The Sublime Paradox of the Human Dilemma

The failed predictions of widespread famine famously made by Thomas Malthus for the 19th century and Paul Ehrlich for the 20th century have cast a long shadow over, if not completely discredited, similar perspectives. This is both understandable and unfortunate. Understandable because repeated failure usually suggests a mistake in theorem and because depictions of apocalypse have become so commonplace—indeed, entertainment for a world-weary chic—that a little optimism seems refreshingly sincere. It is unfortunate because we are dismissing a horrible truth: overpopulation and famine are not distant mirages; they are present day realities.

Famine Memorial in Dublin: Rowan Gillespie, Sculptor

For the past half-century, humanity has experienced a quiet, nearly invisible, yet continuous famine. At any one time, 800 million to a billion people are severely malnourished; 9 million die of hunger and hunger-related diseases each year; and an unimaginable two to three billion people suffer blindness, anemia, and physical and mental stunting from deficiencies of the micronutrients zinc, iodine, iron, and vitamin A. Unlike famines of the past, civilization’s perpetual famine has not been concentrated in any one country, but rather has proceeded as a chronic event spread unevenly across the globe, thereby losing the kind of solidity that our minds need in order to name and recognize it. To rescue it from vague abstraction, I have named it a perpetual famine.

FAMINE FUNERAL by John Coll.

The future promises to be worse. Much worse. Even without the specter of global warming to exacerbate our problems, even were the future to provide the most accommodating of climates, humanity’s fortunes are now tied to a host of conditions going just right for us. And unfortunately, most if not all of them have gravely worsened in the past fifty years—arable land; water and energy resources; fish stocks; crop losses due to pests; forests and biodiversity; political and economic health. That is, our resource base and Civilization’s flexibility to deal with crises are both rapidly deteriorating at the same time that the human population continues to swell and ask increasingly more from the planet and from our societies. Although we have already turned much of the earth into a vast feed trough for our species, storage granaries stand at all-time lows, leaving us little cushion.  Several years of poor harvests in the world’s breadbaskets—due to drought, heat waves, flooding, or disease—will likely set off a pervasive global famine.

THE CONNEMARA SPINNER: Irish School

Population overshoots and ecosystem destruction are not rare in the geological and archeological records. And neither are species diebacks and societal collapses. Both serve as nature’s self-correcting mechanisms. Unique to our globalized Civilization, however, is that our ecosystem now encompasses the whole of the earth.  And we are in the process of destroying it—this it being our very life support system. While nearly everyone studying the problem agrees that the destruction wrought by our species is accelerating and that catastrophe looms near, we still beget more children, blithely consume more products, and squander our extraordinary, unprecedented wealth on outmoded fossil fuel lifestyles, institutions, and war. 

Gaki-zoshi (Scroll of the Hungry Souls): Artist unknown, Late 12th Century, Japan

Radical Mind Shift attempts to explain the great paradox of our times and reveal why humanity will likely choose catastrophe over sustainability and how, in the long run, nature will nevertheless force humanity into a sustainable existence. And it offers hope—now—for each individual and collectively for humanity. For the solutions are simple: consume less, produce less, work less—far, far less.  And serve more, play more, meditate more—again, far, far more. The solution is simple, but not easy.  It is keenly radical. It turns our modern belief system on its head.  It weds the common truths of our greatest triumphs—Science and spirituality—and paradoxically requires us to live the kind of life of which our dreams are made. Ultimately, it requires, as Aldous Huxley suggested some eighty years ago in Brave New World Revisited, an internal revolution as much as an external one.

Gaki-zoshi (Scroll of the Hungry Souls): Artist unknown, Late 12th Century, Japan

To consider such a sweeping solution, however, we must first completely accept the problem.  Radical Mind Shift peers unblinkingly into the environmental degradation and the suffering created, past, present and future, by Civilization, and offers five unequivocal propositions:

(1)   There will not be enough food for all the humans projected to exist this century.

(2)   This will lead to a massive human dieback (whereby hundreds of millions, perhaps billions will starve), beginning within the lifetimes of most people alive today.

(3)   Although there are numerous effective actions we—as a species and as nations and individuals—can take to prevent the dieback, we have thus far remained powerless to enact them.

(4)   We will likely not change our unsustainable behaviors because the beliefs that inform our cultures and mythologies are—at their roots— the very causes of the problems. The environmental crisis is a crisis of consciousness.

(5)   Nature will insure that humanity complies with its laws by steering us away from our human-centered thinking towards a more integral awareness, one whose beliefs, mythologies, cultures, and societies promote sustainability. To that end, one powerful self-correcting mechanism is Dieback.  Another involves the breakdown of our stubbornly unsustainable societies and cultures, leading quite possibly to the collapse of global Civilization.

Gaki-zoshi (Scroll of the Hungry Souls): Artist unknown, Late 12th Century, Japan

 Because these propositions are provocative enough, the tone remains passionate, yet reasoned, and only the most well accepted sources and consensus data are employed.  Given the complexities inherent in such an epic-sized story as this, the discussion can often become dense with reasoning and supporting facts.  The goal of this website is to render the subject accessible to nearly everyone, for the message is simple, profound, and crucial. And that message takes the two largest mega-trends of the past century—the destruction of nature and the evolution of consciousness—and places them squarely within the context of our lives.

Gaki-zoshi (Scroll of the Hungry Souls): Artist unknown, Late 12th Century, Japan

A voluntary population decrease, a sustainable economy, innovation—we will surely require them all. We will need a significant shift in our consciousness to help us choose wisely from the multitude of available political, economic, and technological solutions that hang like ripe fruit within our grasp. Through the millennia, societies have gone through many shifts in their collective consciousness. Beliefs, worldviews, and behaviors have changed radically, and paradigmatic shifts have occurred with increasing frequency. The present shift has just begun. At its core, it involves the healing of a rift between humanity and the rest of nature. With the magical powers we gathered from agriculture, industrialization, and modernity also came ecological and existential blowback. In becoming dominant over Nature, we became separate from it. The more separated we feel from the rest of creation, the more self-centered we are and the smaller our worldview becomes… and the correspondingly more limited is our repertoire of solutions. Our solutions come almost exclusively from the limited human-centered world of economics and technology. We have come to depend on the magical powers of materialism, or, in reaction to its obvious psycho-spiritual drawbacks, to simplistic, human-created, human-centered notions of the cosmos, codified in anachronistic religions. To be whole, we will reintegrate the “spiritual” in us—the artist, the lover, the mystic, the naturalist. That whole person places herself directly at the center of the necessary change. Her individual shift in consciousness manifests in her behavior and ripples out through the world, helping us all shift a bit. This will be our most difficult undertaking.   

Source: regenvillages, Netherlands.

Of those matters over which we have some control, our worldview is the most difficult to change. It requires an extraordinary awareness (or luck or grace) and then a generous portion of humility. And so most people remain steadfast in the belief that it is not their worldview that needs revising, but that of many and nameless others. Not surprisingly then, there has been little response to the environmental devastation, to carbon emissions, and to the human predicament, in general. It usually takes a crisis, personal or collective, for a person to be willing to radically change his behaviors. Still, it does appear that the new shift has begun. There are those (mostly quiet) heroes who have begun forging the way forward. And when the soup does hit the fan, we are fortunately a species magnificently adapted to adapt to changing circumstances. Culture is one of our most powerful tools. With a rate of mutation far faster than our genes, indeed faster than even bacterial reproduction, cultural change will lead us forward. Our culture shapes our worldview. We pick and choose a bit, but for the most part we accept some version not very different from our society’s dominant paradigm. As our material world changes in the coming decades and centuries—as we phenomenologically experience the blowback of all the suffering Civilization has caused—our paradigms will change correspondingly. Likely, sustainability and equity will become guiding principles. Sustainability will help resolve the enmity between our species and the rest of the planet, and equity will help dissolve social, political, and psychological tensions. The obstacles to sustainability and equity are principally the inertia of paradigms and the vested interests of those who maintain power through the various institutions—political, business, media, military, and religious.  The sooner and more voluntarily we can move into the new mental and existential space, the less suffering our species and all the planet will experience. 

Source: regenvillages, Netherlands.

Why Our Solutions are Not Working

To prevent a catastrophe, Civilization must immediately, drastically, and thoroughly decrease its impact on the planet and allow the biosphere to rehabilitate. We will have to deliberately and simultaneously take several steps, each one of them unprecedented—reduce population, reduce material consumption, reduce the inequality of wealth and power, and restore natural ecosystems. This will take a way of thinking, being, and behaving on the planet that is novel to complex civilization. Lamentably, the solutions proposed by most experts and laypeople – (1) fertility declines through modernization, (2) economic growth, (3) technological innovations, and (4) a revolution of consciousness will be insufficient, at least in terms of averting the involuntary dieback this century. These are conclusions that flow from the analyses in this website.

            Radical Mind Shift, for instance, has examined how modernization and secularization, as part of a historical phenomenon called the Demographic Transition, have decreased the fertility rate as a side effect. As fertility rate goes, so goes the population. When the fertility rate drops below the number needed to replace a generation—estimated to be, depending on the country, somewhere between 2.1 to 2.3 children per woman—the actual population begins to drop, as is already happening in Japan, Russia, Germany and some fifty other countries in the world.[i] There are numerous complications to this simple math, of course. On the one hand, gender equality, urbanization, education, and careers do seem to steer women towards having fewer children. On the other hand, an increase in any one of these also tends to increase the amount each parent and child consumes in his or her lifetime. As it turns out, the educated and urbanized have more than compensated for their reduced fertility with an increase in per capita material consumption. And as a result, they have impacted the planet even more, far more actually, than the poor and fertile masses.[ii]

Despite the fact that fertility across most of the globe has plunged, demographers project that it will still take most of this century (and perhaps the next) before world population actually stabilizes to some new high of ten to eleven billion.[iii] By then, demographers calculate, another three-and-a-half billion people will have joined the human family, and economists expect that Civilization will not only be producing and consuming three-plus billion people’s worth more of material goods and services, but even way more than that, because they project that each person will be wealthier on average. Sadly, the Earth seems already wearied of our numbers. It may not be up to meeting the demographers’ and economists’ expectations. If not, we will face an involuntary dieback.

In critiquing the solutions of experts, policy leaders, and media pundits, Radical Mind Shift has examined the economy’s impact on the human predicament. Global capitalism has been very good at producing lots of high quality consumer “goods” and services, mostly for the same billion people who already have more of these than they know what to do with. These products have come at great environmental and existential cost. Hundreds of millions of people work long, monotonous hours in jobs better fit for automatons than for humans, hoping to crawl their way up the ladder of prosperity. Trillions of tons of combined resources have been squandered to ultimately make landfill more than anything else. Most every crucial resource has passed “peak.” The Earth’s biosphere has been gravely degraded.

Meanwhile, despite all the suffering and destruction we have caused, it has not been enough to provide for even the basic needs of a substantial portion of our human family. Billions are malnourished and ill. They look at the prosperous few through the television screen like children with their faces pressed to the candy store window. A great bifurcation has split our human family, creating cyborgs who contemplate colonies on other planets and barefoot skeletons dying in dusty deserts. The solution proposed by the proponents of global capitalism is more capitalism. Create the conditions in poor countries that will foster economic growth.  By following the lead of the First World countries, according to this view, the indigent, too, can move up the economic ladder from the rungs of poverty to those of prosperity. This is where the human predicament runs head on with reality. All indications suggest that the Earth cannot support still more growth. Capitalism, as it has been practiced for the past centuries, is not a sustainable system.

That is not to say that in the sustainable world of the future humans will not continue to produce and trade and consume or even that there will not be some variant of a global market. Given our penchant for creature comforts and given our facility for trading for items we cannot acquire locally, a complex economic system will surely be part of any human society. In question is what kind, or kinds, of systems. Clearly, the types of capitalism we have been practicing for the past centuries have been failures, if our measure of success is sustainability and some level of equity, that is, as the Brundtland Report put it in 1987, systems that provide a reasonable quality of life for everyone “without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”.[iv]  Any economic system (or set of systems) that is sustainable and more equitable will likely look far different than the one that presently dominates the globe. Chances are, though, that we will not change them in time to prevent the dieback of our species. At the moment, we are still stubbornly adhering to “business as usual.”

Similarly, we have a paradoxical relationship with technology. As the world that technology has built unravels around us, we are compelled to rely on it even more. We have succeeded so brilliantly and become the dominant megafaunal species in great part by increasingly melding machine to human, by solving problems through the innovation and application of technology, co-evolving with it, anatomically, neurologically, and behaviorally, by becoming, in a word, cyborgs. Technology helped lift us from survival as a nervous grassland ape to ruling as Earth’s dominant predator. Some of our greatest technological triumphs have involved either increasing the efficiency with which we use resources or synthesizing novel substances that substitute for scarce resources.

However, for the unprecedented problem of the human dilemma—a twinned problem of biologic overpopulation and a cancerous, predatory mutation of capitalism—technological innovations have often done us more harm than good. Any savings we have derived from its benefits has been negated by comparable increases in consumption (Jevons paradox) and by unforeseen and undesirable consequences (blowback). Refrigerator coolants, nuclear fission, plastic water bottles, and hybrid crops have both their uses and their blowback. It will take time, but we will probably determine which innovations are truly helpful in the long run and which we must discard as mistakes. Again, sadly for us, this will not happen in time to avert a dieback and the collapse of the civilization we know and love, for the changes we are instituting scarcely deviate from “business as usual,” that is, from the very ways we have been doing things to get us in this predicament. The innovators of technology tend to be simultaneously brilliant and caught up in the paradigm of technological optimism. Many are being molded by the world’s greatest minds at the world’s best universities to engineer our way into a better future. Genetic engineering, synthetic biology (also called extreme genetic engineering), geo-engineering, and nanotechnology all promise extraordinary outcomes. They also come with unknown and potentially extraordinary consequences. Just because we can do something, does not mean we should. Nevertheless, history suggests that they will be developed and turned into products as soon as they are profitable. 

ENDNOTES

[i] The higher the pre-reproductive mortality rate and the greater are other factors (such as non-reproductive women), the more children are needed for replacement. In the First World, 2.1 is considered the replacement total fertility rate. In the Third World, that number presently stands at 2.3. Some countries, such as Germany, maintain growth rates due to immigration.

[ii] Of course this has occurred within a world-system dominated by capitalist modes of production. Within a different paradigm, the results might be quite different. That is, urbanism, education and careers do not necessarily have to lead to high material consumption.

[iii] There are three main reasons for this slow demographic response, and one factor that will work as a counteracting force. First, because of the pace at which culture changes, it may take another generation (twenty-five years) before the average world fertility rate gets down to replacement level. At that point, the world’s youngest will represent the largest single age group (the wide base of the population pyramid in the figure below), the largest age group in human history, and likely the largest that will ever inhabit this planet. Second, due to what is called population momentum, it will then take another three generations (75 years) for this large age bracket to age through the “pyramid,” although at that point the age structure diagram will resemble more a cube-shaped skyscraper than a pyramid. And third, because the average life span is continually increasing, it will take even longer for population to actually stabilize, that is, for there to be about the same number of people in each age bracket. Offsetting these somewhat will be a continued reduction in the global fertility rate below replacement. The greater and faster the reduction, the less time it will take for our population to stabilize and the lower will be the peak population.

AGE STRUCTURE DIAGRAMS

[iv] A partial quote of a definition of sustainability by the United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development in their 1987 report called Our Common Future (more well known as the Brundtland Report). Although this is an anthrocentric definition, the only way to meet the needs of future generations would be by leaving much of the biosphere intact.

The Intent of Radical Mind Shift from 2007 - 2019 and beyond

This post and the following two offer a summary of the way Radical Mind Shift has served its intent — or mission.

 Radical Mind Shift considers seemingly contradictory information, even when, or especially when, the information and interpretations are inconsistent with our cherished ideas and beliefs. In the unimaginably complex world we inhabit, one that is perhaps beyond our ability to ever fully decipher, we do well to consider many viewpoints. It is unlikely that ours alone will suffice, especially when the subject of our exploration is as consequential as the human predicament. Our default custom is to simplify the great chaos of the outside stimuli and interior information by deciphering patterns, by connecting the dots, often creating images for ourselves that are as arbitrary as the constellations in the sky. Once created, we then have the facility for believing that what we believe is true.[i] A different set of eyes may see a completely different set of patterns, and so may elucidate an entirely different universe. In looking through as many lenses as possible, we have seen in these pages that reality belongs exclusively to neither the cornucopians nor to the apocalyptic, neither to the socialist nor to the capitalist, neither to the scientist nor to the mystic. Choices are rarely matters of either/or, but rather of and, and, and… until we can integrate them into a sensible whole. A billion people are living material lives of unprecedented comfort, and a similar number feel the constant gnawing pangs of hunger every day of their lives. Millions of people are working tirelessly to make reality a carbon-free economy, and we are pouring more carbon dioxide into the air than we ever have before. We are replanting forests and developing better farming methods, and the rainforests are still disappearing and our fertile lands are washing into the seas. We are living longer and we are committing ecological suicide. The glass is half empty and it is half full.

Looking through an evolutionary lens, we can conclude that our impact on the Earth has been neither sudden nor due to some specific historical moment. Being clever creatures, we have long changed the environment by conscious choice. Agriculture and industrialization were punctuated jumps in our already heady attempts to change conditions to our liking. Oil refineries and air conditioners and refrigerators and plastic water bottles are merely logical creations on that path. However, in the process, we have killed off most of the other creatures—beautiful, terrifying, and otherwise. The survivors have adapted to a human-centered planet, to a homogenized biosphere, to a complex web that has been simplified. We have discharged all sorts of radioactive, carcinogenic, mutagenic, and teratogenic substances into the air, water, soil, and therefore into our bodies. And we continue to do so at an accelerating rate.

The human population from 8000 BCE to 2000 CE.

Numbers help us to visualize the magnitude of our dilemma. And so, they serve as an important window into self-awareness. The J-curve serves as an icon for the exponential rise in all human affairs, from the human population and hominid intelligence to everything that tumbles out from those. Wealth made, material consumed, patents catalogued, cars produced, highways and cities erected, resources mined, pollution emitted, food grown, trees cut and burned, wild creatures destroyed, and so on. Numbers give us a sense of how rapidly and thoroughly we have turned forests and grasslands into farms and deserts. They illustrate how fast we have heated the skies and acidified the oceans. They enumerate the new and novel molecules that we have synthesized and dumped into the web of life. And they can give us some indication of the magnitude of the human suffering, much of it otherwise beyond our view. Although we farm nearly every available acre to feed ourselves and we work long exhausting hours, still billions of people are malnourished and drink polluted waters. Millions starve each year in what has become history’s longest perpetual famine. The future promises to be more difficult. Because we rely completely on the annual regeneration of plants for our sustenance, and we have appropriated most every available acre on the planet to this end, and we have relatively little food in storage for a rainy day, humanity finds itself walking on a high wire, with little margin for error, no net, and the wire stretched endlessly ahead.

Radical Mind Shift has, and will continue to demonstrate unambiguously that our numbers and our appetites have grown beyond the Earth’s capacity to support us. In killing off our competitors and landscaping all the fertile Earth into a giant food trough for our species, we essentially abolished nature’s checks and balances on our numbers. Within the short span of a few millennia, we have covered the face of the Earth with our kind. And being creatures with the unprecedented blend of brain and brawn, we took for ourselves the sun’s energy stored in forests and in underground hydrocarbons and the minerals held in mountains to synthesize a civilization never seen before on this planet. Where we had once slept in mud and thatched homes by the millions, we now rest in palaces by the billions. Our few ziggurats have turned into thousands of skyscrapers. Our forest trails have become highways, contrails, and shipping lanes. We have become Homo colossus. We singly move as much sediment, soil, nitrogen, and phosphorus as the rest of all the planetary forces, biotic and abiotic combined. We appropriate as much as forty percent of all the photosynthesis materialized by plants on the six continents. We are the architects of Earth’s sixth mass extinction of complex life. With accelerating force, we have become the dominant change agent on the planet.

Much of the change, however, will not serve our long-term interests.  The numbers unequivocally show that as population and consumption rise, resources diminish and the biosphere degrades. We have long ago passed “peak” on most everything we depend—water, soil, climate, energy, forests, biodiversity. And so we have likely already overshot our planet’s carrying capacity for our species. If we are in overshoot, then our numbers must crash, either voluntarily or by the often-unkind correctives of the Earth. And yet—maddeningly when one considers the disconnect—demographers predict that we will add yet another three-and-half billion people by century’s end, and economists are expecting each of us to consume many times more than we already do.

ENDNOTE

[i] Shermer, M. (2012) The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies—How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce them as Truths. Times Books, New York.

The Destiny and Perils of Geoengineering

It is generally agreed that global heating is dangerous and accelerating and that anthropogenic gas emissions are the primary cause. Still, we will surely burn more coal, oil, and natural gas in the coming decades than ever before, and, in the process, pump more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and oceans. On that point there is consensus.[i] Globally, energy use is expected to increase at least three-fold by century’s end, and the atmospheric concentration of CO2 is expected to rise from its pre-industrial 280 parts per million[1] to 450, 550, or —given present trajectories— 1000 ppm.[ii] Climate models show that even the lower value may bring peril, but we have yet to veer an iota from the worst-case trajectory.[iii]

Given the ramifications to the biosphere, to the economy, and to humanity’s food security, we must change something.[iv] But what? Well, not our consumption, surely. Advertisers spend a half-trillion dollars annually to thwart that option, ever keeping our eyes screen-tunneled onto the prize.[v] Meanwhile, the material suffering of the billions of our human family around the world will be alleviated only by more consumption, of food, water, shelter, health services, and so on. Given civilization’s way of providing for these necessities, far more infrastructure, electricity, and energy will be required. The poorest billions have produced little of the nearly two-trillion tons of CO2 already released into the air since the industrial revolution.[vi] So, as global capitalism invites more of them to the party, their pollution will rise correspondingly.[vii] For nine billion people to enjoy First World prosperity with present technology will require daily consumption of over 800 million barrels of oil worth of energy—or ten times the oil we burn today.[viii]

And however integral they will be to future societies, alternative energy sources and energy efficiency will not solve our problems in the coming decades. Solar and wind have been the fastest growing energy industries worldwide, but we plan to burn more fossil fuel than ever before, as well.[ix] The human civilization train is heading directly for climate apocalypse, and there appears to be no simple off switch to kill the engine. Consciously or otherwise, we plan to consume more fossil fuel and release more CO2  and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and we want to miraculously stop global heating.

Scientists are now seriously contemplating a most outrageous set of possible technological interventions—called geoengineering—that just a few years ago they had agreed to eschew out of fear of their potential repercussions.[x] Geoengineering involves large-scale manipulations of the atmosphere, oceans, and biosphere to offset global heating and to concoct felicitous climatic conditions.[xi] Geoengineering schemes include perhaps the most conjectural (too big to have been tested), potentially indispensable (the Earth might become uninhabitable, otherwise), and risky (because the first experiment will involve our entire planet) array of technologies yet conceived.

Whereas some decades ago science fiction writers and scientists were contemplating ways to terraform other solar bodies, such as the Moon and Mars, many of them have recently realized that, ironically, we may have to first terraform our own planet to keep it hospitable to us in the coming millennia. We might, for instance, capture the carbon emissions and pipe them underground, where they will hypothetically remain forever afterward. Maybe. And maybe we can suck out the carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere by placing huge contraptions across the continents and perhaps by growing forests of transgenic “carbon-eating trees.”  Both of these are, so far, fantasy projects, beyond present technologies and without political support. For a less expensive alternative, maybe we can also manufacture massive plankton blooms in the oceans, inducing these microscopic organisms to remove the carbon for us. The ocean scenario imagines seeding stretches of the oceans with either iron or urea, which hypothetically will act as fertilizer, triggering a plankton population bomb… Bloom!  (The same kind of bloom that sets off the coastal dead zones.) The micro-organisms would then sequester oceanic carbon (from CO2) into their bodies, and, upon death, fall to the sea bottom with this carbon, where it would be stored, again forever after. With lowered concentrations of carbon dioxide, the oceans would then sponge the gas faster from the air.

         Or we could bypass the carbon cycle entirely. We can block the sun’s light before it reaches those pesky energy-absorbing greenhouse gases. We can release microscopic aerosols (salt, fine mist, or sulfur) into the atmosphere, or we can propel sunshades of various shapes, sizes, composition, and colors into space, placing them in orbit between Earth and sun. For aerosol delivery, we might use fleets of planes or ships, artillery batteries, or hoses suspended by zeppelins or balloons. To propel the trillions of needed sunshades, the proposed include spacecraft, cannon, and mile-long electromagnetic launchers with ion propulsion as a last booster stage.  

         The most popular of these schemes, hands down, is the pumping of sulfur particles into the air. It happens to be the cheapest, and it has been known to work, specifically with the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo. Aerosol particles blown into the atmosphere by its eruption, mostly sulfur, lowered global temperatures by a degree Fahrenheit that year. And so enormous was Indonesia’s 1815 Mount Tambora’s eruption that its sulfate aerosols are credited for causing “the year without a summer” in 1816 throughout much of the northern hemisphere.[xii] The sulfate aerosols have the added advantage of being short-lived—they wash out of the atmosphere within a few years. So, there could be some precision in releasing our artificial volcanoes.

         The blowback here is obvious to everyone. Besides the unknowns when dealing with a system as complex and dynamic as the Earth’s entire outer layer, there are the predictable possibilities of unintended climate anomalies, weakened India monsoons, and drought in the Sahel, all of which could be disastrous to hundreds of millions of people. “The year without a summer” saw the global temperature drop, climate anomalies, and widespread crop failures, famine, and disease outbreak. Aerosols also bring with them the very real potential for acid rain, ozone destruction in the stratosphere, and the associated destruction of life. And whereas the cost of sunshades (hundreds of trillions of dollars) will likely dissuade us from implementing that option, the ridiculously low cost of aerosol injection (tens of millions of dollars) could, perversely, prove to be its biggest disadvantage. A wealthy individual could, in a fit of megalomania, easily fund the endeavor. As could a rogue nation, acting with calculated self-interest. Politicians would be loath to enact costly policies that lower carbon emissions when such a cheap alternative was available. However, if emissions were not simultaneously lowered, the oceans would continue acidifying, as acidification is a result of CO2 chemistry, not sunlight. And finally, should blowback force us to discontinue the aerosol endeavor, global temperatures would quickly spike up to new highs that corresponded to the elevated CO2 levels, completely erasing the short-term benefits. And we would be that many more years behind schedule in doing the difficult work of lowering greenhouse gas emissions.

FOOTNOTES

[1] Carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere are expressed in parts per million (ppm), which means the number of CO2 molecules per million total molecules of air.

ENDNOTES

[i] For example, Salameh (2003), Appenzeller (2006), Smil (2006b), EIA (2007), Kintisch (2007), Hightower and Pierce (2008).

Salameh, M.G. (2003) Can Renewable And Unconventional Energy Sources Bridge The Global Energy Gap In The 21st Century? Applied Energy, v. 75, pp. 33-42.

Appenzeller, T. (2006) The Coal Paradox: We Can’t Live Without it.  But Can we Survive it?  National Geographic, March, pp. 99-103.

EIA (U.S. Energy Information Agency)  (2007) International Energy Outlook, Energy Information Administration, Dept. of Energy.

Smil, V. (2006b) 21st Century Energy: Some Sobering Thoughts, OECD Observer, No. 258/259, pp. 22-23.

Kintisch, E. (2007) Making Dirty Coal Plants Cleaner, Science, v. 317, pp. 184-186.

Hightower, M., and Pierce, S.A. (2008) The Energy Challenge, Nature, v. 452, pp. 285-286.

[ii] Hoffert et al. (2002), Potocnick (2008), Monastersky (2009), Schneider (2010).

Hoffert, M., Caldeira, K., Benford, G., Criswell, D.R., Green, C., Herzog, H. et al (2002) Advanced Technology Paths to Global Climate Stability: Energy for a Greenhouse Planet, Science, v. 298, pp. 981-987.

Potocnik, J. (2008) Renewable Energy Sources and the Realities of Setting an Energy Agenda, pp. 16-20, in D. Kennedy (Editor), Science Magazine’s State of the Planet 2008-2009, AAAS, Island Press, Washington.

Monastersky, R. (2009) Climate Crunch: A Burden Beyond Bearing, Nature, v. 458, pp. 1091-1094.

Schneider, S. (2010) The Worst-Case Scenario, Nature, v. 458, pp. 1104-1105.

[iii] Hansen et al. (2008), Potoknick (2008), Meinshausen et al. (2009), Monastersky (2009), Schneider (2010).

Hansen, J., Sato, M., Kharecha, P., Beerling, D., Berner, R., Masson-Delmotte, V., Pagani, M., Raymo, M., Royer, D.L., and Zachos, J.C. (2008) Target atmospheric CO2: where should humanity aim? Open Atmospheric Science Journal, v. 2, pp. 217-231.

Meinshausen, M., Meinshausen, N., Hare, W., Raper, S.C.B., Frieler, K., Knutti, R., Frame, D.J., and Allen, J.R. (2009) Greenhouse-gas emission targets for limiting global warming to 2°C, Nature, v. 458, pp. 1158-1162. 

Monastersky, R. (2009) Climate Crunch: A Burden Beyond Bearing, Nature, v. 458, pp. 1091-1094.

Schneider, S. (2010) The Worst-Case Scenario, Nature, v. 458, pp. 1104-1105.

[iv] See Chapters 2 and 7 of Schneider, S. (2010) The Worst-Case Scenario, Nature, v. 458, pp. 1104-1105.

[v] New York Times Almanac (2008:) estimates U.S. advertising budgets at over $270 billion a year, and this includes only ad placement, not production costs.  U.S. advertising budget is about half of the world total budget.

[vi] Smil (2000a), Allen et al. (2009).

Smil, V. (2000a) Energy in the Twentieth Century: Resources, Conversions, Costs, Uses, and Consequences, Annual Review of Energy Environment, v. 25, p. 21-51.

Allen, M.R., Frame, D.J. Huntingford, C., Jones, C.D., Lowe, J.A., Meinshausen, M. and Meinshausen, N. (2009) Warming Caused by Cumulative Carbon Emissions Towards the Trillionth Tonne. Nature, v. 458, pp. 1163-1166.

[vii] Purushothaman (2003), Flavin and Gardner (2006), Walsh (2006), Sawin and Mukherjee (2007), Takashi (2007).

Purushothaman, R. (2003) Dreaming with BRICS: The Path to 2050, Goldman Sachs Global Economics Paper No: 99. http://www2.goldmansachs.com/insight/research/ reports/99.pdf .

Flavin, C. and Gardner, G. (2006) China, India and the New World Order, pp. 3-23 in The World Watch Institute, State of the World, 2006 (L. Starke, ed.), W.W. Norton and Co., New York.

Walsh, B. (2006) The Impact of Asia’s Giants: How China and India Could Save the Planet—or Destroy it, Time, April 3, p. 61-62.

Takashi, S. (2007) What the Economic Rise of China, India means for Japan, CEAS (Council on East Asian Community) June 19. Available at http://www.ceac.jp/e/commentary/backnumber.html

[viii] Extrapolating from Smalley, R.E. (2005) Future Global Energy Prosperity: The Terawatt Challenge, Materials Research Society Bulletin, v. 30, pp. 412-417.

[ix] Parfit (2005), Kammen (2006), Sawin (2007:36-39), Sawin and Mukherjee (2007).

Parfit, M. (2005, August) Future Power, National Geographic, pp. 4-31.

Kammen, D.M. (2006) The Rise of Renewable Energy, Scientific American, v. 295, pp. 84-93.

Sawin, J.L. (2007) Wind Power Still Soaring, pp. 36-37, and Solar Power Shining Bright, pp. 38-39, in The World Watch Institute: Vital Signs 2007-2008, W.W. Norton and Co., New York.

Sawin, J.L., and Mukherjee, I. (2007) Fossil Fuel Use Up Again, pp. 32-33 in The World Watch Institute: Vital Signs 2007-2008, W.W. Norton and Co., New York.

[x] Tollefson, J. (2010) Geoengineers Get the Fear, Nature, v. 461, p. 656.

[xi] Sources for geoengineering and its blowback from Hoffert et al. (2002), Angel (2006), Broad (2006), Morton (2007), Young (2007), Caldeira (2008), Biello (2009), Boyd et al. (2009), Jones (2009), Morton (2009), Shepherd (2009), Wood (2009), Keith et al. (2010), Kintisch (2010), Robock et al. (2010), Schneider (2010), Tollefson (2010), Pearce (2019, May 29).

Hoffert, M., Caldeira, K., Benford, G., Criswell, D.R., Green, C., Herzog, H. et al (2002) Advanced Technology Paths to Global Climate Stability: Energy for a Greenhouse Planet, Science, v. 298, pp. 981-987.

Angel, R. (2006) Feasibility of cooling the Earth with a cloud of small spacecraft near the inner Lagrange point (L1), Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), v. 103(46), pp. 17184-17189.

Broad, W.J. (2006, June 27) How to Cool a Planet (Maybe), New York Times.

Morton, O. (2007) Is This What It Takes To Save The World? Nature, v. 447, pp. 132-136.

Young, E. (2007, September 15) A Drop in the Ocean, NewScientist, pp. 43-45.

Caldeira, K. (2008) Taming the Angry Beast, Science, v. 322, p. 376-377.

Biello, D. (2009, June) Can Captured Carbon Save Coal? Scientific American, Earth 3.0, pp. 52-59.

Boyd, P.W., Jickells, T., Law, C.S., Blain, S., Boyle, E.A., Buessler, K.O., Coale, K.H., Cullen, J.J., and fifteen other authors (2009) Mesoscale Iron Enrichment Experiments 1993-2005: Synthesis and Future Directions, Science, v. 315, p. 612-617.

Jones, N. (2009) Sucking it up, Nature, v. 458, pp. 1094-1097.

Morton, O. (2009) Great White Hope, Nature, v. 458, pp. 1097-1100.

Shepherd, J.G., Working Group on Geoengineering the Climate (2009) Geoengineering the climate: science, governance and uncertainty (RS Policy document, 10/29) London, GB. Royal Society 98pp.

Wood, G. (2009, July/August) Moving Heaven and Earth, The Atlantic, pp. 70-76.

Schneider, S. (2010) The Worst-Case Scenario, Nature, v. 458, pp. 1104-1105.

Keith, D.W., Parson, E. and Morgan, M.G. (2010) Research on global sun block needed now, Nature, v. 463, pp. 426-427.

Kintisch, E. (2010) ‘Asilomar 2’ Takes Small Steps Toward Rules for Geoengineering, Science, v. 328,  pp. 22-23.

Robock, A., Bunzi, M., Kravitz, B., Stenchikov, G.L. (2010) A Test for Geoengineering? Science, v. 327, pp. 530-531.

Tollefson, J. (2010) Geoengineers Get the Fear, Nature, v. 461, p. 656.

Pearce, F. (2019, May 29) Geoengineer the Planet? More Scientists Now Say It Must Be an Option. Yale Environment 360, Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.

[xii] Oppenheimer, C. (2003) Climatic, environmental and human consequences of the largest known historic eruption: Tambora volcano (Indonesia) 1815, Progess in Physical Geography, v. 27, pp. 230-259.

Perhaps the only Solution to the Human Predicament

To face the human predicament and the ecologic crisis, or as Thomas Berry put it, “… to fix our minds on the magnitude of the task before us,” what must we do?[i]  What are the behaviors we need to change? Whatever they are, clearly they must fulfill at least one, and preferably, two fundamental goals. Firstly, they must help us to live in balance with the rest of the Earth. We bring our collective ruin otherwise, and all else will be pointless. It takes no great awareness to come to this conclusion. Nearly anyone at whatever stage of consciousness will agree: our planetary home must be able to sustain us. So, to what else can we all agree? Although perhaps less unanimously, a great majority of our human family will nevertheless agree on a second obligation: we must reduce the brutal hunger, violence, and disease suffered by the less fortunate. Billions suffer when others live the life of gods. Perhaps the only ones not in agreement with our reasoning here are the gods, themselves. The “one percent,” as the Occupy Wall Street movement called them.[1] Besides these relatively few (and powerful) people, most of us would agree on sustainability and some measure of equity as bottom-line conditions for our civilization.[ii]

Gustav Klimt

            Logically then, given that neither economics nor technology will turn our finite Earth into a planet of infinite carrying capacity, we must—to achieve humanity’s overriding goals—reduce the population of our species and we must (to use a word that admittedly lacks both irony and decorum) consume far less of the Earth’s resources and regenerating capabilities. We must consume in ways in which resources are renewed and in which pollution does not accumulate, and we must share the Earth’s bounty with our entire human and biologic family. These imperatives are so obvious they sound trite. Yet, demographers expect our numbers to rise to eleven billion by century’s end, economists expect a many-fold increase in economic activity, climatologists are concerned with run-away global heating, and we have seen evidence in this website for a horrific population crash. So, to continue the logic of our imperatives: the world’s poor need to have far fewer children, and the world’s affluent need to consume far less. To fulfill those basic goals will require an enormous change in the collective behavior of our family. Unprecedented problems will require unprecedented effort. 

Paul Klee: Darkness Visible.

Likely, the very structure of our economic and social systems, of civilization itself, will have to be changed. For we must produce and consume mindfully; that is, in ways in which most of the world have not seen in generations, except in tucked away pockets like Ladakh. But habits are hard to change. So entrenched are our destructive habits and the worldviews that sustain them that any substantial change will require a punctuated leap in our collective consciousness. It would require a complete make-over for us all: in our behaviors, beliefs, values, and worldviews. Thomas Berry put it this way: “It is not simply adaptation to a reduced supply of fuels or to some modification in our system of social or economic controls. Nor is it some slight change in our economic system. What is happening is something of a far greater magnitude. It is a radical change in our mode of consciousness. Our challenge is to create a new language, even a new sense of what it is to be human. It is to transcend not only national limitations, but even our species isolation, to enter into the larger community of living species. This brings about a completely new sense of reality and of value.”[iii] “Otherwise,” he warned, “we mistake the order of magnitude in this challenge.”[iv]   

Paul Klee: Magic Garden.

Thomas Berry was speaking of a biospheric consciousness, a worldview that few of us have ever inhabited. Einstein’s dictum again resonates: “We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” Foragers think like foragers, farmers think like farmers, and most of us in First World countries think like inhabitants of an industrial and post-industrial world. We produce, consume, and pollute.  And nothing short of death, collapse, or class war can force us to stop. We can, however, stop voluntarily. We can behave with what the scientist Vaclav Smil called “self-serving” altruism, and in a way that the deep ecologists have called “voluntary simplicity” or even “radical simplicity.”[v] Importantly, this self-serving altruism is redefining what we mean by the altruistic act. As Frederic Bender made clear:

 “This is not altruism, for three reasons. Altruism is an ethical ideal, according to which I should center my moral concern on others indifferent to my own interests. Obviously, altruism is just as dualistic as egoism, merely reversing the priorities of self and other.  Second, the human motivation to altruistic behavior, though not nonexistent, is notoriously weak. Most important, though, the ecosphere is not other, nondualistically conceived. We are the ecosphere…” and “we are completely dependent on the… ecosphere’s robustness...”[vi]

Joan Miro.

                  In this view, the self-sacrifice being proposed is not altruism in the way Darwinian evolutionists and psychologists have previously conceived of it, because we now perceive the people and the Earth for whom we are sacrificing to be an extension of ourselves, a part of whom we mean when we say “ourselves” and “me.” The sacrifice—downsizing our lifestyles, eating less meat, embracing green alternatives—is profoundly for me, not for some unrelated “other.”

Max Ernst: Woman, Old Man, and Flower.

Our ecological crises will not be the first time that altruism proves to be advantageous. In The Decent of Man Charles Darwin noted that in conflicts between tribes, one may benefit his tribe more through self-sacrifice “than by begetting offspring with a tendency to inherit his own good character.”[vii] Many acts of altruism have been found to be similarly valuable.[viii] In hunter-gatherer societies, sharing food, information, and decision-making leveled the playing field within a group. So did risking harm to oneself when ganging up on bullies and freeloaders. Survival of such groups reinforced altruism, both biologically and culturally. Christianity’s spread through the Roman Empire and Buddhism’s through Asia was due in part to the compassion[2] and altruism practiced by its priests.[ix] An important story within the saga of Civilization has been the steady institutionalization of individual rights, including suffrage, property rights, civil rights, workers’ rights, welfare, and religious rights. Each one of these was won through the sacrifice of much life and limb.[x] These acts of self-serving altruism curbed gross social inequalities and reduced suffering and social tensions, benefiting the societies.    

Red Leaves.

            Across time and space, the traditional schools of wisdom agree. According to Tenzin Gyatso, known as the 14th Dalai Lama, “High levels of compassion are nothing but an advanced state of self-interest.”[xi] In Wisdom: From Philosophy to Neuroscience, Stephen Hall finds that there exists a “surprisingly universal concept of wisdom. East or West, they all embrace social justice and insist on a code of public morality. They embrace an altruism that benefits the many.”[xii] According to the philosopher Karl Jaspers, for the four people he calls the paradigmatic individuals—Socrates, Buddha, Confucius, and Jesus—“human love was unlimited and universal.”[xiii] Love is not bounded by family, community, or nation. Given this empathic perspective, a person must act and a society must be structured to benefit the many and not to profit only the few.[xiv] These were the same values espoused by the 19th century utilitarian philosophers Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill and the 20th century Peter Singer.[3] For most of the perennial philosophies this idea was captured by the concept of compassion, where one comprehended another’s situation as her own. In the words of the Jewish philosopher, Martin Buber, we experience the other as thou, reverentially and intimately, as subject and not merely object,[xv] as a deeply conscious being just as I am, not as an It or an idea, not as an ends to my means. To come to this realization and to act in accordance has been considered—cross-culturally East and West, North and South—the ultimate form of human wisdom.

FOOTNOTES

[1] And no, this one percent is not the same as the biospheric one percent, or at least the overlap of their Venn diagram would be small.

[2] Compassion will be defined as the feeling that arises in witnessing or knowing of another’s suffering and that motivates a subsequent desire to help.

[3] Although philosophy means the love of wisdom, Stephen Hall (2010:37) finds that in “Over the last three centuries, [Western] philosophy has abandoned its function as a source of wisdom, and has restricted itself to knowledge.”

ENDNOTES

[i] Berry,T. (1988:37) The Dream of the Earth Sierra Club Books, San Francisco.

[ii] Gilson, D. and Perot, C. (2011, March/April) It’s the Inequality, Stupid, Mother Jones.Many analysts believe that sustainability cannot exist alongside poverty, because, if for no other reason, the poor will cut down the forest and poach the wild animal as long as they are hungry.

[iii] Berry (1988:42)

[iv] Berry (1988:42)

[v] Elgin (1981/1993), Smil (1994b), Merkel (2003).

Elgin, D. (1981/1993) Voluntary Simplicity: Toward a Way of Life that is Outwardly Simple, Inwardly Rich. Harper, New York.

Smil, V (1994b) How Many People Can the Earth Feed?  Population and Development Review, v. 20, pp. 255-292.

Merkel, J. (2003) Radical Simplicity: Small Footprints On A Finite Earth. New Society Publishers, Gabriola Island, BC, Canada.

[vi] Bender, F.L. (2003:24) The Culture of Extinction: Toward a Philosophy of Deep Ecology. Humanity Books, Amherst, New York.

[vii] For example, Darwin, C. (1879/2004:157-158).  The Descent of Man. Penguin Group, London.

[viii] Much of paragraph from Bowles, S. (2012) Warriors, Levelers, and the Role of Conflict in Human Social Evolution. Science, v. 336, pp. 876-879.

[ix] Atran, S., and Ginges, J. (2012) Religious and Sacred Imperatives in Human Conflict, Science, v. 336, pp. 855-857.

[x] Piven and Cloward (1979), Bowles (2012).

Piven, F.F, and Cloward, R.A. (1979) Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail. Vintage Books, New York.

[xi] Germer, C.K. (2009:160) The Mindful Path to Self-Compassion. Guilford Press, New York.

Hall, S. (2010:123) Wisdom: From Philosophy to Neuroscience. Alfred A. Knopf, New York.

[xii] Hall (2010:34).

[xiii] Jaspers (1957:92) Socrates, Buddha, Confucius, Jesus: The Paradigmatic Individuals. Harcourt Brace & Company, San Diego.

[xiv] Jaspers (1957), Hall (2010:30).

[xv] Buber, M. (1970) I and Thou. Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York. The Walter Kaufman translation cited here translates the German “Du” as “You,” and not “Thou” in Buber’s text.