Thursday, April 25, 2019
The Overstory Remains, Not Necessarily the Arborists Beneath
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.
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.
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Thanks, Bob, I'm on page 296 of "Overstory:" still up in a tree. Powers is touching me deeply. I'll be at Celo in July. Oesch family just spent a week with me in Beaufort, kayaking, walking beaches.
Yes, unknown, and I just went to a mind-expanding presentation on biochar by Albert Bates last night in a farm east of Asheville with Gred, our local char-man. So much to integrate. Look forward to seeing unknown thee in July.
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