Is Climate Change Earth upgrading itself?

Assumption: Humans are part of Nature. Therefore, human technology is part of Nature.

Hypothesis: If we accept the hypothesis that Climate Change is, at least in part, caused/accelerated by human action, I feel it’s worth asking: is Planet Earth using humans to change itself?

Gaia 2.0

The Gaia Hypothesis of the 1970’s:

“…proposes that organisms interact with their inorganic surroundings on Earth to form a synergistic self-regulating, complex system that helps to maintain and perpetuate the conditions for life on the planet.”

A “synergistic, self-regulating, complex system” is a long ways still from attributing sentience and agency to the overall planetary system — e.g. the potentially animist notion that Earth “wants” to change.

I have no proof either way what the planet “wants,” but we could from here argue that human activity causing Climate Change, in some fucked up way, is actually a Natural Thing.

That is, insofar as any/everything that humans do is, at root, “Natural.”

In a sense, re-defining human activity as natural in this way perhaps broadens the word beyond utility. In other words, if everything is “natural,” we need to come up with some better metric for guiding our actions vis-a-vis sustainability and the rest.

Rebooting Sustainability

I’m firmly in this camp*, re: sustainability.

Degeneration ← Sustainability → Regeneration

“Sustainability is the mid-way point on a scale between degenerative and regenerative. It’s not an end point of anything.” [Source]

* Toby Hemenway had a good joke about this in his video here. 

Land ethic

Via Aldo Leopold’s Land Ethic (okay, the Wikipedia page about it), an essay at the end of his Sand County Almanac:

“A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”

Continuing:

“He also describes it in this way: “The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land . . . [A] land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his fellow-members, and also respect for the community as such.” [Source]

I like this “land ethic” approach because it brings humans back into the feedback cycle.

That is:

1. Yes, humans are natural…
2. By extension, so are all the horrible things that we do (and the good things too, of course).
3. Our actions affect other occupants of the Earth, human and non-human.
4. We can judge our actions not by whether they are Natural/not (a kind of useless axis of value, in the end) but by how they impact ourselves, other occupants of the planet, and how they feed back into the complex system(s) of which Nature is composed.

Bonus: Network effect explains biodiversity

But is Earth upgrading itself?

“Upgrade” is probably a silly word. Or maybe it’s just right…

Did you ever have a favorite piece of software which was effectively ruined by a so-called “upgrade?”

I certainly hope that’s not what’s happening to the planet. But how could we ever hope to define a certain ecosystem or biome as “better” or worse, anyway?

Let’s jump back to this scale:

Degeneration ← Sustainability → Regeneration

Sustainability is simply the mid-point on a sliding scale, where Regenerative is an upgrade to Planet Earth as a Product (PEaaP).

• More biodiversity, more resilience, more richness, more exchange — more features, greater surface area. Energy re-used and transformed in the system.

Degeneration is a downgrade.

• Pollution, waste, energy sinks. Ecosystem diversity over-ridden by one type of actor — landscapes less capable of absorbing pulses of energy, brittleness, hostile conditions.

Act Regeneratively

I don’t want to turn this too much into a hippy-dippy “We can save the Earth if we just feeeeel good, man…” thing, because that’s obviously bullshit.

But it seems like, if you accept as a central tenet of life that:

(1) Humans are natural.
(2) We can affect complex natural systems by our actions feeding back into them. 
(3) We have an obligation to do so intelligently.

That is, we must upgrade the Earth. Even if we do it selfishly, for our own benefit and survival. Us doing it is effectively the Earth doing it.

We are the human-computer operators of a living software system.

We must feed back into the machine locally in whatever ways we can to cultivate regenerative oases, whose network effects will ripple out, creating new patterns which will withstand the chaos that lies ahead.

We have no choice.

That or Game Over.