ecospirit

I started writing about human extinction in 2007. At that time, people thought I was extreme, a doomer. Not any more.

Last Sunday night a group of us held a discussion of Richard Powers' The Overstory, an amazing novel about the primacy of trees for the biosphere. The ways in which trees are interconnected, even across species, and work for the good of the entire tree community (and beyond), implicitly suggests a model for an awakened humanity. It was a good group, with a lot of knowledge of science as well as literary arts in the room.

I have long gardened with the friend who hosted the evening, and at least once a year he has asked me what I thought about our chances of warding off climate change. Five years ago, I still thought we had a glimmer. Jeff always listened carefully, but I felt his essential optimism buoyed a hope that we would at least muddle through.

The group who gathered Sunday night were not doomers. There are a handful of us around these parts, but I was the only one present with a history of that mask. When Jeff read aloud the remarkable page right before the book's end (475) which outlines the history of life as one 24-hour day on Earth, ending with our species bringing on a huge crash of the tree of life at midnight, we paused to consider our prospects. Of the eight people in the room, not one faced down the group, saying "No, this can't possibly be. We can outlast climate change." Society has moved in the last five years to a much more widespread acceptance of the huge possibility of extinction staring back at us from the hurricane winds of the immediate future.

We did consider the likelihood of the plotline of one of the characters. Neelay, a computer genius a generation ahead of the pack, designs an online game in which the players win by designing a sustainable world. By the time he gets to version 7, artificial intelligence works on its own to create a sustainable virtual world with stunningly realistic imagery. Having heard dire warnings about AI effectively supplanting us as earth masters, it seemed next to impossible. Could something like this happen? Do we have time? ."It depends upon the programmers," Tal said. But in the Overstory, the smartest programmers are only interested in amassing wealth through the game. Neelay is an outlier, but what if he can leverage salvaging civilization through the competitive instinct?

What I find interesting in this scenario is that it using gaming to make the leap to a life-affirming consciousness at the next holonic level, that of the group, society, the mass. This is the opposite of what demagogues do so effectively. Individual breakthroughs are evident throughout history, thus the stories of enlightened individuals and god-men. But it seems we need to be tricked into doing the same as society. And the model for the kind of benign intelligence needed to preserve the web is the collective behavior of trees.

When I got home, I summarized for Geeta the group's response about extinction. "So how will you live now?" she asked.

I responded that I try to appreciate the glories of Creation every day, treating my family and circle of friends as compassionately as I can. In other words, live every day as if it were our last.

Geeta thought this was the same as giving up, which she is not ready to do, though she acknowledges the gravity of climate disruption, habitat displacement and all the rest.

The next morning I recalled the debate between Paul Kingsnorth, founder of the Dark Mountain Project (my touchstone) and Naomi Klein, the brilliant socialist climate activist, a few years ago. Klein was incensed that Kingsnorth accepted endgame for the species, saying he was a traitor to the movement. The unflagging ecojournalist George Monbiot said the same in a heated public debate with Kingsnorth at the Uncivilization Festival in 2014. 

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/20/magazine/its-the-end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it-and-he-feels-fine.html

The difference between fighting and acceptance feels critical, but the passage in St. Paul where he speaks of members of the faith community as different parts of the Body of Christ comes to mind. Accepting our situation while continuing to live as sustainably as possible is not the same as going on a carbon spree because all is lost. The hands, feet and heart can be on the front lines while the nurturers gather and cook, and the observers hold everyone in the light, some seeding the noosphere with thoughts on the state of the Ark, either home at the hearth, or incubating in jail prior to the next action.

Body of Christ? Perhaps a better metaphor is Gaia's body. Gaia's body is the intricately interconnected biosphere that has co-evolved over Earth's lifetime. The mystical body of Christ may work for some humans as we imagine our own body. But as Overstory eloquently shows by the example of the community of trees, Gaia's reality is a lot more complex than that of a single big-brained primate. And, as Lovelock pointed out, the key thing to understand about Gaia is that the intelligence is in the whole. We don't direct it, any more than any part of the body- not even the brain-mind- can act independently from the whole.

Gaia has multiple loci of intelligence. If we use our intelligence for the good of the whole Earth body, then the system continues with us as a part of it. But our part in Gaia's story has been a destructive one, especially since the industrial revolution and globalization. It may well be too late for the human experiment to mend its intelligence in ways that would insure our perseverance as one locus of the web.

I built my house in 1979. During the first few years, I would often hear a loud thump against the south dormer wall within which we slept. Whap, thump, whap. It happened night after night. Finally, I went outside just after hearing the sound, inspecting the wall illuminated by moonlight. There clung a flying squirrel, eyeing me with casual interest. Our house was the nearest tree in this newly-configured section of Southern Appalachian forest.

Around 1982, I realized that I had not cut enough trees to allow sufficient solar gain for my passive solar house. I cut another section of them to the south, mostly hickory. After this, no more whaps and thumps. The flying squirrel had lost its habitat.

A few weeks ago, I was sitting at the dinner table and saw, from the corner of my eye, something that looked like a mid-sized rodent jump from the tube in our chimney in which our hot water pipes run to the floor, and scamper to the far end of the living room. Whatever it was, it was clearly too big for a mousetrap, but smaller than a rat. I called Geeta to find out where she had put the mouse poison.

About a week later, the two of us were standing in the dining room and the critter appeared at the opening of the chimney plumbing tube. We froze, but when we took a step towards it, the squirrel sailed through the air, and scampered again to the west wall of the house.

We have had several encounters since. Given our tree habitat, I suspect it is the southern flying squirrel, and it likes peanut butter and honey, which it finds in the little packets you pick up at motel restaurants. It regularly knocks over the container of almond butter, but has yet to find a way in. I have followed it to a tiny whole in the west block wall more than once, but I have no idea how it gets into the house. It has yet to venture inside the have-a-heart trap baited with one of those peanut butter packets. I'm not really sure how to get rid of it, but I definitely mean it no harm.

So the cycle is complete. After 35 years, the descendant of the original squirrel is back, and it has made a home inside my intrusive house. I'd call that poetic justice.