Ingenuity

 

It was a little more than a week ago, very early in the morning on the East Coast and even earlier here in the Western US, and not many people were watching.  The eyes of the news were on mass shootings, police killings of black Americans and the Chauvin trial.  But I happened across a link just as the NASA live feed was starting, so I got to see evidence of the first successful flight of a powered vehicle on another planet (or at least the first initiated by humans, that we know of) at the same time the people at NASA did.

 They were a dozen or so people around hotel convention tables arranged in a horseshow, all of them masked up, most of them wearing NASA orange smocks or golf shirts, peering at their own laptops and glancing up at the big screen at the end of the room.  Many of them had been working on this specific project for 6 years or more. 

 They were waiting to learn whether the flight of Ingenuity, a tiny Kleenix box of instruments attached to very long and ungainly shaped rotors, had actually flown a little earlier, since it takes hours for signals to traverse the distance between Mars and Earth.  Nobody really knew if flying would work in an atmosphere less than a percent of Earth's.

 The NASA channel—which, when I had it on our cable TV system and the Shuttles and Space Station had cameras always pointed towards Earth, I sometimes let just run with this portrait of our planet in real time, in the background—did a fine job of covering this Ingenuity flight story.  A brightly smiling interviewer elicited the pertinent information from various participants in the room, though the answers got less and less coherent as the big moment got closer and closer. 

 Then she did something pretty striking: she shut up, so we could just witness what went on in that room. As I watched the screen full of people watching their screens, I reflected on the deceptive amount of computer power in those laptops and inside that interplanetary tissue box on Mars, and the fact that the Apollo missions that landed humans on the moon had at their disposal much less computer power than a smartphone.      

 We who were watching (and some were: they had sent in questions through various social media) were primed on what to watch for.  So we got the quiet excitement when the initial data package came in, and it looked “nominal” (NASAspeak for A-OK.) The data went from one analyst to another, each adding more information until we all together got the first visual confirmation: a simple diagram, sent by Ingenuity via several links, that mapped its flight: it went straight up, flew sideways, stopped and came straight down, and landed.  That diagram was as exciting as HD video.  It meant it happened.  The first cheer went up in the room.

 A few seconds later we saw the first photo: a black and white snapshot taken by Ingenuity’s camera pointed straight down from the air, looking like a film photography negative, in which the shadow is Ingenuity itself.  There would be other photos and other flights this week, but this will remain the historic one. More cheers in the room, though social distancing meant no hugs.  But the project manager did jump up and down, in place.

 So it meant something to me to be watching this in real time, a memory to set beside seeing in real time the first human step onto the surface of another world When Neil Armstrong touched the Moon, we all did, in a way.  It was the same with Ingenuity’s flight.

 Ingenuity has flown farther and for a longer time, and will probably be pushed beyond its limits.  It’s a proof of concept device, and is unlikely to have a life even as long as the Martian rovers.  None of them are coming back.  It won’t be resting in the Smithsonian—at least, not anytime soon.

 This event, set against the others making news, like those irrational killings, and the raging flames of white supremacy, and within the complicated context of the pandemic, all the madness about masks and vaccines, reminded me again of a conversation I had several Christmases ago with young tech people in Menlo Park, about prospects for the future.  Though we had different intuitions of the outcome, we shared the basic idea of it being like a race—that is, a foot race or vehicle race—between the positive and negative, the creative and the destructive.

 Because it seems clear that as a society we are rushing furiously in two opposite directions at once (with many wiggling lines within the main ones going off slightly in other directions.)  Moreover, the race is timed.  Though we don’t know exactly when the game will be over, there may come such a moment that if destruction is winning, then self-destruction it will be.  And in terms of Earth as environment, that time is fast approaching.

 Who knows if flying a helicopter on Mars is going to contribute to saving the Earth.  (Not if it encourages the Elon Musks of this world to believe they can just leave this planet behind and start this madness all over again elsewhere.)  But those nerdy people in the orange shirts—Asian, black, and immigrant prominently among them—worked hard on this one problem for a long time, and they did something wonderful.  And they know it—they attached a shred of the first manned aircraft from Kitty Hawk to Ingenuity for its first flight.  Maybe future generations won’t care, but seeing something like this we call historic is at least a special experience for the now living.

The Other Side of Apocalypse

It happens in wartime--it happened in World War II for certain, and the Great War, and to some extent during Vietnam.  It happened during the Great Depression.  In the middle of an apocalyptic time, people begin looking beyond it, looking for the silver lining, the changes for the better it might clarify and enable.

The other side of this current apocalypse--of this current revelation--could be a better future.  It's a long way yet to that other side, but that discussion is already beginning.

Anna Marie Slaughter's piece in the New York Times, referenced in a previous post, is one example.  She writes:

"The coronavirus, and its economic and social fallout, is a time machine to the future. Changes that many of us predicted would happen over decades are instead taking place in the span of weeks."

Several of the innovations she mentioned involve increased use of technologies for remote learning, teleconferencing and 3-D printing.  Both remote learning and teleconferencing reduce the need to travel, which helps clear the air and reduces greenhouse gases.  3-D printing is one of the ways communities can reduce dependence for vital supplies on global supply chains. The question is whether universities and businesses go back to the old model or better integrate remote learning and teleconferencing in a new synthesis.

(Other questions are whether any of this stuff works, and how to make them work better.  For those answers, this crisis provides lots of data.)

This crisis, she writes, also increases our awareness of the vital roles of caregivers in our society as well as our economy, she writes, which should lead to valuing them more with better pay.  As for the economy in general, today's crisis argues for more attention to guaranteed incomes, as well as more investment in better broadband capabilities for everyone.  She concludes

"The future is here, whether we like it or not. Although a future dependent on the current federal government looks bleak, we can vote to change that in November. Right now, we can follow the lead of local and regional leaders and step up ourselves. Through the virus, we are rediscovering the dark side of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous “inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.” But we can also rediscover what is possible and what we are capable of as a nation. We can use this crisis to create a better America."

Another example of this kind of thinking is found in a compilation piece in Politico, in which 34 experts forecast how the coronavirus crisis will change the world.  A surprising number of them speculate that despite the horrors it is likely to inflict this year, the crisis and response to it could change the future for the better.

Some of the topics discussed are: "A new kind of patriotism," "A decline in polarization," "a return to faith in serious experts," new forms of reform, a greater appreciation of government, as well as a host of accelerated changes involving technology, new economic models and a society organized more on empathy than hostility.

Certainly some of these reflect the writer's wishlist, and some of them clearly have a dark side.  And there is a long way to go before we get to the other side, in which we will all be tested.  Already we're seeing racism, misinformation and anger erupting, and we're likely to see more.

But some changes, if not transformations, are inevitable, and some offer particular opportunities.  I can't help thinking that all that's being done that was previously unthinkable, was specifically cited as reasons why we weren't addressing the climate crisis with the required urgency.  Giles Tremlett suggests that those governments that acted comprehensively and with urgency to address the Covid crisis provide models for how to address the climate crisis.

Meanwhile--thanks to the vehicles not on the freeways, and the factories not polluting-- the air quality in Los Angeles is suddenly good.  Air pollution is suddenly declining everywhere.  The water is suddenly clear in the canals of Venice, and wildlife is returning.  Locals are talking about controlling tourism there rather than letting it overwhelm them again.

We've known for years that pandemics were becoming more possible for many reasons, but specifically because of global heating--especially those associated with insect-borne diseases. And while I haven't seen anything yet that links this virus to the climate crisis, it has been causally linked to the other paramount (and related) ecological catastrophe of our time--the mass extinction of life forms on the planet.

“We invade tropical forests and other wild landscapes, which harbour so many species of animals and plants – and within those creatures, so many unknown viruses,” David Quammen, author of Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Pandemic, recently wrote in the New York Times. “We cut the trees; we kill the animals or cage them and send them to markets. We disrupt ecosystems, and we shake viruses loose from their natural hosts. When that happens, they need a new host. Often, we are it.”

This view more than suggests that this is not the last viral pandemic we can expect.  For a better future, and for a longer one, the twin ecological threats to the survival of humanity and all life as we know it--the climate crisis and species extinction--must be addressed with a similar urgency, when we get to the other side of this apocalypse.

Update 3/28: Meehan Crist has an oped in the NYTimes, "What the Coronavirus Means for Climate Change" that is along these lines of looking to the future through this new lens.  But towards the end of this piece is a section about the effects of the suddenly clean air in Chinese cities, usually swamped in smoke and industrial pollution:

"In China, just two months of reduced pollution is likely to have saved the lives of 4,000 children under the age of 5 and 73,000 adults over the age of 70, writes Marshall Burke, an assistant professor in Stanford's earth system science department."  

I'm sure there is more to be said about climate crisis, public health and proportionality.

At 73: Further Thoughts on Hope and the Future

There is no possibility of true culture without altruism."
Susan Sontag

"The absurdity of a life that may well end before one understands it does not relieve one of duty...to live through it as bravely and as generously as possible."
Peter Matthiessen
The Snow Leopard

“It is important to work for future generations, for our descendants. We must be proud to do something, even though people do not usually know its value.”
Shunryu Suzuki
founder of San Francisco Zen Center

We live in many kinds of time. We experience time differently, especially according to our age,  and the contexts of our experience are shaped by cycles we know, and that we don't know.  So any speculation on the future is bound to be vague, provisional and a bit of hit and miss.  But this is what I feel about the relatively near future, beyond my time.

As outlined in my previous post, the context of coming decades is likely to be dominated by the effects of the climate crisis, named or not.  Those persistent effects and the new contexts they create will change what people do and how they live.

When that happens in a widespread way (for it is already happening in relatively ignored parts of the world) depends on the climate.  What happens, and how it happens, depends to a great extent on future generations--probably beginning with those who are now young, who are now children.

Right now the impetus for efforts to address the climate crisis--such as the proposed Green New Deal in the US--is coming largely from the young.  Their leading edge is represented in government, and presumably in other influential institutions.  If their awareness becomes the standard for future generations, then responses can become more conscious and deliberate.

 But one way or another, the climate crisis will change just about everything, perhaps in the next few decades, probably by mid century, almost certainly by the end of the century.

There are two major aspects to the climate crisis: there are the causes, and there are the effects.  Societies may choose whether or not to address the causes of future global heating, such as greenhouse gases.  There will be less choice in whether or not to deal with the effects: the sea level rise, heat waves, droughts, floods, shortages, disease outbreaks, and the likely secondary effects of relocations, mass migrations and armed conflicts will demand attention--first local, and then as resources stretch and more people are involved, beyond that. Yet how societies and especially individuals choose to deal with the effects will make all the difference in how people live their lives.

There are those who imagine possible futures, mostly as stories.  While these stories may be visions that include new technologies and/or old forms of human society, or they may be mostly "what if?" explorations, cautionary tales or metaphors of the present, they offer a range of possibilities that cannot be dismissed.  I offer here only a few elements of a future I can imagine and foresee.

There are aspects of that future that can begin right now.  The young can prepare for the meaningful work of that future.  Many of the concerns of today will evaporate.  The consumer economy cannot be the focus of so many lives.  The emphasis will be on meeting needs, rather than in inciting and manipulating wants.

There will be increasing interest in finding technical means for addressing both causes and effects of the climate crisis.  The young can prepare themselves to participate in such research and development.  If I were advising adolescents today, I would suggest examining areas of study and possible occupations by asking the question, what will a climate crisis society need?

At this point, a stubborn refusal to surrender to some sense of the inevitable is healthy for the young. But denial is not.  They can dedicate themselves to possible means of addressing the causes as well as effects of the climate crisis.  But developing means to address future effects is also worthy and important.  In this way--the only meaningful way--they enact hope.  Hope is no longer principally a feeling.  It is a commitment, a set of activities, a life.

In terms of anticipating and dealing with effects, my guess is that the future will need managers of teams and resources responding to individual problems, and to develop strategies to address problems before they occur.

The future will need a greater proportion of dedicated individuals with skills for actions that today are often grouped under the name of first responders.  The future will need engineers and others in specific areas not yet prioritized by society's reward system.

The future will also need dreamers and storytellers, visionaries and critical minds, but using means and applying themselves in incalculable ways.  More broadly, when many occupations that today seem important eventually fall away as useless and wasteful, the need for currently undervalued skills will come forward.

Other needs will become the focus of more jobs, and even with increasing difficulties, those jobs can be more meaningful to communities and the individuals who do them. The perils and pains of this future may be great.  But individuals may find new purpose. Life may be harder, but less absurd.

This future, when so much that seems unavoidably important today fades into the sodden inventory of this failing period of history,  offers new opportunities for individuals to make basic commitments.  Some of these will be instinctive, but many personal commitments and choices will need to be made consciously, because they will be hard to make.  It will even be hard to know they can and must be made.

"To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives."
Howard Zinn

“Such hopelessness can arise, I think, only from an inability to face the present, to live in the present, to live as responsible beings among other beings in this sacred world here and now, which is all we have, and all we need to found our hopes upon.”
Ursula LeGuin

"…the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise."
F. Scott Fitzgerald

There seem to me to be two essential mysteries about humanity and its history.  One is whether humanity as a whole would develop in time to meet challenges of the changing present, particularly those very large ones that humanity itself has set in motion.  So far, when applied to the climate crisis, the answer seems to be no.

The other in some ways underlies the first.  It is the nature of human nature.  Is human nature based on selfishness, greed, lust, fear, envy, anger, the will to dominate and the passion to destroy and to kill?  Or is it based on understanding, a moral sense and sense of justice, compassion, empathy, courage and generosity?  Or is it an uncertain mix of both?

That last view is expressed in a fable, attributed to several Native American peoples, and may be familiar to some from the under-rated film Tomorrowland.  A version of it goes like this:

A grandfather talks to his grandchild. "A fight is going on inside me," he said. "It is a terrible fight between two wolves. One is evil - he is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego." 

"The other is good," he continued. "He is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith."

 "The same fight is going on inside you," grandfather said, "and inside every other person, too."

The grandchild thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather, "Which wolf will win?"

 "The one you feed." 

Under greater pressure and in starker terms than perhaps we can imagine, people of the near future will face this choice.  Their choice may not alter the ultimate future that comes after them--perhaps centuries later-- but it will help characterize their present.  Human civilization is some ways has been a struggle to inculcate a fair degree of personal freedom and justice for individuals while meeting the needs of community.  Freedom is based on choice, and community is based on a sense of common humanity, fairness, decency and shared fate.

 How the needs of the individual and society are both met is an ongoing test of humanity as a social species.  Individuals need the support of community, as community needs the commitment of individuals.  Apart from institutional constraints, the balance is achieved by a sense of responsibility, empathy, compassion, generosity and kindness.  The ethic of "you'd do the same for me" is perhaps the most basic human statement.

Even in his bleakest scenario for the future, HG Wells kept reminding readers than nothing will prevent at least individual human beings from exhibiting qualities of courage and love.  In adverse times, the need becomes even greater for "mutual comfort and redeeming acts of kindness."

Redemption is a curious concept in this context, but there is something to it.  If humanity can't quite redeem its past by fixing its future, it can at least to some extent redeem itself.  Wells expressed his preference that, if the end is truly coming, he "would rather our species ended its story in dignity, kindliness and generosity, and not like drunken cowards in a daze or poisoned rats in a sack."

Humanity can go down fighting, and it can go down loving, both.  Perhaps it will even endure.  But its time of testing need not be one of unremitting pain and degradation. It can be a time that includes creativity, challenge, commitment and character, in which life is lived to the fullness of the moment.  For we live in many kinds of time.

The Whether Report: Thoughts at 73

As I approach another birthday, I mark also the fleeting paradox of living into one's seventies.  While each year seems to speed by faster than you can blink your eyes and see it, each year nevertheless has a greater, more consequential weight;  it takes us inexorably nearer the physical conditions that forecast the end.   So each year means more, and yet is harder to grasp.

Seventy-three--my upcoming milestone--is not 79, and in particular not what 79 often was in the 1940s.  Yet my response to external events of this time raises a question defined by the last book of H.G. Wells, and criticisms of it.

Mind at the End of Its Tether is Well's shortest book by far, published the year of his death (August 1946) and of my birth (June 1946.)  In The Outsider, Colin Wilson calls it "the most pessimistic single utterance in modern literature, together with T.S. Eliot's 'Hollow Men.'"  Wells' forecasts the inevitable end of human civilization, perhaps of the human species, and perhaps of all life on Earth.

I find this particular Wells essay almost incomprehensible, but parts of it suggest forecasts he had made earlier with more evidence.  But first, I want to focus on a particular response to it.

It is present in science fiction author Rudy Rucker's foreword to the Provenance Edition of Wells' last books.  "When approaching their own deaths, some people fall into what I might call fatalistic synecdoche.  They conflate the whole (the world) with the part (themselves), and announce that the world is about to end."

Another science fiction author--Bruce Sterling--was even harder on Wells in his posts to the 2016 annual State of the World thread on the venerable San Francisco site, the Well.  "In this book, the great speculator is elderly, exhausted, politically disillusioned, fatally ill and also the Atomic Bomb has been detonated," Sterling typed.  "So he's like: Welp!  That's It!  No More Future!  For him, yes, that's true.  Personally, he's toast; no more HG Wells."  (And like us old folks are wont to do, I'm somewhat repeating myself.)

I don't defend that strange little book, but I do think all of this belittles Wells.  I spent the better part of a decade reading him and about him, and a recent return to commentaries on him hasn't changed my mind: Wells has to be one of the most misunderstood writers in modern history--with the precise misunderstandings saying a lot more about that writer or speaker than about Wells.

Nevertheless I take this seriously as a caution.  Because in this past year I myself have given up any faith that human civilization has much of a future, with the future of the species and life on Earth as we know it also in considerable peril.

For the moment at least, I try to separate my perceptions that might well be influenced by, if not age itself, simply having lived so long.  The repetition of the same idiocies gets very tiresome, and there doesn't seem to be much reason to believe that this complex of self-destructive behavior will change, before the collapse of civilization forces such changes.  And even then...

I start to resent my time being taken up by such idiocies, especially since there is rarely anything new about them, except some superficial novelty.  But at least at the moment I can still discriminate between my own reactions, and the evidence before me.

So taken together--a natural withdrawal to potentially more meaningful engagement (or at least less stressful and unpleasant), plus the informed sense that the course of the next couple of centuries and perhaps eons is set--I have ceased for one thing to read or write about what used to be called "current events."

Such political, cultural and social events and trends have consequences, and I keep enough of an eye on them to be warned of personal impact.  I still read the list of daily headlines that the Washington Post emails me, and when I think of it I look at Wikipedia's news of the day (which is usually very different.)  But that's about it. I no longer feel it is useful let alone important to follow and analyze these phenomena, partly because they don't matter much in terms of the likely outcome, and particularly since it is highly doubtful I can influence them (or the response to them) in any way.  Otherwise, I've done my bit.  I'm done.

The baseline of the future is set by the climate crisis, which is now having its first effects.  What has been done to address it is very likely insufficient, and there are any number of reasons for believing that nothing really consequential will be done in time to prevent the conditions that will likely lead to the collapse of human civilization, the end of the current line of "progress," and quite likely the end of life as we know it on Earth.

I note that the public voices who've been warning of these possibilities still dance around this inevitability.  Bill McKibben is saying that civilization has a decade to make the necessary changes. He and others have been saying that for 30 years. The differences are that the necessary changes get more drastic and comprehensive every year, and they will not determine the near future--they may at best save the far future.

  Are "enormous changes at the last minute" (the title of a book of stories by the wonderful Grace Paley) even possible?  Perhaps. But the "last minute" is now, or very soon.  Time grows ever shorter, if indeed there is time.  Meanwhile, the Earth's atmosphere gets hotter and the planet's climate changes, in ways that will essentially never change back.

Climate crisis is the baseline planetary physical condition that attacks the ability of the planet to nourish and sustain human and other life.  It accelerates the destruction of the web of life that has been ongoing for centuries, reflected now in the ongoing mass extinction.  Although books like The Sixth Extinction chronicle how much worse it has already gotten, and how extensive it is likely to be, it's worth noting that it's been going on a long time.  In his 1939 book The Fate of Man, H.G. Wells noted:

"The list of species extinguished in the past hundred years is a long one; the list of species threatened with extinction today is still longer. No new species arise to replace those exterminated. It is a swift, distressful impoverishment of life that is now going on. And this time the biologist notes a swifter and stranger agent of change than any phase of the fossil past can show—man, who will leave nothing undisturbed from the ocean bottom to the stratosphere, and who bids fair to extinguish himself in the process.”

Human civilization expanded across the planet at the expense of the very environment that ultimately sustains human life.  Over recent centuries, the wholesale destruction of forests, across Asia, the Middle East and Europe and still ongoing in the Americas, may itself doom the species doing the destroying.  It has doomed plenty of other species already.

Why can't civilization change to fully address this crisis?  After all, previous challenges were met--from the threat of tyranny in World War II to the self-inflicted apocalypse in the making of nuclear weapons.  One reason is leadership. At this crucial moment, there is none, and I see none on the horizon.

In the past few years I've been trying to wrap my head around the immensity of World War II, which ended just before I was born.  What seems clear is that those 20th century existential crises of the Great Depression and World War II were met only by the extraordinary leadership of Franklin D. Roosevelt and (in the case of World War II) Winston Churchill, plus the contributions of lesser known but still essential and able men and women.  Still, World War II was enormously destructive, and the stories of its homicidal stupidities as well as its unknown and even accidental heroisms continue to emerge.

The fact that civilization has not yet been devastated by thermonuclear war is due almost entirely to the decisions of probably a handful of leaders.  When two superpowers were heavily armed with thermonuclear missiles and bombers on hair-trigger alert, only the decisions of fortuitously placed leaders prevented the full use of these weapons, on several occasions we know about.

 Sometimes it was a minor military leader who insisted on waiting for further evidence before launching a strike due to false information. But in better known instances, it was national leaders--in particular, Nikita Khrushchev in the Soviet Union and President John F. Kennedy in the United States, who both held off advisers and political pressures to avoid thermonuclear war in the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.  They later signed the groundbreaking first Nuclear Test Ban treaty.

It could have been otherwise.   In the 1968 presidential campaign, interviewer David Frost asked Senator Robert Kennedy what he thought was his greatest achievement so far.  Kennedy hesitated a moment, and then answered: "I think the role in the Cuban Missile Crisis...The only reason I hesitated at all is because I felt strongly about the election of 1960 and having a role in that change, because I think that affected the course of action and the course of history..."

1960 was the election of John F. Kennedy to the presidency.  RFK returned to the point about the Cuban Missile Crisis.  He noted there were 14 people involved in making the decisions for how the US would respond.  "...if six of them had been President of the United States, I think that the world might have blown up."  He added that "if Mr. Khrushchev had been a different man at that time, the world also would have blown up..."

Right now, at what is likely the most crucial time in human history, we do not have in place anything like the leadership required. We do not have institutions--nor the people that lead them-- with the necessary degree of integrity or intelligence.  In fact, this country and many other nations have been going in the opposite direction, into territory so dangerous, so corrupt and so absurd as to beggar belief.  I don't think I need to say any more than that.

Even if such leadership were forthcoming, it is necessary but not sufficient to meet the crisis of this time.  It requires a society able and willing to follow.

Addressing the Depression and organizing forces for World War II required all of FDR's creativity, determination, political acumen and judgment.  Those who lived through World War II as adults are mostly dead now, so we have only books and other records to suggest the enormity of that undertaking.  Experts today say that addressing the climate crisis would take at least that scale of effort, and that level of concentration, not only by leadership and government, but by society as a whole.  That concentration and commitment was far from complete, but it was considerable--greater I suspect than generations alive today can imagine.

Yet leadership is ineffective unless followers agree with the goal and are willing to be led, even if it is for their own selfish reasons--particularly the more powerful agents of society.  War disrupts the conduct of business, but it also makes some interests rich, so big business largely fell in line.  World War II scaled up and created entire industries.  But most importantly, war (or Cold War) did not challenge the basis or conduct of corporate capitalism.

Addressing the climate crisis threatens large economic interests.  There's plenty of evidence that systematic climate crisis denial has been funded by fossil fuel corporations and those it has made wealthy. But more importantly, the changes necessary to save the planet fundamentally challenge the premises and conduct of capitalism, which today is virtually the only form of economic power in existence.

a former rainforest

Capitalism has always depended on these two elements: ignoring the future costs of destroying the ability of the natural environment to sustain life, and instituting some form of human slavery, which today is hidden in faraway sweatshops and countryside.

Exploitation in both of these senses continues on a massive scale, and it is that scale that has caused the climate crisis.  Resistance to ending that exploitation has been and remains overpowering.  The result is a divided and seemingly helpless society, its human weaknesses exploited to benefit current capitalist institutions.

Capitalism of this era, increasingly unfettered by legal or moral responsibilities towards society and the planet, has fed riches to the rich and deprived most others, resulting in deep divisions within society.  The political and communication tools of the entrenched rich have created, manipulated and exploited divisions, encouraging suspicions and rivalries.  Depriving people of economic security--and what's called income inequality is extreme right now--also tends to make them fearful and easier to exploit.

  Dividing elements of the exploited non-rich (on the basis of race, ethnicity,  gender, immigrant status, "intellectual elite" etc.) for their political benefit is one of the oldest and most successful strategies of these self-centered interests.  Popular failure to understand global heating, and to demand action to address it, has been one of their most conspicuous successes.  For these and other reasons, I believe that Kim Stanley Robinson is right: that effectively addressing the climate crisis is not possible in a world dominated by irresponsible capitalism.  No one seems to know who actually first pointed out that "It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism." However, we do know it was Ursula Le Guin who said (at the National Book Awards) “We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable—but then, so did the divine right of kings.”  Capitalism will end--I just don't think it will end soon enough.

There is another factor, perhaps even more profound. As big as World War II was and as much as was required, the nature of the task was thoroughly familiar: to fight and win a war.  Everybody understands that.  That's why every time a sustained effort is proposed, it's called a war on something.

(It is true however that, contrary to retroactive propaganda, many Americans weren't really sure why the country should go to war, particularly against Germany, other than because of the attack on Pearl Harbor.  That's why the US government commissioned the "Why We Fight" film series.  Further, there was a great deal of grumbling and obstructionism from big business and its political minions. Still, the general goal of winning the war was understood.)

The situation was a little more complicated in the Great Depression, but getting people back to work and the economy healthy again was an easily understood goal.  Plus the catastrophe was evident; it affected almost everyone's life in highly tangible and persistent ways.

The climate crisis is not so easily comprehended or accepted.  That's what makes it a particular challenge.  The basic goal is simple enough to understand: to save the planet.  To keep the climate from changing beyond what life as we know it can tolerate, the world needs to all but eliminate spewing any more C02 and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.  That alone won't fix it--the destruction of habitat for non-human life must also be addressed--but it would be a start.

But there are conceptual problems.  One is the need to avoid the two common reactions to a fearful crisis: panic, or refusing to face it because it is too big and too scary to contemplate.  That second tendency, the one that is currently being exploited, is called denial.  Those of us who lived through the Cold War have seen both of these tendencies in reactions to the enormity of nuclear weapons.  There was also a kind of conceptual or emotional standoff between these two reactions, leading to numbed acceptance, and functional denial.

There is a secondary cause of denial: the basic changes necessary to confront the crisis seem too painful.  Giving up oil, which seems to mean cars, and giving up beef, for instance, are simply too much to accept on the say-so of some scientists.

Besides being exploited by those who feel they can't make enough money in a world dedicated to addressing the climate crisis and other ecological threats, this perfectly understandable denial is exacerbated by the nature of the climate crisis: until recently, and in large measure still, it is a phenomenon of the future.  Why worry about it if it isn't here?  It may never happen.  Worry about it then.  But because of the physical nature of the climate crisis, action must be taken in the present.  The future will be too late.  (I've written about this aspect before, as have others. I won't repeat it here.)

There is also the unfortunate fact that, in a sense, the climate crisis will never obviously happen.  The weather will just keep getting sporadically worse until it is worse nearly everywhere all the time, deaths and disease and disasters, likely including violence and war, will increase until over time the world has changed considerably.  But with nothing obviously pointing back to a cause called the climate crisis.

It is the difficulty that human societies and individuals have in seeing the present patterns of the oncoming future--and then acting decisively and comprehensively to meet the onrushing challenges.  But it is the ability to do so that humankind now needs, and has needed for a century.

Through a writing life that extended from the last decade of the 19th century to the 1940s, HG Wells focused on precisely this problem.  He saw that modern weaponry and other changes made strong international institutions necessary to prevent ever more powerful nations from destroying each other, and civilization with it.  His detailed warnings became realities that confirmed his analyzes and mirrored his fictions in two world wars.

Wells urged policymakers and citizens to think about the future consequences of human actions and of scientific discoveries.  He wrote about history as seen through such patterns. Above all, he urged everyone to think about the consequences of present actions on the future, and about visions of better futures to guide the present.

But at the end of his life he lost faith in the ability of humanity to change its way of thinking fast enough, including this approach to the future.  He had seen that human societies and human thinking could continue to develop to meet future challenges.  But the race between  anticipation and catastrophe had been lost, he felt.  Civilization had become so large and complex and destructive, and was changing so extensively and rapidly, that it no longer made sense, it was out of control--out of anyone's control. It was bound to destroy itself. The human mind had developed as far as it would ever develop, it would go no farther--it was mind at the end of its tether.

Maybe today the race between anticipation and catastrophe is more like baseball, and we can avoid the third out and score enough runs in the ninth to win.  (But then there's that old bumper sticker: Nature Bats Last.)  It seems more likely the game is football or basketball, and even if we are driving for the winning score, the game is over when the clock runs out and the fourth quarter ends, and we've lost.  

I don't think it's true that because I see the end of everything coming for myself, I see the end of everything for everyone.  But I was a great deal more anxious about all this thirty or twenty years ago when I was younger, and that's when it seemed possible that the world could grow up in time.  Now that it seems so unlikely that dire fate will be avoided, there's little choice but to accept it. (Bearing in mind the Scott Fitzgerald dictum: "One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.")  Being old probably makes that easier, especially since I likely won't live to see much of it.

But still, it's painful and--in the full sense--awful to contemplate: that this beautiful world will end, not just for me, but for all time.  This is perhaps a particular feature of my generation's old age, another of our firsts...though ours won't be the last to feel this.

I have however thought about the near future and the lives of those much younger than me--the coming decades and into the next century--and I see a world with positive possibilities, even without contemplating any difference in the ultimate outcome.  But I will save those somewhat happier thoughts for next time.

Fear of Climate

David Wallace-Wells' new book, The Uninhabitable Earth, has been getting more attention than most books on the climate crisis.  He presents the latest conclusions from the latest research, which is especially dire considering the sobering fact that things have gotten much worse in the past 25 years, when the climate crisis was a known phenomenon:

"It’s also the revelation that we’ve done more damage to the environment since the United Nations established its climate change framework in 1992 than we did in all the millennia that preceded it," one writer noted. "Or, as Wallace-Wells puts it, “We have now done more damage to the environment knowingly than we ever managed in ignorance.”

One of his conclusions about the near future is precisely what I've been saying here in recent years: “The 21st century will be dominated by climate change in the same way that … the 19th century in the West was dominated by modernity or industry...There won’t be an area of human life that is untouched by it.”

There are signs that the pace of this becoming true is picking up, apart from all the severe weather and accompanying disasters which are still mostly confronted with benumbed and willful ignorance. This January, as both newly elected and reelected or incumbent US governors gave their inaugural or state of the state speeches, at least five used the occasion to strongly endorse major action to address the causes of global heating.  They included the governors of New York, Pennsylvania, Maine, New Mexico and Colorado.  California is already on the books in this regard.

The change to a Democratic administration in Michigan immediately resulted in that state withdrawing from lawsuits against the EPA seeking to challenge its efforts to reduce greenhouse gas pollution. “Under my watch, Michigan will not be a party to lawsuits that challenge the reasonable regulations aimed at curbing climate change and protecting against exposure to mercury and other toxic substances,” said [new attorney general] Nessel in a statement.

But the big national event was the unveiling of the congressional Green New Deal proposal, which several Democratic candidates for President immediately endorsed.  This comprehensive proposal got some immediate good press.  Its premise in terms of the scope of action was endorsed as accurate by climate scientists. A Green New Deal can give us the freedoms to allow humanity to flourish was the headline to a Guardian opinion piece.

Wallace-Wells admitted it was flawed but praised it as a first and urged Democrats to get behind it: "But even in this larval stage, it’s clear that the Green New Deal is an enormous leap forward — fundamentally, even categorically, more serious than the previous approaches to address the unprecedented threat to human civilization as we now know it."

The Atlantic hailed the coming of "the Millennial era of climate politics," particularly in the person of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, already known on the Internet as AOC, as a chief proponent of the Green New Deal.  As she put it: "Climate change and our environmental challenges are one of the biggest existential threats to our way of life, not just as a nation, but as a world...“In order for us to combat that threat, we must be as ambitious and innovative as possible." 

But once AOC's popularity began to sink in, along with poll numbers showing overwhelming bipartisan support for Green New Deal proposals, and a public somewhat willing to pay taxes to support these proposals, plus the decline in popularity for climate crisis-denying lawmakers, the complex of unsavory forces that comprise the Republican opposition machine began to amp up.

 AOC was quickly demonized, and attacks on Democrats began, characterizing them and such proposals as the Green New Deal as "socialist" and radical. Pundits began to worry whether Democratic candidates were too far "left" rather than whether their proposed solutions adequately address problems. Under this barrage, press turned negative, and the impression that the Green New Deal "rollout" was "botched," and that this somehow tainted or discredited the proposals became conventional wisdom.

Considerable backlash from the current administration and especially the deliberately distracting elements of election year politics--especially the debate over emotional but meaningless abstractions that nobody can define (like "socialism")-- mean that the efforts to address the problems of climate crisis causes and consequences are still likely to be much less than they need to be.

There are also the perennial debates on messaging, on how to talk about the climate crisis in an effective way.  Some say doom and gloom only paralyzes people, while Wallace-Wells thinks that realistic fear is the needed motivator. (His media book tour interviews appear here and here  , reviewed here and here   and a book excerpt here and here.)

Politico highlighted a "change" in semantics emerging principally from weather people:"leading climate scientists and meteorologists are banking on a new strategy for talking about climate change: Take the politics out of it.

That means avoiding the phrase “climate change,” so loaded with partisan connotations as it is. Stop talking about who or what is most responsible. And focus instead on what is happening and how unusual it is—and what it is costing communities."

This tactic isn't new--it's been used at the community level before.  Its danger is a complete concentration on the effects over addressing the causes.  You can't address the causes of the climate crisis without acknowledging those causes: greenhouse gases.  Yet it is almost surprising that this approach hasn't taken over.

 As the effects become more dire and widespread, that is still likely to happen unless people wake up to that danger, with the result of  never-ending and always accelerating efforts to deal with the effects (and the consequences of those effects), while the causes remain unaddressed--and doom the planet to even worse heating in the future.

We most often know the story of something only when it is over, and can look back at events as if the causes and effects were always obvious.  So we don't know the complete story of our civilization's response to the climate crisis.  While "Too little, too late" now seems the likely story, we are in the middle of the events, with lots of information but some that's missing.  Being in the middle of events, we can only do our best, and enact hope by so doing.

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.

Trees of Life's Future

Wednesday's news out of the UN climate summit in Poland was grim: the results of research by the Global Carbon Project, projecting the fall or rise of global annual carbon emissions.  For 2018 they expect the largest rise in three years, resulting in a record high.

Major US media including the NY Times ("Greenhouse Gas Emissions Accelerate 'Like a Speeding Freight Train' in 2018"(, the Washington Post,("We Are in  Deep Trouble")  and CNN had stories on the report that, if not as prominent as its importance merits, were at least somewhere near the front.  They each emphasize different aspects of the report, especially the causes.  The Guardian story which seems to have the broad outlines, begins:

"Global carbon emissions will jump to a record high in 2018, according to a report, dashing hopes a plateau of recent years would be maintained. It means emissions are heading in the opposite direction to the deep cuts urgently needed, say scientists, to fight climate change.

The rise is due to the growing number of cars on the roads and a renaissance of coal use and means the world remains on the track to catastrophic global warming. However, the report’s authors said the emissions trend can still be turned around by 2020, if cuts are made in transport, industry and farming emissions."

Also launched at the UN summit, the World Resources Institute reported on the conflict between the food needs of the rising human population and the planetary need to cut emissions.  A number of major efforts are required, including one that Paul Hawkens Project Drawdown figured out was very big: cutting down on the one-third of all food that is wasted.

But the need for more food without clearing more land for agriculture will require a major dietary change in the US and other western countries.  Namely, a drastic reduction of beef.

Amazon deforested cattle "ranch" 

For at least forty years it's been known that a leading cause of deforestation, especially in the Amazon, has been cutting down trees to make growing and grazing land, so that the hamburger empires could expand.  We're reaching a hard limit, the report says: if we insist on so much beef, all the forests in the world will be cut down.  Or to quote the Guardian's subhead: Current food habits will lead to destruction of all forests and catastrophic climate change by 2050, report finds.

That trees are key to drawing down CO2 is not new.  Hawkens' project named protecting tropical forests in the top five most effective strategies.  Recent research confirms that rainforest regrowth also contributes.  Meanwhile, rainforests and forests in general host a huge percentage of land species, probably more than half of all plant and animal species on the planet.

But in general, the role of plants--and specifically trees--in regulating the global environment has been stubbornly overlooked.  The familiar and seemingly inert vegetation isn't very sexy to a society hypnotized by shiny new technologies. Lots of economic vested interests don't want forests to be looked at or valued: including agribusiness, energy extraction industries (including logging but also fracking and oil), real estate speculators and builders, and fast food nations requiring clear-cutting forests so beef cattle can waddle on their short walk to becoming hamburger.

But according to this article which originated in Quanta, the problem also exists within climate crisis science, dominated by atmospheric scientists who pay little attention to trees:

"Atmospheric scientists—and everyone else—could be excused for thinking of a stoically standing tree or a gently undulating wheat field as doing little more than passively accepting sunlight, wind, and rain. But plants are actually powerful change agents on the planet’s surface. They pump water from the ground through their tissues to the air, and they move carbon in the opposite direction, from air to tissue to ground. All the while, leaves split water, harvest and manipulate solar energy, and stitch together hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon to produce sugars and starches—the sources of virtually all food for Earth’s life."

What new research shows (and old research at least suggested) is that forests can affect weather and climate even at a distance.  According to one scientist quoted:

“None of the atmospheric scientists are thinking about” how plants could influence rainfall, Swann said, though hints have appeared in the scientific literature for decades. And, she added, “it blows the ecology community’s mind … that the plants over here could actually influence the plants over there.”

But a large portion of Earth's food is possible because of forest-driven rainfall.  Scientists are beginning to suggest that in the most important rainforests, it's the forest that came first, and then the rains.

Understanding the life of the forest can also aid in preventing or minimizing the huge wildfires that occur more frequently and more intensely thanks to global heating and its effects.  The state of California is making some headway in dealing with forests and fires, despite the fact that upwards of 60% of the state's forests are under federal control.  And those who live in fire zones can also do more.  But these efforts are only beginning, and must be based on a thorough understanding of forests themselves.

An extensive and more sophisticated understanding of the importance of trees and forests to the planet, its climate and its ability to support life should make its way closer to the top of topics in conversations about the future.

Which also means that studying forests and the role of vegetation is a top future-oriented vocation for those making such decisions about their life's work today.