Earth in Human Hands

by David Grinspoon

  Then there is dutiful, alarm-sounding pessimism. Many concerned, altruistic, compassionate people seem to feel that voicing visions of apocalypse is their civic duty, to ring alarm bells and motivate action. If you are concerned that not enough people are paying attention, you may feel morally obligated to spread a bleak message. Wanting to be a force for change leads some to repeat the gloomiest scenarios. Here I think people are conflating the need to be responsible with the need to be pessimistic. They want to shock their fellow humans awake, but they may be numbing them asleep instead.

  Persistent messages of doom can also spread nihilism and defeatism. In March 2014, a young journalist named Clive Martin wrote a piece in Vice entitled “What the Fuck Are We Meant to Do with Our Lives When We’re Told the World Is Ending?”17 It described how NASA had concluded that our society is heading for inevitable collapse due to climate change, and bemoaned the fact that this left young people no room for hope or cause for action. In reality, NASA has made no such conclusion. This writer made the common mistake of assuming that an author listing a NASA affiliation equates to “NASA saying” whatever the paper concludes. The study in question is full of guesswork, assumptions, and simplifications. It is more of an interesting cartoon than an accurate simulation of the world. Still, the message “Scientists say there is nothing we can do” is spread over the interwebs by concerned activists. And we have this poor young writer stating,

  The problem is that ignorance is bliss when the truth means knowing that you and all of your friends are staring down the barrel of fate. If nothing can be done, then it seems better to just live our lives as we always have: networking, hobnobbing, chitchatting until the sun goes black and the birds start to fall out of the sky.

  I see similar statements every day on social media. If this human bashing and doom prophesizing is tactical, I think it’s backfiring. It’s more likely to become a self-fulfilling prophecy than to rouse people to action.

  Currently I feel that spewing misanthropy and random antihuman sentiment is just as dangerous as emitting CO2 into the air. It is the opposite of activism. I know that people spreading these messages mean well. They want to shock others into realizing the effect we’re having on the planet, but there is a real danger of unintended consequences, of encouraging people to give up. Spreading messages of doom is a form of inactivism.

  There is a widespread propagation of apocalyptic images in our culture right now. At some dosage these are valuable as a warning, but we should be wary of this kind of future becoming an expectation. If you conclude that we are invariably, inevitably incapable of finding a long-term balance with our planet, then you are giving up on Earth, and selling out the rest of the biosphere. Far from spreading a sense of responsibility, it spreads “disaster fatigue” and resignation. Pessimism, if it becomes a habit, can reinforce a narrative of unstoppable decline. If there is nothing we can do, that releases us from our obligations.

  There’s no future in despising humanity. Self-flagellation may feel good to some, but how does it help move us toward solutions? Surely we can find a way to love Earth without hating ourselves.

  Earth is a stunningly lovely planet for so many reasons. Among these is the wondrous presence of curious, artful, inventive humanity. Whenever I see a nighttime picture of Earth from space, with its glowing lights, I am stirred by its beauty. It’s a different sort of awe than we get from the opposite view, looking up at the numberless stars—the mysterium tremendum we feel facing all that infinity. Looking down, we know these lights scattered around the world reveal a pattern of human lives. Not only that, but these pictures were taken by curiosity machines sent into orbit. What kind of a planet does that? We are leaping beyond this sphere and looking back down at ourselves. To me that is spectacular, encouraging, and inspiring.

  Often, when I post such a picture online, someone will comment about how ugly it is, because of light pollution, showing what a hopeless cancerous influence we humans are. I don’t see it that way. I, too, am concerned about light pollution, and I support efforts to control and mitigate unnecessary scattered light. Yet I am overwhelmed by the grandeur of our world, and that includes the interconnected glowing networks we have woven around it. Ours has long been a beautiful and rare planet, but it is especially so now because of the human presence. Earth—the planet that wonders and sings.

  There’s more to my argument than just “put on a happy face.” This negativity is suspect, tactically (it doesn’t work) and philosophically (it reinforces Earth alienation rather than identity). It is also logically suspect, feeding a false narrative about climate change and our responsibilities. Many people see the fight to halt global warming as an impending either/or situation. We’re going to stop it by a certain date or we’re not—and it looks like we’re not. Therefore, humans and the Anthropocene must be bad.

  This reasoning is simplistic and damaging. For well over a decade we’ve been seeing websites and articles and what-not promoting the idea of an approaching deadline by which time we will either have definitively acted to solve the problem or it will be too late. If we don’t act in five years, we’re dead. Every time one of these deadlines passes, this narrative becomes less convincing.

  Some have likened climate change to an asteroid that is clearly heading for Earth. It’s a good analogy in some ways. Scientists are certain that it is heading our way, and we can probably avert it if we apply the right resources toward a solution. Even so, people are ignoring the warning and going about their business while the preventable nightmare hurtles toward us. In some important respects, though, this is a bad analogy. Unlike the path of an asteroid, whose motion is determined by the relatively simple laws of gravitational mechanics, climate is horribly complex. We can’t predict the exact trajectory with perfect reliability. With an asteroid, we can tell you exactly when it’s going to hit, down to the day and even the minute, and roughly what will happen when it does. Once we’ve averted it, we can relax for a few more centuries until another one is spotted coming our way.

  The asteroid will either hit us or it won’t. With climate, it’s not an either/or proposition. It’s a constantly shifting trajectory that will require sustained attention and concern over years, decades, and centuries. Clearly we are not going to shut down all the coal plants in the next ten years. I believe, just as clearly, that they will all be shut down by this century’s end. Between those two boundary conditions lies a huge range of possibilities. Yes, we are putting ourselves at risk, and yes, we should do whatever we can to move ourselves as quickly as we can toward new energy systems. However, there is no critical moment at which the disaster hits or will be averted. There are, rather, accelerating and decelerating trends, and an infinite number of possible paths. It’s a slowly unfolding emergency that requires not a quick pulse of activity, not a fight-or-flight response, but long-term engagement, enduring changes in the way we live, through a long series of thoughtful readjustments. We don’t need to panic or despair. We are in this for the long haul.

  Can we at least envision a behavioral mode, a way of working with the rest of the world, a version of ourselves, that we could celebrate? If not, then what path is there but nihilism, fatalism, and resignation? If we really believed we could not change course, then concern about our future would be as useless as agonizing over an approaching comet in a world where we had no space program, no way to stop it. Yet we are the species with a unique ability to envision futures and sometimes work together to manifest them. As long as we can imagine a better path, of course we are obligated to seek it. This is why unwarranted pessimism about our future is actually irresponsible. The naysayers, prophesiers of certain doom, are giving us a way to avoid responsibility. Don’t listen to them. If we don’t know enough to know that we’re doomed, then the drumbeat of gloom is not helping, it’s hurting. Let’s replace it.

  Remixing Our Metaphors

  We’re not a cancer or a disease. We are organisms doing what all organisms do, surviving and reproducing as
best we can. We are, however, a kind of organism that has never existed before, and we’ve gotten ourselves in a situation. Fortunately, we may be equipped to get ourselves out of it. A plague does not think. A cancer does not decide to change course. A weed does not weed itself. We could. So these metaphors may describe our past, but they needn’t proscribe our future. When we look for solutions, all these negative metaphors do not serve us well. Why not convey some possibility of adaptation, survival, of hope and constructive engagement?

  We’re aware of the damage and loss associated with the proto-Anthropocene, but we also need to focus on gain and opportunity. We’re at least partway through the transition from being the species that bumbles through its world-changing ways with no awareness whatsoever. We’ve figured out how to deal with the worst of acid rain and ozone destruction. (That was a close one.) We’re starting to come to grips with the biodiversity and climate crises. Whatever happens to climate now, it would have been a lot worse without these recent waves of awareness and concern reverberating around the globe. If we get our act together, we still have the potential to consciously save many more species than we have inadvertently destroyed.

  If you look from an evolutionary perspective, you might see us a little more sympathetically. You might realize that we’re not inherently evil, destructive, or malevolent, but that we’re unprepared and ill-equipped for the task we have stumbled into. We are uniquely outfitted with the power of imagination, and it seems clear that any robust solution to our Anthropocene dilemma will involve reimagining ourselves and our interactions with the world. Throughout this book, I’ve attempted to seed some alternative allegories. I’ve described us as being like sleepwalkers waking up in the middle of performing some task. There is a sense of discovering we’re in a difficult situation that some version of us has gotten ourselves into, but that we have not been fully conscious of until forced to realize what we’re doing. We now find ourselves in the unenviable role of sort of running a planet—a job we didn’t ask for, don’t deserve, and don’t know how to do. Still, we have to find a way forward. We’re like an unfortunate soul who has just woken up at the wheel of a big rig, a racing, out-of-control truck. We have absolutely no idea how to drive it, but everything we love is on board. We’re heading furiously down a twisty road. We’re starting to figure out how some of the controls work, but nobody’s ever given us a driving lesson. We’d better learn in a hurry.

  Like an orphaned baby left on a doorstep, with no training in life’s hardest tasks, we need to figure out how to survive on our own. Assuming there is no SETI success around the corner, there is no adult coming to clean up, feed us, or set us straight. In some ways, we’re like an awkward, naïve, and reckless adolescent experiencing a difficult and painful transition. We are self-conscious, aware of our new powers, but not fully in control of ourselves. We’re learning that our actions have consequences, but unwilling to take responsibility, hooked on immediate gratification and not willing to clean up our room. We still have little awareness of limits, and we love to watch things blow up. We’re confused by these new abilities, physical changes, and strange desires. We’re not criminals committing premeditated planetary desecration. We’re more like juvenile delinquents in need of rehabilitation.

  There are parallels between the transition from the infinite resiliency of youth to the realized limitations of maturity and the journey of a young technological species beginning to feel the limits of planetary capacity.18 As philosopher Frederick Ferré wrote in 1993,

  The Earth is no longer, and never will be again, naively bountiful, after three hundred years of avid exploitation by the ever-expansive appetites of the modern world. Much of the easily mined copper and other essentials for high technology, most of the easily extracted oil and other energy sources required for recognizably modern living—these have been used up already in the centuries-long process of building the world we now inhabit.19

  We’ll need to adjust our habits and expectations because we will never again be those young creatures wild and free on a seemingly infinite world.

  Several other biological or medical metaphors suggest themselves. Jim Lovelock has called the study of Gaia “geophysiology.” It’s an apt concept to capture his sense that the planet has its own innate homeostasis, an ability to care for and heal itself when not pushed too far. In this case, though, the physiologists live inside, or comprise part of, their only patient. Geophysicians, heal thyselves. This brings to mind the image of poor or neglectful self-care. If Earth is our body, are we damaging ourselves in expanding so fast and thoughtlessly? If so, is this a kind of self-mutilation? Do you want to punish or help this troubled creature?

  There is also the image of the noösphere, and especially the Internet, as a developing nervous system of Earth, with us as the thinking, connecting nodes and all our satellite sensors as the ears and eyes of the world. Perhaps this baby brain is starting to realize that it needs to care for its body.

  We can update one of the most oft-used negative biological metaphors, giving it a new spin that takes advantage of some cool new science. As I’ve noted, the human presence on Earth is often likened to a virulent disease threatening to destroy its host. Yet our understanding of the nature of disease has been rapidly evolving with growing awareness of the human microbiome. This term was coined by Nobel Prize–winning biologist Joshua Lederberg20 to describe the vast microbial community living within our bodies.

  I heard a narrator on NPR describe it by saying, “Ninety percent of you is not human!”* I would say, rather, that 100 percent of you is human, but a human is not what we once thought it was.† Or, in a sense, an individual human being is an illusion. The nature and boundary of the self has changed. This requires an update to the germ theory of disease. Germ theory, the eighteenth-century discovery that diseases are caused by microscopic organisms invading our bodies, was a powerful advance in our understanding of the world, leading to huge breakthroughs in public health. However, the resulting picture of the human body, as a citadel of health occasionally invaded by dangerous, dirty microbes, wasn’t quite right. Most of these invaders (or should we say visitors? residents?) are not bad for us. Sometimes they just get out of balance, or unwelcome guests show up and start to damage things. In fact, many parts of this community within us play vital roles necessary to keeping us healthy and alive. These beneficial organisms, referred to as the “commensal microbiome,” are essential parts of our bodies that are actually comprised of other creatures. They are parts of us that are not coded in the DNA of our parents but acquired from our environments (including the bodies of our parents and those of other people). In the shock of realizing that our imbalanced growth threatens the health of the global systems we depend on, we have described ourselves as pathogens, invaders in the body of Earth. But now, in analogy to our new understanding of human health, rather than assuming we’re the disease, can we seek to play the balanced and mutually beneficial role that would make us part of the commensal microbiome of Gaia?

  Just as Earth is in some important respects an organism, it is now in some respects a garden or a park. We don’t want to pave paradise and put up a parking lot, so we need a different image. Humans aren’t going away, but we can concentrate our activities into certain areas and have the wisdom to retain wide zones with more of their own wild character. The mere fact that these are our decisions to make does put us in some kind of a managerial role over the whole ball of dirt. Yet, if it’s a garden, it’s a strange one, without walls. It’s finite yet unbounded, like the geometry of Einsteinian space-time itself—and we, the gardeners, must live within the garden and also cultivate and tend to ourselves lest we become weeds. We have been weeds and must learn to be gardeners.

  Our large parks and nature reserves can feel pretty wild when you hike into the back country, but they are all heavily managed as well. They must be, to uphold anyone’s idea of responsible conservation.21 Our planetary park is one with no exit, and we ourselves are one of the species
that must be managed within it. I don’t mean to suggest that the way we have been spreading our constructions and our crap around Earth so far resembles good park management. Right now, we are as much the vandals as the wardens chasing after them. We have much to learn. Good management starts with deep knowledge of the way your landscape tends itself, of the innate patterns and flows of the life and landscapes within your park.

  The idea of a domesticated planet makes us squirm,22 but what is the alternative to some level of conscious global management? We are not going to disappear. Even if we do eventually reduce our numbers and our impact substantially, these would be choices. We would still be managing, cultivating. Our global garden or planetary park must include large wild places, but, inescapably, they have boundaries and thus they are managed to some degree.

  Planetary park is a place we can manage but never fully control. Like any vast preserve, it has wild elements that will remain beyond our influence. We’ll never be fully in control of Earth, nor should we seek to be. The convection of the mantle, the changing output of the Sun, the orbital forcing of the other planets—these are Earth forces we can learn to comprehend, movements and rhythms with which we can learn to dance. Yet we will never be leading.

  This Generation Ship

  There is something potentially mythical about this evolutionary moment we’re in, something of the flawed hero’s journey in this time of waking to realize that our world is not what we imagined. It’s that story where you’ve been training for something all your life, and you thought you knew who you were and what you were preparing for, but then your true, larger task is revealed to you. We have an essential role to play, one that will test us to the limit and determine the fate of our people and our world.