Earth in Human Hands

by David Grinspoon

  6. Sleep, Bird, and Pope, “Paleontology of Earth’s Mantle,” p. 293.

  7. If these little whiffs of methane recently reported by the Curiosity rover turn out to be real—this is still in question—and actually are revealed to be the signs of little pockets of Martian life on an otherwise generally dead world, I would consider that proof that my Living Worlds hypothesis is wrong, and that life can take on very non-Gaia-like forms elsewhere. I don’t consider this likely, but nothing would make me happier.

  8. Or, if you want to get nerdy, think of it in terms of nonequilibrium thermodynamics, as a self-perpetuating dissipative structure that maintains its form in a flow of material and energy.

  Chapter 3: Monkey with the World

  1. B. Werner, “Is Earth Fucked? Dynamical Futility of Global Environmental Management and Possibilities for Sustainability via Direct Action Activism,” abstract for invited talk at the fall 2012 meeting of the American Geophysical Union.

  2. By the way, there are some interesting parallels here to the astrobiological quest to identify biological processes on other planets. Recall in chapter 2 how I describe the Viking biological results that initially seemed to show evidence for life on Mars. These were ruled out largely because the gas release over time did not fit a biological pattern. It’s the same kind of analysis that led Rothman and his colleagues to suspect biology over geology in the Great Dying. In many ways, the paleo-Earth is another planet, and our methods of investigation, including the search for biosignatures, reflect that.

  3. Around that time, a kind of bacteria called Methanosarcina evolved the ability to much more efficiently produce methane from organic matter. This innovation seems to have come about not through traditional Darwinian evolution of mutation among competing organisms, but rather the kind of more fluid sharing, mixing, matching, and swapping of genes among organisms that Lynn Margulis and others championed for a long time and that has more recently been recognized as an important factor throughout evolutionary history. In a rather slick genetic move, rather than evolve this ability through their own mutations, these bacteria borrowed the necessary gene from another kind of bacteria, in something called “horizontal gene transfer.” Rothman’s colleagues performed a sophisticated phylogenetic analysis to derive the timing of this change to more efficient methane production, and though this method is imprecise, they showed that it plausibly happened at the time of the pulse of volcanism. Why do methane-producing bacteria need nickel to grow? The metabolism of organics into methane depends on a protein complex that is built around a nickel atom. In general, seawater is too deficient in nickel. Yet it is known that the Siberian Traps magmas were very rich in nickel. In fact, our planet’s most valuable economic concentrations of nickel are located in Siberia because of these deposits. Rothman and colleagues studied the history of nickel in the well-preserved sediments at Meishan, and they showed that, right before the extinctions, nickel increased up to seven times the background level, to an abundance that would indeed support rapid growth of these methanogenic bacteria.

  4. Jan Zalasiewicz et al., “Scale and Diversity of the Physical Technosphere: A Geological Perspective,” The Anthropocene Review, in press.

  5. I say “seems” rather than “is” only because I have read too many flawed predictions written by the confident futurists of past decades and centuries. I am mindful of Arthur C. Clarke’s observation that when a scientist states that something is impossible, he is probably wrong. I can at least imagine some bionanotechnological innovation that would prevent this seeming rush to inexorable acidification, but I would not bet on it.

  6. See for example: J. Zalasiewicz, R. Kryza, and M. Williams “The Mineral Signature of the Anthropocene in Its Deep-Time Context,” Geological Society, London, Special Publications, 2013.

  7. An excellent book about this is The Botany of Desire, by Michael Pollan.

  8. See, for example, E. S. Rice and J. Silverman, “Propagule Pressure and Climate Contribute to the Displacement of Linepithema humile by Pachycondyla chinensis,” PLoS ONE 8, no. 2 (2013): e56281. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0056281, and references therein.

  9. Prinn was also a grad student of John Lewis’s, which makes him my academic brother and Lewis’s adviser, Harold Urey, the Nobel Prize–winning founder of planetary chemistry who oversaw the famous Miller–Urey experiment into the organic origins of life, our academic grandfather. Tracing these nerd trees is fun, but it also reveals the heredity of ideas and modes of thought—in this case, more cross-fertilization between planetary exploration and earth environmental science.

  Chapter 4: Planetary Changes of the Fourth Kind

  1. A summary of this history is given in W. H. Brune, “The Ozone Story: A Model for Addressing Climate Change?” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 71 (2015): 75–84.

  2. “Global Warming Has Begun, Expert Tells Senate,” New York Times, June 24, 1988.

  3. Lately some pundits have been decrying the notion of “peak oil” as a myth, insisting that as the price goes up because of scarcity, we will always find new sources, drill deeper, extract oil locked up in various kinds of sediments, etc. All this just delays the inevitable peak. We could scrape clean the crust of Earth, and at some point the oil will run out. There is no way around peak oil, unless we find a wormhole inside Earth that links to a filling station in another galaxy. The oil supply is finite.

  4. Stapledon’s book also describes a race of humans genetically engineered to survive on Neptune. That brings up an alternative to terraforming that has been explored in the speculative literature. As Pollack and Sagan put it, “At some time in the future, a much more elegant way to overcome our parochial habitat restrictions may be to genetically engineer humans for other worlds than to physically engineer other worlds for humans.”

  5. In fact, it occurred to me years ago that you might just use the same comet impacts that bring in the water also to raise the dust that would cause an anti-greenhouse and cool the planet. This could be tricky, though, because water is also a greenhouse gas that could work the opposite way and heat things up. Yet if the initial comet impacts were effective enough at raising dust without adding too much warming gas, then things might go in the right direction. I’ve never done the calculations, but this could make a fun little paper or at least a grad student project or term paper. You’re welcome.

  6. The quote is from The Travels of Marco Polo, circa 1300.

  7. A great place to start is the two National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, Medicine Climate Intervention Reports issued in early 2015: “Climate Intervention: Carbon Dioxide Removal and Reliable Sequestration,” and “Climate Intervention: Reflecting Sunlight to Cool Earth,” at https://nas-sites.org/americasclimatechoices/other-reports-on-climate-change/2015-2/climate-intervention-reports/ (henceforth NRC reports). Note, the National Research Council is an arm of the National Academy of Sciences.

  8. M. Bullock and D. H. Grinspoon, “The Stability of Climate on Venus,” Journal of Geophysical Research 101 (1996): 2268.

  9. NRC reports 2015.

  10. There is also an expanding cloud of orbital debris from collisions, anti-satellite military tests, and abandoned hardware. This swarm threatens at some point to become self-sustaining (as colliding debris makes more debris) and hazardous to all future spaceflight. It is a looming potential tragedy of the orbital commons. Fortunately, some smart folks are on the case and some imaginative solutions are on the drawing board.

  Chapter 5: Terra Sapiens

  1. Though they did not invent the concept, chemist Paul Crutzen and paleontologist Eugene Stoermer are largely responsible for modern use of the term “Anthropocene” after the 2000 publication of a paper in Global Change magazine, in which they wrote, “It seems to us more than appropriate to emphasize the central role of mankind in geology and ecology by proposing to use the term ‘anthropocene’ for the current geological epoch.” They proposed a start date in the late eighteenth century, to mark the beginning of the increase in greenhouse g
ases due to fossil fuel use.

  2. Yes, for several of these agreed-upon geological transitions, there is an actual marker in the rock at a location that is designated as typical, but it is not always golden and not always an actual spike. For example, there is a bronze disk in a place called Klonk, in the Czech Republic, marking the Silurian–Devonian boundary.

  3. R. J. Nevle and D. K. Bird, “Effects of Syn-pandemic Fire Reduction and Reforestation in the Tropical Americas on Atmospheric CO2 During European Conquest,” Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology 264 (2008): 25–38.

  4. It was Harlow Shapley, Carl Sagan’s predecessor at Harvard, whose climate change conference I discuss in chapter 1, who discovered this remarkable fact.

  5. Our sun is also bobbing above and below the flattened plane of the galactic disk with a period of about sixty-five million years. From time to time there have been various proposals linking this to a cycle of extinction events on Earth because of comet impacts or dark matter or what have you, but earth scientists haven’t taken these ideas too seriously. The evidence doesn’t support the existence of any cycle that correlates with this motion.

  6. David Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History, 2005.

  7. In part, the idea of the Anthropocene doesn’t seem new to me because I grew up reading the “golden age” science fiction of the postwar years and early space age, which is full of techno-utopian visions in which human influence, guided by science and reason, took full hold of Earth and the other planets. When I should have been going out to play, I was reading Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy, about a planet called Trantor, a world covered by one continuous city, obviously a future version of Earth with mid-twentieth-century trends extrapolated. In my 2003 book, Lonely Planets, strongly influenced by Lem, I use “the psychozoic era” to describe what many are now calling the Anthropocene.

  8. Cynics rightly point out that this can also be interpreted as having been motivated by their wish to keep others from joining the nuclear club, and that they were simply ready, at that point, to start testing underground. Still, the treaty was signed and it held, and as a result, the layer of radioisotopes from atmospheric testing shows a sharp peak and then a decline in the early 1960s, a lasting geologic signature of global cooperation on an Earth on the brink of disaster.

  9. One random moment from later in that day stands out in my memory. After the symposium was over, a small group of us left the convention center together and walked to a somewhat decrepit sedan parked out in the blistering late afternoon LA sun. As we reached the car, I noticed that the interior was black and the windows rolled up. The car was hotter than Venus. In wiseguy grad student mode, I said, “Oh no, look out—low albedo interior!” Atmospheric scientist Richard Turco, whose car it was, looked at me as if to say, “Who the hell is this hairy kid spouting jargon?” Sagan promptly said, “Rich, have you met David Grinspoon? He’s a grad student studying planetary atmospheres.” And that was how I met the lead author of the TTAPS paper.

  10. The presentations from this meeting were collected and published as The Long Darkness: Psychological and Moral Perspectives on Nuclear Winter, ed. Lester Grinspoon (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986).

  11. “An Ecomodernist Manifesto” can be found at http://www.ecomodernism.org/.

  12. A recently published collection of essays, Keeping the Wild: Against the Domestication of Earth, ed. G. Wuerthner, E. Crist, and T. Butler (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2014), captures the response of traditional conservationists to ecomodernism. It could almost be called the “Anti-Ecomodernist Manifesto.” The publisher’s release calls it a “critique of neo-environmentalists’ attacks on traditional conservation.”

  13. This is a flare-up of an old fight. The status of the debate at the end of the twentieth century was summarized well in 2001 by environmental sociologists Dana Fisher and William Freudenburg, in “Ecological Modernization and Its Critics: Assessing the Past and Looking Toward the Future,” Society and Natural Resources 14, no. 8 (2001). They describe ecomodernism as follows: “The lynchpin of the argument involves technological innovation… the authors see continued industrial development as offering the best option for escaping from the ecological crises of the developed world. Unlike theorists who see technological development as being generally problematic—pointing to a potential need to stop capitalism and/or the process of industrialization to deal with ecological crises, [the ecological modernists] argue that environmental problems can best be solved through further advancement of technology and industrialization.” This also builds on the debate within conservation that boiled up in the 1990s over how to reconcile the needs of indigenous and traditional peoples with the management of parks and conservation areas. Should locals be allowed to harvest animals and trees, or should the very notion of a protected area include a prohibition on all human exploitation? In many places, the strict “no harvesting allowed” approach has given way to one where local people who have a long-standing relationship with the land have been made partners in conservation, continuing a certain level of sustainable exploitation and improving overall land management.

  14. Erle Ellis, one of the more thoughtful ecomodernists, despite his love of incendiary phrases like “used planet,” wrote an op-ed in the New York Times in September 2013 entitled “Overpopulation Is Not the Problem,” in which he stated that “there really is no such thing as a human carrying capacity on the Earth.” When I pointed out to Erle, whom I count as a friend, that his statement was inconsistent with the laws of physics, he clarified that what he really meant was that these limits would not be reached in the coming century, and that our current challenges were more social in nature. I agreed with his point but still objected to his phraseology, as it implied the complete lack of limits, which is a habit of thought we need to move beyond.

  15. Actual quote from a string of tweets sent on January 16, 2015, by Alex Trembath (@atrembath), a senior analyst at the Breakthrough Institute, a leading ecomodernist think tank. The tweet storm began with, “I keep seeing this new climate communications message: ‘Global warming will continue as long as we use the sky as a waste dump.’” and continued: “‘the sky’ may be the best waste dump we can imagine!! Nobody lives in the sky! If our shit has to go somewhere, why not there?”

  16. For example, in “What’s So New About the ‘New Conservation’?” Curt Meine, senior fellow at the Aldo Leopold Foundation, writes, “We need to think of conservation in terms of whole landscapes, from the wildest places to the most urban places… We need to do more and better conservation work outside protected areas and sacred spaces; on our ‘working’ farms, ranches, and forests; and in the suburbs and cities where people increasingly live. We need to meet our needs for food, fiber, and fuel in ways that do not simplify and deplete but actively replenish, ecosystems close to home and around the world…” In describing his vision of where traditionalist conservation is going, he seems to be describing a more thoughtful strain of ecopragmatism, fortified with a healthy dose of the essential ingredient lacking in the most strident ecomodernists: humility. Meine writes, “We are engaged in a collective effort to understand and redirect the relationship between the human (and humanized) and the ‘natural, wild, and free.’ To do so, we need to understand, in ways we do not yet fully understand, the complicated history of humans and nature, and the evolution of what we now call conservation and environmentalism, over decades, centuries, and millennia… It is a vast task of intellectual and spiritual synthesis. It demands more than oversimplification and caricature. It requires, above all, humility. We have work to do.”

  17. Another fascinating area of disagreement is over the idea of “de-extinction.” Many ecomodernists are smitten with it. For example, some scientists hope to resurrect woolly mammoths with DNA extracted from frozen remains. These new/old creatures would be born to elephant mothers. They (at least the portion of them that was not microbial) would be genetically similar to actual woolly mammoths but bor
n into a world no mammoth ever walked, full of alien creatures and strange diseases. Who knows how they would take, internally and externally, to this strange new world? Is this act of creation/restoration benevolent or cruel? It is an interesting question, or pair of questions, whether we could, or should try to, re-create lost species. The first answer to “should we?” is another question: why should we? Is it to assuage our guilt? Or an attempt to return some part of the world to some semblance of what is “right” or “normal”? If extinction is bad, then is de-extinction good? When you look at the reality of what this would mean, it seems at most a freak show distraction from the larger questions we confront in owning up to the mass extinction we are in the process of starting. Because the answer to “could we?” is, strictly speaking, “no.” While it is true that we may be able to sort of bring back certain hand-picked popular or charismatic species, or at least somewhat transmogrified simulacra of them (genetically similar, born to mothers of a related species), we will never be able to bring them back as they originally were. We certainly can’t bring back all the lost species, or re-create the bygone worlds they inhabited. What about recently extinct species, who lived not in some vanished world but in ours? Or those still here but threatened? Would you oppose bringing them back if we lost them? This is more challenging. My instinct is to say this is not where our conservation efforts and attention should be focused. Yet I stumble if you present me with the following hypothetical: It’s fifty years from now and there are no Siberian tigers, but we could create a family of them. Should we?

  18. Tom Butler, in the introduction to Keeping the Wild.