Having finished Part III, and as I contemplate Part IV, which will be short, I ran across another instructive example of what Flatland is all about. I am referring to yet another book about the human prospect called Adventures in the Anthropocence by science journalist Gaia Vince. I will quote from the Salon interview. Here is Lindsay Abrams' introduction to that give & take.
The Anthropocene: Don’t worry about trying to pronounce it. Don’t even worry about whether or not geologists decide we've officially entered it. This is the Age of Man: the epoch of mass extinction, of rapidly acidifying oceans and of unprecedented climate change – transformation on a planetary scale, all of which we’ve brought on ourselves.
Gaia Vince, formerly the editor of the journal Nature and the magazine New Scientist and a current editor at the journal Nature Climate Change, has been seeing this all play out for years; for some added perspective, she took an 800-day trip around the world, encountering places where humanity’s influence on the planet is already abundantly evident – and where humans are trying to redirect that influence into something more favorable.
Problem-solving in the Anthropocene is a monumental task: If people aren’t moving mountains yet, Vince at least documents cases where they’re painting them, and, in Nepal, connecting them to WiFi. They’re creating artificial glaciers in Ladakh, using electrical currents to restore coral reefs in Bali and, back in New Jersey, trying to create artificial trees that can remove CO2 from the atmosphere much more effectively than their natural counterparts.
Vince, in other words, is an optimist. Or, to put it better, she believes in humanity’s power to change their world – for better or for worse.
The problems of the Anthropocene may be dire, and they’re definitely unequal, she tells Salon, but we have innovation on our side.
Well, OK, I probably don't have to go on at this point, but where's the fun in that? Gaia "believes in humanity's power to change the world—for better or worse." Already we've encountered our first insurmountable problem. Given where we are in the 21st century, and what humans have been doing on Earth over the last 50,000 years, is it really so unpredictable whether the changes coming will be for better or for worse?
Ms. Vince believes human actions in the future could go either way, even with all the historical baggage we humans are carrying.
Q — It also seems like there’s a little bit of a moral argument there: If we acknowledge that humans are influencing the planet it also means acknowledging our responsibility to do something about it.
A — Yes, that’s a moral viewpoint that you can take or not take. In terms of responsibility, it’s up to every individual to decide whether they feel responsible or not. For me, I think we certainly have a responsibility to the people who are alive now and who will be living in the future, who will feel the impacts and are already feeling the impacts of what we’re doing right now. We’re the only species that can have this big planetary-scale impact and that can change this, and at the same time we have to decide what of nature we think is worth preserving or not worth preserving.
It’s a very human-centric viewpoint, but we’re humans.
Right, a very human-centric point of view. See Flatland, Part II.
Do we like elephants? If we do, maybe we should stop killing an elephant every 20 minutes, as we are at the moment. There won’t be elephants in 20 years, otherwise.
In terms of morals, it’s not nice to kill elephants if we’re hurting them, but in terms of future generations, do we want to live in a world where there are no elephants? Do we want to live in a world where people are starving because we haven’t sorted out the way to grow crops? These are all things that I think we do have some sort of moral responsibility for.
Right, the only reason to stop killing elephants is because some humans believe the world is a much nicer place if there are elephants in it.
People try to put a loaded moral value to the Anthropocene, and it’s a personal choice. We can decide what we want to do: We can be the best humans for the next generation or we can continue to blunder around. It’s a choice that we’ve got to make. I think there are lots of international and global conversations we need to be having which we’re not having at the moment.
Right, it's a "choice" we humans have got to make. There's your Blank Slate. See Flatland, Part I. Perhaps it is merely a coincidence that all the "choices" humans have made over the 50,000 years all went in one direction. Let's look at some more future "choices" we can make.
Q — What about geoengineering on a larger scale? There’s a lot of controversy about whether that will ever be feasible. You describe some promising areas where people are working on that, but is there a limit to our ability to innovate ourselves out of these crises?
A — I don’t know. We are pretty innovative; we can try all sorts of things. We can go to the moon, so presumably… We can already make rain fall: people are cloud-seeding. In China they’re trying to get rain to fall in certain areas and I think they’ve tried it in California as well. We’ve got lots of ability to geoengineer and we’re doing it already; we’re warming the climate, that’s a massive amount of geoengineering.
Yes, we're making "choices" again, but it seems that we can only "choose" to apply this technology, or that technology. Despite this rather severe limit on our behavior, Ms. Vince believes humans still have lots of other "choices" they can make to turn this Anthropocene mess around, despite the fact that they don't seem to be making any important "choices" in 2014 (and didn't make any in 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, etc.).
And by the way—let's be absolutely clear on this point—a promise to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the future is not a "choice" made today.
Count how many times the words 'choice', 'decide' or 'decision' appear in Gaia's next answer.
Q — Intentional geoengineering is a little different from what we’re doing now, where the climate warming is more of an unintentional byproduct of energy production…
A — I mean yeah, and that’s arguable in itself — it may have been an unintentional byproduct maybe 100 years ago, but now that we know what carbon does and we’re continuing to burn it I’d say it’s not unintentional anymore. We’re fully culpable for the carbon dioxide we release and for the climate warming that ensues from it. I think we really are geoengineering. We’re changing the acidity of the oceans, and we’re basically doing it deliberately because we know perfectly well — it’s very, very simple science — what the effects of this are, and yet we’re continuing to do it because we’ve made the choice that this cheap, easy energy is worth the climate change that results.
That’s a societal choice that we’ve made. We could equally make the societal choice that, I don’t know, putting in reflective clouds to lower the temperature is worth the risks that that might entail. It might make crops grow more. These are all choices that we have to make; the thing is who’s making the choices and who’s experiencing the effect. That’s a problem, and we haven’t really had those decisions made yet. While we’re deciding, the simple physics means that the earth is already being geoengineered. We’re living in a different world already; this is already the Anthropocene. The climate has already changed. We’re already living in different circumstances where extreme storms are much more likely, where hurricanes and storm surges and erosion are much more likely, where drought is much more likely in certain places and floods are more likely in other places.
While we have to decide what we’re going to do about these situations in the future — Are we happy to live like this? Or do we want to somehow roll it back? Or are we going to adapt? — we have to, at the same time, adapt our everyday living to this changed reality. Are we going to carry on letting people rebuild houses in New Orleans when it’s bound to be flooded again pretty soon? Are we going to just step up the bill for the insurance? We have to make these decisions, and I think this is a really interesting time to be living, because this is a changed world and we have to face things that none of our ancestors faced with the same ability to do anything about it.
The correct answer is 9 times. Let's finish up.
I want to ask you a bit about the book’s epilogue, where you imagine the year 2100 through your son’s eyes. I found it very haunting — you describe this world that’s powered by renewables, that’s in a time of peace without a lot of poverty, but with a lot of tradeoffs: the loss of biodiversity, of corals, and major conflicts leading up to it. Do you see that as an optimistic scenario for the future?
I am an optimist. I have to be, because I have a son and I’m very fond of people, and I hope to be alive for many decades to come.
An honest answer!
Unfortunately, if humanity is going to get out of its self-created mess, perhaps not being so fond of people—trying to be "objective" about them—is the only way out.
And the future is so totally and absolutely unknowable!
I try to be optimistic, but at the same time… That epilogue is just one tiny little view of what could happen. We can’t see into the future, but what we can see is the trajectory we’re going on. I try to be optimistic with that; I try to find a positive outcome in a world where there is a lot to be nervous about. A lot of things, we’ve kind of left it too late. Other ones we’ve still got time to turn it around, but are we going to be able to act in time? I don’t know.
And then there are game-changers that we don’t know anything about. We can’t see into the future, but some things could completely transform the whole of the Anthropocene. For example, if there was another Spanish Flu or some sort of epidemic that wiped out an enormous portion of humanity, that would completely change things; it would completely change everything. Or fusion power could happen; that could work, and then we’d have instantly cheap, available, carbon-free energy. We don’t know what could happen. I try to be optimistic.
Spanish Flu? Fusion Power? Gee whiz, there's all sort of shit we can't predict.
Ms. Vince left changes in human behavior off her short list of future "game-changers" because she believes humans can make "choices" about stuff like global warming, because the human mind is a Blank Slate, and, therefore, everything is possible for humans. We could stop killing elephants today!
Unfortunately for this optimistic view, it appears that humans are utterly predictable. The only "game-changer" that would truly matter would be a fundamental change in how humans treat the biosphere and each other. So I guess we better pray for Fusion Power to come along and save our bacon.
Brilliant!
Posted by: Mike Roberts | 11/17/2014 at 05:31 PM