Earth in Human Hands
Page 26
Yes, Gaia is tough, and will ultimately be fine with or without us. Yet it is also true that everything we treasure, both the creative works of humanity and a large number of the species we share Earth with today, is threatened by the worst-case climate change scenarios and other self-inflicted existential risks. The traditionalists emphasize that so many species are threatened and that ecosystems can collapse. They make the almost unquestionable assertion that extinct is forever. Neither side denies the tragic potential of the current moment, but the ecomodernists emphasize, rightly, that nature is brilliant at carrying on by forming new alliances and adaptations. They suggest, therefore, that with enlightened management we can create and encourage new “anthromes” that have the qualities we most treasure about Earth’s ancient biomes, but that accommodate human needs and preserve the bulk of the species we care about.17
The traditionalists are eloquent on what we have lost and are losing. They are very clear in describing what they are against, what they fear, what they mourn. They are long on what they don’t like (exploitation, destruction of nature, capitalism, and, sometimes, human beings), but short on where we are going and what we should seek. It’s not always clear what they want, beyond vague notions of relinquishing our privileged place on the planet. When they do give prescriptions, they generally involve reducing the human presence on Earth. I have to admit I do like this idea. I think, in the long run, to some degree this will happen, in combination with the smarter use of technology advocated by the ecomodernists. Yet it is not clear to what point they would scale back. Some suggest ending industrial food production altogether, and that we should simply become “plain members and citizens in the community of life.”18 What does this mean? Abandon agriculture and go back out on the hunt?19
There is a persistent message that we should not get comfortable with the Anthropocene but should fight it. This sounds to me like saying we should not get comfortable with adulthood but should resist it. Growing up was a bad deal. Look at all we gave up: innocence, infinite wonder, a sense of immortality, and, for some, a sense of safety and endless worry-free days. Why would we ever accept anything else?
Though I am often annoyed by their tactics, my heart is with the ecomodernists, because of their lack of sentimentality, their acknowledgment that we do have a role to play on this planet, and their clear-headed appraisal of our choices. Their vision is not perfect, but at least they have a vision for the future. However, there are a few areas where I think they, and we, would benefit from listening more to the traditionalists.
Traditionalists argue persuasively that wildness has very important value that cannot be measured in economic or utilitarian terms. Even as I question their quasi-animist notion of “self-willed” jungles and rivers, I also think they have a very important point here. There is a spiritual, emotional, and cultural value to wildness, something irreplaceable.* Wilderness as a pure entity, a platonic ideal, may not be helpful. Maybe it never existed. Yet what of wildness as a quality to mourn and treasure and protect and foster? An appreciation of wildness as something that we need, and do not fully comprehend, can also encourage humility, restraint, gratitude, respect, and wonder at the world. These are values we will need to cultivate, along with innovation, courage, confidence, and curiosity.
Both sides in this debate are motivated by the same consternation and concern with how we are going to manage ourselves and our planet in the critical century ahead. Each accuses the other of being attached to the status quo, but at least they share a realization that the status quo is unstable. Both recognize the climate emergency we are in, and that business as usual is not okay. Both support efforts to move our energy supply rapidly away from fossil fuels, though ecomodernists would do it with more nukes and fewer windmills. Do we try to go back to nature or move forward to our own reinvented world? It will have to be some combination of the two. To deal with the world as it actually is today, we’ll need a synthesis of these approaches.
We need invention and self-restraint. The most useful inventions will result from paying more attention to limits, not less. Even as we find better, less intrusive systems to power and feed ourselves, we need to recognize that even if we wanted to, we cannot replace or do away with Earth’s massive ancient cycles. The innovations we need most will help us find ways to work with our planet’s properties, not ignore them. That will include deepening our understanding of ecological and biological systems so that we can learn to be better collaborators.
Respect and reverence for the integrity and mystery of wild nature remind us that our innovation must be tempered with caution, because our knowledge of planetary functioning is still dwarfed by our ignorance. I see awareness of limits and the need for restraint as embedded deeply within the notion of the Anthropocene—the moment in Earth history when the world stopped being functionally infinite and we had to start dealing with that fact.
Human Nature
The traditionalists, the purists, remind us of the essential value of large robust parks and reserves, connected wildlife corridors, and healthy forests. Yet what about the environments where most of the world’s people actually live and where more will be living in the future? How should a conservationist regard a city: simply as something to try to have less of or try to mitigate? Or should she concern herself with the health of what is in that environment?
I’m a huge fan of urban nature, not as a substitute for more wild places, but as a marvelous and evolving thing in and of itself; not just a consolation prize, a retreat or last stand, but as something to be celebrated and cultivated. I love the dark skies of the Arizonan and Australian deserts, but I am also fond of urban astronomy, where the stars are muted and the skies are ruled by the dance of the moon and planets, where Venus looms out of a twilight sky sometimes tinged with a lovely red glow. Knowing that this glow comes from particulate smog, I’d like to see a little less of it, but it can still be quite pretty. I love both nature and cities, and I love them together. I love the fact that here in Washington, I often don’t get in a car for days on end (something that was much less likely when I lived in the “wild” West, in Tucson and Denver, where the post-highway cities are spread out on huge square grids, with all that vast pseudo-wilderness just out of reach, just a half hour’s drive out of town…).
Right now, looking out my kitchen window on a summer day on Capitol Hill, I see a complex, shifting scene composed of about 50 percent brick and 50 percent trees. It’s lovely, a riot of organic forms bouncing in the wind. The brick is festooned with lichen, ivy, and moss, its rigid geometry softened and blemished by hundreds of years of wind, rain, and life, and illuminated by splintered sunlight refracted through blowing branches and leaves. A squirrel skitters along a power line, balanced, at ease, “natural,” as if he’s been evolving to do this for a hundred thousand years. The trees are diverse, some deciduous and some evergreen. They look happy, at home, healthy, and strong. They are permanent residents, compared to any people. The birds and rodents that nest, chase, chatter, and squeal among them seem at home as well. I know that here I am reducing this to my superficial impressions. What about the trees themselves? I do believe they have impressions, experiences, and feelings of a kind, but they will never write books about it. Some of them may become books. Well, not these trees in my landlord’s backyard. It’s nature of a different kind: call it “human nature.” It’s not so wild, but it’s beautiful and valuable, too.
When I have time and inclination I find a little more wildness. On a hot summer day, I can drive half an hour, or bike two hours upstream, and scramble through woods and across the mossy shore to wade into the cool Potomac, with no buildings or people in sight. Even closer at hand, within the city, is the Kenilworth Park and Aquatic Gardens, where I can sit in a field of blowing cattails on the muddy edge of an expansive tidal marsh and watch herons land and turtles crawl. Jet planes on approach to National Airport snap me out of my reverie, reminding me of the surrounding city.
As we measure the ex
tent and direction of our influence, it’s important to remember that human-made does not have to mean ugly. It can also be beautiful and inspiring, especially when built in concert with the nature around and within. Who can deny the beauty of Machu Picchu or Angkor Wat? Who hasn’t been moved by the magnificent sight of the Golden Gate Bridge elegantly joining San Francisco to Marin County, its parabolic cables swooping between bold vermillion Art Deco towers? This is a handsome addition to the geography, not a compromise. For me, such a structure contains a message of hope: that humans can collaborate with the land and build with skill and beauty, that even our giant works can be integrated gracefully into Earth without diminishing it. Today, meaningful conservation must concern itself with the ecological health of places that include human activity within them—and the whole world is now one of those places.
Scientific and technical ingenuity allows us to discern and work with the laws and parameters of the universe, but not to change them. Some of those parameters include the geometry, chemistry, and physics of our planet. Our brilliance will succeed by discovering, embedding, and entraining ourselves within our world’s ways. The ecomodernists are all about embracing innovation and the power of human ingenuity. I’m with them as long as that also includes embracing innovation in reimagining our global economy and moving it, in the long run, toward one that encompasses, rather than ignores, the reality of finite global geometry.
We do need to transition to a sustainable economy that incorporates ecological limits. What economists now call macroeconomics is really very micro, ignoring the finite physical capacity of our planet. In this area the traditionalists have it right. Embracing the Anthropocene cannot mean embracing the economic status quo that considers future environmental costs as “externalities” to be ignored. A mature Anthropocene will require the opposite. Recognizing our role requires awakening to the reality that business as usual has no future and accepting the responsibility of finding a new way. This need not require us to abandon or overthrow capitalism, merely to adapt it in smart ways to encompass our increasing awareness that there are constraints on an economic system that is growing within a finite planetary system.20
Three Futures
It’s often said that we humans learn best through disaster. An endless supply of tragic historical anecdotes supports this claim. Yet that is not the whole story, because we are also uniquely gifted with foresight. This is a great strength because we can do much of what would otherwise be trial-and-error learning by running scenarios inside our heads. As individuals, we’re always considering outcomes and making choices. We picture ourselves skidding off the road, so we step on the brake. We’ve developed mechanisms to do this in larger and larger groups, with mixed results. Our big evolutionary challenge now is to take this to the global level more effectively. If we can learn from disasters foretold, we can steer clear of danger.
In 1979, for CoEvolution Quarterly, the underground comic artist R. Crumb drew “A Short History of America,” a series of twelve sequential panels portraying the path of progress (such as it is) over the twentieth century in a random spot, a typical American town. [See here of the photo insert.]
The first panel shows a bucolic scene of a rolling meadow at the edge of a deep forest, with a large flock of birds flying overhead. The next view is nearly the same, but now with a train running through on newly laid tracks. In the third panel a telegraph line and a dirt road have appeared alongside the tracks, along with a lone, modest farmhouse. The scene can still be described as bucolic. The decades pass, and the pace of development, which started innocuously and gradually, quickens. Paved roads, sidewalks, streetlights, electrical and telephone wires appear. The trees decline in number. Billboards and signs grab at our attention. In the final three panels there is no more grass, and nothing but the sky that is not human-made. In the last scene even the sky is visibly altered, dull and smoggy, the backdrop to a clogged, slightly decrepit urban corner where life goes on. A couple rides past on a motorcycle, going about their business. Although the difference from the first panel to the last is jarring, each step seems minor, and each view looks unexceptional, normal. The final panel contains the only text: the caption “What next?”
In 1988, Crumb answered his own question with a follow-up drawing, entitled “Epilogue.” [See here of the photo insert.] It depicts the same scene again in three more panels, showing three possible futures. The top one, labeled “Worst Case Scenario: Ecological Disaster,” depicts a postapocalyptic wasteland. The shells of buildings and cars are decaying in abandoned, weed-grown streets under a frighteningly bright sun and a diseased-looking sky.
The second panel, “The Fun Future: Techno-Fix on the March,” is a much happier place. A clean sky is traveled by sleek hovercraft and flying cars. A sign reads, “NO GROUND VEHICLES IN THIS SECTOR.” The buildings look prefab, molded, efficient. Some green has returned, in the form of well-manicured grass and carefully planted, well-spaced evergreens.
In the third panel, “The Ecotopian Solution,” the trees have grown back tall and wild. The roads are dirt again and are traveled by healthy-looking people who smile and wave as they pass by, riding bicycles and pulling wagons. These are the only machines visible. A roadside stand sells healthy-looking produce. Wooden tree houses and geodesic domes are sheltered in the forest. People sit beneath a tree, playing acoustic instruments. It looks like rural Oregon in the early 1970s, but it’s supposed to be the future after humanity has chosen to loosen our technological grip on the world.
It strikes me that many of our arguments and discussions about how to handle ourselves in the Anthropocene are summed up in these last three panels. We all want to avoid “Worst Case Scenario.” To do so, however, we need to make some big changes and lower our output of greenhouse gases. The “Fun Future” is the ecomodernist fantasy in which our problems have been solved by nifty new inventions. The ecotopian solution caricatures the traditional conservationist fantasy where we have lowered our numbers drastically and returned to a simpler, more low-tech lifestyle.
Either of these fantasy worlds looks pretty pleasant, but neither is a realistic depiction of our likely future. It’s going to have to be a combination of these two. In order to avoid “Worst Case Scenario,” we need an artful and wise combination of “ecotopia” and “technofix.” There is a reasonable path forward for those who love wild nature, fear the consequences of its further diminishment, and yet recognize that both technical innovation and close attention to limits are going to be important. Ultimately I believe we’ll choose both to reduce our numbers and to embrace our nature as engineers and innovators.
The Nature of Nature
To a thoughtful person, the distinction between “natural” and “man-made” has always been somewhat problematical.* Are we ourselves not products of, part of, nature? If so, then our own productions are as well. Yet when we were much fewer in number and much lighter on our feet, we were surrounded by a world that was mostly wild, untouched by humans. We could certainly draw a distinction between those things that were products of our own intellect and handiwork, and everything else, between “artificial” and “natural.” Now this distinction is fading. There is no place in nature that does not bear at least the faint chemical and isotopic touch of human hands. The weather itself, the wind and rain, have become, in part, artifact.
Traditional conservationists describe the Anthropocene pejoratively as the age of human “dominion” over Earth, and the Anthropocene agenda as the vain belief that humans now control the planet. “Control” is a loaded term, but you can’t deny that our decisions or lack thereof do now have major effects on Earth. So, do we take our hands off the wheel, duck, and brace for impact? Or do we try to learn to drive? It has to be the latter, while I would also suggest tapping the brakes, not the accelerator. Still, it is reckless to deny that you are driving, and to refuse to look if in fact you are.
We are, in some sense, running the world now. Yet I see this much more as a reluctant realization
of a fearsome responsibility than as a power grab. It’s not that we think we are so great, but that we are stuck managing this world that we have accidentally pulled off the rails. Some have interpreted this as tantamount to declaring ourselves gods. I don’t like the ecopragmatist phrase coined by Stewart Brand: “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.” I see the truth in it, but I don’t like it. We’re not gods, or if we are, we’re pretty lousy ones: reluctant, incompetent gods who have been “volunteered” by fate to assume a leadership position we know we’re not really qualified for. We’re more like teenage hackers realizing that we’re flying a 747 without instruments or instructions. We have no choice but to figure out how to land the thing.
Let’s face it, it’s disquieting to think we are even sort of running Earth. Nobody in their right mind loves this or is cavalier about the dangers and challenges we face. Who appointed us? We’re like actors who play a starship crew on TV finding themselves suddenly, accidentally, in control of a real starship.* How do you work this thing? We don’t know how to run a planet. Good luck with that. Worse still, we’re only just realizing that we’re driving this contraption, which would likely be a good first step in gaining control.