Planetary Thinking

Archive for the ‘History’ Category

Save the Holocene! Why “the Anthropocene” might not be a useful construct

In Futures, History, Planetary Thinking, Science on March 15, 2012 at 1:59 pm

(This is a piece I wrote years ago, but that seems pertinent to some recent discussions.)

The Anthropocene is a proposed new geological era, meant to signal the idea that we’ve changed the Earth’s biosphere and climate so dramatically that we’ve left the Holocene, the interglacial period that began 12,000 years ago.

It’s a catchy (if grim) concept, but one whose utility I find myself seriously questioning. I don’t doubt the magnitude of human impact on the planet. Quite the opposite. I think we consistently underestimate the degree of disruption we’ve already caused by altering the raw biological function of nearly every corner of the Earth and changing the chemistry of its atmosphere, oceans and soils. Very little “wild” anything remains, and all that does remain exists at our sufferance and will endure only with our conscious commitment. None of this, it seems to me, is really a matter of much debate. It’s just how the world is now.

I get the utility of using the idea of the Anthropocene to provoke recognition of the mind-bending reality that we are transforming the very planet on which we walk.

Where the Anthropocene as a concept breaks down, it seems to me, is in the implications it raises, particularly among certain crowds who seem to be saying with increasing frequency, “well, dude, we’re in the Anthropocene, anything goes.”

The first troubling implication is that we can sketch the blueprint of an era better than the Holocene — the era that produced the planet on which agriculture, civilization and cities arose — and that we can geoengineer the climate at will to fit that (or any other) blueprint. Because we’re really not up for the job.

The reality is that modern humanity and human civilization are the fruit of a very tightly banded set of interconnected climate and biological conditions. We need a certain kind of world in order to thrive, and that world is essentially the mild, moderately wet, biologically abundant world of the Holocene. We’ve never left that world, and in fact we are still intimately dependent on its plenty for our very survival. We don’t know of another set of conditions that would allow us to thrive on this planet. There is no human-designed set of planetary conditions that we know of that will suit us better. We don’t want the Holocene to end: the whole point is that we want to go back to lower greenhouse gas concentrations in order to continue the Holocene climate indefinitely, as long as we possibly can.

The second implication is that we know what we’re doing well enough to get the results we want from planetary engineering, even if we don’t have a better climate blueprint. We don’t. The magnitude of our ignorance about even the most fundamental aspects of the planetary systems on which we depend staggers the informed mind. We’re just coming to understand the climate system. We’ve discovered only a tiny fraction of the planet’s species. We are almost still in the age of alchemy when it comes to truly understanding all the interplay of influences that make up an ecosystem. We are simply not up to the task of running the biosphere as a whole like a machine, because we don’t have a copy of the operating manual, and we’re probably still illiterate anyways. This may be true for generations to come.

That doesn’t mean that we aren’t being forced to make all sorts of choices about how the planet functions. We are, effectively, choosing to screw the climate system up in some unpleasant predictable ways and some potentially disastrous unpredictable ways. Wild nature now pretty much only exists where we protect it and garden it (and this will be more true as climate change shifts habitats). A great many species will only survive if we make saving them a priority (for some, the best we can do may be to find them, freeze them and archive them, but we’re not even doing that). What the planet looks like is now largely a matter of our choices.

But that doesn’t mean that we can choose to do anything. There’s a crazy mistaken logic out there that assumes that because we’re having to make real choices about the planet’s climate and biosphere, we can choose anything we want, redesign the planet in any way we see fit; even that no environmental problems are even problems, because between terraforming and bioengineering, we can figure out how make new planets.

I’ve heard the sneering comments about how environmentalists think natural systems are better because they’re natural. But the reality is this: natural systems are better not because they’re natural but because they’re better at being ecosystems than anything we could possibly come up with in the foreseeable future — they’re more complex than we’re able to understand, with creatures and relationships between creatures that have evolved into marvelous particularities of place. These elegant solutions are profoundly more intricate, complex and resilient than anything we know how to make.

Preserving those ecosystems, and the species in them, is the best thing we know how to do. Humble and attentive restoration — through a multitude of interconnected careful efforts crafted to a particular place and alive to the adaptations climate change may demand; each small, but in aggregate massive and planetary — is the next best. Everything else is a distant, almost wishful, possibility. Our goal, in essence, is to preserve and restore the Holocene biosphere, wherever we can (and in some cases, that might mean looking back to restoring systems and relationships damaged long before the industrial era even began, through re-wilding and resurrection ecology).

So, do we need to take responsibility for the planet? Yes. Do we need to take the climate in hand, and aim to release zero or less-than-zero greenhouse gasses? Yes. Do we need to garden nature, greatly reducing our demands on ecosystem services and preserving wild biological hotspots but also practicing adaptive restoration and so on? Yes.

But our goal in all of this ought to be clear: preserve the planet on which humanity evolved, and, even more importantly, the planetary era whose attributes underpin everything we now are. Our goal should be, simply, to save the Holocene.

Our Future Is A Thing of the Past

In Conferences and Talks, History, Planetary Thinking on November 18, 2011 at 12:49 pm

Here’s the video from my TEDxOxbridge talk this last summer, about How Our Future is a Thing of the Past…

I think it’s critical that we understand that The Future, as we’re used to thinking of it and discussing it, is itself a cultural artifact, not an empirical description of what may happen tomorrow. It says more about where we’ve been than where we’re going. And its uses are not always benign or helpful.

Legacy Day

In History on October 11, 2011 at 10:27 am

This is a little rant. Fair warning.

Columbus Day yesterday got me thinking again about the parallels between the Conquest of the Americas and planetary crisis we now face. There are many people who history has given a bad rap. Christopher Columbus is not one of them. He was a terrible person, and he set in motion a pattern of horrific destruction.

How utterly evil and pointless so much of the destruction we’re unleashing will reveal itself to be not only for future generations but for ourselves in the near future, just as the genocide unleashed by the Conquistadors was seen as a huge evil and a tragic lost opportunity even by their contemporaries:

“What a compensation it would have been, and what an improvement to this whole Earthly globe, if the first examples of our behavior offered to these peoples had caused them to admire and imitate our virtues, and had established between them and us a brotherly discourse and understanding! … So many towns razed to the ground, so many nations extirpated, so many millions put to the sword, and the richest and fairest part of the world turned upside down for the benefit of the pearl and pepper trades. Mere commercial victories! Never did ambition, never did public hatreds drive men, one against the other to such terrible acts of hostility, and to such miserable disasters.” — Bartolomé de las Casas

Or how obviously without an exit strategy our current fossil fuel binge is here in North America; how totally corrupt and reckless and stupid it is, just as all the other resource rushes on our continent have been:

“The quest for personal possession was to be, from the start a series of raids, irresponsible and criminal, a spree, in which and end to it — the slaves, the timber, the pearls, the fur, the precious ores, and later the arable land, coal, oil and iron — was never visible, in which ‘an end to it’ had no meaning.” –Barry Lopez

(both of these are from my journals, so there may be transcription errors…)

As I wrote elsewhere:

“Though we don’t think about it very much, the wealth of the Americas is a major reason why Europeans came to dominate the world. The conquest, colonization and settlement of North America offered what some environmental historians have termed a vast “ghost acreage.” Europeans who had already cut their best trees, trapped out their fur-bearing animals, mined most of their precious metals, and worked many of their soils to exhaustion suddenly found themselves in the 1600′s possessed of all these resources in an abundance beyond their wildest imaginings. They didn’t hesitate. They took everything they could lay their hands on, and there was a lot to grab.

Before Columbus made landfall in the Caribbean, it’s been estimated, there were somewhere between 18 and 40 million native people living in North America, a great majority of whom died of introduced diseases in the century or two after the Spanish started their conquest. When the 16th Century Spanish nobleman Alvaz Nunez Cabeza de Vaca was shipwrecked on the Florida coast and made his way by raft and foot to Mexico, he slept most nights in native villages, and was rarely off a traveled path. America, as some historians have said, was not so much a virgin land as a widowed one.

The natural world Cabeza de Vaca moved through was no less full. North America was home to 10,000 grizzly bear; countless millions of deer, antelope, elk, bighorn sheep, moose; hundreds of salmon runs, some teeming with millions of fish; three billion passenger pigeons; five billion prairie dogs (the near-eradication of whom changed America’s scrublands forever – without those billions of little paws churning the dirt, the surface hardened, the water wicked away in flash floods and desertification set in). Even as late as 1830, 40 million bison roamed the plains. It’s said the ancient deciduous forests of the East were so thick a squirrel could run from the Atlantic to the Mississippi without ever touching the ground, while the evergreen forests of the western coasts ran for hundreds of miles of trees so large we visit their last relatives and gawk. The Gulf’s coral reefs, salt water swamps and estuaries made it perhaps the richest marine ecosystem in the world, through which millions of sea turtles moved in ancient migrations. The list could go on and on.

And that’s only what we know we’ve lost. There are whole swathes of the country for which we have only a handful of sketches and journal entries to hint to us what peoples and ecologies lived there before we brushed them aside. When I think of the scale of that exploitation, I tend go a little numb. As Wendell Berry wrote ‘The thought of what once was here and is gone forever will not leave me as long as I live. It is as though I walk knee-deep in its absence.’

That natural wealth, that one-time gift of a whole New World’s bounty, was the fuel that built the great European empires that followed. The world speaks English and French and Spanish precisely because America had so many beaver pelts, ancient trees and gold mines. And there isn’t another New World of raw materials out there waiting to be found.”

So I have no patience for those who want to see Columbus honored on the day that still has his name.

Instead, I’d love to see the day be reframed as Legacy Day, when we stop and think about what our descendents will think of us: what they’ll damn us for destroying, what they’ll love us for handing down in health and beauty.