Shrinking Planet, New Work for the Future

The UN climate summit took the day off on Sunday, after Saturday produced a predictable if dispiriting dissension.  The Guardian led:

The US and Russia have thrown climate talks into disarray by allying with Saudi Arabia and Kuwait to water down approval of a landmark report on the need to keep global warming below 1.5C.

After a heated two-and-a-half-hour debate on Saturday night, the backwards step by the four major oil producers shocked delegates at the UN climate conference in Katowice as ministers flew in for the final week of high-level discussions."

Besides further evidence of US-Russia collusion, it was basically another effort to bury heads in the sand until the last profits can be rung out of our current carbon-based global suicide.

But the report, which was issued in October in draft form, warns of a catastrophic future for the planet, beginning of course with the poor and the poor countries, but sure to cause turmoil and suffering in the rich countries.  If this future isn't soon faced, as it appears it won't be, an even worse one is in the cards.  So thinking about the future is a moral imperative.  One aspect of the climate cataclysm future is the subject of the rest of this post.

Call it capitalism or imperialism or colonialism or call it endless greed backed up by ideology and armies, or just the way the human animal mindlessly spreads, but the result has been civilization's insistence on infinite growth in an unfortunately finite world, which sooner or later becomes tragically impossible. Thoughtless growth bashes away at a sturdy but not indestructible support system, sometimes also known as resources and otherwise known as what makes life possible.

Unlimited human expansion (in several senses) seemed to work for awhile, but the fast-growing number of humans plus the power of human technologies and the heedlessness with which we use it is rapidly using up the world.  Infinite growth is meeting the finite limit.

The size of planet Earth obviously remains the same, but the resources--that is, the life as well as the basic supports of a particular mix of gases in the atmosphere, the abundance of water and soil, and in particular, the quantity and quality of land necessary for the diversity of life that is also a vital part of the matrix that supports humanity--all of that is shrinking.  Throw in a climate that becomes increasingly inhospitable to human life and lots and lots of other existing lifeforms, and there's less room--not even to grow but to exist.

A couple of years ago Edmund O. Wilson proposed that we devote half of the actual planet to saving the many forms of life that otherwise are going to become extinct.  In the words of the Guardian reviewer: "So what should be done? For Wilson, there is only one solution. We must increase the land we have set aside for reserves for protecting wild plants and animals until this terrain covers half the globe. Such a project would then give us a reasonable chance of saving around 80% of species still alive today, he argues."

Unfortunately, the reviewer (Robin McKie) said, Wilson is vague on how this could be done, and offers no plan.

More recently, Kim Stanley Robinson endorsed the idea and gave it more substance: empty half the Earth of humans, concentrate them in cities and leave the rest to the rest of life.

Again, the reason for doing something like this is inescapable: Our situation, KSR writes,"can’t endure for long – years, perhaps, but not decades. The future is radically unknowable: it could hold anything from an age of peaceful prosperity to a horrific mass-extinction event. The sheer breadth of possibility is disorienting and even stunning. But one thing can be said for sure: what can’t happen won’t happen. Since the current situation is unsustainable, things are certain to change."

But clustering people into cities is not as big a change as it might seem, he says: people are already doing that on their own, emptying out territories where small towns and farm communities used to be. "So emptying half the Earth of its humans wouldn’t have to be imposed: it’s happening anyway. It would be more a matter of managing how we made the move, and what kind of arrangement we left behind." 

"One important factor here would be to avoid extremes and absolutes of definition and practice, and any sense of idealistic purity. We are mongrel creatures on a mongrel planet, and we have to be flexible to survive."  So some of the remaining land (and sea) would be wilderness, while some would be cultivated, used for recreation, etc.

This is less vague that Wilson, but huge problems remain. For instance, it's true cities are expanding, and fast, but many in the world are growing so fast, primarily because starving people flood into them, that they are chaotic places: unhealthy and dangerous, with intensely overcrowded slums.  They already constitute overwhelming management problems.

But the Half-Earth idea reminded me of a similar plan proposed 45 years ago by Paul Shepard in his book The Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game.  Shepard saw these problems coming (resource depletion, extinctions, runaway human growth over the planet threatening all other life--though not so much the climate crisis yet), but he thought that by the 21st century, human civilization might be capable of designing a sustainable world, and ready to do so.

In particular he believed it would be possible to have low density human spaces and large natural spaces--with easy access for humans to non-human life.  He noted the work of an architect-planner who figured the optimum human city would have fifty thousand inhabitants.  Shepard figured the human population would be about 8 billion in 2020 (pretty much what demographers predict today), and so 160,000 such cities would suffice.

It would be possible to configure them in a simple way--by placing cities "in a broken line on the perimeter of continents" and therefore leave the interiors to nature.  He goes into more detail about how these cities might be organized internally and in relation to natural areas, all in a few pages.

At the time this proposal seemed so outlandish that even Shepard devotees (a small but enthusiastic and sometimes influential self-selected group) tended to ignore these pages as an overreach, if not an actual embarrassment.

Soleri's demonstration Arcosanti, built in 1970s in Arizona

On the other hand, it was the 1970s--the era of planned communities and big ideas, Buckminster Fuller and his floating cities and cities under geodesic domes, Paolo Soleri's arcologies, when Daniel Burnham's exhortation was widely quoted: "Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men's blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work."

The world has much bigger cities now, and more of them, but they grew virtually unplanned, and many observers would simply call them monstrous.  Meanwhile the world's population has more than doubled, from 3 billion to nearly 8 billion.  All of the ecological disasters identified in the 70s are getting closer or well underway, with the addition of the mother of all crises, the climate crisis.  (And the "perimeters" of continents in Shepard's suggestion can longer be coastal cities, thanks to flooding by the rising oceans.)

And thanks to the climate crisis, the Half Earth is likely to be realized, though not in a pretty way.  In fact the online version of  Bill McKibben's recent New Yorker  piece is entitled: How Extreme Weather is Shrinking the Planet. 

The changes may come in waves (literally on the coasts when the sea washes in) with gaps between them, but the changes--whatever they will be--will be as close to permanent as humans can conceive. McKibben:

"Human beings have always experienced wars and truces, crashes and recoveries, famines and terrorism. We’ve endured tyrants and outlasted perverse ideologies. Climate change is different. As a team of scientists recently pointed out in the journal Nature Climate Change, the physical shifts we’re inflicting on the planet will “extend longer than the entire history of human civilization thus far.”

If global heating reaches predicted levels, let alone levels allowed by doing little or nothing to limit them, areas of the world where human now live will be too hot for humans to remain.  Islands are already disappearing under rising seas, cites will next be pushed back or erased.  The entire state of Florida is endangered even in relatively modest scenarios.

The areas where humans can live (or work or visit or farm or even see) in a century or two (and possibly sooner)  may well constitute a much smaller part of the Earth than now. The planet is effectively shrinking now, as McKibben illustrates, as pollution, garbage and effects of global heating spread, along with concrete, razed forests, dying rivers, dead zones spreading in the oceans, and dead soil.  It will do so faster and for more people in the coming years and decades.

So new ways of living in new places won't be only a ecologist's proposals.  They will be the work of the future.  New ideas now, new designs, new strategies to make life worth living, and quite possibly better, are also the work of the present.