Earth in Human Hands

by David Grinspoon

  Nevertheless, however reluctantly, unconsciously, and incompetently we are doing it, we are now managing this planet. Many people don’t want to admit this, don’t want it to be true. Well, of course we don’t want it to be true. Everyone prefers the carefree innocence of childhood to the weighty responsibilities of adulthood. Still, it is far better to grasp things the way they really are. When we deny that humans are now to some degree in charge of Earth, aren’t we persisting in a comforting illusion? If we want to get to work solving the problems we’ve created, the first step is seeing clearly who we are.

  Though we are not gods, we did create nature—meaning we invented the concept, and made it necessary. Before us, there was no nature to be despoiled or protected, there was just the tangled bank of the world with its profusion of crawling species growing upon and adapting to one another, living, dying, and evolving. Once we started pondering things, we saw that we inhabited a world, and asked where we and it came from, and whether we had always been part of it. With that question, we invented nature as something apart from us. Now we’re realizing that we may have fallen for our own illusion.

  How about realizing that we can be neither saviors nor external, outside managers but must recognize ourselves as integral? If we are to feel truly not apart but a part of the biosphere, then we must recognize exactly what sort of part we are: a thinking, communicating, planning, engineering part. We need to use those unique capacities to see more clearly the situation we’re in. We’re not separate entities on an infinite, nonliving world. The nonhuman world was doing just fine before we got here, but it needs us now, to clean up after ourselves and to chart a path forward. We need to use our human qualities to be better partners, better spokeshumans, better colleagues with the nonsentient and nonliving parts of this planet—because we need them, because we are them, because it is right.

  Promise

  One popular response to our current predicaments is to insist that the human race is inherently ignorant, destructive, and divisive. It’s an unimaginative, defeatist reaction. We need to look clearly at our record, but we also need to see our promise, because our sense of ourselves can help guide our choices.

  Certainly it’s not difficult to find examples that point to a record of carelessness and casual disruption and destruction of natural systems at the hands of humans. There are books full of them being published as fast as trees can be felled to print them. However, it is equally true that humanity is uniquely creative and constructive. If we weren’t, we wouldn’t be in this mess. Right now we are certainly facing a situation that is new for us. For so long we behaved as if the world were infinite, and compared to the scale of our activities, it basically was. Then we spread around it so thoroughly that we ran back into ourselves. Our great cleverness has reached clear around the world to bite us in the ass.

  I want us to differentiate between the proto-Anthropocene, the time of unconscious technological transformation of our planet, and the mature Anthropocene, not so that we can escape responsibility for what we have done, but so that we can fully and clearly assume responsibility for what we need to do.

  In order to lose innocence, you need awareness. Awareness of a certain kind seems to be something we humans are blessed (or cursed?) with as individuals. Yet is it something we possess as a global entity? Humans are aware, but is humanity? Complex global problems require intelligent global responses. Intelligence entails the ability to sense changes and consequences and modify behavior. Yet humanity has rarely acted collectively, or consciously changed anything to meet collective needs on a planetary scale. On this level, we have not acted with intelligence, with sentience. Now the challenge of climate change is forcing us to face this fragmented aspect of our nature. That’s why, in chapter 4, I referred to the “twisted gift of global warming.” It may turn out to be the wake-up call we need, and the resulting gradual mass realization of our planetary role could represent a turning point, a critical juncture in the evolution toward intelligent life on this world, as currently manifested by the bumbling progress of the human race.

  In becoming dependent upon energy sources that endanger the future of our civilization, we’ve stumbled into a trap. Yet don’t assume we’re stuck there. Our fleets of Earth-observing satellites, our climate-modeling supercomputers, and our tightening mesh of global communications are all very new phenomena. Many people have pointed out that the Internet looks a lot like Vernadsky’s noösphere. Is the world developing a kind of mind that might be capable of looking out for itself? Could it be that this big, slow creature is awakening and has just started to notice, and is slowly turning to face, the threat?

  This transition to self-conscious, self-aware global change seems to us, trapped in the flitting pace of human lifetimes and generations, painfully slow. Yet on the cadence over which Earth goes through its ages and stages, bobbing along in its orbit around the galaxy, a time frame in which a century is nothing at all, it is lightning fast.

  If, for a moment, we step back, way back, and seek a view that is not only less human centered, but also less focused only on our own time, instead regarding the history of the planet and the biosphere as a whole, then we see that there is something truly new and remarkable happening here. Yes, there is a tragic component to it, just as there was a tragic component to the end-Cretaceous extinction that took out the dinosaurs. As I’ve discussed, extinction, even mass extinction, is a familiar refrain in the story of Earth. Yet this time is different because we have some awareness and therefore some sense of responsibility and agency. We have the potential not only to forestall the worst of the wave of extinction that has accelerated on Earth in our time, but also even to prevent future mass extinctions that would occur inevitably without our influence.

  Self-aware global change is really so new on this planet that, arguably, it has not had time to catch on and catch up with the careless changes that have dominated our impact. Looking at it this way, I believe there is something profoundly different, unprecedented, and ultimately incredibly promising, about the Anthropocene. The mature Anthropocene begins with our mass awareness of our role as world changers. So it starts right now, in our discussions about the global environment, in our growing realization of ourselves as a planetary-scale entity with a need to start behaving like one. All attempts to spread the word are, in effect, efforts to get the Anthropocene started in earnest. Every book, lecture, discussion, online argument, flame war, and bar fight about climate change, the global economy, and the Anthropocene itself is a part of this beginning. Even the voices seemingly pushing us backward, arguing against the obvious reality of global warming and attempting to thwart efforts at global responses to our global problems—like those recalcitrant neuronal circuits in your head firing in protest of your clear need to get out of bed in the morning—are a manifestation of our collective global brain starting to pay attention more and more, to think these thoughts and wake up to the new reality. In this sense, the Anthropocene is just beginning, and it’s something not to fear but to welcome. Let’s get it started. Let’s do it right.

  Humanity: An Event, a Phase, or a Transition?

  Scientists debating the Anthropocene have been so focused on locating its beginning. It might be more important to ask where it is going, and when will it end?

  What will be the significance of the Anthropocene rock layer and the ultimate legacy of the human race when, in another 225 million years, our star, having completed one more dance around the black hole at the center of our galaxy, returns to this quadrant? Will we simply leave a thin layer rich in refined metal and Twinkie wrappers, underlying a layer bereft of coral reefs? Or will we leave more lasting changes on this world, or even never leave it at all?

  In the scientific literature, you see the Anthropocene referred to sometimes as an “event” and sometimes as an “epoch.” “Event” implies it will all be over pretty quickly, whereas “epoch” implies some more prolonged phase of human influence. From the standpoint of Earth evolution, which w
ill we be, a moment or a phase? There are plenty examples of each in Earth’s history. The end of the Cretaceous period was an event caused by a disruptive impact, marked by a centimeter-thick layer of clay that represents a few years of accumulation. What immediately followed was an epoch, the Paleocene, which lasted more than ten million years and finally ended with the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, one of the most rapid and extreme periods of global warming the world has ever seen.

  Is it audacious to think that, geologically, the changes we bring might be anything more than an event on this world? After all, species come and go; why should we be any different? Notwithstanding the great longevity of certain species—sharks have been here, pretty much unchanged, for more than one galactic year—why should we expect to be spared? This frequently stated fatalistic opinion ignores the central observation of the Anthropocene: that, all value judgments aside, human civilization has brought new forces to bear in the dynamics of Earth and of evolution itself. The past is no longer the key to the present because the rules of the game have changed, but not necessarily in our favor. The adolescent stages of a young technical species appear to be fraught. We need to find a way to power our growing civilization without wrecking our environment, but this is merely the first in a string of challenges brought by an expanding human population and the increasing global reach of our technology on a finite planet.

  So, event or epoch? There is actually a third possibility: a transition. The origin of life, the Great Oxygenation Event of 2.3 billion years ago, and the Cambrian explosion are examples of unreversed transitions that left Earth dramatically and permanently transformed. The Anthropocene could mark the beginning of a transition of similar importance in the history of Earth. If we make it past the next few centuries, it will be because we’ve honed our survival skills to make them work on a planetary scale. Once we achieve that, we have done much more than ensure our persistence against near-term self-induced challenges. We will have unleashed the power of reason and foresight in defense of Earth’s biosphere—but first we have to get through a bottleneck.

  The Bottleneck

  We are blessed and cursed to live in interesting times. Not that there have been any uninteresting times, but both cosmic evolution and its local subplot of biological evolution seem to have gone through long periods of cruising along in relative stasis, like a drive across Kansas and Nebraska. Then they hit the Rockies. Naturally we should be suspicious of the impression that there is anything special about our current era. It’s easy, I’m sure, for the people of any time to think that theirs is the most crucial in history. This could just be another pre-Copernican type of fallacy: “Ours is the crucial time!,” as suspect an opinion as “Ours is the most special place.” We’ve escaped from the parochial trap of assuming Earth to be the center of everything just because it’s where we are, and we don’t want to fall into the trap of thinking that now is important just because it’s when we’re here. Yet even looking carefully for this type of bias, I still come to the conclusion that major changes are afoot in the very mechanisms of evolutionary change and in the relationship between life and Earth. Such transformations do not happen every day.

  All those upward-arcing curves defining the Great Acceleration described in chapter 3 cannot continue. That would be physically impossible. Global warming is only the most visible of several accelerating and interconnected challenges confronting humanity now, others being issues of energy, population, environmental pollution, and global supplies of food and potable water. Add to these several developing technologies that have been credibly proposed as existential threats for humanity. Among these are the nexus of artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, and nanotechnology, which together suggest the possibility of dangerous self-reproducing and evolving agents being loosed on the world by accident or malice. Combined, all these risks define the “twenty-first-century bottleneck” we must pass through, either learning to achieve a sustainable balance with our own expanding population and technology or suffering dire consequences. This is the test that will determine whether our time will ultimately be just a strange, thin layer in the strata, or the early stages of something lasting and wondrous.

  In the last century, we’ve increased our speed of transportation and communication by huge factors. Life expectancy has risen sharply around the world, and levels of poverty and malnutrition have declined. Many terrible infectious diseases have been put in their place. By several meaningful measures, we’re doing pretty well. We may have already passed “peak child,” that is, the number of children being born is no longer increasing, and we are approaching “peak human,” after which the global population will start to decline. By that time, we will surely have largely transitioned off fossil fuels, though we’ll have an atmosphere with substantially more carbon dioxide. I strongly suspect that by century’s end we will be in the process of removing CO2 from the air, drawing it down toward preindustrial levels. So, if we can just get through this century…

  As I described in the previous chapter, we are on the cusp of having the ability to prevent certain terrible natural disasters that until very recently we would have been helpless to avoid. At the same time, we are creating the potential for new, equally devastating disasters. All this locates us at a curious and frustrating step in our evolution. We can see how technology could be used to ensure, rather than threaten, survival, and we can conceive of the idea of a truly intelligent, sustainable society. Yet we don’t know if we can get there from here.

  Not just one but several transitional moments are near or upon us, any or all of which could be pivotal in life’s future. Our accelerating development of science and technology carries both great promise and great peril. There are many ways in which we could quickly doom ourselves. Yet these same abilities have improved life for vast numbers of people, and if we can learn a little self-control, will also offer us possibilities for survival never before open to any other species on Earth.

  The twentieth century may have been a build-up toward a cusp in human history that will come to a head in the twenty-first or twenty-second century, where our accelerating technological development may become either a threat to our survival or, alternatively, a tool for great longevity.

  Biologist Edward O. Wilson, in his 2002 book, The Future of Life, described it as follows:

  [T]he immediate future is usefully conceived as a bottleneck. Science and technology, combined with a lack of self-understanding and a Paleolithic obstinacy, brought us to where we are today. Now science and technology, combined with foresight and moral courage, must see us through the bottleneck and out.

  British astronomer Sir Martin Rees, president of the Royal Society, in his very sobering book Our Final Hour, surveyed a range of existential threats and gave humanity a 50 percent chance of surviving to the end of the twenty-first century. He is particularly concerned about the fact that biotechnology and interconnectedness are potentially making it easier for a malicious actor, or an error, to cause huge worldwide damage. As he put it,

  In our interconnected world, novel technology could empower just one fanatic, or some weirdo with a mindset of those who now design computer viruses, to trigger some kind of disaster. Indeed, catastrophe could arise simply from technical misadventure—error rather than terror.21

  Others rebut this pessimistic view by pointing out that defenses against biological and computer viruses are advancing as fast as the potential to do harm. So while the point remains valid that mischief makers or careless experimenters will have increasingly powerful tools at their disposal in the coming century, the doomsday predictions involve a lot of guesswork. They should concern us but not paralyze us with fear.

  As I discuss in chapter 3, our Anthropocene dilemma is that right now we have global influence without global self-control. What if technological intelligence is actually an evolutionary dead end? In small doses, it may be a liability and a threat. Like bird’s wings, you wonder how it ever evolves to the full thing, as a partially form
ed version seems like an awkward disadvantage.

  H. G. Wells, the Arthur C. Clarke of the paleoindustrial age, saw this all coming in 1920, when he wrote, “Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.” Wells also said, “There is no way back into the past. The choice is the Universe—or nothing.” Einstein, in 1946, noted that powerful new technology “has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.” Einstein was referring specifically to the threat of nuclear weapons, about which he no doubt felt some special personal responsibility. Both these brilliant men recognized humanity’s problematic and dangerous combination of great cleverness with limited vision, and foresaw the accelerating collision of these tendencies, which confronts us today. A few years later, in his short story “The Sentinel” (1950), Clarke, describing why the aliens had left a monolith buried on the moon, instead of placing it on Earth, where we would find it much sooner, explains that its builders

  were not concerned with races still struggling up from savagery. They would be interested in our civilization only if we proved our fitness to survive—by crossing space and so escaping from the Earth, our cradle. That is the challenge that all intelligent races must meet, sooner or later. It is a double challenge, for it depends in turn upon the conquest of atomic energy and the last choice between life and death.

  A decade after that, as the Cold War simmered, Arthur Koestler predicted that within the foreseeable future we would either destroy ourselves “or take off for the stars.” Subsequent events and discoveries have only made this choice more clear than H. G., Albert, or either Arthur could have foreseen, and they foresaw a lot.

  An evolutionary perspective reminds us that the human race has survived bottlenecks before. Just prior to the emergence of modern humans (which seems to have occurred around 190,000 years ago), Africa was in a warm climate phase, and many different human populations all around the continent were migrating and interbreeding with one another. Then there was a very cold, glacial phase, and humanity suffered an apocalypse. With the changed climate, populations of many game species disappeared, and we nearly did, too, because most of Africa could no longer support our hunter-gatherer ancestors. We almost went extinct.