Saving The World - Quareness Series 180th "Lecture".
Where in hell can you go, far from the things that you know,
far from this sprawl of concrete that keeps crawling its way,
about a thousand miles a day.
Take one last look behind, commit this to memory and mind,
don't miss this wasteland this terrible place when you leave,
keep your heart off your sleeve.
- from "Motherland" by Natalie Merchant.
Earth may be best understood as a living being with a complex physiology, whose well being depends on the health of her constituent organs i.e. forests, wetlands, grasslands, estuaries, reefs, soil, insects and indeed every intact ecosystem and resident species. And if we continue to degrade, drain, cut, poison, pave and kill them, our Mother Earth will eventually die of organ failure...regardless of the levels of greenhouse gases. In this regard we might seriously ponder whether reducing the ecological crisis to climate, and the climate crisis to carbon, might be a fundamental scientific, strategic, rhetorical and political error.
Although we have seen some unusual weather patterns in recent years, global temperatures (per satellite measurements of the lower troposphere) are about the same as they were in 2016, despite an overall warming trend (since measurements began) of about 0.13 degrees per decade. This tells us that the warming has not been accelerating and suggests that our climate crisis may be mainly due to something other than temperature rising. The more likely "culprit" could be ecocide i.e. the killing of ecosystems? Destroying soil, plant life, etc. and all they nourish and depend on, leads directly to flood-drought cycles (erroneously blamed on global warming?). And the complex homeostatic feedback loops that maintain stability unravel e.g. loss in the Amazon can bring drought to Colorado, loss of rain forests in Borneo+Sumatra might cause drought in China, loss in the Congo may be causing floods in Nigeria. Everything seems connected to everything else.
In responding to industry advocates who claim that the ecological benefits of solar "farms" outweigh those of a forest, the American conservationist and University of Delaware entomology professor Douglas Tallamy has pointed out -
“Cutting down an existing solar plant, which is a tree, in order to build an artificial one is just ridiculous. It’s more than energy. Solar doesn’t feed a single bird, it doesn’t manage the watershed. The only ecological value is capturing energy from the sun, which is what plants do, but it’s not passing it on to rest of the food web.”
“It’s the plants and animals around us that run the ecosystems that we all depend on. I know we want renewable energy, but we’ve got enough land that has already been leveled. Put the solar arrays on rooftops. Put them on all the destroyed properties we already have. Don’t cut down existing forests. It’s totally antithetical to the goals of conservation.”
The industry's argument is based on carbon maths...adding up the sequestration numbers of a mature forest and comparing it to the fossil fuel equivalent of the photovoltaic output. Here we see an extreme (and quite common) example of what can happen when we define "green" in terms of carbon dioxide. In this approach the ecological utility of forests stands to be vastly underestimated and they will inevitably suffer when carbon maths dominates. We can expect even more perverse outcomes if/when carbon capture technologies reach economical feasibility, as is already apparent from the currently in vogue carbon offsets practice.
It's quite possible that any degradation of our Earth's ecosystem organs renders her less able to cope with changes in atmospheric gas composition e.g. any additional thermodynamic flux through an already unstable system may exacerbate existing instabilities. However, from a living earth point of view there's much more of a downside from the impact of ongoing economic developments which have relatively little to do directly with atmospheric levels of CO2 or methane e.g. strip mining, drilling, fracking, burning, offshore oil development with their potential to devastate ecosystems, poison landscapes, destroy habitats, etc. Shifting industrial civilisation to another equally (or even more) damaging energy technology is hardly a viable solution. Scale and purpose are what's really important here i.e. a good fit for an ecological relationship with the living inhabitants of any local place. When/if we get around to questioning the whole developmentalist program with its tendency to separate us ever further from life and matter, we might ask more of ourselves what does it really serve. It'll be clearer then that any ultimate solution to our ecological crisis cannot be a technical one but rather will have to come from reclaiming basic values and changing our relationship to nature.
The word conservation really means to serve with / to serve together. Framing environmentalism in any other way than to make it about love of nature / love of life is mistaken and leaves any such societal movement open to being hijacked by people and institutions who are not nature lovers. We can see already where this leads...nature dying in the service of "sustainability", forests being cut down for solar "farms", landscapes being sacrificed to extract cobalt, lithium silver, etc, for decarbonisation. There's a lot of dosh to be made in the current sustainability industry with most energy and funding and indeed attention going towards "saving the world" by reducing CO2. And quite neglected in comparison are concerns vital to our planetary physiology e.g. protection of seagrass meadows, peat bogs, mangrove swamps, beavers, elephants, whales, sharks, etc.
When it comes down to it the choice we are facing is more about what kind of world we would wish to live in rather than survival...regenerating a world vibrant with life by enacting a reverence for life in all its forms. We can embrace traditional conservation by protecting intact ecosystems from destructive development through our having an intimate understanding of and reverence for the places where we live. We can embrace regeneration by restoring life to places where it has been depleted, through say regenerative farming, marine preserves, replenishment of fish stocks, water retention landscapes, etc. thereby revitalising the Earth's organs to stabilise the climate. And we can embrace detoxification of herbicides, pesticides, antibiotics, dioxins, pharmaceutical residues, agricultural chemicals, etc. as well as refraining from spaying aluminum and other detrimental particles in geoengineering experiments, all of which harm the Earth on the tissue level further weakening her already compromised organs. We could also take more seriously into account the impact of electromagnetic, light and noise pollution on the planet's ecosytems.
The alternative choice now before us is to continue to lay waste to the living Earth, ending up on a concrete world, so chronically ill physically and mentally that we must incorporate technological assistance into our very brains and bodies. We could then find ourselves frantically compensating for the lost connection to a living world with a burgeoning array of virtual substitutes, digital realities and online adventures, tragically seeking something that we've forgotten we ever had. Indeed we may already be far down this path to an "out-of-balance" world of unhappy people. With our inner desolation mirroring the outer, we may hopefully soon come to recognise that today's ecological crisis and spiritual / "mental health" crisis share a common source i.e. denial of our Earth as a living being worthy of our love and service.
The rationale proposed here rests on a conviction that one vital purpose of a human being is to participate in the flourishing of life...to conserve. Sundered from that purpose, illness becomes inevitable with our inner state reflecting that outer sickness of ecosystems. Ultimately the global climate cannot but reflect our social, political, economic and psychic climate?
The Silent Forest.
Why are there no birds Papa?
Why are the trees so quiet?
Even up close I can't see any bugs Papa
It just doesn't feel right.
It's the summer of 2035
And we safely secure in our bubble
Are tucked away from a wild outside
Of fearful strife and trouble.
Back at the fall of 2025
The human race was all outside
But then there came the great divide
When some of us ran away to hide
Feeding our sense of right and pride.
Since then we have broken with all of the bridges
Binding our future to all of our past
But we live in the light and we die in the darkness
And this feeling secure cannot really last.
So here we are now son on the inside
And I'm not so sure we were wise to hide
You see I miss when we were much more alive
When the silent forest had not yet died.
Sean.
Dean of Quareness.
March, 2023.