Tag Archives: Environmentalism

The Deeper Meaning of the Anthropocene

TheSublime1938

Last year when I wrote a review of E.O. Wilson’s book The Meaning of Human Existence I felt sure it would be the then 85  year old’s last major work. I was wrong having underestimated Professor Wilson’s already impressive intellectual stamina. Perhaps his latest book Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life  is indeed his last, the final book that concludes the trilogy of The Social Conquest of Earth and the Meaning of Human Existence. This has less to do with his mental staying power ,which I will not make the mistake of underestimating again, than because it’s hard to imagine what might follow Half Earth, for with it Wilson has less started a conversation than attempted to launch a crusade.

The argument Wilson makes in Half Earth isn’t all that difficult to understand, and for those who are concerned with the health of the planet, and especially the well being of the flora and fauna with which we share the earth, might initially be hard to disagree with. Powerfully, Wilson reminds us that we are at the beginning of the sixth great extinction a mass death of species on par with other great dyings such as the one that killed the dinosaurs.

The difference between the mass extinction of our own time when compared to those that occurred in the past is that rather than being the consequence of mindless processes like a meteor strike or bacteria breathing poison, it is the result of the actions of a species that actually knows what it is doing- that is us. Wilson’s answer to the crisis we are causing is apparent in the very title of his book. He is urging us to declare half of the earth’s surface a wildlife preserve where large scale human settlement and development will be prohibited.

Any polemic such as the one Wilson has written requires an enemy, but rather than a take aim at the capitlist/industrial system, or the aspiration to endless consumption, Wilson’s enemy is a relatively new and yet to be influential movement within environmentalism that aims to normalize our perspective on the natural world.

Despite the fact he that definitely has a political and ideological target with which he takes umbrage being a scientist rather than a philosopher he fails to clearly define what exactly it is. Instead he labels anyone who holds doubts about the major assumptions of the environmental movement as believers in the “Anthropocene”- the idea that human beings have become so technologically powerful that we now constitute a geological force.
The problem with this is that Wilson’s beef is really only with a small subset of people who believe in the Anthropocene, indeed, Wilson himself seems to believe in it, which shows you just how confused his argument is.

The subset he opposes would include thinkers like Emma Marris or Jedediah Purdy who have been arguing that we need to untangle ourselves from ideas about nature that we inherited from 19th century romanticism. These concepts regarding the purity of the natural as opposed to the artificiality of the man made- the idea that not only is humanity distinct from nature but that anything caused by our agency is somehow unnatural- are now both ubiquitous and have become the subject of increasing doubts.

While mass extinction is certainly real and constitutes an enormous tragedy, it does not necessarily follow that the best way to counter such extinction is to declare half of the earth off limits to humans. Much better for both human and animal welfare would be to make the human artifice more compatible with the needs of wildlife. Though the idea of a pure, wild and natural place free from human impact, and above all dark and quiet, is one I certainly understand and find attractive, our desire that it exist is certainly much less a matter of environmental science than a particular type of spiritual desire.

As Daniel Duane pointed out in a recent New York Times article the places we deem to be the most natural, that is the national parks, which have been put aside for the very purpose of preserving wilderness, are instead among the most human- managed landscapes on earth. And technology, though it can never lead to complete mastery, makes this nature increasingly easy to manage:

More and more, though, as we humans devour habitat, and as hardworking biologists — thank heaven — use the best tools available to protect whatever wild creatures remain, we approach that perhaps inevitable time when every predator-prey interaction, every live birth and every death in every species supported by the terrestrial biosphere, will be monitored and manipulated by the human hive mind.

Yet even were we to adopt Wilson’s half earth proposal whole cloth we would still face scenarios where we will want to act against the dictates of nature. There are, for instance , good arguments to intervene on behalf of, say, bats whose populations have been decimated by the white nose fungus or great apes who are threatened extinction as a consequence of viral infections. Where and why such interventions occur are more than merely scientific questions ,and they arise not from the human desire to undo the damage we have done, but from the damage nature inflicts upon herself.

From the opposite angle, climate change will not respect any artificial borders we establish between the natural and the human worlds. It seem clear that we have a moral duty to limit the suffering nature experiences as a consequence of our action or inaction. We are in the midst of discovering the burden of our moral responsibility. Perhaps this discovery points to a need to expand the moral boundaries of the Anthropocene itself.

Rather than abandoning or merely continuing to narrowly apply the idea of the Anthropocene to the environment alone, maybe we should extend it to embrace other aspects of human agency that have expanded since the birth of the modern world. For what has happened, especially since the industrial revolution, is that areas previously outside the human ability to effect through action have come increasingly not so much under our control as our ability to influence, both for good and ill.

It’s not just nature that is now shaped by our choices, that has become a matter of moral and political dispute, but poverty and hunger, along with disease. Some even now interpret death itself in moral and political terms. With his half earth proposal Wilson wants to do away with a world where the state of the biosphere has become a matter of moral and political dispute. This dismissal of human political capacity and rights seems to run like a red thread through Wilson’s thinking, and ends, as I have pointed out elsewhere, in treating human like animals in a game preserve.

Indeed, the American ideal of wilderness as an edenic world unsullied by the hands of man that Wilson wants to see over half the earth has had negative political consequences even in the richest of nations. The recent violent standoff in Oregon emerged out of the resentments of a West where the federal government owns nearly 50 percent of the land. Such resentments have made the West, which might culturally lean much differently, a bulwark of the political right. As Robert Fletcher and Bram Büscher have argued in Aeon Wilson’s prescription could result in grave injustices in the developing world against native peoples in the same way the demands of environmentalists for wilderness stripped of humans resulted in the violent expulsion of Native Americans from large swaths of the American West.

Eden, it seems, refuses to be reestablished despite our best efforts and intentions. Welcome to the Fall.

 

Edward O. Wilson’s Dull Paradise

Garden of Eden

In all sincerity I have to admit that there is much I admire about the biologist Edward O. Wilson. I can only pray that not only should I live into my 80’s, but still possess the intellectual stamina to write what are at least thought provoking books when I get there. I also wish I still have the balls to write a book with the title of Wilson’s latest- The Meaning of Human Existence, for publishing with an appellation like that would mean I wasn’t afraid I would disappoint my readers, and Wilson did indeed leave me wondering if the whole thing was worth the effort.

Nevertheless,  I think Wilson opened up an important alternative future that is seldom discussed here- namely what if we aimed not at a supposedly brighter, so-called post-human future but to keep things the same? Well, there would be some changes, no extremes of human poverty, along with the restoration of much of the natural environment to its pre-industrial revolution health. Still, we ourselves would aim to stay largely the same human beings who emerged some 100,000 years ago- flaws and all.

Wilson calls this admittedly conservative vision paradise, and I’ve seen his eyes light up like a child contemplating Christmas when using the word in interviews. Another point that might be of interest to this audience is who he largely blames for keeping us from entering this Shangri-la; archaic religions and their “creation stories.”

I have to admit that I find the idea of trying to preserve humanity as it is a valid alternative future. After all, “evolve or die” isn’t really the way nature works. Typically the “goal” of evolution is to find a “design” that works and then stick with it for as long as possible. Since we now dominate the entire planet and our numbers out-rival by a long way any other large animal it seems hard to assert that we need a major, and likely risky, upgrade. Here’s Wilson making the case:

While I am at it, I hereby cast a vote for existential conservatism, the preservation of biological human nature as a sacred trust. We are doing very well in terms of science and technology. Let’s agree to keep that up, and move both along even faster. But let’s also promote the humanities, that which makes us human, and not use science to mess around with the wellspring of this, the absolute and unique potential of the human future. (60)

It’s an idea that rings true to my inner Edmund Burke, and sounds simple, doesn’t it? And on reflection it would be, if human beings were bison, blue whales, or gray wolves. Indeed, I think Wilson has drawn this idea of human preservation from his lifetime of very laudable work on biodiversity. Yet had he reflected upon why efforts at preservation fail when they do he would have realized that the problem isn’t the wildlife itself, but the human beings who don’t share the same value system going in the opposite direction. That is, humans, though we are certainly animals, aren’t wildlife, in the sense that we take destiny into our own hands, even if doing so is sometimes for the worse. Wilson seems to think that it’s quite a short step from asserting it as a goal to gaining universal assent to the “preservation of biological human nature as a sacred trust”, the problem is there is no widespread agreement over what human nature even is, and then, even if you had such agreement, how in the world do you go about enforcing it for the minority who refuse to adhere to it? How far should we be willing to go to prevent persons from willingly crossing some line that defines what a human being is? And where exactly is that line in the first place? Wilson thinks we’re near the end of the argument when we only just took our seat at the debate.

Strange thing is the very people who would likely naturally lean towards the kind of biological conservatism that Wilson hopes “we” will ultimately choose are the sorts of traditionally religious persons he thinks are at the root of most of our conflicts. Here again is Wilson:

Religious warriors are not an anomaly. It is a mistake to classify believers of a particular religious and dogmatic religion-like ideologies into two groups, moderates versus extremists. The true cause of hatred and religious violence is faith versus faith, an outward expression of the ancient instinct of tribalism. Faith is the one thing that makes otherwise good people do bad things. (154)

For Wilson, a religious groups “defines itself foremost by its creation story, the supernatural narrative that explains how human beings came into existence.” (151)  The trouble with this is that it’s not even superficially true. Three of the world’s religions that have been busy killing one another over the last millennium – Judaism, Christianity and Islam all have the same creation story. Wilson knows a hell of a lot more about ants and evolution then he does about religion or even world history. And while religion is certainly the root of some of our tribalism, which I agree is the deep and perennial human problem, it’s far from the only source, and very few of our tribal conflicts have anything to do with the fight between human beings over our origins in the deep past. How about class conflict? Or racial conflict? Or nationalist conflicts when the two sides profess the not only the exact same religion but the exact same sect- such as the current fight between the two Christian Orthodox nations of Russia and Ukraine? If China and Japan someday go to war it will not be a horrifying replay of the Scopes Monkey Trial.

For a book called The Meaning of Human Existence Wilson’s ideas have very little explanatory power when it comes to anything other than our biological origins, and some quite questionable ideas regarding the origins of our capacity for violence. That is, the book lacks depth, and because of this I found it, well… dull.

Nowhere was I more hopeful that Wilson would have something interesting and different to say than when it came to the question of extraterrestrial life. Here we have one of the world’s greatest living biologists, a man who had spent a lifetime studying ants as an alternative route to the kinds of eusociality possessed only by humans, the naked mole rat, and a handful of insects. Here was a scientists who was clearly passionate about preserving the amazing diversity of life on our small planet.

Yet Wilson’s E.T.s are land dwellers, relatively large, biologically audiovisual, “their head is distinct, big, and located up front” (115) they have moderate teeth and jaws, they have a high social intelligence, and “a small number of free locomotory appendages, levered for maximum strength with stiff internal or external skeletons composed of hinged segments (as by human elbows and knees), and with at least one pair of which are terminated by digits with pulpy tips used for sensitive touch and grasping. “ (116)

In other words they are little green men.

What I had hoped was the Wilson would have used his deep knowledge of biology to imagine alternative paths to technological civilization. Couldn’t he have imagined a hive-like species that evolves in tandem with its own technological advancement? Or maybe some larger form of insect like animal which doesn’t just have an instinctive repertoire of things that it builds, but constantly improves upon its own designs, and explores the space of possible technologies? Or aquatic species that develop something like civilization through the use of sea-herding and ocean farming? How about species that communicate not audio-visually but through electrical impulses the way our computers do?

After all, nature on earth is pretty weird. There’s not just us, but termites that build air conditioned skyscrapers (at least from their view), whales which have culturally specific songs, and strange little things that eat and excrete electrons. One might guess that life elsewhere will be even weirder. Perhaps my problem with The Meaning of Human Existence is that it just wasn’t weird enough not just to capture the worlds of tomorrow and elsewhere- but the one we’re living in right now.

 

The Human Age

atlas-and-the-hesperides-1925 John Singer Sargent

There is no writer now, perhaps ever, who is able to convey the wonder and magic of science with poetry comparable to Diane Ackerman. In some ways this makes a great deal of sense given that she is a poet by calling rather than a scientist.  To mix metaphors: our knowledge of the natural world is merely Ackerman’s palette whose colors she uses to paint a picture of nature. It is a vision of the world as magical as that of the greatest worlds of fiction- think Dante’s Divine Comedy, or our most powerful realms of fable.

There is, however, one major difference between Ackerman and her fellow poets and storytellers: the strange world she breathes fire into is the true world, the real nature whose inhabitants and children we happen to be. The picture science has given us, the closest to the truth we have yet come, is in many ways stranger, more wondrous, more beautifully sublime, than anything human beings have been able to imagine; therefore, the perfect subject and home for a poet.

The task Ackerman sets herself in her latest book, The Human Age: The World Shaped By US, is to reconcile us to the fact that we have now become the authors and artists rather than the mere spectators of nature’s play . We live in an era in which our effect upon the earth has become so profound that some geologists want to declare it the “Anthropocene” signalling that our presence is now leaving its trace upon the geological record in the way only the mightiest, if slow moving, forces of nature have done heretofore. Yet in light of the the speed with which we are changing the world, we are perhaps more like a sudden catastrophe than languid geological transformation taking millions of years to unfold.

Ackerman’s hope is to find a way to come to terms with the scale of our own impact without at the same time reducing humanity to that of the mythical Höðr, bringing destruction on account of our blindness and foolishness, not to mention our greed. Ackerman loves humanity as much as she loves nature, or better, she refuses, as some environmentalist are prone to do, to place human beings on one side and the natural world on the other. For her, we are nature as much as anything else that exists. Everything we do is therefore “natural”, the question we should be asking is are we doing what is wise?

In The Human Age Ackerman attempts to reframe our current pessimism and self-loathing regarding our treatment of “mother” nature , everything from the sixth great extinction we are causing to our failure to adequately confront climate change, by giving us a window into the many incredible things we are doing right now that will benefit our fragile planet.  

She brings our attention to new movements in environmentalism such as “Reconciliation Ecology” which seeks to bring into harmony human settlements and the much broader needs of the rest of nature. Reconciliation Ecology is almost the opposite of another movement of growing popularity in “neo-environmentalists” circles, namely, “Environmental Modernism”. Whereas Environmental Modernism seeks to sever our relationship with nature in order to save it, Reconciliation Ecology aims to naturalize the human artifice, bringing farming and even wilderness into the city itself. It seeks to heal the fragmented wilderness our civilization has brought about by bringing the needs of wildlife into the design process.

Rather than covering our highways with road kill, we could provide animals with a safe way to cross the street. This might be of benefit to the deer, the groundhog, the racoon, the porcupine. We might even construct tunnels for the humble meadow vole. Providing wildlife corridors, large and small, is the one of the few ways we can reconcile the living space and migratory needs of “non-urbanized” wildlife to our fragmented and now global sprawl.

Human beings, Ackerman argues, are as negatively impacted by the disappearance of wilderness as any other of nature’s creatures, and perhaps given our aesthetic sensitivity, even more so. For a long time now we have sought to use our engineering prowess to subdue nature. Why not use it to make the human made environment more natural?  She highlights a growing movement among architects and engineers to take their inspiration not from the legacy of our lifeless machines and buildings, but from nature itself, which so often manages to create works of beautiful efficiency. In this vein we find leaps of the imagination such as the Eastgate Center designed by Mick Pearce who took his inspiration from the breathing, naturally temperature controlled, structure of the termite mound.

The idea of the Anthropocene is less an acknowledgement of our impact than a recognition of our responsibility. For so long we have warred against nature’s limits, arrows, and indifference that it is somewhat strange to find ourselves in the position of her caretaker and even designer. And make no mistake about it, for an increasing number of the plants and animals with whom we share this planet their fate will be decided by our action or inaction.

Some environmentalists would argue for nature’s “purity” and against our interference, even when this interference is done in the name of her creatures. Ackerman, though not entirely certain, is arguing against such environmental nihilism, paralysis, or puritanism. If it is necessary for us to “fix” nature- so be it, and she sees in our science and technology our greatest tool to come to nature’s aid. Such fixes can entail everything from permitting, rather than attempting to uproot, invasive species we have inadvertently or deliberately introduced if those invasives have positive benefits for an ecosystem, aiding the relocation of species as biomes shift under the impact of climate change, or introducing extinct species we have managed to save and resurrect through their DNA.

We are now entering the era where we are not only able to mimic nature, but to redesign it at the genetic level. Creating chimeras that nature left to itself would find it difficult or impossible to replicate. Ackerman is generally comfortable with our ever more cyborg nature and revels in the science that allows us to literally print body parts and one day whole organs. Like the rest of us should be, she is flabbergasted by ongoing revolutions in biology that are rewriting what it means to be human.

The early 21st century field of epigenetics is giving us a much more nuanced and complex view of the interplay between genes and the environment. It is not only that multiple genes need to be taken account of in explaining conditions and behaviors, but that genes are in a sense tuned by the environment itself. Indeed, much of this turning “on or off” of genes is a form of genetic memory. In a strange echo of Lamarck, the experiences of one’s close ancestors- their feasts and famines are encoded in the genes of their descendants.

Add to that our recent discoveries regarding the microbiome, the collection of bacteria that live within us that are far more numerous and in many ways as influential as our genes, and one gets an idea for how far we are moving from ideas of what it meant to be human held by scientists even a few years ago and how much distance has been put between current biology and simplistic versions of environmental or genetic determinism.

Some such, as the philosopher of biology, John Dupree see in our advancing understanding of the role of the microbiome and epigenetics a revolutionary change in human self understanding. For a generation we chased after a simplistic idea of genetic determinism where genes were seen as a sort of “blueprint” for the organism. This is now known to be false. Genes are just one part of a permeable interaction between them, the environment and the microbiome that guide individual development and behavior.

We are all of us collectives, constantly swapping biological information and rather than seeing the microscopic world as a kind of sideshow to the “real” biological story of large organisms such as ourselves we might be said to be where we have always been in Steven Jay’s “Age of Bacteria” as much as we are in an Anthropocene.

Returning to Ackerman, she is amazed at the recent advancements in artificial intelligence, and like Tyler Cowen, even wonders whether scientific discoveries will soon no longer be the prerogative of humans, but of our increasingly intelligent machines. Such is the conclusion one might draw from looking at the work of Hod Lipson of Cornell “Eureqa Machine” . Feed the Eureqa Machine observations or data and it is able to come up with equations that describe them all on its own. Ackerman does, however, doubt whether we could ever build a machine that replicated human beings in all their wondrous weirdness.

Where her doubts regarding technology veer towards warning has to do with the question of digitalization of the world. Ackerman is best known for her 1990 A Natural History of the Senses a work which explored the five forms of human perception. Little wonder, then, that she would worry about what the world being flattened on our ubiquitous screens   into the visual sense alone. She laments:

What if, through novelty and convenience, digital nature replaces biological nature?

The further we distance ourselves from the spell of the present, explored by all our senses, the harder it will be to understand and protect nature’s precarious balance, let alone the balance of our own human nature. I worry about virtual blinders. Hobble all the senses except the visual, and you produce curiously deprived voyeurs.  (196-197)

While concerned that current technologies may be flattening human experience by leaving us visually mesmerized behind screens at the expense of the body, even as they broaden their scope allowing us to see into world small, large, and at speeds never before possible, Ackerman accepts our cyborg nature. For her we are, to steal a phrase from the philosopher Andy Clark “natural born cyborgs”, and this is not a new thing. Since our beginning we have been a changeling able to morph into a furred animal in the cold with our clothes, wield fire like a mythical dragon, or cover ourselves with shells of metal among much else.

Ackerman is not alone in the view that our cyborg tendencies are an ancient legacy. Shortly before I read The Human Age I finished the anthropologist Timothy Taylor’s short and thought provoking The Artificial Ape: How Technology Changed the Course of Human Evolution. Taylor makes a strong case that anatomically modern humans co-evolved with technology, indeed, that the technology came first and in a way has been the primary driver of our evolution.

The technology Taylor thinks lifted us beyond our hominid cousins wasn’t the usual suspects of fire or stone tools but likely the unsung baby sling.  This simple invention allowed humans to overcome a constraint suffered by the other hominids whose brains, contrary to common opinion, were getting smaller because upright walking was putting a premium of quick rather than delayed development of the young. Slings allowed mothers to carry big brained babies that took longer to develop, but because of the long period of youth could learn much more than faster developing relatives. In effect, slings were a way for human mothers who needed their hands free to externalize the womb and evolve a koala like pouch.

To return to The Human Age; although, she has, as always, given us a wonderfully written book filled with poetry and insights, Ackerman’s book is not without its flaws. Here I will focus only on what I found to be the most important one; namely, that for a book named after our age, there is not enough regarding humans in it. This is what I mean: Though the problems suffered from the effects of the Anthropocene are profound and serious, the animal most likely to broadly suffer the impact of phenomenon such as climate change are likely to be us.

The weakness of the idea of the Anthropocene when judged largely positively, which is what Ackerman is trying to do, is that it universalizes a state of control over nature that is largely limited to advanced countries and the world’s wealthy. The threat of rising sea levels look quite different from the perspective of Manhattan or Chittagong. A good deal of the environmental gains in advanced countries over the past half century can be credited to globalization, which amid its many benefits, has also entailed the offloading of pollution, garbage, and waste processing from developed to developing countries. This is the story that the photos of Edward Burtynsky, whom Ackerman profiles, tells. Stories such as the lives of the shipbreakers of Bangladesh whose world resembles something out of a dystopian novel.

Humanity is not sovereign over nature everywhere, and for some of us not only our we faced with a wildness that has not been subdued, but where humanity itself has become like a unpredictable natural force reigning down unfathomable, uncontrollable good and ill. Such is the world now being experienced by the west African societies suffering under the epidemic of Ebola. It is a world we might better understand by looking at a novel written on the eve of our mastery over nature, a novel by another amazing writer who was also a woman.

Capitalism vs. the Climate: a rejoinder

Naomi Klein has an interesting and much discussed recent article in The Nation. To grossly oversimplify, her argument goes as follows. Segments of the right are vehemently opposed to any acknowledgement, let alone measures to address the climate crisis, because the way in which climate change would need to be dealt with given its scale would mean the overthrow of the capitalist based order, and the imposition of a truly revolutionary progressive agenda.

So let’s summarize. Responding to climate change requires that we break every rule in the free-market playbook and that we do so with great urgency. We will need to rebuild the public sphere, reverse privatizations, relocalize large parts of economies, scale back overconsumption, bring back long-term planning, heavily regulate and tax corporations, maybe even nationalize some of them, cut military spending and recognize our debts to the global South. Of course, none of this has a hope in hell of happening unless it is accompanied by a massive, broad-based effort to radically reduce the influence that corporations have over the political process. That means, at a minimum, publicly funded elections and stripping corporations of their status as “people” under the law. In short, climate change supercharges the pre-existing case for virtually every progressive demand on the books, binding them into a coherent agenda based on a clear scientific imperative.

Everything in the above agenda I fully support, but then Klein makes what I feel is a grave error that could doom any effort to transform society in a way that would address the scale of our environmental predicament. She, is, in effect as blinded by ideology as the right wing she wishes to dethrone.

This can be see is the way that she throws overboard a whole group of scientists and thinkers who are asking themselves one fundamental question: how can we halt or contain climate change and allow technological civilization to survive?

Far from learning from past mistakes, a powerful faction in the environmental movement is pushing to go even further down the same disastrous road, arguing that the way to win on climate is to make the cause more palatable to conservative values. This can be heard from the studiously centrist Breakthrough Institute, which is calling for the movement to embrace industrial agriculture and nuclear power instead of organic farming and decentralized renewables. It can also be heard from several of the researchers studying the rise in climate denial. Some, like Yale’s Kahan, point out that while those who poll as highly “hierarchical” and “individualist” bridle at any mention of regulation, they tend to like big, centralized technologies that confirm their belief that humans can dominate nature. So, he and others argue, environmentalists should start emphasizing responses such as nuclear power and geoengineering (deliberately intervening in the climate system to counteract global warming), as well as playing up concerns about national security.

She has articulated the essence of our dilemma, but fails to see it as a dilemma, that we are trapped between the devil and the deep blue sea. By characterizing the crisis of Anthropcene as a issue of progressives vs capitalist, Klein misses the ugly truth of the matter. We may have little choice but to “double down” on the very need for technology that got us into this crisis. Like her, I pray that we can create some alternative decentralized and sustainable economic and political system, and think the search for such a path should begin immediately. Like her, I admire the poet-farmer Wendell Barry, unlike Klein and Barry, I realize we do not have 50 years to figure out whether sustainable poly-culture can supplant our massive reliance on mono-culture. 9 billion mouths to feed, the product of technological civilization’s success, is doubtless going to require a huge amount of genetic engineering in the name of increased yields (and hopefully lowered environmental impact). This is the case whether or not I like or embrace that fact. In the same vein coming up with some ideas as to how a massive geo-engineering is a necessary form of insurance give our desperate situation.

Nuclear energy, is much less a PR device to win over “hierarchical” and “individualist” opponents to the policies necessary to stem global warming, than the only solution we have at our fingertips that would allow us to contain on the our impact on the planet without abandoning the majority of human beings that would be imperiled were our technological civilization to be abruptly unplugged. This is the conclusion not of technological junkies, but of deep environmentalist such as the revered James Lovelock.

Klein thinks the right will be unmoved by the kind of environmental genocide unleashed by allowing climate change to run its course.

As the world warms, the reigning ideology that tells us it’s everyone for themselves, that victims deserve their fate, that we can master nature, will take us to a very cold place indeed. And it will only get colder, as theories of racial superiority, barely under the surface in parts of the denial movement, make a raging comeback. These theories are not optional: they are necessary to justify the hardening of hearts to the largely blameless victims of climate change in the global South, and in predominately African-American cities like New Orleans.

Oddly enough, this critique exactly mirrors what some on the right (with a good deal of justification) see as the callousness of radical environmentalism which recognizes the potential human cost of jettisoning technological civilization in the midst of 9 billion people alive on earth. To quote perhaps the most famous radical environmentalist- Ted Kaczynski- better know as the “Unibomber”.

For those who realize the need to do away with the techno-industrial system, if you work for its collapse, in effect you are killing a lot of people. If it collapses, there is going to be mass starvation, there aren’t going to be any more spare parts or fuel for farm equipment, there won’t be any more pesticide or fertilizer on which modern agriculture is dependent. So there isn’t going to be enough food to go around, so then what happens. This is something, that as far as I’ve read, I haven’t seen any radicals facing up to.

Far from abandoning the world’s poor to the ravages of climate on the basis of an atavistic racism, the spread of Christianity, perhaps detrimental in any other ways, may make such coldness less not more likely from the right than from the left. This, after all, is what happened in the best (perhaps only) example of a localized, Third World climate crisis that we know- in Darfur- where developed world Christians were the loudest voice is bringing an end to the slaughter.  The world is a complicated place, and any ideology- left or right- blinds us to the opportunities and dangers in its complexity.

Given the scale of the change in human living that will be required to mitigate the impact of not just global warming, but the Anthopocence more generally, Klein misses the fact that the most necessary allies for such a change, are exactly the ones that the left will find so difficult to deal with (and for many good reasons) that is the religious. After all, from both a humanist and a religious perspective what is required is nothing less than a spiritual revolution in how humanity relates to nature, even if we have to take the fight politically for those who can not, or refuse to see, the dangers we face.