This Is (Merely) Our Darkest Hour
Let me tell you a story, though you know it well. You, me, all of us: we are the protagonists; we are the antagonists; and we make up a substantial share of the victims. The story begins with us, but we have yet to decide whether it ends with us.
Once upon a time
Homo sapiens appeared in Africa about 300,000 years ago. We were not the only human species on the planet. We were not the strongest or the most populous. We were not the first to migrate to other continents or to use sophisticated tools.
When we did start making forays off the continent, we did not establish significant populations outside of Africa until between 80,000 and 60,000 years ago. Meanwhile, we hunted, outcompeted, and destroyed the habitats of several species with whom we shared (or failed to share) territory, just as our human ancestors and contemporary human species probably had.
Like much life, we were driven to expand our reach and numbers. But as time has shown, big brains can be the most dangerous thing in the world.
The fossil record reveals how we left a trail of megafauna extinctions in our wake as we migrated to different landmasses. We altered the landscapes of whole continents by wiping out keystone species. We plundered ecosystems, burnt them, and left impoverished biotas where there once had been grander complexity and richness.
We left the human print on everything.
The Rise of Homo Sapiens
By about 10,000 years ago, we were in Europe, Asia, Australia, and the Americas. We had been making art for around 20,000 years. We sewed clothing that fitted the body. And we learned to cultivate plants and domesticate animals.
We were also alone, the only human species left on Earth. As we had been doing to other animals for hundreds of thousands of years, we likely competed every other human out of existence. We were making way for the Anthropocene early on in our existence.
But why did we survive and not another species of human?
The main characteristic that set Homo sapiens apart was that dangerous organ behind our eyes. It bestowed us with a profound ability to imagine a world different from the one in which we lived. It allowed for complex communication and cooperation, strategising, abstract thought, and inventiveness like no other animal on Earth. These remarkable abilities made us apex predators. Our numbers grew, and there were no more formidable predators to keep those numbers in check.
Farming allowed for a human population boom, drastically changing the ecology in the process. Around the time we began to farm, about 1 million humans were living on the planet.
In 500 B.C.E., there were 200 million of us.
But we would not truly conquer the Earth in terms of numbers until the 1800s when, thanks to tools that gave us access to fossil fuels, our population reached a total of 1 billion.
Plants and animals derive their energy from the sun through photosynthesis. The process involves harnessing and breaking down carbon dioxide (CO2) and water (H2O), providing hydrogen and carbon atoms as the main building blocks of organisms.
The key to what fossil fuels are made of is in the name. (For reasons mentioned above, you’ll also hear them being called “hydrocarbons”.) Coal, oil, and gas are all made of dead plants and animals buried beneath the surface for millions of years. Different geological conditions and the type of fossil involved determine which of these three forms results.
Fossil fuels were discovered long before the 1800s, but their relative inaccessibility made them too difficult for us to burn in worrying amounts.
The Enlightenment’s legacy of liberalisation and the yields of the Scientific Revolution prepared the ground for the Industrial Revolution. Humanity could reach into the bowels of the Earth and take what had been secreted away from us until now. No longer would we need to rely only on timber, animal labor, our own muscle power, or the somewhat marginal contributions of wind and water mills.
If We Had Known It Was Pandora’s Box…
…would we still have opened it?
Where we extract fossil fuels, we degrade the land, the air, and the water, destroying the habitats of myriad species. Fossil extraction is a direct threat to biodiversity, and it is a direct threat to human health. But the worst of what we do was, at first, invisible to us.
For 200 years, we released increasing amounts of a relatively inert gas — carbon dioxide — into the atmosphere. But carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas that raises the average temperature of our planet by preventing solar heat from escaping back out into space. Before we began the Great Burning, the atmospheric level was 278 ppm. As of four days before the publishing of this post, the atmospheric level is 419.47 ppm.
The average global temperature has now risen by 1°C since pre-industrial times. Take note of the word “average”. Some populations (such as India’s 1.4 billion people) and some environments critical in regulating the global climate (such as the Antarctic) will be harder hit by extreme temperature shifts than others.
The changes we have set in motion have already been epoch-changing in scale.
- Eight of the hottest years on record have been in the last nine years. Since 2000, the number of people exposed to heatwaves increased by about 125 million.
- The ocean has become 30% more acidic, leading to a massive die-off of the globe’s coral reefs — the most diverse marine ecosystems — and the collapse of many food chains, impacting global communities.
- Sea ice declines by 13% each decade, and 95% of the oldest, thickest ice has vanished. This diminishes the albedo effect: the phenomenon by which ice reflects the sun’s heat into space, which further accelerates the warming of the planet.
- We rely on water in ice sheets and glaciers staying frozen because, if it were to melt, sea levels would rise by 60 metres. But the Antarctic ice sheet is losing its mass at an average annual rate of 150 billion tons, and the Greenland ice sheet, at a rate of about 270 billion tons.
- The average annual acreage of US forests destroyed by wildfires between 2000 and 2021 was double the average recorded in the 1990s.
In the 1970s and 1980s, the largest fossil fuel company in the world carried out unprecedented research to establish the effects on the climate of burning fossil fuels, and then promptly set about covering up the findings. They continue to invest in campaigns that obfuscate the issues of climate change today.
But our leaders were made to understand the gravity of climate change at the first World Climate Conference in 1979, and yet little meaningful action has been taken to mitigate climate change. Indeed, half of our cumulative emissions occurred since 1990, the year of the first IPCC report.
A seemingly infinite source of power got into our hands, and it proved addictive. We consumed more and more of it, and we have never stopped growing. We built our ideologies around infinite growth, paramount growth, incontestable growth. It made gods of us compared to what we had been. But gods like those of the Greeks: greedy, short-sighted, and childish, who would turn the Earth to dust beneath their feet to get at the treasures within it.
Homo sapiens population: 8 billion
Homo sapiens as a proportion of global mammal biomass: 34%
Domesticated mammals as a proportion of global mammal biomass: 62%
Other species of mammal as a proportion of global mammal biomass: 4%
Hope for a Redemptive Arc
We have come to the darkest hour of our story.
In many ways, our behavior has been an exceptional iteration of the ordinary impulse of life — the will to live. It is a mechanism that, in other species, is counterpoised by the selective pressures of their environment, e.g., predation, disease, limited resources, etc. We — the gifted, prodigal children of Earth — have eluded many of those pressures, to the detriment of everyone else.
But, Homo sapiens are still only animals. We need to eat, sleep, shit, rut, and belong to a social group. We haven’t surpassed our basic needs.
More than we think, we resemble the most primitive types of life.
In Figure 1., you can see that the population of Homo sapiens is growing exponentially. If we liken our own trajectory to bacteria in a petri dish [Figure 2.], we are in the exponential phase. We have been highly efficient in producing the resources we need to explode our population since the Industrial Revolution.
But we have treated the Earth’s life support systems without regard for the future, as bacteria do. If we follow the path of the bacteria, we will consume our resources to depletion and be poisoned by our own waste. There will be a lag in the reduction of the population as we extend beyond the carrying capacity of our finite, battered planet, and then our population will drop precipitously.
As you will have guessed by the last subtitle of this post, I do not seriously believe that Homo sapiens can be equated with single-celled organisms. We may be driven by very primal urges, but these are not out of the control of the more sophisticated parts of our big brains. We need not be destined to the same end as bacteria growing in a laboratory.
The arc of the human story will not resemble the bacterial growth curve because we know what the bacterium does not: how our choices now will impact our future. We, Homo sapiens, are agents of our own destiny, and our history of ingenuity thus far has proven that.
Now, as we find ourselves at the limits of nature, we have a choice to write our story arc. Is this going to be the tragedy of the savages who got their claws on a fancy toolbox? Or are we going to turn this story into a redemption arc?
Originally published at https://leabonheim.substack.com on February 24, 2023.
