Saturday, September 30, 2023
Regenesis Is Possible
The book begins with a brilliant chapter on Soil, the least studied dimension of our remarkable planet. Monbiot patiently researches and interviews experts on the remarkable holistically nested relationships of soil denizens. There are whole phyla down there, not just classes of critters, including springtails, bristle tails, symphylids, crustaceans mites, spiders, centipedes and millipedes, earthworms, nematodes and mollusks. And of course the much-celebrated and crucial symbiosis of fungi and plants.
Tolly, tough and weathered, hands that have worked the soil for decades, late sixties, long blonde hair and a gold earring works an ancient estate, productive since lower paleolithic times, recognized in these latter days by its mansion, Toad Hall. The soil is about forty percent rock, chock full of ancient implements and shards, not what agronomists would call arable. But by patient observation and a labor intensive crop rotation, the plot produces at the threshold of high yields. As a gardener, I was in delight and amazement at Tolly’s genius in integrating multiple systems (including weeds!) to create good yields of high-quality vegetables without importing animal products from what he calls “ghost acres” (off-site sources of soil amendments).
So yes, Regenesis is possible, as Monbiot skillfully illustrates. But is it likely? That depends on the collective (political) will, which has not yet reached critical mass. According to the climate clock, we have less than 6 years until we are over the climate cliff. The intellectual and scientific case was made quite awhile back. Now Monbiot points to a breakthrough in foodways patterns laid down in the neolithic, a true agricultural revolution. It is no longer a matter of intellect, but of Schopenhauer’s sleeping giant, the Will, to get up and carry the Intellect over the slough of our lazy, dumb denial
Nobody I have talked to about this book is excited about his solution to our food problem. Organic farmers and pasture-raised beef hands are as attached to their own supposed improvements over BAU as are the poets who have blessed the images of the pastoralist and farmer for thousands of years, deeply etching our cultural memories (in a radical chapter laying the blame for our predicament at the poet's feet).
Monbiot's bacterial protein fix is a potential civilizational lifeline, but only to a point. Large parts of the Earth will soon be uninhabitable, and the oceans will not recover for thousands of years. The New Yorker article that features a photo of a Swedish architect as a spaceman feeding on mealworms who digest plastic is not as far-fetched as it may seem. I'd rather make bacterial pancakes, while watching the chickens patrol the fields for grubs and the (elk) calves drink their mother's milk.
Friday, March 31, 2023
Climate Grief is Not Seasonal Work
For everything, there is a season – Ecclesiastes.
In the climate movement, the ongoing debate
continues to bring passionate responses. Having absorbed the lessons of
climate science, are we on the side of hope or despair? My own engagement
led from cautious hope in the early 2000’s to leading workshops on Collapsing
Consciously in 2015, when I embraced the term “climate doomer.” Leading those
workshops led me into deep despair and after a healing process I have described here, I disengaged from both teaching and civil disobedience. It has
been a long road since then, but my work now is to open the door to grief-work,
both personally and in a small support group of those who want to do the same.
Grief and despair are not the same thing.
Despair saps both hope and energy, and does nobody any good. Grief,
on the other hand, is healing work, and the more specific it is, the more
effective. The thing about grief over climate disruption and the ongoing Sixth
Extinction is, that the grieving is ongoing. The grief is bottomless, so
when one grief episode ends, another calls out for attention. Grieving is
not seasonal. We are not constituted for perennial grieving, so we give it a
rest and go into denial, or go to a mass action to feel good for a day or so.
Given this Earth moment, how do we discern the seasons for grief, for righteous
anger, and for joy in what remains? We probably all will do this differently,
and as social creatures, we need folks to join us in our emotions. And as
intelligent and sensitive beings, we need to make room for others experiencing
the different emotional modalities at different times.
Paul Hawken’s Blessed Unrest (2007)
presents the idea that the emergence of over two million NGO’s of various sorts
in the first few years of the millennium represented the awakening of the
immune system of the biosphere and humanity. The NGO’s were a systemic
response, fighting for the life of the system. This is an important idea,
but it does not necessarily lead to a restoration of biospheric and societal
health. It is more like the healthy response of a dying person who decides
to stay positive and seize all the joy she can in the precious time
remaining. So yes, we must not yield to despair, but, even when things
look impossibly bleak, carry on anyway. But the grief work will always be
there, and finally, as in Kubler-Ross’s stages, we each need to reach
acceptance. If the additional climate disruption headed our way is sudden
and catastrophic, then we may miss out on this important act of completion.
I get the survival instinct. The point is
to stay alive and responsive, where the point is the survival of the
group. You grieve your losses along the way, but when extinction stares
you in the face, you say a prayer of acceptance. And that acceptance is
grounded in faith in the evolutionary intelligence of the whole Earth and
cosmological system, which is guided by a deep, purposive interiority. In
the overall scheme of evolution, we have a purpose, which is to keep the whole
thing going at as elegant a level as we can. The problem is that we don’t
direct it, and don’t have sufficient respect for the intelligence of the
whole. It is in response to that intelligence that we now help many
species survive the wave that we ourselves have unleashed. (The ironies
are multiple and overlapping.) So, to that extent, we are long-termists.
And we would be even better at this process if we were a rational species, but
we keep proving that we are not. The current global wave of populism despises
the elites who follow the scientists and the technocrats, which is understandable,
due to their haughtiness, unexamined privilege, and disregard for the common
man. But it is tragic, nonetheless.
Hope is a universal emotion. But its varieties
and contexts are complicating. I have written here about it several times,
ranging from biblical hope, which most accurately describes my own, to “honest
hope” (Diane Dumanoski, whose idea is described in the same post).
I studied a semester in mid-life with archetypal psychologist James
Hillman, who always argued that hope was a dishonest emotion that blocked
facing reality. More recently, two writers I greatly respect, Dahr Jamail
and Stephen Jenkinson, have argued against hope for similar reasons. They add the
crucial point that, if one remains hopeful that somehow we will escape climate
catastrophe, we will not grieve Earth’s immense, virtually unending losses
sufficiently or completely.
Grief is indeed a deep well, but can one survive without hope? Most people would argue no, and I only know a few very tough, resilient folks who seem to consistently live that practice. I still look for hope, not for short-term survival of homo sapiens, but one grounded in trust for the miracle of evolution, in which the divine is embedded: biblical hope in the age of science.
Monday, February 27, 2023
Time for a Dignified Retreat in the Face of Climate Disruption
But I have always returned to my dark roots, and that has happened again. Led by the indefatigable Michael Dowd, I have encountered the work of Dahr Jamail, whose book, The End of Ice, is the latest in a series of books that have profoundly influenced me with respect to climate disruption. Each time I read accounts of the latest science, I face anew the starkness of our future as a species, and of whole pieces of the biosphere. In the case of Jamail, meticulous journalism is combined with personal history and a willingness to record his feelings about our dilemma– and crucially, those of the scientific experts he interviews. Jamail models for me personal practices (he might agree with the broad term “spiritual”) of going to the woods when he reaches overwhelm, and going through grief, fear, and anger, rather than walling them out. For these reasons, I find his truth-telling unparalleled in my extensive study of climate science during the last twenty-odd years.
In addition to Ice, there are two fine Jamail interviews, one with Dowd, another with Carolyn Baker and Andrew Harvey. Other extremely helpful interviews in Dowd’s “Post-Doom” series are those with Jem Bendell (“Deep Adaptation”) and the droll and thoughtful Alan Weisman, author of The World Without Us.
This is an unglamorous position, and very hard work, especially in an era of continuing Republican denial and the generally inconsistent response to climate and other ongoing large dilemmas that populist politics has mired us in. But it is an admirable response, both practically and morally, which one can contrast with both doomer “quitting” and activist eleventh-hour behavior when midnight is baked into the pudding. (The key data here is that every 100-ppm CO2 increase in the atmosphere produces 100 feet of sea-level rise. At 410 ppm, 130 feet of sea-level rise is insured, no matter what happens with future emissions Ice, 130-31. I'll leave it to my readers to check the elevations of the world's major coastal cities.) This is responsible behavior in terms of humanity, but also in the interest of the beings involved in the holy mystery of ongoing evolution. The overarching vision is described in E. O. Wilson’s sublimely optimistic Half-Earth (now whittled down to "30-30"), highlighted by such efforts as planting trees poleward to insure the best possibility of their surviving the current Sixth Extinction.
Labels: 30-30, Dahr Jamail, End of Ice, EO Wilson, Everglades, Half-Earth, Miami, Michael Dowd, sea level rise, sixth extinction, South Florida
Friday, January 27, 2023
Stop Gulping Kool-Aid!
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
Wednesday, November 30, 2022
The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity
The Precipice is Toby Ord’s apt word for the current precarious human condition. Most of the book details existential risk for our species - meaning extinction. He clearly shows that natural risks – anything from asteroids and comets to supervolcanic eruptions and stellar explosions, are not very high, based both on Earth history and projecting the rate of risk across the aeons ahead.
Far more worrying are anthropogenic risks, including nuclear
weapons, climate change, and overall environmental damage. In a chapter on
future anthropogenic risks, he adds artificially induced pandemics and
“unaligned artificial intelligence.” He
agrees with Future of Humanity Director Nick Bostrom in ranking these
existential risks, with AI the highest (at 10%, which is a worrisome figure),
followed by nuclear weapons, pandemics, and climate change fourth. The
fifteen-year history of this blog has focused on climate change within the
context of the global ecocrisis, including habitat loss, exhausting resources,
and what has been called the Sixth Extinction (Ord thinks this is
premature). It’s only fair that I
present a larger picture, based on the risk probabilities of these eminent
Oxford institutions.
I learned of Toby Ord’s work reading the fine New Yorker
piece on William MacAskill, the reluctant prophet of effective altruism . As a small-scale
philanthropist, donating most of my federally mandated Required Minimum
Distribution (RMD) to non -profits, Will’s central argument to donate to
organizations that would have the most effective longterm influence for
humanity (and the Earth) made sense. And
the fact that he was a reluctant leader made his pitch even more
attractive.
The in-depth interview, following Will around for a week and
later dropping in for various EA events, highlighted the key moment when Toby
Ord attended a meeting in Durham (NC) and was sold on the idea. Ord is a moral philosopher at Oxford, and
co-founded the charitable arm of the EA organization with MacAskill. The organization shares a building at Oxford
with the Future of Humanity Institute, which also shares many of EA’s concerns
(Ord works for both), and clearly informs Ord’s book. The Precipice:Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity, is the culmination of his work
on global poverty and his pledge to donate 10% of his income to help improve
the world, underpinned by his training and teaching in ethics.
The biggest shock for me was hearing detailed history of AI,
and recognizing the speed at which this development is cascading. It feels very much like the development of
nuclear bombs, in which the thrill of the chase is again outrunning prudence
and safeguards (this is true as well of viral research). I have been hearing for years from a
colleague in the Forge Guild, a trans-traditional group of spiritually oriented
folks, warning us about AI. But his
posts did not go into the kind of harrowing detail that Ord presents here. The real concern is not AI per se, but the
development of artificial general intelligence (AGI), where the robot has
the full panoply of brainpower, including invention, choice, and motivation, at
a level far more advanced than our species.
I will not detail the multiple scenarios where things could go wrong
enough to lead to our extinction, but clearly there needs to be better
monitoring of what’s going on before it’s too late. And we are on the threshold of too late.
Ord also outlines various dystopian scenarios. Foremost among these would be a global fascist government with extreme control tools. Three of the biggest democracies on the planet are edging towards fascism. India under the BJP and its Hindutva ideology has already passed the boundary, though it is not clear to me that it is irrevocably fascist. A planetary disaster due to the loss of the Amazon rainforest carbon buffer has been averted (perhaps) by the election in Brazil, where the socialist Lula narrowly defeated Trump’s clone Bolsonaro. This was a huge concern heading into the mid-term election in the US, but the crisis has been defused for now by the partial Democratic victory.
Ord’s position is one of a pragmatic humanist, a rationalist
perspective relying heavily on the science of risk analysis. But I
find it odd that a book that is drenched in risk probabilities does not fully take account of the scenario of risk synchronization. He
does speak of the “increasing risk of a cascading failure of ecosystem services”
(118), but why doesn’t he do the calculations that he performs for individual
risk categories?
The ending chapter, on “Our Potential”, fully demonstrates Ord’s
breathtaking optimism about our future. In
his scenario, if we can work through the current multifaceted crisis (the Precipice)
to give ourselves some time for reflection (the “Long Reflection”) by slowing
down the pace of research and economic growth, that potential is unlimited. Here he echoes the book’s first sentence: If
all goes well, human history is just beginning.
The promise of “heights of flourishing unimaginable today” is outlined
in an extraordinary fable of colonizing the cosmos, adding “trillions of years
to explore billions of worlds.” Not only trillions of years, but 80 trillion
human beings (MacCaskill’s number), based upon the average span of mammalian
species. I gasped at these mind-boggling
figures. Ord is morphing from a
philosopher doing risk analysis to science fiction.
Despite the catastrophes of two world wars, multiple
instances of genocide, two global pandemics and the climate chaos of the
present century, he doubles down on Condorcet’s Enlightenment-era optimism. For
Ord, man is indeed the measure of all things, not only on Earth, but in the Universe
itself. He makes it clear that humanity alone creates value, thus we should
colonize the universe, giving it value.
He could be a spokesperson for Elon Musk.
Ord agrees with many anthropologists that we are a young
species. But his heady optimism assumes
that we will go from adolescence to mature wisdom in a generation or two. It would be the greatest evolutionary leap in
Earth history. When asked how long it
would take our species to grow up, Pulitzer poet Gary Snyder laughed and said “10,000
years.” Dark Mountain founder PaulKingsnorth and other dark ecologists would agree. That is, if we survive
the Precipice.
But Ord presents a strong argument against those who would
lead us back to traditional practices (Gandhi and his spinning wheel,
Kingsnorth with his scythe for every occasion) and minimal tech solutions: “…forever
preserving humanity as it is now may also squander our legacy, relinquishing
the greater part of our potential.” The problem is that we have to be pretty
much perfect in our choices going forward, so rapid is the pace of
technological advance, and so severe the consequences if we make a key mistake
in the several areas of risk Ord outlines so thoroughly. And our track record
is not good.
Ord makes gestures at various junctures of The Precipice indicating he respects the fact that we are part of an entire life web, but his anthropomorphic bias overwhelms these statements. And his thoroughgoing rationalist, pragmatic humanism ignores the immanence of the divine in the tiniest corner and widest reaches of the cosmos. Though his Oxford institutions are doing invaluable work in risk analysis, reminding us that we are clearly at a precipice, a far more promising pathway is my mentor Sunderlal Bahuguna’s insistence on the union of advaita (non-dual, the “Buddhist” end of the vast Hindu theological terrain) and science as a pathway forward for imperiled humanity and our exquisite earthly home. See my post on his death.
Wednesday, December 29, 2021
The Ocean's Other Problem: Deoxygenation
The causes for the fish die-offs were multiple. In the Pacific Northwest, the precipitating
factor was a mammoth heat wave in June that left almost a thousand humans dead,
and billions of fish and bivalves. Fish in coastal waters, especially bays and
inlets, were most affected, as were bivalves living in tidal pools, especially
those lacking northern exposure. These same
areas are those most affected by nutrient run-off, which is a global problem in
highly populated river estuaries. Unless
we move very quickly and decisively to contain contamination of waterways by
agricultural fertilizers, the problem of eutrophication, leading to dead zones
such as the 500-mile one in the Gulf of Mexico at the Mississippi Delta, will
only worsen. Nothing but algae and
jellyfish can live in these conditions.
In Tampa, an unusually bad red tide caused greater than
annual fish die-off. Chinook salmon were
killed in rivers in Washington and at the base of the Shasta Dam in
California. The problems came chiefly
from increasingly lower flows due to drought, exacerbated by extreme heat. In Washington, a lingering columnaris bacteria
infestation of chinook was also worsened by the heat.
But underlying the heat waves and drought experience on land
is a greater problem: ocean deoxygenation.
We have long heard about ocean acidification, which especially affects shell
formation, requiring a very specific ph range that favors calcification. But research
into deoxygenation has lagged until recent years. It is even more threatening to almost all forms of ocean
life. All animals require oxygen, which
is primarily dependent upon photosynthesis.
We are taught from elementary school that this crucial process happens
in trees and other land plants. It is
startling to learn that the majority of oxygen produced on Earth - 50-85% - comes
from phytoplankton, photosynthesizing on or near the surface of the ocean. Since 1950, Earth’s oceans have lost 2% of
their oxygen, with another 3-4% projected loss by 2100. In some tropical areas, as much as 40% of
oxygen has been lost. (Compare average
heat gain to heat gains in the poles, though the observed loss of oxygenation is
greater by a scale of 10).
Like average figures for planetary warming of 1, 2, and 3
degrees Celsius, 2% may not sound like much.
But marine scientists have found that base-of-chain species like phytoplankton
and zooplankton are very sensitive to very small changes in available oxygen. For instance, they may need to go deeper to
breathe, where they are unable to reproduce.
Lack of oxygen degrades sight in a wide array of species (including
humans), so they are more vulnerable to predators. Two key species of zooplankton have already
gone extinct, as I reported five years ago.
The reasons for loss of oceanic oxygen are twofold. First,
warmer water simply holds less gas. Secondly, polar ice melt produces a layer
of less dense, warmer water that forms a kind of lid over colder, more saline
water at greater depths. We think of ocean currents as traveling horizontally at
or near the surface, like the Gulf Stream.
But there is a crucial vertical pump that also operates, which brings
nutrient-rich water from deeper waters to the surface, sending oxygenated
waters down. This vertical mixing has been
slowed by glacial melt, and it is obviously getting worse. One consequence is that marine species migrate
towards higher O2 concentrations, which means more in the top ocean layer. This makes them more susceptible to predators
(including fishermen), and drives some of the colder-loving species to outright
extinction. See these two key articles:
We are already in the Sixth Extinction. When I think of this sad dilemma, my thoughts turn to big cats, rhinos, elephants, and many species of birds. In recent years, we have learned of a frightening increase of insect die-offs, which are of course the greatest number of species at the multicellular level. The oceans don’t have many insects. In fact, they host only around 15% of all species. But they also are habitat for 50-80% of all life on the planet (compare this range with the source of oxygen generation). If slight changes in O2 content can cause extinctions at the base of the food chain, then marine life in general is threatened. The ocean is where life began. It is our mother and remains our container. We may be King of the Mountain, but the mountain, like Turtle Island, is dwarfed by the sea around it. If phytoplankton numbers drop below a critical threshold, we are all doomed, like the fish around the bays this summer panting out their last breaths. If the oceans die, we die.
Tuesday, November 30, 2021
Shall We Spend the Rest of Our Days Grieving Climate-Related Loss?
One response to the ongoing climate crisis, a disequilibrium
verging on collapse, has been to grieve, both ritually and informally, what we
are losing: individual species, ecosystems, as well as relationships in the age
of Covid, and much else related to humanity’s historical moment.
Margaret Renkl’s NYT essay, “I Don’t Want to Spend the Rest
of My Days Grieving,” published in late summer, refuses to travel that
road. “Life is not at all a long process, and it would be wrong to spend my
remaining days in ceaseless grief.” https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/09/opinion/nashville-summer.html?campaign_id=94&emc=edit_owr_20210815&instance_id=37986&nl=sunday-best®i_id=91234879&segment_id=66316&te=1&user_id=8b7e582a945a3084f9bc576a342b9373
Renkl goes on to enumerate all the wonders that still remain
in her local world of Nashville, Tennessee, despite tears in Mother Earth’s
fabric. Renkl’s essay is evocative and
elegiacal, but she misses the crucial realization that one may find hope on the
other side of grief, if one attends fully to the grief, especially with the
support of others. I have frequently
noted in these pages Joanna Macy’s groundbreaking work in this area. So much of struggling is trying to send
out hope, but having grief echo back. Denial of grief, so common among
eco-activists, only leads to burnout.
Naming the grief as a confession in the presence of open listeners can
lead to reconnecting with the Earth’s wider intelligence embedded in her
planetary organism like so many micelia, so that we may serve the whole system,
not just our grieving or hopeful selves.
So grieving is necessary. We are
losing a lot, and we will lose a lot more.
However, many eco-activists rail against grieving over the
planet’s condition, seeing it as giving up.
The question is, does acceptance
of what we see all round us, and of the implications of the findings of climate
science mean giving up, as Naomi Klein has frequently argued? Grief is the natural response to full
acceptance, but working through that grief, and the accompanying despair, can
lead us through those emotions to the possibility of hope, including, for some, renewed initiative.
I know that I have not attended grieving as much as I did
when I led workshops along the lines that Joanna has long demonstrated. It’s a matter
of practice, and if it is unattended, we lose the benefits. So, as an
intermittent griever, what is my hope?
Its ground is my deep faith in Creation, and the remarkable power of evolution. That latter territory is laid out in the
emergent cosmological paradigm shift describe in Rob Messick’s Regenerative
Universe (to be released next spring), affirming the cosmology of ancient
Vedantists, world after world (see my essay in Dark Mountain). Stay tuned for an announcment this spring about Messick's upcoming book, which is a major event.
My elder, a West Virginia Quaker, said to me recently, “How
wonderful it will be to watch what unfolds on Earth after we are gone.” Perhaps not wonderful, but definitely
fascinating. Do we feel none of this
matters if we aren’t here to observe it?
Margaret (Renkl), life is a long process, not from the perspective of a
single individual life, but from the perspective of evolution; not just the
evolution of life on earth, but cosmic evolution.
As for grief, I’lll give Wendell Berry the last word: Be joyful even though you have considered all the facts.
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