ecospirit

Returning from considering the possibilities of Deep Time, I come upon the present geological period, one dominated by human artifacts and titanic planetary shifts we have brought about, chiefly through burning fossil carbon. It is aptly named the Anthropocene. While many would like to see the age of mammals, the Cenozoic era, continue, especially the sweet spot in which we have thrived, the Holocene period, we have clearly thrust ourselves, and the entire biosphere, into a brave new world. Though modern industrial civilization is out of control, we are now in charge, as indicated in the bold book by Mark Lynas I reviewed here, The God Species

If we are out of control, shouldn't we perhaps submit to the forces of chaos, wipe the slate clean, and try to create something more sustainable from the wreckage? For several years now I have been advocating economic collapse, the sooner the better, since the longer we continue on our present reckless course, the greater the number of extinctions and the more ecosystems to go into collapse But it has finally sunk in that industrial collapse might actually push us over the edge. For the irony is that industrial pollutants, mostly sulfates, are blocking more incoming radiation – a full 1degree C. That extra degree would bring us to the brink of runaway climate change, the 3 degree threshold outlined in another of Lynas's books, Six Degrees. We may well be already there. James Hansen argues that 2 degrees Celsius, around which there is an international consensus, is too soft as a safe target, that 1.5 degrees is the tipping point. Though we are “only” at .8 degrees now, a strong El Nino – which may have just begun - would release another .2 still stored in the oceans, and the carbon cycle will deliver another .8 degrees over its period of 20 years. That would leave us at 2.8C by 2035. Unless a significant amount of carbon is removed soon, we have locked in that tipping point within twenty years, even if we stopped further fossil emissions today.

So we are stuck with global industrialization, at least for now. The best we can do is to try to limit growth, approaching a steady-state, continuing to release industrial aerosols while we work to find something more benign, creating a soft landing for a more mature, sustainable Anthropocene. We seem to be approaching a global consensus that something robust needs to be done, with major statements by the G-7 in late spring, and a deepening commitment from China to the major agreement announced last fall between China and the US, the two biggest players. Global corporations are getting it, with almost 90 companies signing on to Obama's effort to get their cooperation in emissions reductions. Here's the link again to the New York magazine article on 2015's potentially momentous shift.  We are starting to transition to a path of lower carbon pollution; however, it has not come soon enough to avoid catastrophic climate change. So the major players in the Anthropocene scenario, the developed nations and their partner global corporations, will need to go into crisis mode and design some major tinkering, something beyond redoubling efforts to reduce omissions.

GEOENGINEERING. An atmosphere manipulated by humans is the first major piece of geoengineering. It started with the Industrial Revolution in Britain (the coal-fired steam pump to be precise), with the process accelerating greatly when the US and Europe industrialized , redoubling with re-industrialization during post WWII, and finally the rapid industrialization of China in the 1990's. This process, which began willy-nilly, will not end without some intentional reverse geoengineering of the sort being discussed by scientists and policymakers world-wide. Such discussions have intensified in recent years, with calls for public disclosure and vetting of potential experiments involving some of the techniques being proposed. No matter what the people in the streets, town halls, and blogosphere say, the global power structure, both national and corporate, will simply not go into stoic mode and let the climate catastrophe run away with us in its wake. We may still prove to have been too smart for our own good, but we are going to use the tools at our disposal.

I know this flies in the face of the romantic/green position, which asks us to sacrifice our high-consumption lifestyles and is wary of technological fixes, which got us into the mess in the first place. They would also endorse Thomas Berry's challenge that we need a “re-invention of the human at the species level.” Since natural selection would obviously take far too long to have any effect on fast-moving planetary events, Berry can only be talking about cultural evolution, which has been the agent of planetary change via the huge acceleration in human invention. (This is pointed out by James Lovelock, whose latest book is the focus for the next post in this series). Greens would correctly point out that large-scale attempts at geo-engineering are not only potentially dangerous for Gaia, they would have the effect of encouraging earthlings to relax about carbon emissions. But as I should have made clear, the best we can do in reducing emissions will fail to halt a very steep climate change curve which is accelerating every day. Geoengineering will come only when it absolutely must, and it will be about buying time, not “solving” climate change.

Geo-engineering could come in two forms. The first is removing carbon from the air, carbon capture and storage (CCS). Several years ago, after a talk in Raleigh in which he touted this as one answer to our dilemma, I asked James Hansen if he knew of any peer-reviewed studies of the process. He said no, he did not, but “surely the best method would be to capture it from power plants and pump it to the bottom of the ocean, where it would do the least harm.” In other words, he didn't really have a a clue. Surveying the status of such projects today, one plant continues operation in Finland. Both the Eurozone and the US started prototypes, then dropped them because of funding overruns. The process is extremely expensive and it is doubtful we will ever have the will or the money to do much of it.

The other form of geo-engineering is far more powerful and far cheaper to do, namely limiting the amount of sunlight that reaches the earth in the first place. Two methods have been put forth. One is to emulate volcanoes. Volcanoes throw out a lot of sulfur dioxide, which has the effect of blocking incoming radiation. Large eruptions have had global cooling effects for a year or more (the Pintatubo eruption of 1991, for example), and scientists think that a series of huge eruptions may have caused at least one of the planet's large extinction events.

The process would be fairly simple. Planes would fly into the stratosphere at the poles and dump sulfur dioxide, which would spread and create the effect of a high-altitude volcanic eruption. The process would be repeated at required intervals until the cooling effect would not be needed any more. Since the effects of such an activity would be unknown in advance, scientists have proposed small-scale experiments to get some data, hopefully exposing negative side effects. One of these, which may not be detectable at a small scale, is that the sky would no longer be as blue, based on observations of largescale eruptions in the past. 

A second promising method would be to artificially create low-altitude, extra-bright clouds over oceans which would reflect some of the sun's rays back into space. Armand Neukermans, building on the work of John Latham at NCAR, has made substantial progress towards creating aerosols from ocean water which could greatly enhance the reflectivity of these low-lying clouds. This would be economical as well as less risky than injecting sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere – although the aerosol droplets would ultimately need to be injected 10 miles into the stratosphere for maximum effect. The first oceanic experiment is scheduled for Moss Landing, CA next year.

Though many greens, including those like myself thoroughly drenched in romantic values, would prefer to let it all crash, I have reached clarity that we must stay with the global industrial system long enough to see through the geoengineering prior to collapse. If we don't create conditions for a soft landing of the industrial age, we face the twin dangers of losing the aerosol buffer and of not having the means to create the atmospheric tinkering to cool things down. Paul Gilding lays out this second part in probable detail in The Great Disruption, where he argues that big companies have one last co-ordinated action to complete before being replaced by a new order, more earth-friendly. He expects that, once the developed nations experience the first massive climate shocks, a global alliance will quickly form to rapidly transform industrial products to fight the climate war, similar to what US corporations achieved during WWII, only at a more gargantuan scale.

So geoengineering will come, and it will need to be soon to be effective. While the climate diplomats in Paris this December are scrutinizing endless draft texts for something their governments can accept, there could well be a parallel underground conference of their engineer counterparts discussing strategies for coordination of these massive projects. There is a sense in which an international treaty, a second Peace of Paris, would be the “noble lie” which serious policy players, advised by scientists, would use as cover for their work of “saving civilization.” How such a scenario might unfold is unclear. The best case is for the best possible research to be done, and that the action will be co-ordinated by the international community, rather than rogue states or corporations.

There is clearly a comparison with another signal event of the Anthropocene, the first atom bomb test in Alamagordo, New Mexico. Scientists observing it were laying bets whether the earth's atmosphere would survive. Robert Oppenheimer quoted the Bhagavad-Gita, “I am the destroyer of worlds.” The rest is central history of the Anthropocene. We dropped two bombs, devastating two large cities in Japan, which led to a nuclear stalemate that has dampened our warlike tendencies, due to the MAD consequences. As with the Manhattan Project, we simply don't know how a complex earth system (Gaia) will respond to rapid large-scale geoengineering. We don't know enough variables to build a reliable model. We will need to face the risk of unexpected consequences.

Risk-taking is a hallmark of the Anthropocene, and one risk creates the scenario for the next (viz nuclear power), even greater risk. At some point it will end, either with a huge failed gamble, or with a gradual series of stepped-down actions, ushering in a more sustainable successor to the Anthropocene. Either way, its days are numbered, for it will be the shortest geological era ever, a tiny stratum in the geological record.

Honest hope is like tough love, continually tested by the realization that the only certainty is immense uncertainty. Nature has always been uncertain. But since we've flourished during a long calm, the 10,000-year Holocene Epoch, we have become lazy. We take it for granted that farmers will continue to feed 7 to 9 billion people and that we will be able to suck out all the fossil fuels the Earth has sequestered to replace animal power. We are used to easy street. The Big Easy – New Orleans before Katrina. Though humanity has made it through some very tough times, especially repeated eras of glaciation, we have never faced rapid warming and all that sets in motion in the biosphere. As one climate scientist recently said, “They have no idea of what's coming.” The scale of climate disruption we face is unprecedented.

Instead of honest hope, hydra-headed denial fuels a flight from uncertainty into Providence. Dumanoski outlines three forms of providential salvation: faith in the technological fixes that have gotten us through every bottleneck until now; deliverance by the invisible hand of the market; and the clincher – deliverance through Apocalypse and the end of human history. Though these may all sound like the overconfidence of the political right, these fantasies lurk in us all to some degree.

Grimly clinging to my last thread of honest hope, I recently led a retreat entitled “Collapsing Consciously.” Readers of this blog might recognize the title from my review of Carolyn Baker (March 31). Though the very structure of my retreats, which are based upon Joanna Macy's work in moving through despair to an awakened level of coping, insures residual or renewed hope, my dogged reading of the latest climate science made my statement about honest hope the most tenuous ever. I told the group that honest hope remained, but that it was tied to the thinnest of moorings.

I was completely honest with the group, outlining the latest IPCC report (as well as its glaring omission of the Arctic methane emergency), the tenuousness of the world economic order, and the continuing geopolitical impasse over an international treaty on climate. The latter was leavened by my joining the People's Climate March the preceding week, but we don't know yet if that remarkable event will lead to the necessary shift from protective nationalism to an awakened last-hour accord. And in the central exercise, the Truth Mandala, I once again confessed my fear that we would not survive imminent climate apocalypse.

But the process was resilient enough to allow the group to leaven my darkness and fear, as participants shared their openness to the movement of the Spirit in the midst of dire uncertainty. One person, who had spoken twice of her despair, anger, and deep sadness over the earth crisis came forward, placed both hands on the floor, and testified to the hope that upheld everything. This brought me to a place of wonderment, for shortly before I had pointed out that the very ground of this ritual confession of our deepest feelings was hope. But I had not experienced hope as I spoke. Her eloquent act brought the Buddha's mudra, touch the earth, to bear on our ritual.

As I reviewed the retreat afterwards, rereading Dumanoski's chapter on honest hope. I was startled to realize that my utilization of her concept had subtly morphed over time into a desire that, with some tweaking, the established order would survive. Despite years of wrestling with the central moral dilemma of anthropogenic global ecocrisis, I am still seized by our cultural myth, fearing a break with comforts and the tenuous security of the established order. Thus when I experience myself as cooly rational, I am still provisionally open to techno-fixes like geoengineering, nuclear power, or GMO's as inevitable in the brave new Anthropocene. But this is not honest hope. Honest hope means accepting the challenge of devolving from a complex extractive civilization to a cultural order that is resilient in the face of warming.

“We don't know.” So often my audience says this when I point fatalistically to our impending end. Too often this simply covers a deep-rooted denial of the gravity of our situation. Sometimes it is the simple child-like faith that “God wouldn't let us perish.” But it can also be a genuine openness to the possibility for something new and unforeseen hidden in the nucleus of our uncertain moment in history.

Towards the end of that retreat, I actually found myself saying we don't know for the first time. A sense of wonder and possibility was moving through the room; one man named it the Holy Spirit. The place from which that sentence surprisingly emerged was different from honest hope. And since I later realized that what I was calling honest hope was really a rationalization for a last-ditch confidence that our way of life could be salvaged in some way, then the statement was a tentative doorway to something deeper, even scarier, and more real.

There is a people's climate movement building, with many laudable efforts such as fossil folly divestment, Transition Towns, rapid renewable ramp-ups, shifts in agricultural practices, and a growing call for replacing capitalism with an economic system that is responsive to the earth's stability as well as a chastened but sustainable human presence. But it appears as if we simply don't have time to make changes; we have squandered too many chances. The days of honest hope are coming to an end.

So if we relinquish honest hope, what are we left with? We are in a chiasm strongly reminiscent of the Hebrew community after the fall of the First Temple. It is time for a prophetic response that acknowledges the deep sadness and regret of our seemingly impossible dilemma. Such a response would acknowledge that You have broken God's covenant and will suffer for your ecological sins – but be nevertheless grounded in a deep place of hope. The Hebrew word is batah: confidence, security, without care. It is redoubled in the New Testament with the Greek elpis (“whence cometh our help”) - for elpis is the root of “help.” Neither of these terms can be modified by a downside, as we do with “hope” in everyday speech. Biblical hope is complete, total. It is an unshakable reality, not a feeling.

Even spiritually-minded moderns do not often show this kind of hope. Usually when I hear folks testify to it, I doubt them; surely their faith has not been sufficiently tested. Well we are being tested, and “honest hope” is not going to answer the test.

No matter how bad things get, we need to continue to act as if our actions mattered, honest hope or no, cultivating batah/elpis by something like Paul's continual prayer. When asked the reason for our hope as the world as we know it crumbles around us, answer as Paul did in I Peter 3:15 – Be prepared to give the defense that the Light (Christ) is in your Heart... The experience of hope gives grounds for faith, what I call cosmological faith. This is not collapsing into the arms of Apocalypse, confident of a place in heaven, but seeding the hope of the new Phoenix, whose form we know not. Cosmological faith, rooted in biblical hope, is my anchor when honest hope has become thin to the point of vanishing.

“Why We Resist the Truth about Climate Change.” Hamilton answers the book's subtitle in a series of no-nonsense chapters: growth fetishism, addiction to consumer life, denial in a myriad of forms, and the “new foundation” (Descartes) upon which the others are built, disconnection from Nature. Each of these chapters is compelling, but I found the one on denial particularly enlightening. I have blogged about one of the cornerstones of recent Republican policy, climate denialism, trying to understand the curious phenomenon ("Why Educated Republicans Are in Denial about Climate Change” - see April 25).  Hamilton's searching analysis takes us into its historical roots with the fall of the Berlin Wall, closely followed by the breakup of the Soviet Union (1989-91), to reveal how quickly the conservative right seized upon a new enemy, environmentalism: “America did not fight and win the wars of the twentieth century to make the world safe for green vegetables” (Richard Darman, the elder Bush's OMB director).

My post argues in terms of Nietzsche's will to power (conservatives embrace it and liberals don't), but Hamilton's analysis is more telling. The twin ideas of progress and mastery of nature “define modernity itself” for conservatives, and progress is identified for them with unfettered growth. He goes into detail tracing the conservative think-tanks, initially founded by nuclear war hawk-scientists, and how they have systematically and effectively worked to undercut the liberal critique of human overreach. And if there is collateral damage, it can easily be managed by geo-engineering, whose origins lie with those same military-scientific heroes of the right.

Hamilton outlines where we are headed in a chapter entitled “The Four-Degree World.” It is the briefest in the book, for he relies on Mark Lynas's brilliantly documented Six Degrees. I am reading that as well, and am in the midst of the terrifying long chapter “Three Degrees.” In Requiem, all that Hamilton needs to do is point to what is now the consensus view of climate scientists of where we are headed – 4 degrees Celsius warming - which he gets from attending a pre-Copenhagen global conference in Oxford of climate scientists with which he frames the chapter. As opposed to public statements, these sober and shaken researchers shared among themselves their deepest fears based on the dawning truth that global civilization was not coping with a situation that the scientists were finding was much, much worse than the two-degree world they had initially assessed.

“Relinquishing our rosy view of how the future will unfold is a task more difficult that it may appear because the vision of a stable and sympathetic future undergirds our sense of self and our place in the world.” (210) “Awakening to the prospect of climate disruption compels us to abandon” our comfortable beliefs. Thus begins a powerful final chapter in which Hamilton argues that we must “despair, accept, act.” Earlier, he acknowledged the adaptive quality of unrealistic illusions about the future; they keep hope alive, producing action (Shelley Taylor, Positive Illusions). But he seizes upon Taylor's key distinction, “Illusions respond and adapt as reality forces itself upon us, while delusions are held despite the evidence of the outside world...evidence that large -scale climate change is unavoidable has now become so strong that healthy illusion is becoming unhealthy delusion” (131-32).