Tag Archives: climate change

More than human

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Decorative imageIn his recent book, ‘The Place of Tides’, James Rebanks writes ‘the age of humans will pass.  Perhaps the end has already begun though it may take a long time to play out’.  I grew up when nuclear armageddon appeared to be the major threat to the future of life on Earth and it remains a major threat, especially given current tensions between nations.  However, other threats have gained prominence including both a massive asteroid impact, on the scale of the one that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs 66 million years ago, and climate change, which caused the largest mass extinction, killing 95% of all species, about 252 million years ago.  The current extinction rate is between 100 and 1000 times greater than the natural rate and is being driven by the overexploitation of the Earth’s resources by humans leading to habitat destruction and climate change.  Humans are part of a complex ecosystem, or system of systems, including soil systems with interactions between microorganisms, plants and decaying matter; pollination systems characterised by co-dependence between plants and pollinators; and, aquatic systems connecting rivers, lakes and oceans by the movement of water, nutrients and migratory species.  The overexploitation of these systems to support our 21st century lifestyle is starting to cause systemic failures that are the underlying cause of the increasing rate of species extinction and it is difficult, if not impossible, to predict when it will be our turn.  In his 1936 book, ‘Where Life is Better: An Unsentimental American Journey’, James Rorty observes that the most dangerous fact he has come across is ‘the overwhelming fact of our lazy, irresponsible, adolescent inability to face the truth or tell it’.  Not much has changed in nearly one hundred years, except that the global population has increased fourfold from about 2.2 billion to 8.2 billion with a corresponding increase in the exploitation of the Earth for energy, food and satisfying our materialistic desires.  A recent exhibition at the Design Museum in London, encouraged us to think beyond human-centred design and to consider the impact of our designs on all the species on the planet.  A process sometimes known as life-centred design or interspecies design.  What if designs could help other species to flourish, as well as humans?

References:

Rebanks, James, The place of tides, London: Penguin, 2025.

Rorty, James, Where life is better: an unsentimental journey.  New York, Reynal & Hitchcock, 1936.  (I have not read this book but it was quoted by Joanna Pocock in ‘Greyhound’, Glasgow: Fitzcarraldo Editions, HarperCollins Publishers, 2025, which I have read and enjoyed).

Image: Photograph of Pei yono uhutipo (Spirit of the path) by Sheraonawe Hakihiiwe, a member of the Yanomami Indigenous community who live in the Venezuelan and Brazilian Amazon. One of a series of his paintings in the ‘More than Human‘ exhibition at the Design Museum which form part of an archive of Yanomami knowledge that reflects the abundance of life in the forest.

Fictional Planetary Emergencies

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Decorative photograph of a wind-shaped tree on a hillside in fogA little while ago, when looking for something to read when visiting someone’s house, I picked up ‘The Complete Short Stories: volume 2’ of JG Ballard and started reading from the last story in the collection, ‘Report from an Obscure Planet’.  I was surprised to discover its similarity to a fictional piece I posted on this blog last year, see ‘Where has the blue planet gone?’ on July 3rd 2024.  Then I was shocked to realize that some readers of my blog might have thought I had plagiarised Ballard’s short story, whereas I was completely unaware of it when I wrote the post.  In Ballard’s story, a rescue mission has just landed on a remote planet from which frantic emergency signals had been received; however, their aerial reconnaissance of hundreds of cities spread across the planet found no inhabitants.  They accidentally activate the planet’s extensive, and apparently undamaged, computer networks when broadcasting a signal of greeting and friendship.  The networks react with ‘a sudden show of alarm, as if well used to mistrusting these declarations of good intent’.  The visitors’ research reveals that war was the most popular sport of the inhabitants, with nations maintaining huge arsenals.  They conclude that the computer networks sent out the emergency signals in an attempt to save themselves from a danger that was about to overwhelm their planet.  In my version, the rescue mission finds a planet transformed by a climate change and mass extinct induced by an asteroid strike or the activities of the inhabitants.  Ballard wrote his story in 1992, so more than thirty years before me, and perhaps twenty years after the first data centre had been built by IBM.  The first convincing evidence of the warming effect of carbon dioxide was found in the 1960s and scientists started ringing the alarm bells in the late 1980s and early 1990s, for instance at the 1988 Toronto Conference on the Changing Atmosphere – so perhaps too early to feature in Ballard’s story.  Of course, I could also have written about artificial intelligence being the only sign of life found on the planet but that really would have looked like wholesale plagiarism!

Reference:

JG Ballard, ‘The Complete Short Stories: volume 2’, Harper Perennial, London, 2006.

Where has the blue planet gone?

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Decorative image showing 'snowball' EarthThey had moved across the galaxy at half the speed of light, covering the 17.6 light-years from their planet in the orbit of Ehseaplus to the Sol system in a couple of hundred days and now they had slowed down their inter-constellation craft to manoeuvre prior to landing on the planet Sol III.  They were looking for a blue planet but they had found two reddish planets orbiting the star, Sol adjacent to an asteroid belt.  Their expedition had been launched after an alien object had been detected and recovered as it passed about two light-years from their planet, Ehseaplus VI.  The recovered object, which at some point appeared to have had an atomic energy source, carried on its exterior surface a gold-plated disc with primitive representations of various lifeforms and a map that appeared to suggest that the object had come from a planet orbiting the star, Sol.  Although, they had not been able to detect any artificial signals from that part of the Milky Way, their mission was to make contact with the lifeforms.  However, it appeared that Sol III was no longer blue but had become a cold, dark planet like its neighbour, Sol IV.  As they orbited Sol III, their sensor systems told them that most of the planet was covered by a thick ice-sheet with a dusting of volcanic ash, which they presumed was from volcanoes that dotted its surface – they counted about fifty of them erupting as they orbited the planet.  Their sensors also informed them that the atmosphere contained some water crystals and large amounts of carbon dioxide and sulphur dioxide.  Their explorations of the galaxy had not revealed any lifeforms capable of surviving in such an atmosphere so they were beginning to think that they had had a wasted journey.  They discussed their findings with mission control and concluded that the lifeforms responsible for the representations on the gold disc must have become extinct.  A catastrophic climate change had probably led to a mass extinction though they could not deduce whether the catastrophe had occurred due to an asteroid strike or the activities of the lifeform causing the planet’s climate to reach a tipping point.  The navigation system of their craft was weaving a gently curving path through what appeared to be tens of thousands of artificial objects in orbit around Sol III.  So, they launched one of the crafts’s autonomous probes to recover some of the objects and perform some tests which revealed that a crude carbon-based system had been used to push the objects into orbit about 40,000 Sol III years ago.  Maybe the high levels of carbon dioxide they had detected in the atmosphere of Soll III originated from these carbon-based energy systems and excessive use of them had taken the planet’s climate to a tipping point?  They gave up on finding life on Sol III and set course for home.

Footnotes:

  1. I was inspired to write this short story after reading ‘The NASA Archives: from Project Mercury to the Mars rovers’ by Piers Bizony, Andrew Chiakin and Roger Launius (Taschen GmbH, 2022).
  2. The NASA space probe, Voyager 1 was launched in 1977 and is travelling through space at 10 miles per second carrying a gold-plated metal disc with messages from humanity and images of life on Earth. It will pass close to a star, AC+79 3888 in the Ursa Minor constellation in 40,272 AD.
  3. The atmosphere of Mars, the fourth planet from the Sun, is very thin, cold and composed mainly of carbon dioxide. About one-third of the surface of Mars is covered by a very thick layer of ice that is only a spade’s depth beneath the red soil that gives our neighbouring plant its reddish tint when seen from Earth.
  4. Image: NASA snowball planet from https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2018/05/04/snowball-earth-frozen-solid/

Virtual reality and economic injustice in a world with limits

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Decorative photograph of a pile of carved stonesIt is sometimes suggested that materialism and greed are key drivers of our social and political system that largely refuses to acknowledge that we live in a world of limits.  However, Rowan Williams has proposed that we have a ‘culture that is resentful about material reality, hungry for anything and everything that distances us from the constraints of being a physical animal subject to temporal processes, to uncontrollable changes and to sheer accident.’  In other words, it is our desire to be in control of our lives and surroundings that drives us to accumulate wealth and build our strongholds.  Education and learning lead to an understanding of the complexity of the world, a realisation that we cannot control the world and perhaps to unavoidable insecurity, particularly for those people who thought they had some distance between themselves and uncontrollable events.  It is more comfortable to believe that we are in control, adhere to the current out-dated paradigm, and ignore evidence to the contrary. This is equivalent to living in a virtual reality.  This approach not only accelerates uncontrollable changes to the planet but also leads to economic disparities because, as Williams states, economic justice will only arrive when everyone recognises a shared vulnerability and limitation in a world that is not infinite.

Source: Rowan Williams, Faith in the public square, London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015.

Image: a pile of carved stones in the cloisters of Hereford cathedral where I bought a second-hand copy of ‘Faith in the public square’ while on holiday [see ‘Personale mappa mundi‘ on November 1st, 2023].