openspace4life

I haven’t written about the threat of global resource depletion in far too long. Luckily, I just saw a movie that provides a great excuse to discuss the issue at length.

“It’s easy now to see kind of a giant social brain, or planetary brain, because it’s in, it’s in the physical form of the Internet, it, it looks so much like a nervous system, you almost can’t miss the analogy.”
- Robert Wright, author/journalist (this and all other quotes are taken from this transcript)
“My first job [at Chase Manhattan Bank] was to calculate how much debt could Third World countries pay. And the answer was, 'Well, how much do they earn?' . . . our objective was to take the entire earnings of a Third World country and say, ideally, that would be all paid as interest to us.”
- Michael Hudson, economist

The movie Surviving Progress is very much a child of its time. Chock-full of a dizzying array of ideas, it mirrors the headlong speed of the Internet era while focusing squarely on the subject of how little time we have before that reckless speed slams our civilization into a brick wall (or perhaps it's more of a ceiling). I learned about it at the last possible minute too, just before going to bed on the night before the film's last showing in Seattle. Also appropriately, the source of the information was the Facebook group for the Occupy Seattle Get Money Out of Politics workgroup, which advertised this movie because it explicitly blames Wall Street's powerful moneyed elites (as well as their IMF and World Bank henchmen) for the accelerating resource depletion that threatens to bring our civilization to the same fate that supposedly met the Romans, the Mayans, and others.

Okay, that's not entirely fair. The movie doesn't exactly blame anyone in particular. Its thesis, in five chilling words, is “Human nature is the problem.”

“The Ice Age hunter is still us, it's still in us. Those ancient hunters who thought that there would always be another herd of mammoth over the next hill shared the optimism of the stock trader, that there's always going to be another big killing on the stock market in the next week or two.”
- Ronald Wright, author of the book A Short History of Progress on which the film is based

Our brains, with their fifty-thousand-year-old “hardware,” don't allow us to act consistently in the interest of the long-term future. According to this movie, that's the reason why we have predatory financial oligarchs who drive the rest of the world into ever-growing debt to fuel supposedly endless economic growth. The idea is that these people can't help themselves; their brains simply aren't built to resist the allure of massive short-term gains. Like Julian Simon, they assume that human inventiveness can find some way to keep the game going despite the depletion of various resources. They rationalize away all the damage done by “austerity measures” in debtor nations by convincing themselves that the “development projects,” most of them aimed at extracting wealth in the form of natural resources and shipping it back to the wealthy nations, create enough benefit to the poor nations to outweigh the harm.

This thesis creates a bit of a disjunct between means and ends. How can we reconcile the need to deny and consciously transform our primitive natures with the project of living within our ecological means, as a member of the global community of species? It's as if, to live in harmony with nature, we must first pull ourselves further outside it.

“Our only chance of long-term survival is not to remain inward looking on planet Earth, but to spread out into space.”
- Stephen Hawking, theoretical physicist

Of course, one answer to the problem of the ultimate “debt ceiling” imposed by Earth's limited resources is to hurry up and start mining the rest of the solar system, a project that recently made headlines when a group of well-known investors endorsed it. I suspect this continuation of the harsh logic of exponential growth driven by short-term thinking is not exactly the destiny Hawking would support, but I can't say for sure, because none of the dialogue elaborates any further on his statement above – despite the fact that images of astronauts, the Space Shuttle, and the International Space Station are sprinkled liberally throughout the film's visuals.

If you're interested in the arguments for and against the “mine the sky to save the economy” plan, I highly recommend Stephen Baxter's short story “On the Orion Line,” which extrapolates that plan millennia into the future. In any case, access to space is currently extremely expensive, and many resources (such as food) are much harder to produce in space than on Earth, so this means of escape from our current "progress trap" doesn't seem particularly feasible to me unless coupled with other strategies. So in addition to the moral questions posed by people like Baxter and Kathryn Denning, I think necessity will also compel us to reject the radical growth-at-all-cost agenda and find some other way forward.

“If we don't develop what you might call the moral perspective of God, then we'll screw up the engineering part of playing God, because the actual engineering solutions depend on seeing things from the point of view of other people, ensuring that their lives don't get too bad, because if they do it'll come back to haunt us.”
- Robert Wright
“Admittedly, we’ve used our brain[s] in ways that are detrimental to the environment and society, but brains are beginning to get together around the planet to find solutions to some of the harm that we’ve inflicted. And, you know, we humans are a problem-solving species, and we always do pretty well when our back is to the wall.”
- Jane Goodall, primatologist

One way to describe the other set of possible solutions is “enlightenment.” Several speakers in the movie observe that our progress in the fields of morality and wisdom lags far behind our progress in knowledge and technology, but they don't offer much in the way of suggestions for how to change this. Professor Vaclav Smil even comments on his own deliberate incoherence on the subject of solutions, saying that having lived under a Communist regime, he's fed up with overconfident, doctrinaire answers to the problems of society.

While it would be lovely to imagine a near future in which the “global social brain” of the Internet compels the world's wealthier citizens to radically lower their resource consumption, I'm not convinced that there is any way to make that happen. For one thing, the Internet, as the ultimate incarnation of accelerating change, scarcely seems likely to be the source of a solution that lets us flatten our trajectory. California has found other ways, successfully keeping their per-capita energy use from growing since the 70’s -- but then again it hasn't decreased either.

“We need to begin by saying we're at the end of a failed experiment and it's time to say goodbye to it. It's an economic experiment, it's a technological experiment. It's been going on for a couple of hundred years and it's not worked; it's brought us to this point of crisis. Then we can start to sanely and intelligently say: How can we live within the real limits that our planet gives us and create a safe operating space for humanity?”
- Jim Thomas, activist, ETC Group

So if I buy all the logic above and assume that we can't hit the brakes or duck out from under the resource ceiling fast enough (and that we can’t expect a deus ex machina like aliens arriving in the nick of time to save us from ourselves), I’ll have to join my new friend Hank in accepting the strong likelihood of a global crash. The only questions seem to be “How soon?” and “How violent?” On this spectrum, we have the Transition movement at one end, advocating preparations for gradual “energy descent,” and a strange group of radicals called “collapsitarians” on the other. I once read an article about collapsitarianism, which didn't give me any real sense of why anyone would be crazy enough to want to crash now, but thinking about the specter of that resource ceiling suggests a possible answer: if we enter a dark age sooner rather than later, there will be more resources left with which to stage a recovery from it. I find it very hard to imagine using that reasoning to justify all the near-term suffering involved in a hard crash – but maybe that’s just because I’m not good enough at thinking long-term.

For more of my thoughts about the various kinds of progress (just in case this blog entry wasn’t long enough for you), check out this page on the SolSeed wiki.

“Encouraging those who burden society to participate in elections isn't about helping the poor. It's about helping the poor to help themselves to others' money.”

- "Registering the Poor to Vote is Un-American" by Matthew Vadum of American Thinker magazine, cited among other quotes by anti-voting-rights advocates in "Conservatives Say It Out Loud: They Hate Democracy" by Dave Johnson of the Campaign for America's Future blog

“'Our parents are grateful because they’re voting,' said Marta Solanas, 27, referring to older Spaniards’ decades spent under the Franco dictatorship. 'We’re the first generation to say that voting is worthless.'

“Economics have been one driving force, with growing income inequality, high unemployment and recession-driven cuts in social spending breeding widespread malaise. . . .

“But even in India and Israel, where growth remains robust, protesters say they so distrust their country’s political class and its pandering to established interest groups that they feel only an assault on the system itself can bring about real change.”

- "As Scorn for Vote Grows, Protests Surge Around Globe" by Nicholas Kulish of the New York Times

So it seems democracy is under attack from both ends of the political spectrum. If voting were an occupation, conservatives would be trying to fire the liberals (while pointing at the poor to slightly mask their intent), and liberals would be saying, "You can't fire us--we quit!" This doesn't bode well for liberal political parties.

As you can imagine, I have more sympathy for the liberal protesters (protestors?), who at least seem to have their logic mostly straight. (By contrast, there are plenty of poor people who contribute to society, and if it were only jobless poor people voting for the politicians who created programs like welfare and food stamps, those politicians could never have been elected.) But as with any movement that opposes the status quo, you have to ask whether these protests are aimed at any specific alternative vision. Kulish has an idea of what it might be, but it sounds more like wishful thinking than responsible journalism:

“The critical mass of wiki and mapping tools, video and social networking sites, the communal news wire of Twitter and the ease of donations afforded by sites like PayPal makes coalitions of like-minded individuals instantly viable.

“'You’re looking at a generation of 20- and 30-year-olds who are used to self-organizing,' said Yochai Benkler, a director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. 'They believe life can be more participatory, more decentralized, less dependent on the traditional models of organization, either in the state or the big company. Those were the dominant ways of doing things in the industrial economy, and they aren’t anymore.'”

Uh huh. I'll believe that when you show me a self-organized wiki group capable of running a factory or a public transit system. I acknowledge that times are changing fast, but I think I'll stick with democracy for now.

Anyway, about a week after I discovered those articles, I was in Orlando for an astonishing event called the 100 Year Starship Symposium, where other paradoxes could be found in abundance. Convened by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the event nevertheless hosted plenty of radically pacifist speakers who expressed the hope that the long-term, international project of building a starship would divert resources and passions away from warfare. Even Matt Bille, a speaker from the defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton (BAH for short), went so far as to hold up the Rainforest Action Network as a good example of the type of multi-stakeholder organization that should take on the project. (That last link is to a Booz&Co article Mr. Bille referred me to, which kind of looks like it could have been written by Nicholas Kulish.)

And then there was a speaker from Oregon named J. N. Nielsen, who actually agrees with the claims of romantic and primitivist philosophers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Derrick Jensen about the evils of our industrial civilization--then turns around and uses those claims as support for the theory that said civilization has a moral imperative to expand throughout the solar system and beyond. The gist of the argument is that as long as our economy is butting up against the limits of one planet's resource base, we will be doomed to produce atrocities and eventually self-destruct (unless we get hit by a killer asteroid first). A spacefaring civilization wouldn't be utopia, but would at least keep us from running into those limiting factors (and could also deflect killer asteroids). Nielsen even claims such a society could be nomadic, somewhat in the manner of primitive hunter-gatherer tribes.

This argument strikes me as highly problematic, and not just because it brings cartoon images of "space cavemen" irresistibly to mind. I'm no primitivist myself, but I know how folks like Jensen and Edward Abbey would react to the notion of carrying the "cancerous" industrial growth paradigm to its logical extreme. They would doubtless envision something like what Stephen Baxter (who was also at the Symposium) describes in his short story "On the Orion Line": Humanity inhabits an ever-expanding sphere of star systems. Every time a system's resources are used up, we simply send colonists outward to the next one, driven by the implacable force of the growth paradigm, overrunning any alien biospheres and civilizations that stand in our way. The outermost colonies are frantically stripping their systems of resources to provide, not just for their own needs, but for those of all the other colonies and Earth as well--worlds that are ravaged and depleted and can no longer support themselves.

On the other hand, I guess it could be worse. If the people of the outermost colonies shared Matthew Vadum's philosophy, as one suspects they would, they wouldn't willingly send any resources back to "those unproductive freeloaders" in the other systems without some form of compulsion from a higher authority. So even if humanity becomes an interstellar cancer, maybe at least we can still maintain a democracy.

( Overview of first, second, and third wave environmentalism in America )
The phenomenon I've decided to call fourth wave environmentalism didn't begin with Bill McKibben, but his new book Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet nicely sums up its goals and their justification. It's strange to discover that he was already working on this book during the run-up to the 350.org International Day of Climate Action, for which he was the lead organizer. 350 Day's premise was based on Dr. James Hansen's assertion that "If humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted, . . . CO2 will need to be reduced . . . to at most 350 ppm." But McKibben's book assembles an impressive array of statistics to show that the planet Hansen is talking about no longer exists, that the ten-thousand-year-long climatic "sweet spot" we've inhabited is already gone and probably never coming back. On page 184, McKibben writes that getting down to 350 "is what we must do to stabilize the planet even at its current state of disruption"--that is, the world of smaller icecaps, acidified oceans, more and bigger droughts, floods, and wildfires, etc, etc.

The first three waves of environmentalism never came close to this kind of statement. They generally assumed not only that the world as we know it was still around, but that we should focus so squarely on preserving it that failure should be unthinkable. After all, to plan for how to survive and thrive after such a failure would seem to take away some of the urgency of our discourse. Most previous pictures of a world where environmentalism fails have been simplistic apocalypse scenarios where civilization collapses into chaos and almost everyone dies, painted solely for the purpose of emphasizing that "failure is not an option."

But that doesn't mean no one has been planning for at least a partial failure. The Transition movement is all about adapting to both global warming and the end of economic growth powered by cheap energy. Many of the Permaculture principles they're based on can also be seen in the new localism and voluntary simplicity movements, which include Slow Food, Slow Money, Slow Cities, etc. All of these groups and movements fall under my definition of fourth wave environmentalism.

The fourth wave is opposed to the third wave's economic mainstreaming, asserting that due to peak oil and the immense cost of coping with a newly chaotic world, economic growth will end soon regardless of how "green" the economy gets. On page 52 of Eaarth, McKibben tries to maintain some ties to third-wave idealism: "I support a green Manhattan Project, an ecological New Deal, a clean-tech Apollo mission. If I had money, I'd give it to Al Gore to invest in start-ups." But, he is forced to conclude, "it's not going to happen fast enough to ward off enormous change. I don't think the growth paradigm can rise to the occasion . . . We no longer possess the margin we'd require for another huge leap forward, certainly not enough to preserve the planet we used to live on."

Instead, the fourth wave proposes a new system of small, stable economies with some degree of local self-sufficiency, although "it will be a while before there's a village computer maker or a local locomotive manufacturer" in most places (p. 141), and big governments will still help in "spreading risk across a continent: New Orleans couldn't have repaired itself" after Hurricane Katrina, the kind of disaster that will soon be commonplace (p. 144). Communities will feed themselves with local organic farms that replace oil-based inputs with compost and manpower, while growing many different plants in every field for resilience to extreme weather. Power grids will be regional, not national, and most communities will have small local generators (wind, solar, hydro, biomass, etc) for resilience to grid power outages.

Of course, there are a chorus of standard objections to the idea of eliminating growth and reversing globalization. The resulting society would be "stagnant and hierarchical and no fun to live in," as

bdunbar summarized in a reply to this entry. McKibben's answer to this is simply to keep the Internet running. He argues that this would a) help maintain an open society that resists local tendencies to stratify, eliminate women's rights, etc, b) provide lots of virtual fun to offset the boredom of small-town life, and c) serve other useful purposes like helping people learn farming skills. (This suggests an interesting sci-fi scenario: what if both the Permaculture people and their arch-nemeses, the Singularitarians, turn out to be right? A superhuman AI emerging in the Internet on a world locked in permanent climate crisis would have an interesting time of it.)

I'm not sure how I feel about all this myself. McKibben leaves no room for space travel in his new world, dismissing the idea that it will remain a national project in future America: "Theoretically we've committed to sending a man to Mars, but I know very few people who either believe we will or care" (p. 120). But what if he's wrong about how bad things will get? Most crucially, what if he's not pessimistic enough? Space colonization is worthwhile partly because it provides a means of persistence for both societies and ecosystems even if Earth plunges into a true apocalypse scenario. Even in the face of so many other demands on our perhaps-soon-to-be-shrinking economy, that plan for survival should not be lightly abandoned.

I finally decided I couldn't wait any longer--I had to get rid of that boring "Thoughts on the Environmental Crisis" title, which virtually guarantees me a permanently small readership. I needed something short and catchy, like Technozoic. But since I couldn't think of anything clever and original offhand, and had reluctantly decided that trying to become "The SolSeed Eco-Blog" put too many constraints on what I could say, I decided to use Brian "Space4Commerce" Dunbar and his sometime nemesis, Bruce "Space4Peace" Gagnon, as a model. (There must be an alternate timeline where they're allies; after all, as far as we're presently aware, the commercialization of space is the alternative to its dominance by the military.)

But wait, I thought--while I'm very interested in space colonization and growing new biospheres, that's a pretty small fraction of what I write about on this blog. So Space4Life isn't really a good enough title. Making it OpenSpace opens up at least four possible interpretations:

The outer-space aspect, of course: if Open is a verb, the title clearly refers to the opening of the Final Frontier for colonization by the seeds of Gaia. Which is fine, as long as we don't repeat the evils of the first colonial era by landing on already-living worlds and overexploiting/exterminating their inhabitants.
The classic environmentalist stand for Open Spaces: the preservation of natural landscapes, both as habitat and for the enjoyment of hikers, campers, and sometimes even hunters. It's a good time to be promoting this ideal, with the release of acclaimed documentarian Ken Burns's new film, "The National Parks: America's Best Idea," coming out next month on PBS.
As an abstract metaphor, with "Life" referring to the process of living, usually in an exclusively human sense. This would cover, albeit obscurely, the political and economic issues I discuss: for example, America needs to maintain public space for free and open dialog, rather than surveilling the heck out of us and pouncing on whoever trips a computer search algorithm looking for words that might be related to terrorist activity.
On a similar note, there's the reference to Open Space Technology, which was used to organize the first two SolSeed events and is very Web 2.0: the conveners just provide a space and an open wall where any participant can tape up agenda items.

As long as I was changing the title, I decided a facelift for the site's appearance was also a good idea, allowing for a subtitle and more horizontal space for my entries. Let me know what you think!

Current Mood: accomplished

The long-term goal of the organization called SolSeed is to become an intentional society, with a large number of people living in the same place, a number of businesses and industries, art and culture, etc. It will be a society of "starfarers," that is, the type of people who are able and willing to commit to massive long-term endeavors such as seeding the galaxy with life.

Solseed is like a religion in some respects. But unlike most religions, certain governments, and other human institutions such as the global capitalist economic system, it has no interest in converting everyone to its way of life. The goal is to find people who want to be starfarers, in the broad sense described above, and see if they like us enough to join. In short, SolSeed wants to be a non-totalizing society. This is based on our core value of respecting and welcoming difference.

Yet, paradoxically, the sum of all organizations who hold that value, what Paul Hawken calls "the movement of movements," is itself totalizing. It wants everyone to respect and welcome difference, which implies the abolition of all prejudice. The only aspects of any culture that this broader movement abhors are those which treat women, gays, minority ethnic groups, people of other social classes or castes or faiths or political beliefs, as second-class citizens.

This "intolerance of intolerance" seems to turn the ideal of respecting difference upside down, because so many of the world's cultures have deeply ingrained prejudices, such as those built into the division of gender roles that was arguably necessary up until relatively recently, when modern technologies and practices made pregnancy less of a limiting factor in women's lives. In asking such a culture to give women the right to hold paying jobs and even start businesses, as the burgeoning microcredit movement does, aren't we demanding that they give up what makes them unique and become just like us (or even less prejudiced than we are, in some especially hypcritical instances)?

Perhaps, to some degree. But the purpose of such demands is to grant an oppressed group the freedom to fully express its own uniqueness, collective and individual, and it's held as an article of faith in the movement of movements that this flowering of difference more than makes up for anything that is lost in the process of turning a culture upside down and shaking the prejudices out.

P.S. Happy hottest day in Seattle in recorded history! Let's see if we can avoid celebrating this again next year!

“What does it mean to 'Bring Life' to each of us, to all of us, and to the entire galaxy?”

- Theme question for SolSeed's first organized event

“Rational hyper-intelligent critters would realize that even hyper-intelligent critters can make mistakes and having backups is a good idea. In this case having a terrestrial planet people can live on [without high technology] in the event of a really massive systems crash is a good idea ...”

-

bdunbar , in a comment thread here

“Taking and not giving back, demanding that 'productivity' and 'earnings' keep on increasing with time, the System removing from the rest of the World these vast quantities of energy to keep its own tiny desperate fraction showing a profit: and not only most of humanity--most of the World, animal, vegetable and mineral, is laid waste in the process. The System may or may not understand that it's only buying time. And that time is an artificial resource to begin with, of no value to anyone or anything but the System, which sooner or later must crash to its death, when its addiction to energy has become more than the rest of the World can supply, dragging with it innocent souls all along the chain of life.”

- Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow, pp. 480-481

Many sources agree that more solar energy falls on Earth's surface in an hour than humanity currently uses in a year. But according to Nikolai Kardashev, eventually we could reach a point where we use it all, along with every erg of available nuclear, chemical, and geothermal energy this planet can produce.

Okay, in actual fact you can be a so-called Kardashev Type I civilization just by using a total of around two hundred quadrillion watts, however obtained. But let's take it literally for a moment. ( It's a pretty insane idea, really... )

As if Type I weren't crazy enough, Kardashev Types II and III involve harnessing all the energy of a star and a galaxy, respectively. The premise I don't buy here is that increasingly advanced civilizations must always use ever-growing amounts of energy. It's infantile, really--why assume that there is no such thing as “enough?”

Now, I'm all for getting out there and building some colonies and big solar arrays in space, on Mars, and on extrasolar planets. Even a Ringworld or a Dyson sphere could be pretty cool if we figured out how to do it right. But I think that in all these adventures, we're really going to want to take samples of our biosphere along for the ride. It's what created us, after all--and for the time being, we really can't live without it.

This article about the possible new Little Ice Age, arguing based on sunspots rather than an ultimately human-caused Gulf Stream shutdown, sounds depressingly plausible (although he doesn't seem to mention these spots in his rundown of solar activity this year). Depressing in that croplands would have to move south instead of north, thus speeding the destruction of the world's rainforests; in that we might seriously consider deliberately releasing the methane under the Arctic permafrost to combat the cooling, with probably disastrous results; and yes, also in that we may be too slow to respond more rationally because we've gotten all geared up to fight global warming and numerous scientific and engineering careers have been built around that pursuit.

My thinking is that in an ideal world, we would have contingency plans for both scenarios, since we still need to wait a few years to see where this particular trend leads. During that time, there's no reason not to work on both continued research on electric cars (which we need anyway, considering Peak Oil), and cheap ways to heavily insulate existing structures in the event they're asked to cope with colder climes. As for agriculture, maybe now is the time to invest in large-scale indoor hydroponics, which would also be useful for space colonies in the event we want to pick another basket or two to put some of our eggs in sometime soon.

Via.

Update, 4/26/08: Mr. Chapman cites four climate agencies to support his hypothesis that 2007 marks a decisive turning point for global temperature--a drop of 0.7°C from January '07 to January '08. The British Hadley Centre, his first source, has a convincing argument for why the drop happened based on the fact that El Niño and La Niña weather patterns are both becoming more severe. The second agency listed, the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, also stands with the consensus: "The Southern Oscillation and the solar cycle have significant effects on year-to-year global temperature change. Because both of these natural effects were in their cool phases in 2007, the unusual warmth of 2007 [which tied with 1997 for second-hottest year on record] is all the more notable." (But try telling that to all the right-wingers who have been gleefully reposting Chapman's analysis all over the Web, apparently believing they'll enjoy watching America get crushed under advancing glaciers as long as it means Al Gore was wrong.)

Another way to use biotech to save the environment: this time, they're using carbon monoxide as a feedstock for bacterial ethanol production. Cheaper and less land-intensive than corn, and turns an industrial pollutant into a resource? Pretty awesome, if you ask me. The only question in my mind is whether ethanol-powered cars will produce more or less carbon monoxide than the standard gasoline-powered ones.

The newest Big Bad Wolf for the environmental movement: the Farm Bill. Apparently, the good old days of paying farmers to produce less are gone. Now they're being hounded to make as much corn, soy, and wheat as possible for cheap, so we can dump the surplus on foreign markets as well as indirectly subsidizing the processed-food industry.

And another positive item: The first Earthlike world outside the solar system? It's orbiting a tiny star and is at least 1.5 times the size of Earth, but it has great potential. At only 20.5 light-years distant, it also wouldn't be a bad target for our first attempt at interstellar travel.

What environmentalists are asking our species to do, in terms of halting the rapid growth in the scale of the human presence on Earth, is quite literally unprecedented. In the whole history of this planet, it is virtually certain that no other species that found itself suddenly capable of hacking out an entirely new niche for itself in an unsuspecting ecology showed the slightest bit of self-restraint in exploiting that niche. Such a species always overshoots the carrying capacity of the new niche and continues to expand until limited resources bite back.

Ecologists call this a "hard landing" scenario, perhaps in acknowledgement of the simple truth that life is hard, a corollary of the fact that evolution is blind. Non-intelligent species do not actively strive toward the goal of coexistence with their ecosystems; instead, this ideal is forced upon them over many diminshing cycles of overshoot and dieoff. Only after this hard beginning can cooperative systems of symbiosis begin to form. A right-wing Iraq hawk once vandalized an antiwar poster in a Pomona College dining hall with the words, "Peace is not free--it is something created by war." In ecology, this is almost the literal truth.

But humans don't have to go that way. The notion of a "soft landing" is not just a pleasant dream, but something we can actually turn into action if we choose. The ideology of unlimited growth, in its most basic form, is telling us to go with the flow and accept the terrible price if it turns out that we can't continue finding new niches to hack out of our limited planet (and eventually, perhaps, our solar system and galaxy). But there is every reason to decide that we don't want to take that chance. Even if history provides no guidance about how else we can live, I think we're smart enough to figure it out for ourselves.

"Seeds of Gaia" is a short but extremely complex piece of animation with bits of live-action thrown in. I created it for the "clone project" in a Digital Cinema course. It's a music video about a possible future in which Earth is dying, but with the help of some rogue colonists, other worlds are coming to life. It goes by really fast, for two reasons: animation is hard work, and the timing has to be roughly in line with the music track, which is less than a minute long.

"World of the Ninja" isn't really mine. I helped make it, but it was written and directed by Diego Bustamante, a member of the Really Ambitious Filmmaking Team, which I founded. It's a parody of National Geographic specials, and apart from that, the title speaks for itself.

The flight of a bird is a tenuous, fragile-seeming thing. It relies on the complex interplay of eddies and vortices working out just so, to keep the bird oriented right and balance out both gravity and drag forces. And yet flying is, in fact, an incredibly robust survival strategy. To choose just one obvious example: where other creatures run and hide, birds can always be seen flitting brazenly from tree to rooftop to power-line no matter how many humans are around.

Similarly, human nature may not permit us to build any civilization that maintains freedom, justice, and equality on truly strong, stable foundations. Instead, we may have to learn to fly, in the sense of balancing unstable forces until it becomes second nature, and the potential catastrophes surrounding us in almost every direction simply hold no terror for us anymore.

It would help a lot if we knew, as DNA does, that we had more than one chance at this: if a single bird falls, the species and Class Aves as a whole will go on. And despite globalization, the same may be true of individual human societies, but I'll feel a lot better once we establish some serious space colonies.

Link to version 1

Humanity is not just the passengers and crew of the Titanic. We're also the primary forces--the iceberg and the cold ocean--that are bringing the ship down.

Yes, I've decided we're already sinking. The iceberg was the Industrial Revolution itself, which has been tearing a wider and wider gash in the hull ever since, letting an ocean of dangerous chemicals pour into Nature and thence into our own bodies. Unless we can throw together a lot more lifeboats, we're going down with the ship, which might also be named Gaia.

At this point, it looks like steering the boat away from the iceberg won't help much. What needs doing is a crash effort to bail out the flooded areas and repair the leak. That is, we need to clean up the existing mess we've made of our air, water, and soil and take drastic steps to ensure that we don't just mess it up again immediately. Every "pollutant" that can be recycled into useful materials, should be. Whatever's left should be buried as deep as possible or, preferably, launched into the Sun.

That's not to say I don't support the lifeboat idea too, but that's our emergency backup. We should start building sealed-off, self-sufficient underground towns now so we can get the hang of it; the plus side is that future Mars colonists will need that skill too. Are you listening, President Bush?

"Call us a disease, I don't care--I am a human, and I want us to spread everywhere like an epidemic, so we can never be stamped out."

-Colonel Graff of the Interstellar Colonization Ministry, in Shadow of the Giant

(For those few who don't know what I'm talking about, this is how an AI program named Agent Smith describes humanity in the movie The Matrix: "I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You move to an area, and you multiply, and multiply, until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet..." Source)

Life is sacred. Thou shalt not worship anything else.

Change is eternal. Thou shalt not try to set up a changeless order. Doing so will only lead to unnecessary Chaos.

Chaos is inevitable, but can be managed by Life.

Life keeps Chaos at bay by building complex structures, on every scale from the microscopic (bacteria) to the planetary (Gaia).

Life Changes slowly through evolution, becoming ever more complex and shaping itself to fit its Changing environment.

Overly rapid Change leads to unnecessary Chaos, and unnecessary death.

Humanity must slow the pace of the Change we have unleashed, so that we can direct and shape it well enough to avoid creating too much Chaos. Only then can humanity fulfill its Destiny, which is to become Earthseed.

The Destiny of Earthseed is to take root on other worlds, there to grow new biospheres, Gaia's children.

"The Destiny of Earthseed is to take root among the stars," says religious leader Lauren Olamina in Octavia Butler's novel, Parable of the Sower. It's an old idea in science fiction: by carrying life to other worlds, humans can serve as the seeds, the reproductive mechanism, of Earth's biosphere. Some take this literally, referring to the hypothetical planetary superorganism called Gaia; for others it's merely a useful analogy.

But there is another important reason to establish space colonies, also alluded to in Parable of the Sower: "It's a destiny we'd better pursue if we hope to be anything other than smooth-skinned dinosaurs." To be a bit poetic about the analogy, we need to evolve into what a Star Trek fan might call "the Great Bird of the Galaxy" (which was actually a nickname for Gene Roddenberry).

More prosaically: at this point, we have to acknowledge that terrible things may happen to Mother Earth no matter how hard we try to prevent them, and while a catastrophe that kills off the whole human species is unlikely, it's certainly not beyond the realm of possibility. As SF authors also like to say, "humanity has all its eggs in one basket," but we can change that if we choose. Ecologists may see this as a misguided attempt to escape the natural cycle of species birth and death, even though humans will probably continue to evolve wherever we may be. But coupled with the first rationale, I think there is a very compelling ecological argument for human expansion into space.

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Ben

Living Worlds Productions

March 2015

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Page Summary

Back to my roots
Philosophical paradox week: interstellar primitivism and the anti-democratic pincer movement
Fourth wave environmentalism: We wrecked the planet, now we have to live with it
Journal makeover!
Upside-down world, part 1: The anti-missionaries
Kardashev's Manifest Destiny, or: Do we really want Gaia's job?
OK fine, have a DIFFERENT apocalypse
Cool articles
Intelligence and overshoot
Link to my environment-related movie(s)
Flying analogy
The Titanic metaphor, version 2
Orson Scott Card's response to Agent Smith
Tenets of the Church of Gaia/Earthseed
The emergency backup society

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Toward a bright future for both nature and civilization

Entries tagged with space colonization

Back to my roots

Philosophical paradox week: interstellar primitivism and the anti-democratic pincer movement

Fourth wave environmentalism: We wrecked the planet, now we have to live with it

Journal makeover!

Upside-down world, part 1: The anti-missionaries

Kardashev's Manifest Destiny, or: Do we really want Gaia's job?

OK fine, have a DIFFERENT apocalypse

Cool articles

Intelligence and overshoot

Link to my environment-related movie(s)

Flying analogy

The Titanic metaphor, version 2

Orson Scott Card's response to Agent Smith

Tenets of the Church of Gaia/Earthseed

The emergency backup society