Originally published on the CGS blog on June 5, 2015.
As I discussed in Part 1 of this blog series, Over the next 70 years, our children and grandchildren will need to negotiate three major transitions in human civilization: the transition to large-scale sustainable energy flows, managing the environmental impact of human civilization, and maintaining global governance systems that enable humans to meet these challenges. CGS and its members can play a role in all three transitions.
Thinking about environmental issues often evokes a feeling of impending doom, due to dwindling fossil energy supplies, population above environmental and economic sustainability, and heedless, ungovernable “human nature.”
However, analysts around the world now suggest that if we are disciplined, patient, and prudent, we may be able to expand sustainable energy supplies to civilization-maintaining levels. We now see early versions of ideas for managing economic and environmental assets to produce futures both ecologically sustainable and reasonably comfortable for humankind.
I suggest a few major themes to keep before us:
First an evolutionary product of nature, we as humans are now evolving along with nature (though the processes are not equal—nature is bigger.) Microscopic nature has adjusted to us and will continue to do so, at least on land. Microbes rule. Plants and other animals are experiencing major difficulties with our teeming numbers. But we are going to have to adjust to what works for them also, or they will not support us.
Ecologists have calculated that humans have assumed some control of about 40% of the earth’s vegetation, and either use or otherwise cause to be lost to other creatures about 25% of the world’s potential vegetation biomass. We humans might think that impressive, but we may be wrenching the life circumstances of honeybees so drastically as to imperil their ability to pollinate crops making up major parts of our diet. The U.S. White House is orchestrating a response to this threat. In the oceans, fish populations are under great stress. So we have to let the rest of nature live if it is to let us do so.
Second, we need to move from parasite to producer. Most of the life system works off organic photosynthesis. If we replace energy from life-stored fossil fuels with sun, wind, and nuclear alternatives, we will be in a position to add to the world’s energy. With this sustained energy flow, we would have the capability to add measurably to the overall scope of life on this earth instead of merely plundering it. We need to reduce where we impose too much and add where we can.
Third, closely related, we need to recognize that to sustain a high energy, high complexity lifestyle there must be a huge life system (including the oxygen in the air, microbes, and much else), much of it lower in complexity, into which humanity fits. This has to do with “power law” understandings pioneered by Mark Buchanan and Stephen Jay Gould. (Here is an extended treatment of these concepts as applied to humans. See also cosmologist Eric Chaisson’s treatment of complexity in his marvelous website on cosmic evolution).
Fourth, in this co-evolutionary process, local realities sum up to global reality, and global imperatives must be localized. As the United Nations Environmental Program recognizes, diverse circumstances require diverse solutions. But lessons learned locally can often be shared. The sum total of humanity’s successful reconciliation with nature is its successful local initiatives: setting aside wildlands for bees, perhaps, economizing on water use in watersheds, protecting wetlands, maintaining vegetation in arid regions, and the like. We may not often need projects of the scope of China’s 1400-year-old, thousand-mile-long grand canal. Many less grand but useful programs may do.
CGS is actively involved in a current, pressing global issue: keeping the temperature of the earth’s atmosphere from rising dangerously. CGS climate change resources and actions offer opportunities to make contributions in a number of ways. Keep informed and stay active.
