Guest post: This time it’s global
Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on The climate has no pronouns.
Yes, the climate disaster is here, and it is going to get worse, especially for people who aren’t lucky enough to make it to rich Western countries. Some smart dude has a couple of posts about how it isn’t going to be end-of-civilisation bad which have caused me to re-think my own position slightly from “humans will probably go extinct in the next thousand years” to “billions of people will remain a permanent underclass while a small percentage of the species explores and colonises space”.
I’m just thinking out loud here, too.
I think humans as a species are tough and resilient; it’s civilization that is fragile. For the forseeable future, as long as Earth remains to any degree habitable, humans are going to be inhabiting it, albeit in far smaller numbers, as iknklast noted. Supporting billions of people requires civilization, and if that collapses, then you can’t feed billions of people, so there won’t be billions of people, “underclass” or no. The surviviors of such a collapse will be those who are able to exist within the limits of natural, living systems rather than artificial, industrial ones. The West’s dependence on a small number of industrialized monocultures requiring massive inputs of industrialized chemicals and machinery for planting, growth, and harvesting is a weak point, not a strength. The few human communities which have managed to remain unentangled with and dependent upon modern civilization may have a better chance of survival if they can adapt their lifeways to the changing world around them.
As temperatures rise, climate zones and biomes will tend to shift northward. If they can. Not all of the things that make up a given biome can just get up and trek north. Like soil. There will be massive disruption. Some species and combinations thereof will be squeezed out as they run out of “north” to go, or leave conditions upon which they’d depended behind them. This will be as true for human agriculture as it is for natural ecosystems. The Canadian Shield is not noted for its crop-ready acreage.
Life on Earth is actually pretty resilient, too, if not particular species and ecosystems. We are disrupting the current configuration of plants, animals and climate, but we are not destroying the foundations for life itself. A new balance will emerge, but not necessarily on a timescale convenient for human lifespans, or conducive to human civilization, but life will go on, with or without us. As for putting our hopes on space for continued human survival, even a post-nuclear-holocaust, post-climate-change world will be far more hospitable to life than anywhere in the solar system we can get to or build. Any space colony will always be a few critical technical failures away from extinction.
But it seems…funny, to me, how so many people in the West can look at the most prosperous and healthy and free and equal society in the history of the world and only see doom and gloom and evil and suffering. Yes, doom and gloom and evil and suffering all exist, but they have existed everywhere, for all time. And every generation has had lots of people who were absolutely certain that theirs would be the last generation, or at least would be the apex, with nothing but chaos and dissolution and destruction to follow. It has been that way at least as long as we have written records, and likely far longer. Yet we are still here, and we have made a civil society out of the chaos of nature, regardless.
The problem is how much of Western prosperity, freedom and equality is dependent upon the infliction of doom, gloom and evil upon others? As iknklast noted, humans are operating beyond the carrying capacity of the planet. Earth cannot support seven billion people living at a North American or European standard of living; it’s just not possible. Stripmining asteroids only works for some materials. It doesn’t address the destruction of biodiversity brought about by expanding agricultural production. Either we reduce our numbers, or it will be done for us. We are swiftly destroying the natural systems upon which our own civilization depends, before we’ve had a chance to figure out how they all work and interact. We are in fact, entirely dependent on “the chaos of nature.” As we diminish the natural world, we destroy the very foundations upon which civil society is built. That society is only possible because of nature, not in spite of it.
Previous collapses of cultures and civilizations have been relatively local. This time it’s global. There will be no safe havens. Western wealth and power will insulate us from disaster for only so long. Grotesque levels of inequality can be maintained for only so long. We are animals. We have to eat. We can’t eat money. We are dependent upon the air, water and soil just like everyone else. Like it or not, we’re all in this together.
Thank you, not Bruce, that’s exactly what I would have said except I fell into a blue funk yesterday (not because of this) and didn’t have the energy or the interest in saying it. Everyone I know that talks about colonizing space, or human ingenuity solving the problems, always talk to engineers. Yes, we can build things, lots of things. We cannot build ecosystems with any reasonable degree of success, even on a planet where ecosystems already exist. Without other species, we are doomed. And at this point, we don’t even know what all of the species are that we depend on.
You’re welcome! I was actually keeping your perspective as an environmental scientist in mind as I wrote this, hoping it would pass muster, and that I wouldn’t make any major mistakes. I know this is for the most part preaching to the choir (again), but your appreciation is appreciated nonetheless!
Tara Djokic:
“So in an ironic twist, microbial life made way for complex life [the Great Oxidation Event], and in essence, relinquished its three-billion-year reign over the planet. Today, we humans dig up fossilized complex life and burn it for fuel. This practice pumps vast amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and like our microbial predecessors, we have begun to make substantial changes to our planet. And the effects of those are encompassed by global warming.
Unfortunately, the ironic twist here could see the demise of humanity. And so maybe the reason we aren’t connecting with life elsewhere, intelligent life elsewhere, is that once it evolves, it extinguishes itself quickly.
If the rocks could talk, I suspect they might say this: life on Earth is precious. It is the product of four or so billion years of a delicate and complex co-evolution between life and Earth, of which humans only represent the very last speck of time. You can use this information as a guide or a forecast — or an explanation as to why it seems so lonely in this part of the galaxy. But use it to gain some perspective about the legacy that you want to leave behind on the planet that you call home.”
https://www.ted.com/talks/C_this_ancient_rock_is_changing_our_theory_on_the_origin_of_life?language=en#t-1163
Yeah, except microbial life didn’t make way for complex life. Microbial life is still here, still thriving, still abundant, and is not likely going anywhere. The real ironic twist is that we only think it’s all about us. The microbes even control our bodies; very few of our cells are actually human. Most of them are microbes.
Complex life may have muscled its way into the party, but microbial life didn’t cede a single damn thing. They thrive in our world better than we do, living off of us, off of our leavings, off our our pollutants, off of our food supply…we could learn a thing or two from microbes.
This is often stated, and I believed it until a few minutes ago, when I came across a paper by Ron Sender, Shai Fuchs and Ron Milo (doi: 10.1371/journal.pbio.1002533). If there is anyone who knows what he’s talking about on this subject it’s Ron Milo, whom I visited when I was in Israel in 2013. The estimate in the paper is 3.8 x 10^13 for bacteria in a 70 kg man, and 3.0 x 10^13 for human cells, so the ratio is not far from 1:1. Nonetheless, you are right that there are lots of microbes, and we couldn’t live without them.
Ecosystems are both robust and fragile. Robust in that they can often still function if many species are removed, but fragile in that targeted removal of a few key species can cause catastrophic failure, chain reaction and positive (in the sense of ‘adding to’) feedback. We can detect this in the data for mass extinctions and by analysing the properties of ecosystem networks.
This, of course, is a blessing and a curse. We humans see species being lost in huge numbers, but nothing catastrophic happening as a result. So we shrug and call environmental scientists alarmists, infuriating iknklast in particular. But obviously this is only sustainable for a little while and when climate change and habitat loss reach such a level that key species disappear and damage begins to propagate exponentially… well, we’re certainly going to notice then.
It’s been a while since I’ve done any analysis of ecosystem networks, but my somewhat educated guess is that we won’t have long to wait.
The short human lifespan (and even shorter business and election cycles) offer a poor basis for judging the results of our environmental perturbations. Our timescales are not well attuned to slow changes in our surroundings. Even outside of human activity, the Northern hemisphere is still undergoing post-glacial isostatic rebound after the most recent retreat of the great ice sheets. We even have a hard time noticing changes from events orders of magnitude faster, assuming we’re interested in paying attention to them in the first place. In Harold Edgerton’s high speed photographs of bullets passing through balloons, the punctured ballons retain their prior form for a brief instant before exploding and collapsing into a shapeless mess. When it comes to evaluating our impact on the environment we’re still in that instant before the explosion and resultant shapeless mess.
In the West the concept of extinction itself is barely 200 years old. Just looking at our destruction of a few species of birds, it’s only been about a thousand years since the extinction of Madagascar’s Aepyornis, about 600 years since the demise of Moa species in New Zealand, 350 since the death of the Dodo and just over 200 years since the functional extinction of the Great Auk. The passenger pigeon has been gone for just over a century. On top of the extirpation of these birds, we also cleared land, planted crops, and introduced other species, both wanted and unwanted, into most of their former haunts. In the waters where Auks once lived, we mined cod to the point of collapse. So we piled change upon change in rapid succession, heedless of the results of the initial destruction, ignorant of unintended conseqences, barely cognisant of what we actually did do.
An ecosystem which has suffered the extinction of one or more of its constituent species can never “return” to its previous “balance”. It must find a new shape. Given our continued disruption of so much of Earth’s environments, that new shape and balance, the accomodation to the imposed new order, is still being worked out, in many cases without the courtesy of our notice or concern until that new configuration and functionality has some unfortunate, unforeseen impact on our interests, comfort, or profits.
We’re living in the midst of a massive, multi-generational, uncontrolled and unrepeatable experiment on the entire biosphere of the only planet in the universe known to support life. Poorly designed, and launched without any ethical review, carried out with little or no follow-up, this experiment, thousands of years into its run, is only now stirring concerns about its effects and morality. Well, better late than never, I guess.
iknklast @1
Yes. To have any chance at all of colonizing space (on a planet or moon or in a pspace station) we will have to take a huge chunk of our ecosystem with us. And figure out how to keep it going. Also, we will be living directly downstream and downwind of ourselves. We will need to recycle and reuse everything. EVERYTHING. Including no wasting of organic matter by burying it in a graveyard.
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iknklast October 16, 2021 at 8:36 pm #4
“except microbial life didn’t make way for complex life … we could learn a thing or two from microbes”
You’re right, of course. The Great Oxidation Event, as well as the incorporation of bacteria that became mitochondria, set the stage for more complex life.
Ellen LaConte celebrates the mechanisms for the continued success of the survival of microbial life as a paradigm for human survival (“Life Rules”).
(The link to Djokic incorrectly included “#t-1163”. It should be
https://www.ted.com/talks/tara_djokic_this_ancient_rock_is_changing_our_theory_on_the_origin_of_life?language=en)