A Reversible Crisis
All the signs seem to be that the planetary crisis is sharpening, deepening, accelerating, worsening. The thing about a planetary crisis is that we are all threatened, although the prophets say that the people least responsible are also the most vulnerable, and there is certainly an elite who are looking to protect themselves as everyone else is destroyed.
There are even people that deny the symptoms of the crisis: the melting icecaps, the extreme weather events, the rising temperatures of land and ocean, the sudden disappearance of insects. But if we put them to one side, you might think that people were in approximate agreement about the nature of the problem: about causes and about potential mitigations and remedies. Remember we are at least fifty years into thinking about this.[1]
Ponder this. The great waves of migration into the US from the Mexico side of the border are largely due to the subsistence of great swathes of central America becoming impossible. The recent wars of north Africa and the middle East and the migrants trying to get into Europe are also due to rising temperatures and desertification of the land. No-one in official politics is trying to address the root causes of these problems, still less voicing Nora Bateson’s question: how do we know we are not the next to be refugees?
You should listen to the excellent Prof Millán Millán explaining with great clarity that, when a piece of land changes from agriculture or forest into a building complex or a road, there are necessary and obvious consequences downwind: perhaps 50 or 100 kilometres downwind. Or you should look at the aridification of the central valley in California, once a Garden of Eden.[2] These are the obvious effects of planning and development choices that have been made, and no-one wants to even acknowledge that there are consequences.
Millán Millán is also very clear that because we know there are consequences, we can mitigate those consequences. We can regenerate some forest locally, we can change the patterns of agriculture to compensate. Big Energy is criminally responsible for much of the rise in greenhouse gases. Culpable by exploiting oil reserves too fast and culpable by lying about the effects and subverting climate science. But we don’t have to close down the oil majors to deal with what we are doing ourselves without regard for the consequences.
Think perhaps of a third runway at Heathrow. Although there are endless and endlessly political environmental risk assessments, they never propose the sorts of mitigation that would concretely counterbalance the effects of all that concrete.
The role of agriculture
I think agriculture is best regarded as a microcosm and as a death spiral. We know that managed grazing can be used to restore arid landscapes, even the deserts of the Arabian peninsula. If you watch over historical time, humans turn fertile land into deserts. That is simply an observation, not an accusation. And we have good evidence that this is a reversible process, to some degree.
When aridification is reversed, the local climate stabilises, cools. A place can become truly habitable again, when it was absolutely not. Springs and rivers flow, the landscape is green and productive. And we should emphasise that this process does not require external energy or inputs, and is not externalising costs. It is simply life stabilising its environment, which is what life does, when we don’t interfere.
The opposite of this process is the standard death spiral. Agricultural practice and global warming changes to weather patterns mean it is difficult to maintain traditional approaches to land management. Advice from government scientists and corporate interests typically makes the situation much worse. As the remaining vegetation cover is overgrazed and trees are used for fuel, the process of desertification gathers pace.
The key is in the soil and whether the rise in surface temperatures is allowed to destroy the soil biology which supports the whole of terrestrial life. Armouring the soil and grazing vegetation in a tightly managed way (to allow plants to regrow after each grazing) can start the regeneration process.
The prophets
Not only is there precious little agreement on causes and mitigations, the prophets of collapse have wildly different ideas about the way forward. I want to focus on two tendencies that we have touched on before. They go to opposite extremes in a way I find edifying. Let’s look at the rewilding cult and the vegan cult. I quite appreciate that these are not mutually exclusive as personified but I think their logic is at polar opposite ends.
The rewilders say that if agriculture became more productive then we would not need all the land currently used for agriculture and lots of land could be left to become wild again. I have some sympathy with the need for wilderness even if it is a sort of post-industrial jungle. It gets past our need to manage things and to pretend we have answers.
Certain sorts of terrain and certain climatic conditions allow relatively rapid rewilding. But if you read Richard Powers disturbing novel The Overstory, you will understand that there are forest regenerations that take thousands of years, if they ever take hold. And, of course, the arid deserts we have created will not rewild: they will remain as deserts.
The vegan say we must eat plants not animals. If got our calories from plants and cut out the middleman of feeding animals in order to eat their meat, then we would put less pressure on planetary resources. I have less sympathy with this thinking mistake. Yes, we are mad to put thousand of animals in sheds and feed them corn and soy, but that does not mean that animals are not indispensable to regenerative agriculture.
So, at the rewilding extreme people are saying we must get humans out of the picture altogether in order for nature to survive. And at the vegan extreme people are saying that it is only humans who count in the design of the world food system. Both suffer grotesquely from human species solipsism, a human exceptionalism that say that when the chips are down, only humans count. It is precisely because of this solipsism that people can take both these extreme positions simultaneously, as George Monbiot does.
Systemic thinking
Battling the oil majors is not systemic thinking, it is decidedly linear in its logic. It is thinking about a system, not thinking with the logic of the system. Put it this way. The oil and the coal which fuel our little technology bubble of cars and electric devices were put in the ground by natural processes. Those processes worked at a scale that we can barely conceive of in taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. Which is obvious if you think how much oil and coal we have chosen to squander.
That sequestration of carbon on an unimaginable scale happened because of a flourishing of life processes that needed to stabilise the atmosphere in that way. I can say comfortably and categorically that no humans were involved. Not only have we burned fossil fuels but we have directly and on a massive scale interfered with the processes that sequester carbon. In fact, there are denialists who say it is not possible to sequester carbon in the volumes required!
Regenerative agriculture sequesters massive amounts of carbon at the same time as restoring habitability to places. You can tell that this is a life process because it is not a trade-off. George Monbiot wants to limit agriculture geographically to make space for nature: that is a trade-off. Life processes do not work that way and that is why any sort of thinking that has human exceptionalism in it cannot be part of the available solutions.
Voila: we are close to being able to argue that if the planet is to continue with life as we know it, then humans have to become well-behaved parts of an ecosystem they can neither understand or manage. We are not central and cannot be central because no part of a system can manage the system. It is the abject lie that the world is here for us that means that, increasingly, the world is not here for us.
Finding a political route
Our political systems are very ill-designed for the purpose of civilising our behaviour as a species. If we were really democratic in spirit, we would have to extend that democracy to the rest to the ecosystem: to animals, birds, fish, but most of all to the soils that we abuse at our peril. Remember that we depend absolutely on teeming trillions of incredibly diverse life forms in every square metre under our feet.
The best parts of the US constitution were put there by First People representatives who understood far more about our place in the world than do any current politicians. Progress in understanding this has been decidedly and vehemently backwards: a regression into ignorant self-harm. We still have this trope about “primitive” hunter-gatherers: let me commend David Wengrow again to bring us out of our totally delusional and self-serving understanding of human history.
We need to be able to observe the world with different eyes. We need to be able to join with other species in understanding what heals. We need to understand the achievements in human history that are about successful respect for our place in the ecosystem, not temporary domination of one sort or another. From this needed perspective domination is always destructive both of the world and of ourselves.
There have been experiments and proposals around basing politics on the measurement of happiness. But the key indicator is always health. If the great majority of western populations now suffer from metabolic syndrome, meaning their health is fundamentally compromised, then you can tell we are trashing the planet: it is the same thing. When any species sickens something in the environment has changed: when a coral reach bleaches, whole ecosystems sicken and die. It is not necessarily a problem caused by human disregard, but the chances are that it is. When we are trashing the systems that keep us healthy, we need to pay attention: not to whether we are happy to be hooligans but whether we actually want to live.
The central nexus is that our thinking is diseased so that we cannot see our place in the ecosystem. Diseased minds in diseased bodies in diseased ecosystems. Diseased minds corrupting children and young people with their misperceptions, especially the misperception that we have the answers.[3] Diseased minds giving bad advice about what it takes to be healthy unlike the people giving the advice. Diseased minds whipping us populist fury against outsiders who of course can do nothing to help. If you don’t believe that soil with compromised life can lead to diseased thinking on your part you need to look again. Apparently, IQs are declining around the world.[4]
Finding a political route requires allowing, supporting, people who are least damaged, most in touch with the crisis to have a public prominent voice. The prophets we need are more like the Old Testament prophets, insisting that the people and their leaders have lost their way and are heading directly for disaster. We need the truth about our political diseases, not a fresh bunch of ideas and “answers” that do not even understand the question. We need to find a way to stay in our place as a species and to steward the worlds we impact.
I used to have a rule of thumb working as an organisational consultant that it might well be the person that delivered the internal mail that knew how the organisation worked and what was wrong with it.[5] The trouble with our obsession with leadership and celebrity is we consistently miss the person who knows because they don’t fit our concept of knowledge.[6] Last week’s blog post was about the tyranny of purpose, how purpose blinds us. This post is about how that blindness is taking us to the end of life as we know it. Even without knowing why we are doing it!
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[1] In 1972 , NASA accidently captured the famous Blue Marble image from the Apollo 17 mission, the last of its kind. This image of the whole earth, isolated against the blackness of space, helped create the environmentalism movement.
[2] For a look at the political and capitalist shenanigans of the Californian water wars, you could do worse than watching Chinatown and The Two Jakes. The second movie makes more sense watched soon after the first, rather than after a 17-year gap…
[3] We inflict this belief on our leaders, too. You can see this in adult expectations that the CEO of a company has control, vision, and certainty. Likewise in government. A colleague recently did a project in Australia and found that the many agencies involved in child protection had never spoken to one another. Magic occurred simply by getting them into a room and letting them discuss things like how each of them assessed risky situations, etc. And yet the public believes/expects that there is a coherent child protection agency, one government, etc.
[4] IQ is a measure I do not respect in any way shape or form when it comes to individuals. And yet, IQ seem to be useful in some kinds of aggregate research. Scott Alexander says “IQ is very useful and powerful for research purposes. It’s not nearly as interesting for you personally.” https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/09/27/against-individual-iq-worries/
[5] There’s not so much physical mail these days, and employees often fetch it themselves from a central location, rather than receiving a visit from the stereotypical mail cart. Another example of organisational knowledge being lost in the pursuit of efficiency.
[6] This is weird, given the cultural celebration of mailroom-heroes. Think of the number of movie plots that start with the hero as a disadvantaged nobody, the 90-lb weakling who punches above their weight by the end.
