ecospirit

The book's challenge for me is twofold. The first is to broaden my perspective from focusing almost exclusively on climate change as the central ecological issue of our time. Biodiversity loss, the overuse of nitrogen, land use, and water shortages are all boundaries whose interaction with climate change are crucial to the biosphere. The second is to suspend my “naturalistic fallacy” to consider the possibility that some high tech solutions might actually be worthwhile in getting us out of the mess created by the very technologies that are the hallmark of our human-dominated era, the Anthropocene (a term coined by one of the scientists in the group, Paul Crutzen, to describe our dominance of the planetary system since the beginning of the industrial era ca. 1800). This second challenge is far heavier, for it goes against some of my most cherished values.

So here is the crux. Are romantic Greens, seized by the “naturalistic fallacy,” missing the opportunity to utilize technology and market mechanisms to ease, indeed make possible, the final transition from pre-industrial poverty to sustainable energy, land use, agriculture, and housing for the nine billion humans who will be here by mid-century? Are we the ones who are unwittingly condemning billions to unnecessary starvation or death by exposure by our purist opposition to GMO's and nuclear power? What do we want to sustain, our Romantic values or the earth?

On the other hand, as Paul Kingsnorth argues in his equally challenging Orion article, “Dark Ecology,” Lynas joins a whole group of neo-environmentalists who place full faith in the very kinds of technological solutions that have often made problems worse by creating new, unforeseen ones. Moreover, they enthusiastically adopt (Kingsnorth's word is “worship”) capitalism, the very system that has ruthlessly heightened our ability to hunt, mine, burn and otherwise strip the earth of her resources, as the best economic engine for sustaining civilization while respecting those boundaries

Indeed, the book's title contains both hubris and hope. Hubris because we have usurped god (from the religious perspective), the ecosystem manager (Eugene Odum) become the God Species, able to create or destroy the post-natural (McKibben's End of Nature) world which we dominate. If we live in a web, as the ecologists eloquently show, we have the position of a master spider, spinning from a ubiquitous center in a global technocracy. And hope, because in the anthropocene, we have the tools to pull ourselves and crucially, the biosphere, out of the mess. Though he clearly understands what we're up against, Lynas is an upbeat optimist, identifying the engines of change as well as signs of coalescing international agreement after the debacle of Copenhagen, “humanity's darkest hour.” Characteristically, he points out that we have “only” crossed three of the nine boundaries, perhaps not so far along (in 2011 anyway) that we can't go back (They are: climate change, 390 ppm CO2 vs 350; biodiversity loss, 100 species extinct per million per year vs. a boundary of 10; and the nitrogen cycle, expressed in the amount of N2 removed from the atmosphere, millions of tonnes per year, 121 vs. 35.) Lynas' figures for the extinction rate are low - the range biologists give is from 1000 to 10,000 species/yr.