ecospirit

Ok, I admit I’ve been sipping Kool-Aid, the hopium of these bright young Brits who rationalize this slippery world, its calibrated risks, but most of all, trade on my love of my fellow humans and their magnificent potential.  Though Ord places climate change fourth on his list of risks, it is the one that is most apparent for anyone with eyes open.  Reading that it is fourth in his list of existential risks did not make me focus more on the other three for very long, since I know a lot less about them.  But it did have the effect of getting me to relax more about the huge climate shifts that are accelerating.  This was a mistake, a failure of moral imagination.  Huge shifts are already underway. To be honest, we are in Earth Overshoot, and that alone is enough to render our continued existence a vanishing hope.  

 Like Ord, I love humanity, though shudder at the power of our mistakes, which we still keep making, with planetary consequences. We are as gods. And Ord struck a chord when he spoke of the impossibility of voluntarily resetting at a more primitive level, for in the Anthropocene humans are needed to shepherd Creation that we have so disrupted, and that is now colonized as our planetary realm of control.  This is true for our species in terms of economics, agroforestry, and all levels of growth, with the dream of “sustainability,” mainly to be found in gene manipulation and the possibilities of geoengineering. But it is also true of the role of scientists and conservationists in preserving plant and animal species, which gives support to our continued role as ecosystem manager (Eugene Odum). 

What is our responsibility to the future? Our village of Celo, NC is sponsoring its annual Cabin Fever University, and spurred by reading Ord, McCaskill and other Oxford philosophers, I am hosting a discussion of this topic next month.

Human, Earthly, and Post-Human Futures: What is our responsibility to the future?  Whose future?  We will explore the notion of long-termism presented in works like To Be a Good Ancestor, The Precipice, and Effective Altruism founder Will MacCaskill’s What We Owe the Future?  One of the key questions raised in these works is: does the Earth, or the universe for that matter, have value without homo sapiens or some other self-reflective species embedded within it?  Thomas Berry formulated a similar question in The Universe Story ( with Brian Swimme, 1992), affirming that the Universe knows itself through our participative deep listening, postulating this was a fundamental and necessary quality of the universe.

When we are facing possible near-term extinction, our responsibility to the future is hugely relevant. What’s odd about this is that I’ve circled back to my roots (Sunderlal Bahuguna, Thomas Berry, ecotheology) by taking what feels like a detour through a group of neo-Utilitarians. I am certain that Jeremy Bentham never imagined that his simple guide for right and wrong would turn out to be a recipe for human colonization of the universe.  Such is the power of instrumental, technological science unleashed by the return to Robber Baron capitalism, combined with Bentham’s shallow operative morality. 

Regarding near-term extinction, The Guardian published a recent article featuring the latest climate science to forecast a range of temperatures for tipping points.  We are at the lower threshold of four now: West Antarctic ice sheet, Greenland ice sheet, northern permafrost belt abrupt thaw, and tropical coral reef mass die-off.   

The Greenland ice sheet collapse is the highest probablility of already being in collapse state, at the present 1.2 degrees of warming. My denial, which refuses to completely go away, makes me look to the mid-range, hoping beyond hope that surely we aren’t there already.  But we know that in almost every instance thusfar, climate scientists have underestimated the speed of change, starting with the consensus that held from the late nineties until the Paris Accord that the magic number was 2 degrees C.  Now even 1.5 looks too optimistic for several tipping points.  And they interlock, producing a cascade effect. 

And that methane burp?  Scientists do not have a clear understanding of how and when this might happen, but some of them (Peter Wadhams) think it could happen at any time, with immediate catastrophic consequences.

It shouldn’t require a Sam Bankman-Fried crypto meltdown to see through the shallow morality of the neo-Utilitarians.  Their problem is an inability to see that humans are not the apex of evolutionary history, which is continuous, and thoroughly buying into the concomitant myth of infinite (human) progress. In the next series of posts, I will look at our responsibility within the context of evolutionary history at the end of the Anthropocene, the shortest geological period in Earth history. This will be from the perspective of my personal wrestling with Overshoot and looming climate catastrophe, aided by a tiny group of friends. I invite us all to embrace the metanoia of letting go of denial and techno-fixes and accepting the necessity of collapse - and into the Mystery beyond.

 

 

Labels: EarthOvershoot, Effective Altruism, Eugene Odum, JeremyBentham, near-term extinction, Peter Wadhams, the Precipice, Toby Ord