On the other hand, broad reliance on automation—in both mechanical and knowledge jobs—could mean that a society grounded in carbon removal may not be transformative to the workforce in the ways we might hope. In fact, the trends in automation caution against the application of a “green jobs” justification to cheerlead carbon removal.
But carbon removal as a massive, mission-driven project would create some jobs, and taking a worker-centered lens to the endeavor would help ensure that these were decent green jobs, rather than poorly paid or hazardous ones. It’s challenging to think through this, though, since our notions of work will probably be undergoing massive revision at the same time.
In one version of a post-work world, as Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams write in Inventing the Future, we can foresee a surplus humanity. There are more urban migrants, more circular labor, more expulsion from land and the formal economy into informal, low-paid, and irregular work.19 “Premature deindustrialization,” they fear, is leaving the urban proletariat dispossessed of their agricultural livelihoods, but without the opportunity to obtain manufacturing jobs. Under capitalism, they note, jobs have been pivotal to our social lives and identities: “Our inner lives, our social world and our built environment are organized around work and its continuation.” One option for coping with the loss of jobs is to institute a universal basic income, which, they explain, is a political transformation, not only an economic one. But it matters how this basic income is instituted—implement a universal basic income too soon and too low, and it would act as a handout to companies.
Another vision sees work continuing despite the automation of labor, but in a transformed state. Tech journalist Luke Dormehl points to an “artisan economy” that favors “high-touch jobs.”20 Thomas Davenport and Julia Kirby, in a book called Only Humans Need Apply: Winners and Losers in the Age of Smart Machines, ask: “If you were a machine, what shortcomings would you readily admit to, and wish to have a human making up for?”21 In what reads like a how-to manual for surviving the job apocalypse, they suggest that the job seeker ask not “What work can I do without a computer?,” but “What work can’t be done by a computer without me?” Their answers: pursue design and creative thinking, provide a big-picture perspective, interrogate and synthesize multiple systems and results, elicit information, persuade humans to take actions, and deal with exceptions to rules—among others. They point to the increased value of traits like empathy, humor, ethics, integrity, taste, vision, and the ability to inspire. The issue with cottage, boutique, or artisan applications of carbon removal, like one might see in some regenerative agriculture products, is the ways this comes into tension with the massive scale of the task at hand.
Besides these “abolish work” and “we’ll just create new jobs” schools of thought, there’s also a line of thinking that considers the effect of artificial intelligence on employment to be overblown. As sociologist Judy Wajcman observes, an oft-cited estimate that 47 percent of US jobs are vulnerable to automation within the next two decades is based upon an algorithm that predicts the susceptibility to automation of different occupations, rather than the tasks that individual jobs entail. “The popular commentators and journalists, not to mention the business consultants, seem to devour this bleak picture with a Frankensteinian relish,” she notes, pointing to the “pleasure—even pride—we take in the idea that a man-made, robot-worked utopia/dystopia is on its way.”22
It is not yet clear which of these three versions of our work future will prevail, but I find it highly likely that the social response to automation and machine intelligence will inform the shape of carbon removal jobs. There will be even more questions about why we work, what actually defines a “good” job, and what sort of labor is necessary. Carbon removal jobs could at least offer a form of labor with a clear mission and sense of social good. If fairly compensated, these would be socially valuable jobs; and in that sense, they might be “good” jobs for this century and the next.
Nature’s labor: Counting on life
The work of carbon removal might be orchestrated by humans, but it hinges on the participation and enrollment of all kinds of life forces. Literature on lively nonhuman labor has been blooming in recent years. For example, anthropologist Stefan Helmreich writes about cyanobacteria, and how blue biotech companies configure microbial biodiversity as a form of accumulated labor power. He describes how the reproductive capacity of marine microorganisms can be “channeled into profit-making commodities and accumulation strategies (contrast biocapital with necrocapital: dead matter, like fossil fuel, put to unregenerative, zombie-like work).”23 Putting the focus too heavily on the power of organisms naturalizes biotech: productivity isn’t the essence of these creature’s species being, Helmreich points out, and they’re not just naturally factories or assembly lines. They only become so in certain relations. It’s knowledge work, on the part of humans, and our enclosure of the organisms that make them do labor for us.
Another social scientist, Elizabeth Johnson, describes how the imaginary of planetary management enrolls nonhumans as workers, rather than “attending to multispecies entanglements with an ethics of care.” The capacity for transformation of earth systems has always been more than human:
Workhorses, oxen, mules, bees, etc. have and do work alongside the living labor of humans. Like machines, these organisms facilitate the transformation of the earth’s material, adjusting the parameters of space and time. With them, we have accelerated planting and harvesting, extraction, acts of war, and migration across landscapes. But other-than-human organisms are not merely ‘natural resources,’ the products of human innovation, or engines of extraction. They are biological entities that we have shaped and that shape us. At times their labor or lives are appropriated in ways that enhance human life.24
What is the right way to treat our nonhuman worker-partners? Talk to the scientists and growers working on carbon removal, and you’ll see notes of affection, of commonality. Perhaps this will evolve into a code of behavior, into certain norms (or even rituals) that are passed on. Education, as we’ll discuss in the next chapter, is key to the adoption of an ethics of working with other life-forms.
Both automation and the enrollment of nonhumans via genetic modification and cultivation techniques can be seen as new frontiers of accumulation. Jason W. Moore, theorist of what he terms “world-ecology,” argues that we are at the end of “cheap nature,” representing an epochal crisis for capitalism. The increasing necessity of carbon removal, too, indicates that we’re at the end of “cheap nature”—it signals the arrival of the point where we have to pay to remove the carbon, and it’s no longer cheap. One question is whether these other frontiers—these other ways of generating surplus value—create enough revenue to pay the cost of the carbon removal. Without redirection of those surpluses via a concerted political struggle, this appears unlikely. The next question is: Will those other frontiers produce enough surplus to pay for carbon removal, and universal basic income, and renewable energy, and poverty reduction, and …everything else we need and desire? This is why degrowth, and the consumption patterns of the rich world, need to be part of the conversation around an after-zero society.
The people’s labor: Or, I don’t want to clean up after their fucking party
“We are as gods and have to get good at it,” wrote Stewart Brand, in his 2009 book Whole Earth Discipline.25 This line is evidence of hubris, according to geoengineering skeptics. The line has also been quoted people by who believe the Anthropocene to be some kind of step-up-to-the-plate moment for both earth systems and social transformation. Brand’s original passage from the 1968 Whole Earth Catalog, however, is seldom quoted in full:
We are as gods and might as well get good at it. So far, remotely done power and glory—as via government, big business, formal education, church—has succeeded to the point where gross defects obscure actual gains. In response to this dilemma and to those gains a realm of intimate, personal power is developing—power of
the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested.26
Today, indeed, much of the development of the carbon removal field is led by individuals following a path or calling. It’s quite resonant with the 1960s wish that individuals have the power to shape their own environment. Yet this wish is in tension with the demands of the task at hand: the removal of gigatons of carbon. Are these going to be artisan jobs, performed by practitioners of a craft—as opposed to “remotely done power and glory”? Or does the scalability requirement demand remote control and configuration, orchestration? In the end, there will have to be serious engagement by the state. With all this talk about scalability, where is the room for the non-scalable? The bespoke? The self-determined? Or is the self-determination of the entrepreneur, the making of one’s own destiny, only a mirage?
I will close this chapter with three brief contentions—really just seeds for further discussion. First, the people who will be doing the work of carbon removal should be defining the field, and what sort of jobs these are. Workers should be able to set the terms of their labor, and following from that, make a decent living providing the service of carbon removal. We can start by bolstering unions and experimenting with collectively owned factories and farms. Second, and at the same time, we need open-source technologies that can be adapted by people in various contexts around the world, because the terrain for innovation and the capacity to implement carbon removal is egregiously uneven. Third, creating good jobs in carbon removal will need to include attention to race, gender, and inclusion.
I recently attended a lecture at a modern art museum—the works of art were luminous orb-like freezers, displaying slabs of meat, skeletons, and plastic artifacts, meant to evoke Anthropocene strata. The scholar lecturing on the exhibit called for better housekeeping in the Anthropocene. I knew what he meant, sure: the mess needs to be cleaned up, the earth-home cared for. But the word “housekeeping” brings up the fact that housekeeping is gendered and racialized work. In the lecture’s suggestion of an Anthropocene housekeeping, there was no mention of race or gender; nor the fact that the makers and beneficiaries of the Anthropocene have been primarily white men. These men made a 2-trillion-ton mess with fossil fuels, profited handsomely from it, and then are going to go off and smoke and drink tea and whiskey, while we take care of the dishes. (Not All Men, sure; and some women somewhere benefited—washing machines! suburban landscape through which to drive to soccer matches!—but the basic contours are accurate.) Except it’s complicated, because the rich white men also own the industrial means and control the technologies that we would need to clean it up. So: (a) either the men get a double-profit, or (b) they simply won’t get around to cleaning it up, while climate suffering falls disproportionately on people of color and women. The nascent carbon removal technologies are by and large controlled by white men: both the basic materials used in the carbon removal methods discussed in the previous chapters, and the technologies described in this chapter that modify carbon removal’s implementation. The remedy for this situation can start in many places. One is at the beginning: in childhood, with socialization and education.
7
Learning
…the kind of thinking we are, at last, beginning to do about how to change the goals of human domination and unlimited growth to those of human adaptability and long-term survival is a shift from yang to yin, and so involves acceptance of impermanence and imperfection, a patience with uncertainty and the makeshift, a friendship with water, darkness, and the earth.
—Ursula K. LeGuin
Pacific Grove, California, January, 13°C / 55°F
Outside, it’s misty and gray, spitting salt spray and rain. Beyond the dunes, Pacific breakers slam into the land. On this side of the sheltering dunes, there’s thin soil, slick rock, lichen, sick pines oozing resin.
I’m inside a solid-stone lodge, warming myself beside a crackling fire. A woman in sturdy boots pokes the logs, sending lazy sparks aloft. Another woman, bundled in a scarf, is knitting soft gray fiber with a circular needle. The rows of stackable conference chairs upon which we sit, the quiet podium with its waiting PowerPoint, and the sturdy beams evoke a collision between a nineteenth-century living room, a hotel meeting salon, and a church.
Asilomar is a conference center on the Monterey Peninsula. In science policy circles, it is known as the site of a 1975 meeting in which scientists came together to discuss the risks of recombinant DNA research, agreeing on guidelines that formed the basis of US regulation of the field. This researcher-led model of governance was the inspiration for a 2010 meeting of geoengineering researchers at Asilomar, which attempted to deal with standards for climate engineering research and assess the risks of experiments. I’ve come to Asilomar for quite a different reason, though: a workshop exploring regenerative agriculture. In fact, it’s quite the opposite of top-down, expert-led governance of climate intervention. It’s about intervening quite literally from the ground up.
The proceedings begin with an invitation to get grounded. We place our feet on the floor and meditate on the question: “What do you want to regenerate?” Sharing time: the woman next to me says she’s interested in understanding the flows in nature. Wow, I think, what doesn’t need to be regenerated? The plants in my backyard, after just one rain event in the past six months, are looking pretty sad. Not to mention the blackened, fire-blasted hillsides of Highway 101 that I drove past on the way here. My cells could probably do with regeneration. The country probably needs regeneration. I’m overthinking it: I say something about community, generic but true. Then, the energetic speaker, soil scientist Ray Archuleta, begins.
“Good morning! This is an exciting new movement!” He’s talking about the soil health movement—and, in particular, the move from sustainability toward regeneration. “If somebody says, how’s your marriage, and I say … Oh, it’s sustainable … what do you think?” Everyone laughs. “Ladies and gentlemen, I’m blessed that my marriage is regenerative.” Archuleta then talks about the marriage between us and the land: “It starts with people of integrity.” For him, the revolution started with a realization of “failure.” As a government employee working in soil conservation, he began to see that what they were doing wasn’t working. “Reductionist conservation,” such as filter strips, riparian forest buffers, windbreaks, and grass waterways, wasn’t getting the job done. “We have made yield our god, but look what’s happened to our communities!” You drive through the skeletal remains of rural America, he says, pacing, and see the death of community, along with that of the fossil agriculture powered by oil from Canada’s tar sands, “Why are America’s farmers killing themselves in record numbers?” Ray asks. “The stress, the pressure.” The whole system is broken.
“We have all been products of Western thought processes since Aristotle,” Ray declares, explaining how reductionist thought has been ingrained through years of filters. Universities, governments, parents, grandparents—all living with the wrong paradigm. “A good paradigm will smash yours,” Ray says; it will smash through your filters.
Ray’s paradigm is the chaotic, elegant, and beautiful paradigm of soil health. “We are all dirt on legs.” The word human is from the Latin humus. “Folks, it’s us. A living substrate.” We are all interconnected. We must allow the soil to speak to us: “It will tell you, if you listen.” He refers to Job 12:7: “But ask the animals, and they will teach you, or the birds in the sky, and they will tell you; or speak to the earth, and it will teach you, or let the fish in the sea inform you.”
Then, Ray commences his demonstration. For audience members who may not grasp how to “listen” to soil, it’s a fairly simple visual display known as the “slake aggregate stability test.” On stage, there are five large cylinders filled with water. Five people are chosen from the audience. The volunteers gently drop different clods of soil into the columns of water: one clod from North Dakota, one from Missouri,
and one that was cultivated using no-till agriculture. Which holds its integrity and structure? The visual evidence illustrates how the soil clod with no-till holds its integrity. “Wow,” someone whispers behind me.
“The tillage is so brutal,” Ray explains. Tillage, indeed, is an intrusive tool. There’s another demonstration, of rain. “Ladies and gentlemen, the water does not infiltrate,” he announces. The tilled soil can’t absorb the water. “We do not have a runoff problem; we have an infiltration problem.”
“Look in the mirror: we’re the problem. We’re disconnected.”
What is the difference between the functioning soils and the leaky ones? “The understanding of the producers,” Ray emphasizes. Regeneration begins in the heart and the mind. This is echoed by the next speaker, a North Dakota farmer named Gabe Brown, who practices regenerative agriculture on his ranch. “The revolution starts with a few,” Brown says, explaining that our carbon is out of place.
After Geoengineering Page 20