Jake Sully’s Earth is a world where, he says, there is no green—where, we have to infer, the natural order has entirely broken down. Is this possible? And could humanity even survive on such a world?
As we face a bottleneck of resource depletion and environmental collapse, it’s not hard to imagine a nightmarish future of warfare and famine, social collapse, disease and mass migration, punctuated by climate catastrophes like drought, flood, and hurricanes spinning off the warming oceans. Richer countries or groups of countries may become fortified blocs. As always, the poorest will be most vulnerable, for they live close to the limit of sustainability anyhow. But none of us would be immune.
And things could get a whole lot worse than that.
Climate change could stop being gradual. Some scientists predict that if the world’s natural cycles are pushed too far we could reach a “tipping point” into a sudden, much greater disaster. Among the tipping-point triggers could be the abrupt release of deposits of methane and carbon dioxide, currently trapped under permafrost layers around the rim of the Arctic Ocean and elsewhere. These vast volumes of greenhouse gases would make global warming suddenly accelerate.
Another much-discussed tipping point is the possible collapse of the ocean current known as the Gulf Stream, which brings warm water (and air) to the north Atlantic. If this were to fail, coastal regions, including the east coast U.S., Britain and Scandinavia, could suffer a dramatic and sudden cooling. This scenario was (over) dramatised in the movie The Day After Tomorrow (2004). And it may have happened in the real world, triggering the “Younger Dryas” episode beginning around thirteen thousand years ago, in which the world’s emergence from the last Ice Age was interrupted by a thousand-year reversion back to glacial conditions.
A 2003 report commissioned by the Pentagon imagined sudden climate collapse triggered by something like the Younger Dryas. The consequence would be a sharp reduction in the world’s “carrying capacity,” its ability to feed us all. Amid the subsequent wars, droughts and huge population movements there would be a collapse of states and federations like the European Union, and a breakdown of international order. This was an extreme scenario, but then it’s the job of defence departments like the Pentagon to dream up and prepare for the worst case.
The very bleakest future predictions of all make grim reading. In the 1970s James Lovelock devised the famous theory of “Gaia,” our world seen as a network of flows of energy and matter, “a dynamic physiological system that has kept our planet fit for life for more than three billion years” (and perhaps Gaia has a parallel in Pandora’s Eywa; see Chapter 29). Now, Lovelock says in his latest book The Revenge of Gaia, “The world is fighting back… The bell has started tolling to mark our ending… Only a handful of the teeming billions now alive will survive.”
Is there anything we can do about this?
For a start we might go beyond the “green” activities already prevalent in the modern world: recycling, saving energy, conserving the remaining wild.
Perhaps we could rescue threatened portions of the biosphere itself. There are already over a thousand gene banks around the world, storing millions of plant seeds. Animals are being “stored” as frozen tissue samples, for example at the Frozen Zoo at San Diego Zoo in California, in the hope that if all else fails these creatures could be revived as clones some day. The Zoological Society of London is even considering a bank of frozen corals. And some scientists are considering how to preserve ecosystems on a larger scale—whole landscapes, perhaps—in order to allow evolution a large enough arena in which to continue.
But there are gentler possibilities. American environmentalist Paul Wapner argues that we should soften the lines between “us” and “nature.” For example, Wapner suggests, instead of building a fence to divide forest from city, we should create zones of selective logging. Forests would gradually shade into suburbs that would be intentionally wildlife-friendly, and there would be migration corridors for wildlife and plenty of exposed ground. There might be no wilderness, but the suburbs would be wilder, and we would all become wardens of the wild things around us. Ecologist Dickson Despommier has another interesting proposal: we should raise crops and animals in the cities, in “vertical farms,” large high-rise buildings. Then we could afford to allow the countryside to return to the wild—and we would drastically cut the cost of transporting food.
But if the situation continues to deteriorate, such small-scale initiatives might not be enough. We can imagine frantic efforts to put Gaia back together again on a much larger scale. This is geoengineering: rebuilding the Earth.
Geoengineering solutions can be vast in scale, but are generally based on two simple principles. Earth intercepts heat from the sun; and an excess of carbon dioxide in the air traps that heat. So to reduce the retained heat you either reduce the amount of solar energy the planet soaks up in the first place, by reflecting it away—“albedo manipulation”—or you take carbon dioxide out of the air—“carbon sequestration.”
One sequestration method is to liquefy atmospheric carbon dioxide and pump it under pressure into deep rock layers, or into the deep sea. (It was in 1970s studies of solutions like this that the term “geoengineering” was first coined.) This is already being done, for instance at natural gas plants in Norway. The challenge is not to generate more heat in the process than you’re saving by removing the carbon dioxide.
On the other hand the most ambitious albedo-manipulation schemes are to assemble immense solar reflectors in space. In 1929 the German-Hungarian space visionary Hermann Oberth suggested using huge orbiting mirrors to reflect sunlight to the polar regions, to alleviate the Arctic night. The Russians actually tested a twenty-metre space mirror in 1993, unfolded in Earth orbit from the Mir space station. The idea of using space mirrors to deflect light from an overheating Earth has been explored by American energy analysts. There are less dramatic schemes, such as using naval guns to fire aerosol particles into the high atmosphere, and thus to screen out the sunlight. Other possibilities have been explored in science fiction. Kim Stanley Robinson’s Forty Signs of Rain and its sequels (from 2004) dramatised the collapse and artificial restarting of the Gulf Stream, and in my own Transcendent (2005) I had engineers stabilise the methane deposits at the poles.
Many people instinctively recoil from such drastic tinkering with the planet. It feels hubristic, arrogant. In our myths only the gods fooled around with the weather, like the deities in Homer’s Odyssey who created storms to blow Odysseus around the Aegean Sea. And the science is definitely uncertain. As I said, Lovelock’s “Gaia” hypothesis depicts the Earth as a complex web of interlocking feedback processes. Until we understand how this web works it’s hard to be sure if our meddling will make things better, or worse. There is even a danger that a geoengineering solution would actually encourage us to continue to commit our biospheric sins in the mistaken belief that we could clear things up later.
However, there is plenty of serious talk about geoengineering. In 2009 Britain’s prestigious Royal Society produced a major report on the “science, governance and uncertainty” of geoengineering, and in 2011 the idea was debated by the highly influential Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the UN’s climate science body.
Your optimism in our ability to handle something like geoengineering might be dented if you read some of the fractious arguments being waged today in public forums about climate change, but at least we are talking. Perhaps even the arguments are a sign of a (slowly) emerging global consciousness, of how we’re groping towards becoming a mature planetary civilisation. Certainly if things deteriorate there might come a point where we have no choice but to try drastic solutions.
But perhaps, in the end, if things got bad enough, a new and shocking paradigm would emerge: let it die.
With enough power and raw materials I suppose it would be possible for mankind, or a large chunk of it, to survive even on a world with little or no ecology left at all. It might be like colonising an alien world, with domes over the cities, and gigantic air-scrubbing machines, and food factories churning out processed blue-green algae. The tremendous energies that had been devoted to failed geoengineering efforts could now be devoted to artificial life-support systems for a planet.
I wouldn’t underestimate what it would take to replace the lost “services” of the ecology. Consider the humble tree, for example—the tree, so central to the Na’vi’s culture and lifestyle. Trees prevent land erosion, they provide a weather-sheltered ecosystem in and under their foliage, they help maintain the atmosphere by producing oxygen and reducing carbon dioxide, they provide crops from apples to rubber—and, when they die, they give us a remarkably flexible building material, in wood. There are thought to be some four hundred billion of these giant servants on the planet (see Chapter 29). We would have to spend some serious money to build mechanical equivalents of all that. (And if we did, perhaps the last trees would end up in a tree museum, as in the Joni Mitchell song.)
How would it be to live on such a world? The fragmentary visions in Avatar give us a hint. There have been all-city planets in science fiction, such as in Isaac Asimov’s 1954 novel The Caves of Steel, which depicted a world of claustrophobic metal-walled corridors. And consider the dismal dead-Earth vision of Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road.
I imagine a world of vast mines and huge engines, of foul, smog-choked air and dead oceans, where every sip of water and breath of air has to be passed through a filter first. (Maybe the exopacks used on Pandora are based on technology developed to survive on Earth.) I imagine a world still flaring with war over its remaining resources, just as in Avatar. I imagine a world of intense control and surveillance, mediated by the super-powerful artificial minds of the future (see Chapter 19). I imagine a planet like a vast shanty town, where the plight of the poor and the vulnerable would be dreadful.
And we would miss mother Earth badly. Already we are disconnected from the ecology that nurtured us, and don’t fit the world around us. Our brains are still hardwired to avoid long extinct predators, which is why our bodies are flooded with adrenaline in response to everyday hassles, as if they were lethal threats. This is the “pronghorn principle.” The pronghorn is a North American antelope-like creature that runs ridiculously fast, a now useless ability it evolved to flee the vanished predators that once hunted it. We would be desperately unhappy on a dead Earth, and we might not even understand why.
For better or worse however this does seem to be the sort of world into which Jake Sully was born—and a sense of what we’d have lost is dramatised in Jake’s first wondrous reaction to the living world of Pandora. But our world isn’t like this yet.