KEY CONCEPTS FOR A NEW PLANETARY PARADIGM
We have seen that the impacts of global environmental change are beginning to be experienced widely, and that the implications for business-as-usual expansion of the technosphere are becoming ever clearer. The familiar planetary paradigm of humanity as insignificant relative to the background operation of the Earth system is obsolete, and a new planetary paradigm that places humanity as a core component in the structure and function of the Earth system is needed. By way of cultural evolution, this new planetary paradigm is currently being conceived and propagated. Here we will revisit and integrate several key concepts introduced earlier that are relevant to this project.
THE ANTHROPOCENE NARRATIVE
Humans are storytelling animals. Our brains are wired to assimilate information in terms of temporal sequences of significant events. We are likewise cultural animals. Within a society, we share images, words, rituals, and stories. Indigenous societies often have myths about their origin and history. Religious mythologies remain prevalent in contemporary societies.
Earth system science has revealed the need to self-organize a global society that will address emerging global environmental change issues. A shared narrative about the relationship of humanity to the biosphere, and more broadly to the Earth system, is certainly desirable in that context. Hence, the Anthropocene narrative.
Societal narratives tend to have normative implications. For example, the “grand narrative” of the progress of western civilization implied a certain virtue about features such as colonialism and an economic system based on the self-regulated market. Likewise, a societal narrative may ignore significant divisions or inequalities within that society. These aspects of societal narratives are often not questioned. But in keeping with the call by environmental sociologists for a second, reflexive, modernization, let’s make the Anthropocene narrative a reflexive narrative. It is a story of humanity’s relationship to the global environment, but the ending is uncertain and questions are posed about what humanity is now doing to the biosphere, as well as what is needed to achieve a sustainable Earth system.
Recall the stages of the Anthropocene narrative introduced in chapter 1 (table 1.1).
The Prehuman Gaian Biosphere
The Gaian biosphere, which self-organized relatively quickly after the coalescence of the geosphere, is fueled mostly by solar energy. The biosphere drives the global biogeochemical cycles of carbon, nitrogen, and other elements essential to life, and plays a significant role in regulating Earth’s climate, as well as the chemistry of the atmosphere and oceans. The biosphere augments a key geochemical feedback mechanism in the Earth system (the rock weathering thermostat) that has helped keep the planet’s climate in the habitable range for four billion years. By way of collisions with comets or asteroids, or because of its own internal dynamics, the Earth system occasionally reverts to conditions that are harsh for many life forms (i.e., extinction events). Nevertheless, the biosphere has always recovered—by way of biological evolution—and recently produced a mammalian primate species that was qualitatively different from any of its predecessors.
The Great Separation
Nervous systems in animals have obvious adaptive significance in terms of sensing the environment and coordinating behavior. The brain of a human being appears to be a rather hypertrophied organ of the nervous system, but has evolved in support of a capacity for language and self-awareness. These capabilities are quite distinctive among animal species and set the stage for the human conquest of the planet. As the most recent ice age receded about 10,000 years ago, Homo sapiens emerged from Africa and dispersed widely. An unusually stable Holocene climate favored the discovery and expansion of agriculture. With agriculture, and gradual elaboration of toolmaking, humanity ceased waiting for Nature to provide it sustenance. Rather, Nature became an object to be managed. This change is, of course, also captured in the religious myth of the Garden of Eden.
Building the Technosphere
The next phase in the Anthropocene narrative is characterized by the ascent of the scientific worldview, the spread of representative government, and the establishment of the market system. Human population rose to the range of billions and the technosphere began to cloak Earth. The Industrial Revolution vastly increased the rate of energy flow and materials cycling by the human enterprise. The telecommunications and transportation infrastructures expanded and humanity began to get a sense of itself as a global entity. Evidence that humans could locally overexploit natural resources (e.g., the runs of anadromous salmon in the Pacific Northwest of the United States) began to accumulate.
The Great Acceleration
Between World War II and the present, the global population grew to more than 7.5 billion. Scientific advances in the medical field reduced human mortality rates, and technical advances in agriculture, forestry, and fish harvesting largely kept pace with provision of food and fiber. The density of the technosphere increased rapidly. At the same time, we began to see evidence of technosphere impacts on the environment at the global scale—notably, changes in atmospheric chemistry and losses in global biodiversity.
The Great Transition
This phase is just beginning. Its dominant signal will be the bending of the exponentially rising curves for Earth system and socioeconomic indicators (see figures 4.2 and 4.3). The Great Transition is envisioned to be accomplished within the framework of a high-technology infrastructure and robust global economy. To accomplish this multigenerational task, humanity must begin to function as a global-scale collective, capable of self-regulating.
Equilibrium
Human-induced global environmental change will continue for the foreseeable future. The assumption for an Equilibrium phase is that humanity will gain a good understanding of the Earth system—including the climate subsystem and the global biogeochemical cycles—and develop sufficiently advanced technology to begin managing the technosphere and biosphere for the purposes of shaping the global biophysical environment. Humanity itself is, of course, part of the Earth system, meaning it must gain sufficient understanding of the social sciences to produce successive generations of global citizens who value environmental quality and will cooperate to manage and maintain it.
The Anthropocene narrative is broadly consistent with scientific observations and theories, which gives it a chance for wide acceptance. It also provides a solid rationale for building a global community of all human beings, as we are all faced with the challenge of living together on a crowded planet. The assimilation of the Anthropocene narrative, or something like it, by a sizable proportion of the global population would seem to be a requirement for the eventual materialization of its later stages.
THE ICARUS SCENARIO
The study of Earth’s environmental history in the paleorecord reveals episodes in which an elevated level of greenhouse gas emissions from the geosphere led to high atmospheric concentrations of those gases, and radical changes in the physical climate, the biosphere, and the global biogeochemical cycles. Slowing of ocean circulation and stratification of the ocean appear to be significant contributors to the associated extinction events. The eerily similar anthropogenic pumping of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere could, if unabated, push the climate system through multiple tipping points and, over hundreds to thousands of years, to a repeat of the earlier global environmental convulsions.
The point of evoking the Icarus scenario is to emphasize that we know enough about the Earth system to imagine it happening, but we don’t know enough about the Earth system and our own self-destructive tendencies to rule it out. Thus, there is a strong basis for altering the current trajectory toward a massive disruption of the Earth system and widespread human misery.
THE NOÖSPHERE SCENARIO
In chapter 1, we settled on a definition for noösphere as a planet on which a biosphere has given rise to a sentient species that has managed to build a technosphere and establish a sustainable, high-technology, global civilization (i.e., playing out the Anthropocene narrative). There are obviously many significant challenges along the way to building a noösphere, but given the order-friendly universe we live in—and how far we have come—humanity can reasonably aspire to accomplishing it. Doing so would require stronger institutions for global governance, especially a new intergovernmental institution for global environmental governance—a World Environment Organization.
ECOLOGICAL MODERNIZATION
This grand abstraction refers to the process by which environmental considerations rise to the level of factors such as economics, security, and social justice in all societal deliberations. Ecological modernization (EM) does not involve radically altering current sociopolitical and socioeconomic systems, but rather developing appropriate technologies and conservation-oriented natural resource management schemes. EM is a decidedly bottom-up approach, including vital civil society and corporate responsibility movements. However, it also relies on robust governmental regulation when needed. EM is energized by consumers when they select products that are certified “green,” and voters when they support politicians who follow an environmentally friendly agenda. EM results in policies that (1) end externalization of costs by business interests, (2) foster eco-friendly technologies (e.g., renewable energy sources), and (3) steer land-use toward enhancement of biodiversity. The geographic scale at which EM must be actualized extends from local to global.