“…knowledge-enabled mass destruction…”
Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:
Now that’s a mouthful. Terrifying, too.
…knowledge-enabled mass destruction. Mass destruction enabled by knowledge.
Geoengineering — attempting to use knowledge to engineer the basic systems of Gaia, of Earth, in the hopes of saving us from global warming and other horrors threatening the atmosphere and biosphere of the planet.
Be scared. Be very scared. And read this disturbing and challenging article from this week’s Science section of the NY Times, Handle With Care: The Ethics of ‘Geoengineering.’
The first paragraph:
Last year, a private company proposed “fertilizing” parts of the ocean with iron, in hopes of encouraging carbon-absorbing blooms of plankton. Meanwhile, researchers elsewhere are talking about injecting chemicals into the atmosphere, launching sun-reflecting mirrors into stationary orbit above the earth or taking other steps to reset the thermostat of a warming planet.
If you read on, you will see that many scientists and engineers, private companies (which means for-profit), and others are prepared to start using our technological know-how to attempt to reengineer the basic processes of the planet, its chemical make-up (like fertilizing the ocean with iron or shooting chemicals into the atmopshere), in an attempt to engineer our way out of our ecological crisis.
Read the article through to find examples of where this approach has gone, well, rather wrong — like in splitting the atom and then creating the atomic bomb.
Or like reengineering agriculture — with monocrops on a massive scale, with massive use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and now genetically-modified seeds — in an attempt to address global hunger and make huge profits for the corporations involved in the research and development, corporations like Monsanto and Archer Daniels Midland. For a generation or more, the ‘green revolution’ did indeed increase food production around the world — leading now to a massive crisis of overused and overexploited soils, the greatest threat to biodiversity since the disaster that wiped out the dinosaurs, toxins everywhere, dwindling water supplies, and the looming threat of hunger on a scale humanity has never seen.
Nice job.
So with nanotechnology, as this article indicates, and microscopic-scale robotics — little robots we will soon be able to insert into people’s brains. I’m not making this up. This technology will be available in most of our lifetimes.
This article points out several scary things. One is this: who will decide how this technology is used? Who will make up the rules? Who will enforce them? And once this stuff is launched, and then the current generation passes, in whose hands will this planet-threatening technology be in?
Another scary thing: what if they don’t work? Can’t take ‘em back.
For example, if the planet came to depend on chemicals in space or orbiting mirrors or regular oceanic infusions of iron, system failure could mean catastrophic — and immediate — climate change.
And then what? The next disaster unimaginably worse than the one we tried to prevent. Fertilize the ocean with iron. And when it doesn’t work, or creates a nightmare scenario, who will take it back out?
Are we really this crazy? “…knowledge-enabled mass destruction” indeed.
Or might we choose this other path, the one that really might save us — scaling back the entire human project to allow this planet to do what it knows how to do, to restore its own balances, to regenerate its damaged ecosystems and biosphere.
This path of bigger and bigger technology developed by hubristic humans and put in the hands of private research groups and for-profit corporations is precisely the path that has led us to this moment of crisis.
The path that will save us does exist. It is the path of humility. It is the path of smallness, small projects everywhere that scale down our lives in the direction of true simplicity and deep meaning. It is intentional healing of the plantary systems and life forms; it is also knowing how to retreat and allow the Earth space and time to do its own healing and regeneration.
One of my favorite meditation CDs is entitled, Praises for the World, by Jennifer Berezan. At one point in this 45-minute-long chant of love for the Earth, Alice Walker reads a poem, We Have A Beautiful Mother. It concludes:
We have a beautiful
mother.
Her green lap
immense.
Her brown embrace
eternal.
Her blue body
everything
we know.
Everything we know. Everything we love. Just how great a peril do we want to create here — because we just couldn’t quite manage considering this other possibility of living differently instead.
[tags] geoengineering, geoengineering and ethics, fertilize oceans with iron, ecological crisis, monocrops, green revolution, nanotechnology and robotics, we have a beautiful mother, jennifer berezan, praises for the world[/tags]
Photo credit:
Earth’s atmosphere: Geography for Kids, geo.kids.com
August 13th, 2008 at 10:20 am
Hubris is enculturated and learned
August 18th, 2008 at 9:50 am
When I was a boy, we were taught that each generation had responsibilities to assume and duties to perform with regard to the acknowledgement and acceptance of the challenges that are presented to us, so that the next generation can have a chance at a better life. Under no circumstances, would it be correct to pose as willfully blind, hysterically deaf or electively mute in the face of any challenge, as many too many in my not-so-great generation are doing in these days.
What has happened to the misguided leaders of my generation? So many in the elder generation have determined to let the looming challenges in our time fall into the laps of our children. At least to me, today’s leaders show an astonishing unwillingness to examine the prospects of a good life for those who directly follow us, let alone coming generations.
After my single, not-so-great generation finishes the `missions’ (ie, fools’ errands) the leading, self-proclaimed “masters of the universe” among us have set before the human community, what resources will be left for our children to consume; how many more people will have to share what remains of the dissipated and degraded resources; where will they find clean air to breathe, clean water to drink? I shudder when thinking about what our children might say about what we have done so poorly and failed to do so spectacularly, all for sake of selfishly fulfilling our insatiable desires for endless material possessions and freedom without responsibility…..come what may for the children, coming generations, global biodiversity, the environment and Earth’s body.
How could one generation go so wrong? Here are some of the ways.
First, the leaders in my generation of elders wish to live without having to accept limits to growth of seemingly endless economic globalization, of increasing per capita consumption and skyrocketing human population numbers; our desires are evidently insatiable. We choose to believe anything that is politically convenient, economically expedient and socially agreeable; our way of life is not negotiable. We dare anyone to question our values or behaviors.
We religiously promote our widely shared and consensually-validated fantasies of `real’ endless economic growth and soon to be unsustainable overconsumption, overproduction and overpopulation activities, and in so doing deny that Earth has limited resources and frangible ecosystems upon which the survival of life as we know it depends.
Second, my not-so-great generation appears to be doing a disservice to everything and everyone but ourselves. We are the “what’s in it for me?” generation. We demonstrate precious little regard for the maintenance of the integrity of Earth; shallow willingness to actually protect the environment from crippling degradation; lack of serious consideration for the preservation of biodiversity, wilderness, and a good enough future for our children and coming generations; and no appreciation of the vital understanding that humans are no more or less than magnificent living beings with “feet of clay.”
Perhaps we live in unsustainable ways in our planetary home; but we are proud of it nonetheless. Certainly, we will “have our cake and eat it, too.” We will own fleets of cars, fly around in thousands of private jets, live in McMansions, exchange secret handshakes, frequent exclusive clubs and distant hideouts, and risk nothing of value to us. We will live long, large and free. Please do not bother us with the problems of the world. We choose not to hear, see or speak of them. We are the economic powerbrokers, their bought-and-paid-for politicians and the many minions in the mass media. We hold much of the world’s wealth and the extraordinary power great wealth purchases. If left to our own devices, we will continue in the exercise of our `inalienable rights’ to outrageously consume Earth’s limited resources; to recklessly expand economic globalization unto every corner of our natural world and, guess what, beyond; and to carelessly consent to the unbridled global growth of human numbers so that where there are now 6+ billion people, by 2050 we will have 9+ billion members of the human community and, guess what, even more people, perhaps billions more in the distant future, if that is what we desire.
We are the reigning, self-proclaimed masters of the universe. We enjoy freedom and living without limits; of course, we adamantly eschew any talk of the personal responsibilities that come with the exercise of personal freedoms or any discussion of the existence of biophysical limitations of any kind.
We deny the existence of human limits and Earth’s limitations.
Please understand that we do not want anyone presenting us with scientific evidence that we could be living unsustainably in an artificially designed, temporary world of our own making….a manmade world filling up with gigantic enterprises, virtual mountains of material possessions, and boundless amounts of filthy lucre.
Third, most of our top rank experts appear not to have found adequate ways of communicating to the family of humanity what people somehow need to hear, see and understand: the rapacious dissipation of Earth’s limited resources, the relentless degradation of the planet’s environment, and the approaching destruction of the Earth as a fit place for human habitation by the human species, when taken together, appear to be proceeding at breakneck speed toward the precipitation of a catastrophic ecological wreckage of some sort unless, of course, the world’s colossal, ever expanding, artificially designed, manmade global political economy continues to speed headlong toward the monolithic `wall’ called “unsustainability” at which point the runaway economy crashes before Earth’s ecology is collapsed.
Who knows, perhaps we can realistically and hopefully hold onto the expectation that behavioral changes in the direction of sustainable production, per human consumption, and propagation are in the offing…..changes that save both the economy and the Creation.
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population, est. 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/index.php