Earth in Human Hands

by David Grinspoon

  The Earth belongs always to the living generation. They may manage it then and what proceeds from it as they please during their usufruct. They are Masters too of their own persons and consequently may govern them as they please.1

  When I first saw this, I wondered at that strange word. Usufruct? I assumed it was some fancy elaboration on the root revealed in the first syllable, so in my head it translated as “use.” It bothered me that Jefferson seemed to be saying that the world is there only for the use of the current generation. Future generations can worry about themselves. This seemed emblematic of the mind-set that got us into the Anthropocene dilemma.

  We are all products, and prisoners, of our times, no matter how enlightened we fancy ourselves, and in Jefferson’s time, the notion that Earth is infinitely durable could have seemed reasonable and not in conflict with even a very learned person’s knowledge and experience. Today we know that the solar system and the universe are not infinite but so vast that we cannot really imagine a day when they would be filled up. So, to us, they are functionally infinite. In Jefferson’s day, even though they knew the finite geometry of Earth, with the western frontier still so vast and open the world must have seemed functionally infinite. The notion of a finite planet that must be cared for, and stewarded for future generations, might have seemed strange. At least to a European man of means in North America, the West seemed unlimited, unconquered, unowned. Of course it was easier to think of the world as infinite and yours for the taking if you did not see that those lands were already occupied by human beings with their own civilization. Pondering this inscription enhanced so many of my contradictory feelings about the founding fathers, and Jefferson in particular.

  The second half of the quote carries an admirable message of personal freedom. He was also saying, it seems, that people are masters of their own persons and that the living generation must be free from the shackles of their ancestors. Yet who was enabling the leisure time for all his reading and writing, design and philanthropy? I remember as a student visiting Monticello and marveling at the ingenious inventions and architectural innovations. At one point our guide proudly pointed out that all the furniture in the larger rooms was cleverly designed to be moved around and set up differently for different occasions. Well, that is nifty, but it sounds like a lot of work. Who was moving all that furniture around so Jefferson and his family and visitors could dine and plan and read and invent? Oh, yeah, right. It was easier to live a life of leisure, creativity, and scholarship if someone else was doing the lifting, building the libraries, and cooking your meals. Embodying the morally complex origins of the United States, Jefferson, the silver-tongued champion of freedom and architect of our Constitution, was also a slave owner. That has always been hard to square with the Jefferson of “all men are created equal.”

  When we think about the moral and intellectual failings of wise and enlightened people in the past, it is always worthwhile to try to imagine how our current culture and ideas will look in the future. Which of our mores will seem ghastly or shortsighted? I’ve played this game with many people, and answers that arise include eating meat, eating any food that comes from living beings, keeping animals as pets, the outrageous economic inequities that we accept, the fact that we go about our daily business while some people are starving, militarism, nationalism, the fact that we still accept to the extent we do sexism, homophobia, racism, and ableism. Lately I’ve been wondering if someday soon the insistence that everyone have a job in order to have a decent livelihood will seem a strange and primitive relic of the time before machines did most of the grunt work. In the context of the subject of this book, I’ve been wondering about our neglect of global thinking and the fact that we so often do not act out of concern for our descendants. In some more enlightened future, these habits may seem as unpalatable and unacceptable as cannibalism or child abuse does to us today. If the human race is to thrive, if our civilization or anything that we might want to have evolve out of it is to have a bright future, then it is these patterns of thought (the shortsighted, the tribal, the less than global) that we will need to move beyond.

  One of the great benefits of working at the Library of Congress was contact with scholars from other fields who were thinking about some of the same topics but were approaching them from very different perspectives. Among the first people I encountered was a young French environmental historian named Jean-François Mouhot, who was collaborating with John McNeill, the historian at Georgetown who has been a leading scholar of the Anthropocene. I was lucky that Jean-François was studying there when I arrived. He immediately started turning me on to books and suggesting sources. We ended up collaborating on a program called the Evolving Moral Landscape: Perspectives on the Environment, Literary, Historical and Interplanetary.2 At this event, Jean-François made a very provocative comparison between the institution of slavery in antebellum America and our use of fossil fuels today. Many people at the time, he said, acknowledged that slavery was evil but kept slaves anyway because it was how they powered their society and they could not conceive of life without them. So they lived with a moral deficit they could never pay. Clearly our society has still not settled that debt. Similarly, today, Jean-François has written,

  Our abundant energy gives us an extraordinary power, and this is why it is so hard to do away with all the luxuries provided by our modern machines—even when we are convinced that using them is morally wrong.3

  We power our society in a way that we know is doing harm, but still we persist. So we are running up a moral debt. Yet can we really compare driving cars and heating our homes with coal to the great evil of holding human slaves? I found his comparison offensive, but in a good way, the way that shocks you into realization. The slave trade resulted in millions of deaths, untold more ruined lives, unimaginable suffering, and an enduring legacy of poverty, disenfranchisement, and trauma. Jean-François argued that if we include the extinction of many species, and the mass displacement, hunger, and warfare that could result from the scarier climate change scenarios, then these crimes are not so obviously beyond comparison. He later elaborated on this in several published papers, including an essay called, “Thomas Jefferson and I,”4 where he specifically compared his own fossil fuel use with Jefferson’s holding of slaves. I am still not altogether comfortable with this comparison. I think this discomfort is exactly his point.

  Having spent two years looking up at this mural and ruing Jefferson’s limited outlook on the future, I recently learned that I had misconstrued his words. I discovered that Jennifer Harbster, one of the wonderfully resourceful reference librarians at the Library of Congress,5 has studied the original letter from which this quote came, and from her I learned that I had gotten the meaning wrong. Jefferson was not saying that the living generation has the right to do anything with the world and leave it in any kind of shape. The word usufruct does not mean what I had assumed. It’s actually a concept that comes from Roman law and means the right to use something temporarily, for a limited period of time, only if it is left unharmed for future users. So if you rent a car, you can drive it anywhere, get it dirty, and put it through its paces, as long as you don’t dent or scrape it. That is your usufruct, and to violate it will cost you. Jennifer, having studied the full text and the context for this quote, has convinced me that Jefferson was actually saying that the living generation had the right to Earth only insofar as they left it in decent shape for their descendants. Well, what do you know?

  Searching for Terrestrial Intelligence

  We’ve shed so many illusions, but some stubbornly remain. We are still getting over the illusion that our world is infinite. We teach in school that it is not, but have not yet integrated this fact into our lifestyles and global economy. Another illusion is that without our help or hindrance, “Nature” will take care of us and our planet will always be a benign place for human life. It’s easy to understand how we could have gotten that impression because we’ve been so lucky. We were born in a gard
en, and we’ve become dependent upon a very steady climate that is not a long-standing feature of Earth. It’s shocking to realize that we are disturbing the pristine balance of nature in a way that threatens our future wellbeing, along with that of so many other species. It’s perhaps even more shocking to learn that this balance is an illusion. Now we’re not just altering the planet; we’re populating it to the point where “normal” climate changes of the kind that, over the ages, have occurred routinely would be calamitous. Fortunately, now we can begin to make our own luck.

  We can’t return to that garden of ignorance and bliss, letting the planet take care of itself and of us. So we’ll have to take a more active role in our planet’s path, but not in the random, unconscious way we have been doing. We’ve tasted the fruit of science and technology, and now our best chance for survival lies in cultivating planetary knowledge and a planetary identity, in awakening to and embracing our part in this world.

  So let’s become planetary gardeners. Once we get over the strangeness and fear of this responsibility, we can also enjoy the privileges and freedoms that come with this role. This will include freedom from planetary changes that are “all natural” but massively lethal. It’s tempting to romanticize the past, but cowering in a frozen cave while deadly predators growled and licked their chops just outside was probably not all that much fun. We’ve survived a couple of ice ages, barely, and in the process we became modern humans. With our current population we’d have a harder time making it through another glacial period. Fortunately, we won’t have to. In avoiding this fate, we will continue the journey we began in those Pleistocene caves.

  What really distinguishes humans, or the human age, from the rest of life, the rest of Earth history, or the evolution of matter over cosmic history? When we talk of seeking intelligence, consciousness, or self-awareness elsewhere in the galaxy, we refer to something that we possess, seemingly headquartered inside our skulls, and that a head of lettuce does not. We wonder how much dolphins and monkeys have, and marvel at how much cats and dogs seem to have at times (and, at other times, how little). Yet what is it? It is not something that resides fully in an individual. We are cultural animals, and we cannot separate the evolution of individual human intelligence from our novel capacities to pass on information in structures that outlive individuals, in artifacts, songs, rituals, and stories.

  The question of what, if anything, makes human beings exceptional is historically and scientifically vexed. Attempts to distinguish human behavior from that of the rest of the animal kingdom have focused, always contentiously, on such achievements as tool use or language. All these efforts have failed or been fraught with ambiguity. In the mid-twentieth century we had “man, the tool maker,” but in Tanzania in October 1960 primatologist Jane Goodall, observing a chimpanzee she had named David Greybeard, saw him, and later other chimps, stripping the leafs off twigs to fashion an ideal tool for fishing termites out of a mound. When she informed her mentor, Louis Leakey, of this by telegram, he replied, “Now we must redefine tool, redefine Man, or accept chimpanzees as humans.”

  Although not everyone has gotten the memo, we’ve discarded “man” so as not to implicitly exclude brilliant scientists like Jane Goodall. So we needed to redefine “human.” Since Goodall’s breakthrough observation, many other species have been observed making tools, including elephants, dolphins, octopuses, and several kinds of birds. None of these manipulate objects as intensively, constantly, and innovatively as humans, but these are differences in degree not in kind.

  Other candidate attributes for human uniqueness include language and the ability to recognize that other individuals have their own thoughts and feelings, also known as “theory of mind.” Elements of language can be seen in birdsong and the infrasonic rumbles of elephants. Yet these generally lack the syntactical complexity and flexibility of human language, which gives us the open-ended ability to express an infinite number of new ideas. With the still-mysterious songs of the cetaceans being a possible exception, no other species writes poetry, constructs complex narratives, and produces an endless supply of gossip. Observations of dolphins and other animals interacting with mirrors suggest that humans are not alone in possessing theory of mind. Perhaps uniquely we have “metacognition,” the ability to think about thinking, to reflect upon and make judgments on our own thoughts, to second-guess ourselves, questioning our memories and our decisions.

  One human capacity that is very powerful, and apparently unique, is abstract thought: our ability to imagine alternative scenarios, to invent stories and characters, to think beyond the here and now. We can picture distant places and hold different points of view in our minds, project ourselves into a wider frame, learn from the past and imagine the future. This equipped our species, as none before, to survive new challenges.

  Abstract thinking allows us to consider hypothetical and unlikely future possibilities. If we can model scenarios in our heads, we don’t have to learn by trial and error. We can play out some disasters only in our minds, learning from (and avoiding) potential bad outcomes without needing to let them unfold in the external world. It is actually a form of trial-and-error learning, but we can make some of our biggest errors in our imaginations only, so that we don’t have to live through them in real life.

  Our powers of symbolic representation and abstract imagination facilitate two uniquely human ways of engaging with the world, one ancient and one brand new: art and science. The making of art may be, at present, the best candidate for a unique activity common to all humans. Every culture has made art, and archeologists use this to distinguish sites of early humans from those of other primates. Today we are unique in doing science, producing ever-evolving technology and, through these activities, changing the world.

  Though each term is fraught and debatable, no other species on Earth has the combination of intelligence, consciousness, foresight, culture, tool use, and artistry possessed by Homo sapiens sapiens. I don’t mean to exalt humanity or present us as some end state of evolution, as the rightful rulers of Earth. I do not regard us as the apotheosis of intelligent life on Earth. As I’ve mentioned, I’m not even sure that humanity qualifies as an intelligent species, and I’ve tried to describe how we’re in a difficult situation for which we are ill-prepared. Yet denying “human exceptionalism” can actually be a way of shirking our responsibility. So the Anthropocene does put us on a pedestal, but also on the witness stand, and on trial.

  These “human qualities” have uniquely enabled us to create a technological civilization, which is the behavior that concerns us here. The Anthropocene transformation of Earth marks us as distinct from other animals in being able to induce, for better or worse, this particular kind of change to our planet. We are equipped to build a global civilization, but can we keep it? Can we maintain it for one hundred thousand years or longer?

  We humans are hard-wired for collective action. It goes back to our hunter-gatherer days. A human being alone is not an impressive hunter, but a band of humans is well equipped to survive. We were good not because we were the fastest runners on the savannah, or had the sharpest teeth in the jungle, but because we developed language and strategies and tools. When we invented agriculture and settled into towns, we developed larger social structures and new customs that made use of these innate proclivities to communicate and cooperate, and invented new tools to solve the survival challenges we created along with our new environs. For example, urbanization created horrible public health problems, many of which were solved by the invention and wide adoption of sewage systems. Now we are in need of new tools to handle our global effluence.

  Perhaps our core problem today is that, though we are well evolved to cooperate in groups the size of hunter-gatherer clans (dozens or hundreds of people), we struggle to organize ourselves well at larger scales. However, we have evolved, and continue to develop, communication and organizational tools that have repeatedly changed our large-scale social dynamics: written languages; cultural, economic,
and political institutions; books, artworks, and recordings; broadcast media, telephones, and the Internet.

  At one talk, where I described the list of human qualities (awareness, collective memory, and foresight), my friend the Rev. Dr. Jeff Moore, agent provocateur and planetary scientist extraordinaire, noted that, ironically, this was also a pretty good list of those qualities we might be said to lack in sufficient quantity to navigate our current global situation. He’s got a good point. Certainly, in lacking these qualities, previous species of planetary home wreckers cannot be said to have been responsible for their actions. They were innocent in a way we can never be.

  We, however, have tasted the fruit of science, bulldozed the walls of the Garden, driven the serpent to near extinction, and genetically reengineered the tree of knowledge. We have a lot to answer for, and unlike the cyanobacteria, we can answer. Unlike them, we have consciousness, intentionality, and choice, and therefore responsibility.

  But do we really? Do we, humanity, have consciousness and intentionality? Does humanity or human civilization as a whole know what it wants, what it is doing, even know that it exists or possesses free will? It’s a different question from asking whether human individuals possess these properties, just as it is different to ask if your individual cells have them.