraordinary plethora of social phenomena, many of which strayed far from the original. Such beliefs are known as social Darwinism and, from colonial-era expressions like ‘shouldering the white man’s burden’ and ‘soothing the pillow of a dying race’, and on to eugenics, they permeated the cultural and intellectual fabric of the era.

  During the early part of the twentieth century the appeal of such thinking only strengthened. Indeed, by the 1930s and ’40s social Darwinism was informing extermination and selective breeding programs in Nazi Germany, while in the US contributors to the journal Eugenics were arguing for the mass sterilisation of those they felt were inferior, as well as publishing ridiculous family pedigrees of the movement’s leaders in an attempt to position them as the fathers of a future superior American race. Allied victory in World War II largely destroyed the credibility of these extremists and their programs, but some versions of social Darwinism continue to be influential. Notions about the ‘survival of the fittest’ are exemplified by Margaret Thatcher’s comment in 1987 that ‘there is no such thing as society’ (by which she presumably meant that each should look after his own).12 They are also evident in the field of neoclassical economics, with its belief that an unregulated market best serves humanity’s interests.

  Perhaps Charles Darwin, as he trod his sand walk, foresaw the possibility of all of this, or perhaps not. In any case, late in life he wrote, ‘I feel no remorse for having committed any great sin but have often and often regretted that I have not done more direct good to my fellow-creatures.’13

  What Lies on the Other Side?

  2010

  Do we as a species constitute a Gaian nervous system and a brain?

  JAMES LOVELOCK 1979

  AS I COMPLETED my lap of Charles Darwin’s sand walk, I looked back towards Down House and wondered what the great man would have made of our world, with its cars parked over the fields where cattle once grazed, and his home turned into a scientific shrine. Would he have regretted that use of the term ‘favoured races’ in the title of his book? I’d like to think he understood that the survival of the fittest means the survival of none, and that he would have congratulated Wallace on his extraordinary insights, so far ahead of their time.

  Had I just a moment with a resurrected Darwin, I’d like to share with him the spectacle of heavens’ performance as we now understand it: from the moment of Earth’s creation, through to the plains of Africa where our species took shape, and on to this century. We’d watch this Earth—a sphere of stupendous complexity—transforming itself over an immensity of time, guided by the evolutionary process that he so brilliantly elucidated.

  If I were granted one conversation with Darwin, I’d ask him what he made of Bill Hamilton’s last project. Hamilton, you might recall, was using computer models to investigate whether evolution builds ecosystems that, over time, become more resilient and stable: as he put it, how likely is it that a ‘Genghis Khan species’ will soon arrive and destroy all? It’s a question that goes to the heart of this book, and I believe that the answer is to be found not only where Hamilton searched for it. It’s a question that we, as individuals and as a global civilisation, must answer. Will ours be a Medean or a Gaian future? The choice will be made soon—for the best of our science and plain commonsense are telling us that our influence on Earth is eroding our future, and that we cannot escape responsibility.

  If we take too small a view of what we are, and of our world, we will fail to reach our full potential. Instead we need a holistic, Wallacean understanding of how things are here on Earth with its illumination of how ecosystems, superorganisms and Gaia itself have been built through mutual interdependency. In this light it is absolutely clear that our future prosperity can be secured only by giving something away. But for the brief moment that is the early twenty-first century we strange forked creatures are perilously suspended between Medean and Gaian fates. Beckoning us towards destruction are our numbers, our dismantling of Earth’s life-support system and especially our inability to unite in action to secure our common wealth.

  Yet we should take solace from the fact that, from the very beginning, we have loved one another and lived in company, thereby, through giving up much, forging the greatest power on Earth. Those simple traits have allowed the weakest of us collectively to triumph, to establish agriculture, businesses and democracy, in the face of opposition sometimes so formidable as to make success look impossible. We have hated and fought too, but all the while villages have grown into towns, and towns into mega-cities, until at last a global superorganism has been formed. And today we understand ourselves, our societies and our world far better than ever before, and are uniquely empowered to shape our ends, rough-hew them as natural selection will.

  Lately it’s become fashionable to assume the worst, to imagine that our global civilisation has passed its peak and will soon collapse. Books like James Lovelock’s The Revenge of Gaia and Jared Diamond’s Collapse have done much to foster this philosophy, as has a growing awareness of the climate crisis. Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road, I think, captures the utter humbling of spirit that such an eventuality would bring. The moral aridity of that world, where life is reduced to a struggle for mere survival in a horrendous environment, is crushing. In it the division of bodies substitutes for the division of labour, and win-win is replaced by a catastrophic loss of all. We are capable of many things, but our beliefs do have a way of turning into self-fulfilling prophecies.

  Climate science is now so advanced that we can anticipate the kind of event that may, if we do not reduce the stream of greenhouse-gas pollution, initiate the end of the great ‘us’ that is our global civilisation. With no warning, a gargantuan ice sheet will begin to collapse. It will mark the beginning of an irreversible process and, even if the initial rise in sea level it causes is just a few centimetres, it will herald an abandonment of our coasts, for the ice must continue to melt and collapse, albeit erratically, until there is no more. It will be impossible to put a time scale on the flooding, but Shanghai, London, New York and most other coastal cities must suffer partial or total abandonment, over weeks or decades or centuries. With economies in ruins and infrastructure drowned, we will then all be on The Road.

  But the future worlds of Lovelock and McCarthy are just two possibilities. Such is the power of the mneme that, as far as our relationship with Earth goes, little is either possible or impossible—unless we think it so. Perhaps we’ll tread a middle road, committing our global civilisation to a prolonged and agonising transition before securing a sust
ainable future. When a caterpillar weaves itself into its silken cocoon, it is for the most part weaving its own coffin. Shutting out the last of the light, it dissolves into a soup that nourishes just a few living cells that, by feeding upon the mush that was once their caterpillar, grow until they tear the silken veil to emerge as a moth and fly into the night. Must our human transformation be so brutal? With the climate crisis we’re already sitting our first test, and it has arrived even before the human superorganism has properly matured.

  But there is another possibility—that we will use our intelligence to avert catastrophe and secure a sustainable future. We now have most of the tools required to do this and, after ten thousand years of building ever larger political units, we stand just a few steps away from the global cooperation required. But do we have it in us to take those last steps? Between our evolved genes and our social structures, are we constituted so as to cooperate at a global level?

  The immediate challenge is fundamental—to manage our atmospheric and oceanic global commons—and the unavoidable cost of success in this is that nations must cede real authority, as they do whenever they agree to act in common to secure the welfare of all. This does not mean the creation of a world government, simply the enforcement of common rules, for the common good.

  By ordinary human measures, the climate crisis moves slowly, and so do the changes we’re making to address it, so slowly, indeed, that we often fail to detect important thresholds except in retrospect. How will we know if we’ve turned the corner in our battle for a sustainable future? When profiteering at Gaia’s expense is regarded and punished as the gravest of crimes—both because it represents a theft from the whole world, present and future, and because it may not remain mere theft but, as its consequences ramify, may become murder or genocide as well—then a sustainable future will be ours. Such a moment, if it ever comes, will close a chapter in human history—that of the frontier—that has characterised our species for fifty thousand years. In early 2010 we edged a fraction closer with the commencement of a campaign to have the UN’s International Criminal Court recognise ‘ecocide’ (the heedless or deliberate destruction of the environment) as a fifth ‘crime against peace’.1

  If our civilisation does survive this century, I believe its future prospects will be profoundly enhanced, for this is the moment of our greatest peril. Should we cross the valley of death, democracy may well sweep the world, as Francis Fukuyama argued twenty years ago, creating a universal mode of government. And, as the geneticist Spencer Wells believes, in just a few generations most regional genetic difference will be muddied then lost. But there will also be tragic losses, for what is true of genes is also true of languages. Countless have already vanished, and the thinning of linguistic diversity will only continue as the members of our superorganism seek universal communication. Perhaps in the Chinglish of Singapore, Hong Kong and Shanghai we hear the embryogenesis of a future world language. With a homogeneous gene pool, universal communication and a common political system, our children and grandchildren may have a far better chance than we do of acting as one.

  It’s sometimes argued that if humanity became extinct tomorrow, Gaia would look after herself. That may be true in the very long term—the tens of millions of years—but in the shorter term disaster would befall many species and ecosystems. That’s because they’ve been so deeply compromised that only human effort keeps them functioning efficiently. The Australian Wildlife Conservancy, along with Aboriginal land holders, keep dozens of species from extinction. In New Zealand, and many other islands, species are kept in existence only through the most careful protection from introduced pests. Even in places like the UK, active management is required to preserve species such as heathland orchids and rare butterflies, while the majestic red kite soars in British skies only through our good grace. As the pace of climate change increases, our efforts to protect nature will become more critical.

  This notion of humans as indispensible elements in the Earth system challenges the concept many of us have about our relationship with nature—for example, that we are somehow apart from it, or just one species among many. The truth is that no other species can perceive environmental problems or correct them, which means that the responsibility for managing this world of wounds we’ve created is uniquely ours. We are, it seems, the Faustus species—the one that, on that day thousands of years ago when we started to assemble our intelligent superorganism, signed a fateful bargain not with the devil, but with the blind watchmaker. It made us lords of creation, but left our fate and that of Earth inextricably interwoven.

  As we seek to support the growing human family, our enormous power over nature could be exercised in any number of ways. We could, for example, seek to control nature at every turn, and so transform our planet into a huge, intensively managed farm. It’s extremely doubtful, however, whether such an entity could be sustainably maintained, for it would lack the resilience and energy budget required to keep Earth habitable.

  I would like to ponder a different kind of future relationship with our planet. The American ecologist Aldo Leopold said that:

  One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.2

  Such damage, we now know, stretches back over fifty thousand years, and it is profound. Making much of it good is beyond our current capacity, but, as an intergenerational ambition, healing Earth’s ecological wounds is highly desirable.

  There is something magnificent about the idea of a wild and free planet, one whose functioning is maintained principally by that commonwealth of virtue formed from all biodiversity. It’s the sort of place celebrated by Jay Griffiths in her book Wild, which describes the last untamed corners of the Earth: places without roads, hotels and other Western influences. Yet the book is as much a requiem as a celebration, for Griffiths acknowledges that wilderness is fast disappearing, if not already gone.3

  If we wish to increase nature’s influence a re-wilding is required—a reconstruction of vital ecosystems on a scale sufficient to allow them to operate optimally without intrusive human management. In effect, we’ll need to make good the damage of fifty thousand years. Partially re-wilded areas in fact already exist in many parts of Europe, Africa and Australia, and in them one can see horses, elephants or wallabies roaming landscapes from which they were once long vanished. Such ecosystems are more productive and stable than the degraded ones they replaced. But they are not as productive as they might be, and are far too small to affect overall planetary health. The Russian biologist Sergey Zimov has bigger plans. He wants to enclose part of northern Siberia with a twenty-kilometre-long fence and introduce bison, musk oxen, horses and other species long since locally extinct.4 This is re-wilding on a grand scale, but without mammoths such efforts seem bound to fail, because mammoths and other elephants are the ecological bankers of our world. Their grazing, defecation and ploughing of snow in winter was vital to the entire ecosystem of the mammoth steppe and allowed it to be vastly more productive than it would otherwise have been.

  Could we, should we, bring back the mammoth? The answer to the ‘could we’ is ‘not quite yet’. While scientists have made advances in reconstructing the mammoth genome (as well as the Neanderthal’s and the thylacine’s), they’re still far from being able to produce a living mammoth.5 And the moral and ethical dimensions of such science are daunting. We might give birth to a kind of Frankenstein’s monster, a genetic freak that could never live in the real world. So why should we want to try? Simply because creatures such as mammoths are vital elements in important ecosystems, and it is only through restoring them that Earth’s productivity and resilience can also be brought back to the level that would most benefit our
living planet, and thus ourselves. Attempting to re-establish their role in ecosystems is thus similar to restoring health to our farms and rangelands. It’s also akin to helping a crashed economy back onto its feet. The alternative is for humanity to remain eternal ‘estate managers’ of expansive, semi-wild regions whose contribution to the Gaian whole remain suboptimal.

  If the future I’ve outlined is not merely fantastical, it has the potential to herald a profound change in Gaia. From her birth until now she has been a loosely coordinated entity lacking a command-and-control system—a mere commonwealth of virtue—and therefore unable to regulate herself precisely. But if the global human superorganism survives and evolves, its surveillance systems and initiatives to optimise ecosystem function raise the prospect of an intelligent Earth—an Earth that would, through her global human superorganism, be able to foresee malfunction, instability or other danger, and to act with precision. If that is ever achieved, the greatest transformation in the history of our planet would have occurred, for Earth would then be able to act as if it were, as Francis Bacon put it all those centuries ago, ‘one entire, perfect living creature’. Then the Gaia of the classical world would in fact exist.