A change in the weather is sufficient to recreate the world and ourselves.
Marcel Proust
1 | About 70,000 years ago the world entered a glacial period, which reached a peak of coldness about 21,000 years ago. By 10,000 BC the climate was as warm as it is today, and the warmest it had been for hundreds of thousands of years. Tools and a change in the weather enabled us to farm. Humankind selected just a few plants and animals, and began to alter the world forever. Once-nomadic humans now settled down as small communities. Some of these communities grew in size. For the first time, a species moved outside its own local ecosystem. For the first time, a species began deliberately to control the environment. Human history has been a process – powered by technological progress – of moving out of nature and indoors.
2 | No one can control the weather, but collectively humans have managed to change it. For the last 12,000 years we have been living through an interglacial period – an unusual and brief period of clemency. During this time the earth’s temperature has increased. Because of human activity the temperature is now increasing faster than it otherwise would.
There is a direct correlation between levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere and the temperature of the earth. For 12,000 years the concentration of CO2 stayed constant at about 260 parts per million. In the 1800s, as the industrial revolution spread widely, it began to climb; by the end of the century to around three hundred parts per million. It reached 346 parts per million by 1985, 378 by 2005, 387 by 2009, and four hundred by 2012.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a body set up by the United Nations in 1988 to investigate climate change caused by human activity, warns us that at some time in this century the surface temperature of the earth will have increased by at least 1.1 degrees Celsius, and perhaps by as much as 6.4 degrees. An increase of a single degree will mean that the earth is hotter than it has been at any time in the last two million years. The earth hasn’t been as hot as it is today for about a million years. Even if humans manage to restabilise the levels of greenhouse gases in the earth’s atmosphere, the earth will continue to increase in temperature for the next thousand years. Within a few hundred years or less, the planet may no longer be able to support multi-cellular life like trees and humans. The earth will be returned to the rule of bacteria.
3 | In the 1780s, one of the first balloonists, moving silently, high above the ground, saw the earth from a new perspective, ‘as a giant organism, mysteriously patterned and unfolding, like a living creature’. The earth has been thought of as a living organism for millennia, but it was James Lovelock in the twentieth century who first gave this belief scientific credibility. ‘Gaia’ is the name he gave to the now widely accepted hypothesis that there is an intimate connection between the earth’s living and non-living processes. Gaia was an ancient Greek personification, literally grandmother of the earth.1 When Lovelock first presented his ideas in the 1960s, they were largely ignored. There was a time when he was the only person in the world measuring the presence of CFCs in the atmosphere. Lovelock predicts that by the end of this century Gaia will have established a new equilibrium, and billions of humans will have died.2
Nature wastes a thousand seeds, experiments lightly with whole civilisations.
W.N.P. Barbellion
4 | Of the perhaps fifty billion species that have ever existed on earth, evolution has done for well over 99 per cent of them.
5 | We are in the midst of a massive extinction, larger than the last mass extinction of sixty-five million years ago. This current extinction is greater than it would otherwise be because of the influence of humans.
Conservatively estimated, there are ten million species living on the earth today. We have identified and named about two million of them. Somewhere in the region of 30,000 species a year – microbes, fungi, plants and animals – are becoming extinct, many, presumably without our awareness that they ever existed.
I can never get used … to the opulence of nature and the squalor of human life.
Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977), Ada or Ardor
6 | If humans disappeared, life would flourish. If insects disappeared, all life would end within fifty years. A calculation made by Jonas Salk (1914–95), American virologist.
7 | Scientists and naturalists respond in radically different ways to Gaia. Lovelock says we must take control of the planet and wrest it back into a state that will continue to support human life. Only further technological intervention can repair the damage older technology has wrought. He has suggested, for example, that we add sulphur to aviation fuel, in order to create sulphuric acid droplets in the stratosphere to reflect sunlight back out to space.
When we understand how the natural systems regulating the climate react to our technologies, and we begin to operate our technologies and economies so that they work in harmony with the climate, we will have transformed the divide between the natural and the artificial on a planetary scale.
Lee Smolin
8 | The thin blue line of our atmosphere may be the only such line in the universe.
9 | The oceans move heat around the earth, the mountains create weather systems, volcanoes pump gases into the atmosphere, plants photosynthesise, animals breathe – all part of a balanced feedback system which extends out beyond the earth to include the moon and the sun. After billions of years of interaction between these living and inanimate structures, the conditions for life on earth are finely tuned.
We do not know what an ocean is. For now we know it as a simple, predictable, mechanical system, even though we also know that it must be much more complex, inseparable from the sky, inseparable from the workings of the whole earth.
Every year the rivers bear thousands of tons of mercury, cadmium and lead, and mountains of fertiliser and pesticides, out into the North Sea.
W.G. Sebald (1944–2001), The Rings of Saturn
10 | In May 2007, 250 miles north-west of the Galapagos Islands, fifty tonnes of ground haematite was released into the ocean, an experiment to see if levels of phytoplankton could be boosted as a way of trapping CO2 from the atmosphere. To work, the phytoplankton needs to sink to the bottom of the ocean when it dies, and stay there. It is not clear that this is what happened.
11 | Strontium 90 has been detected in the milk of nursing women living near nuclear test sites. The insecticide DDT, which was never used in Antarctica, has been found in the fat of penguins. Dutch elm disease was caused by a fungus from Asia, and accidentally spread across the world on imported timber. When it was introduced into Australia from Hawaii the cane toad didn’t do what it was supposed to do,3 and has since grown stronger. GM crops may encourage super-resistant weeds. Myxomatosis in rabbits. Canine distemper in lions. Thalidomide. Warfarin and superwarfarin.
12 | CFCs have improved the quality of our lives indoors, but we now know that they suppress biological life, increase rates of cancer, damage the immune system, cause cataracts and harm the environment.
We have involved ourselves in a colossal muddle, having blundered in the control of a delicate machine, the working of which we do not understand.
John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946), economist; here writing about the study of economics, but he might as well be describing any complex system that we do not understand, like the weather, or human beings
The world is disgracefully managed, one hardly knows to whom to complain.
Ronald Firbank (1886–1926), novelist
13 | Humans are the only species found everywhere on the planet.
14 | For maybe 40,000 years the world’s human population stayed constant at around a million, rising to ten million by 6000 BC, one hundred million by 500 BC, two hundred million by AD 1, three hundred million by AD 1000,4 two billion by 1927, three billion by 1960, four billion by 1974, five billion by 1987, six billion by 1999, seven billion by 2011, perhaps eight billion by 2025 and nine billion by 2045–50.
15 | 250,000 people are added to the world’s population every day.
16 | The population of Rwanda rose from about one and a half million in the mid-1930s to over seven million by the late 1980s. In 1994, 800,000 people were killed there in one hundred days. The cause of the genocide has partly been attributed to the country’s population density, which is among the highest in Africa.
17 | The overpopulation of Easter Island led to a genocidal conflict between the ‘long ears’ and the ‘short ears’ that did for that civilisation.
18 | Kassites and Babylonians, Persians and Greeks, Spartans and Athenians, Macedonians and Persians, Romans and Carthaginians, Romans and Gauls … Danes and English, Normans and English … Crusaders and Cathars, Egyptians and Crusaders, French and English, Scots and Norwegians, Spanish and Aztecs … Chinese and Tibetans, Siamese and Burmese, Spanish and Portuguese … Brazilians nd Argentines, Spanish and Cubans, British and Zulus, Japanese and Chinese … the world at war against itself, civil war … Christians nd Muslims, Hutu and Tutsi, Catholics and Protestants, MacDonalds and Campbells, Sunni and Shia …
Yet live in hatred, enmitie, and strife
Among themselves, and levie cruel warres,
Wasting the Earth, each other to destroy.
John Milton, Paradise Lost
19 | When the world’s first atomic bomb was exploded on 16 July 1945 near Alamogordo, New Mexico, no one knew exactly what would happen. At least one scientist feared a chain reaction would be set off that would destroy the earth.
20 | 6 August 1945 Hiroshima. 9 August 1945 Nagasaki. The bombs that fell on the two Japanese cities killed around 150,000 humans. Many were atomised, leaving behind nothing more than a shadow.
The Japanese had, in fact, already sued for peace. The atomic bomb played no decisive part from a purely military point of view, in the defeat of Japan.
Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz (1885–1966), Commander-in-Chief of the US Pacific Fleet
Now with the release of atomic energy, man’s ability to destroy himself is nearly complete.
Henry Stimson (1867–1950), United States Secretary of War in 1947
21 | On 25 July 1946 the Baker atomic bomb exploded over the Marshall Islands in the Pacific. One of the islands was completely vaporised. Bikini atoll is still uninhabited. The test resulted in the first instance of concentrated radioactive fallout. The chemist Glenn Seaborg called it ‘the world’s first nuclear disaster’.
22 | 31 October 1952, the first successful test of a hydrogen bomb. It was named ‘Mike’. The small island of Elugelab was vaporised. Waves twenty feet high followed the explosion and stripped surrounding islands of vegetation. Radioactive coral was blown into the air, falling on ships thirty-five miles away.
We don’t know how the third world war will be fought, but I can tell you what they will use in the fourth – rocks.
Albert Einstein
23 | The greatest threat to the world is unchecked religious fundamentalism. The greatest threat to the world is unchecked scientific fundamentalism.
And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.
Genesis, King James Version
Men … Ransack’d the Center, and with impious hands
Rifl’d the bowels of their mother Earth
For treasures better hid.
John Milton, Paradise Lost
[Then, we] saw the world as an inexhaustible Bagdad Bazaar. Now we see it is exhaustible, and are grimly determined to exhaust it as soon as may be.
W.N.P. Barbellion
[Man is] master and possessor of Nature. Which aim is not only to be desired for the invention of an infinity of devices by which we might enjoy, without any effort, the fruits of the earth and all its commodities, but also principally the possession of health, which is undoubtedly the first good, and the foundation of all other goods of this life.
René Descartes
Painters woo nature, scientists violate her.
Jean Renoir
24 | The pile of shit outside your castle wall was an emblem of wealth and hospitality. Look how well I entertain my guests! For centuries we have been inside the castle jettisoning our waste over the walls. The world outside has been our dungheap. But now the shit begins to seep back in: the castle walls are breached, and the inside becomes the outside.
Yeah, we are playing God, and it’s a good thing. We play God all the time, starting with, you know, agriculture. We try to change the world, including forms of life, in ways that are beneficial. And it’s important that we do so, because we’ve been able to prosper and flourish as a result of it.
Mark Bedau, American philosopher working in AI
We don’t do it because it is useful, we do it because it is amusing.
The biologist Eric Kandel, quoting an unnamed scientist
All men naturally desire knowledge.
The opening words of Aristotle’s Metaphysics
25 | Without science there would be no such thing as progress.
26 | Between 1700 and 1900 average life expectancy in Britain rose from seventeen to fifty-two.
27 | The farming methods of the 1940s could not support the world’s current population.
28 | The introduction of fertilisers in the 1950s saw the number of malnourished people in the world fall by 20 per cent.
29 | In 1970, 37 per cent of the developing world was undernourished, now it is 16 per cent.
30 | The world produces enough food to support the world’s population.
31 | Genetic modification has made it possible for rice to store beta-carotene, normally found only in rice leaves. A source of vitamin A has been made available to millions who would otherwise not get it.
32 | Smallpox was eradicated by international cooperation. It killed three hundred million people even in the twentieth century. By 1978 it had been eradicated worldwide.5
33 | Living pesticides are being used to destroy mosquitoes, with the aim of eradicating malaria. Sterile male mosquitoes are being bred which dominate the population and so wipe out the next generation. The technique has the benefit that it targets only a single species.
34 | i When the American conservationist Dave Foreman was told by a US senator not to be emotional or he would lose his credibility, he said: ‘But damn it, I am emotional. I’m an animal and proud of it. Descartes was wrong when he said, “I think therefore I am.” Our consciousness, our being, is not all up here in the skullbox. It’s our whole body we think with, and it goes beyond that. David Brower tells us that you can’t take a California condor out of the wild and put it in the LA Zoo and still have a condor, because the being of a condor does not end at those black feathers at the tips of the wings. It’s the rising thermals over the Coast Range. It’s the rocky crag where she lays her egg. It’s the carrion she feeds on. The condor is place … and we are place too.’ A condor in a cage is little more than a lump of meat stuck with feathers.
The condor, along with the frogs and salamanders that are vanishing, is a constant reminder that I am not the center of it all.
Paul Shepard, naturalist
ii Five hundred years ago, the California condor could be found all the way down the American west coast and across the states of the south-west, but during the last century its population began to fall dramatically. By 1987 every California condor in existence could be accounted for, and there were just twenty-two of them. In a risky strategy, all twenty-two were captured and kept at Los Angeles Zoo, where they were successfully bred. A few were released back into the wild in 1991. In 2007 a California condor laid an egg in Mexico for the first time since 1930. Today the world population of the California condor has risen to 349, about half that number living free. Saving the condor has cost tens of millions of dollars, making it the most expensive species conservation project in history.
Is this a moving story of humans making some kind of reparation for the damage inflicted on nature by other humans, or another story of humans interfering with nature? Certainly no one doubts that the decline in the condor population was due to human influence. In the mistaken belief that they kill young cattle, ranchers shot condors. They also killed them indirectly. Other birds shot by ranchers using lead shot, and left to rot where they fell, became carrion for the condors. Because their stomach acid is strong enough to dissolve lead, many condors have died of poisoning. The California condor has a wingspan of between eight and ten feet. Large numbers of them have met their end by flying into electric power lines. And then there are the usual reasons why species are declining across the globe, because of habitat destruction and climate change.
Some naturalists were alarmed by the seeming recklessness of the strategy that was adopted to save the condor. Animals evolve complex habits, not all of them genetically determined. By raising condors in captivity, breeders were forced to interfere with the condors’ usual and natural habits. Condors rear one chick at a time, but if the first egg is removed the female can be encouraged to lay a second. In order to speed up the captive breeding process, it was decided that the females should be encouraged to lay two eggs. The first-laid egg was hatched artificially, leaving that chick’s parents free to bring up a second chick from an egg hatched by more conventional means (though still hardly under natural conditions). The first-born chick was brought up by human keepers using hand puppets as stand-ins for adult birds. Later, using a kind of aversion therapy, all the birds were trained to avoid flying into power lines. Effectively, the condors were partly domesticated. Humans have taught them some new survival techniques, but what has human interference removed? It is impossible to know in what ways the ‘wild’ California condors of 2010 differ from those few remaining condors before they were captured in 1987.
35 | Humans have been blurring the boundaries between the wild and the domestic for centuries. Joseph Hooker’s The Rhododendrons of Sikkim-Himalaya was a sensation when it was first published in 1849–51. It ignited a craze for rhododendron-growing across Britain that has permanently changed the landscape.
When sheep were slaughtered en masse during the UK foot-and-mouth epidemic of 2001, naturalists were concerned that subsequent generations of sheep would lose a culturally-acquired homing instinct known as hefting. A hefted sheep lives on a hill without fencing, but never strays beyond a certain region. Large areas of hillside might be divided up into many hefts, containing a large number of sheep, but each sheep or lamb knows which heft it belongs to. Hefting is an ability that has co-evolved between humans and sheep over more than a millennium. Herdwick sheep, for example, probably came over with Norse settlers in the tenth century. The word heft comes from the Old Norse hefda, meaning to acquire by right or prescription. Hill farmers, when they acquired new land, would train their sheep to stay within a particular area without being herded, the area being known as the sheep’s heft. Hefted sheep passed on that information to their lambs, and so on down generations of sheep for centuries. By removing entire populations of sheep from a particular heft, that cultural knowledge is in danger of being lost forever. Few farmers know any longer how to heft a sheep (hill farms themselves having often been passed down unaltered for many generations). And in any case, it takes years to heft a sheep from scratch. Without hillside sheep, the landscape will change, bogs and marshes will spread, and gorse and juniper will take over.
Thousands of years of farming has created a very particular kind of European pastoral scene. Much of the English countryside has been tamed and integrated into our history and culture. Wherever we come from, we cannot escape our environment. We are forced to have some kind of relationship to the environment we inhabit, on the outside (and ‘other’), or on the inside (and ‘civilised’).
To learn to live with our planet, we have to rid ourselves of the vestiges of this old yearning for elevation from it … We need to see everything in nature, including ourselves and our technologies, as time-bound and part of a larger, ever-evolving system.
Lee Smolin
Knowledge is power was the belief behind all the activity of the students of the world – but it was knowledge of the infinitely divisible atoms of that world. Out of the endless breaking up and recombining of elements, the numberless taking-to-pieces of things, the examination and the observation – out of all that knowledge people had learned how to move faster, how to transmit electrical force, and how to be more physically comfortable. The practice of infinite divisibility had produced an enormous number of devices. Indeed, the whole world was cluttered up with devices. Knowledge is Power – and with the power they gained, they learned to make electricity do their living for them. The more singleness, separateness, and indivisibility became the habit of our development (so that everywhere everybody was breaking away from old patterns of social and family life), the more ways there were of escaping mechanically. Actually, the conquest of machinery was to promote the separation of the individual from the mass; and the by-product of scientific conquest was to become the elaborate, unhappy, modern man, cut off from his source, powerful in mechanisms, but the living sacrifice of his scientific knowledge.
Mabel Dodge Luhan, Edge of Taos Desert
36 | Tools increased our sense of separation from the world. The separation of tools and self may become less apparent in the future as tools become integrated into flesh. Tools will become seamless extensions of the body rather than separate things that we can hold or touch. Perhaps then we will feel (again?) the continuity between the self and its environment.