The sun rose again this morning. Looking out of my window, eighteen floors above the streets of Bangkok, I still see familiar skyscrapers punctuating the horizon. And as the ambient noise of human activity begins to cut through the lazy dawn it is clear that life is going on much as before.
Or is it? Something extraordinary is happening. You can almost feel it in the air. I do not mean the imminent arrival of my son Dominique Oliver Hames into the world, although that too is very special. I am not talking about an Armageddon following the return of Jesus Christ to Earth in a “rapture” moment or the likelihood of aliens observing us from afar even though there are possibly billions of planets, some just like ours, in the Milky Way. I am not referring to the waves of civil disobedience that have been sweeping across the Arab world of late, mixed reactions to the death of Osama bin Laden, the cascading failures of a global monetary system based upon compounded debt, nor even the inexorable rise of China and the corresponding economic and moral collapse of the US empire.
On the contrary I am suggesting a phenomenon that will have us scrambling to re-write textbooks and re-examine the most deeply-embedded of our hypotheses concerning human identity and purpose.
It turns out we are living through and contributing to a defining moment in geological time. As incongruous and as unlikely as it seems, the human species has become a force of nature, the sheer scale of our activities reshaping the Earth’s surface and the natural processes upon which all life depends. Unlike fateful events of a transitory nature this intervention actually does change everything! Not necessarily for the worse as many claim, although the final outcome is far from certain and probably will be for some time.
A number of leading Earth scientists have suggested this is happening from observing a set of life-critical, natural, recycling systems. For example, carbon and nitrogen cycles are both speeding up. While natural fluxes of carbon dioxide are many times larger than the amount put into the atmosphere each year by people burning fossil fuels, the effect of human intervention is disproportionate. It is possible that even a small increase can can cause a catastrophic tipping point to occur in the climate system. A recent report by the International Energy Agency now suggests human intervention in the carbon cycle will generate global heating of between 3 and 5 degrees celsius over two or three generations. That posits a degree of global chaos for which we are not at all prepared.
Over the past century the nitrogen cycle has accelerated by almost 150 per cent. Although some of this increase is accidental it has mostly arisen through a deliberate attempt by scientists at the end of the 19th century to increase the supply of nitrogen fixates into the food chain. The Haber-Bosch process harnessed the atmospheric abundance of nitrogen to create ammonia, which could then be oxidized to make the nitrates so essential for the production of artificial fertilisers. Unfortunately Fritz Haber and his associates failed to anticipate the scale of unintended consequences flowing from this early attempt at geoengineering. Their intervention increased the human population by a quantum!
There are numerous other salient factors to be taken into account which arise from an acceleration in these natural cycles. The oceans are acidifying and warming faster than predicted. Sediment flows in the world’s great deltas, home to hundreds of millions of people, are eroding faster than they can be replaced. Seasons are shifting. Water supplies are threatened by retreating glaciers. Extinction rates are higher than normal. The Arctic ice shelf is melting, puncturing the permafrost and allowing vast stores of methane to leak into the atmosphere for the first time…
Human curiosity, possibly more than a sense of responsible stewardship, obliges us to enquire into the source of such shifts. It is actually quite simple. We have become Creator, architects of our own evolution, not only at a nanoscale level of genetic and cellular manipulation but at the macro level of geological shifts. In effect humanity’s disruption, modification and acceleration of natural processes has triggered the age of homo sapiens. The Anthropocene age has dawned and there are important consequences to consider.
The evolutionary clock is ticking loudly. As hard as we might try we cannot wind back the hands. Returning to a more reassuring or comfortable past is ethically untenable as well as an impractical illusion. Instead we must learn to live wisely with our creation. At a minimum this means safeguarding the continuing viability of life-nurturing systems - such as clean air and pure water; halting the rampant despoilation of natural ecosystems - such as the rainforests and the oceans; prioritizing our most critical needs (like nutritious food, love and happiness) more prudently and transparently; enhancing environmental, social and institutional resilience; commissioning new technologies responsibly; and creating an ecology of mind grounded in appreciation, abundance, sufficiency and collaboration.
Simply put, it is time to let go of past frameworks - and with it the fears, superstitions, protocols and practices that constrain potential and set us against each other – to design a future capable of generating sufficient well-being and prosperity for everybody. That objective will be impossible to achieve through incremental or cosmetic changes to current ways or fiddling at the inconsequential fringes of the existing paradigm. We need an archetypal metamorphosis: a suite of profound transformations that will shift human praxis from competition to cooperation, from economic growth to well being, from inequity to integrity, from despair to hope and from inward-looking interests to a planetary consciousness.
I find the idea of metamorphosis, resulting from positioning human development at the centre of the natural sciences rather than some kind of peripheral sideshow, genuinely inspiring. On the one hand it sounds simple and obvious. Indeed it is. But in order to accomplish a panarchical transformation of such ambition and scope we would need to initiate a wave of societal innovation, the audacity of which is unprecedented. For what we are proposing here is nothing less than an awakening to a conscious human evolution where human purpose and intent is reconceptualised at its most fundamental levels. At the same time a transfiguration of this nature would presumably offer profound alternatives to the popularly held view (of a synthesis between biological and digital life forms) proposed by some overly-enthusiastic technocrats as the most likely future for our species.
Consciously designing a world that can comfortably accommodate ten billion people will require all the empathy, compassion, ingenuity and imagination we can muster. What I am intimating is a contemporary renaissance of humanity and the human soul possibly unlike anything we have previously envisaged.
Just as the natural world is working differently as a result of our presence, so the world we are creating will need to operate differently from the one which effortlessly accommodated two billion people at the end of World War II in 1945. We have to adopt ecological design criteria and alternative governance methods; invent more aligned, responsive and adaptive institutions based on an appreciation of the need to conserve our common wealth; find smarter ways of producing life’s necessities by working with nature rather than against it; reduce waste; establish an economy in which prosperity is decoupled from corruption and motives of greed or self-interest - all the while embedding efficiencies to ensure that our planet can continue to provide abundantly for us all and not just the privileged or wealthy few.
In that context it is vital we seek to transform how we think - about our relationship to the planet and to each other. This will require a profound transition of individual and collective consciousness. That is the extent of the task facing us. The scale of this challenge is astonishing.
To comprehend the dynamic complexities entailed in such a transformation we can use the carbon cycle, which I referenced earlier, as a typical example of the entangled nature of the issue. You are probably already aware of the claims being made by our leading climate scientists. But I will restate some relevant statistics if only to ensure you are up-to-date with the most recent science.
According to the International Energy Agency, Greenhouse gas emissions increased by a record amount in 2010, reaching the highest carbon output in recorded history. Not even the financial crisis, considered by many observers to be the most serious global recession of the past 80 years, has done much to curb rising emissions. The eminent economist Nicholas Stern, noting this fact, stated that the heating resulting from increased emissions "will disrupt the lives and livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people across the planet, leading to widespread mass migration and conflict."
In spite of an extensive and prolonged search from numerous sources I have found no credible information that is seriously at odds with this prediction - apart from the banal observation that we cannot possibly know for certain. This being the case, in order to avoid the most damaging effects of global heating annual energy-related emissions will need to be no more than 32 gigatons by 2020. If emissions in 2011 rise by as much as they did in 2010, that limit will be exceeded nine years ahead of schedule. This would make it all but impossible to keep the rise in global temperatures to within 2° Celsius, the tipping point, many scientists believe, before exponential feedback loops lead to abrupt, asymmetric and potentially irreversible changes to the climate system.
I confess that I find this news terrifyingly bitter-sweet. As the room for maneuvering contracts by the day, urgent action is still not forthcoming – even when it comes to the relatively less painful implementation of energy efficiencies through reduction, re-use and recycling. Instead, the reverse seems to be happening. For example, since the earthquake and tsunami damage to the Daiichi reactors at Fukushima earlier this year several countries have been re-evaluating nuclear power. Germany has seemingly declared a halt to its nuclear reactor programs although it had been on the verge of doing so for some time. Japan is teetering on the brink of electing to go down a similar path. Community paranoia over nuclear energy has been evident since the accidents at Three Mile Island (1979) and Chernobyl (1986). Yet it is one of the safest forms of electricity generation. It also happens to be one of the major technologies for producing electricity without carbon dioxide. The gap left by scaling back the world's nuclear facilities is unlikely to be filled entirely by renewable energy, meaning an increased reliance on fossil fuels, at least in the foreseeable future. Some of these can be made cleaner, that is true. But they remain damaging to our climate in spite of the reassuring messages being disseminated by the oil, coal and gas lobby.
Then there are locked-in emissions to consider. About 80 per cent of the power stations likely to be in service in 2020 are either already built or under construction. Most of these are fossil-fuelled power stations unlikely to be taken out of service early. So they will continue to emit carbon – possibly for a further 40 years or so.
Add to all of this the fact that the significance of climate change in international policy debates is being taken less seriously than it was a few years ago, mostly as a result of intensive lobbying and fear mongering from certain sectors of the business community, and that developed nations have really only managed to reduce carbon emissions by importing goods from countries like China, and we have a recipe for catastrophe. At least without a shift in consciousness….
It is worth repeating here that it is not just global heating caused by increasing amounts of carbon in the air that is of concern but how climate is intricately linked with other life-critical systems. For example, we are witnessing an unprecedented rise in the cost of staple foods like rice, grains and potatoes. Food is getting more expensive as successive grain harvests fail. Unless urgent action is taken to reform the global food system the cost of these staples will more than double within 20 years, forcing many more millions into poverty. Half of that increase will be directly caused by global heating while the remainder will be the result of a combination of factors including geopolitical conflict, soil erosion, a scarcity of arable land and water for irrigation, and access to affordable energy.
But let us step out of our linear thinking habits to incorporate ever more salient data. If we pause to examine the entire contextual system of human behaviour in the environment over a period of several hundred years (the panarchical relationship) the picture of cascading problems becomes much more evident. Take the sum of around thirty environmental trends (including for example, ocean acidification, worsening oxygen levels in large cities, loss of biodiversity, soil erosion, desertification, falling water tables, declining fish stocks, or methane venting from melting icecaps) and we can plot exponential deterioration over at least the past 75 years. It is clear our species is changing how nature works. There is no other feasible explanation.
When I was born there were just under two billion people on the planet. Later this year the figure will have grown to seven billion. By the end of the century it is likely to exceed ten billion. In spite of such ballooning population growth our desires and behaviours have not changed one iota. We still aspire to become more affluent than our neighbors. We still rely on technology to solve our problems. We still wait for a crisis before we act. We still delegate our responsibility for each other to those less capable than ourselves. I have no doubt that unless excessive consumption is outlawed, which is highly improbable, marketing gurus will continue in their obsessive quest of getting us to buy more and more stuff from manufacturers being urged to produce more and more goods, a large proportion of which will eventually go to waste.
The truth is there to see. Yet even now, against such dire scenarios, politicians and industry lobbyists in each of the great powers are eyeing up extraordinary and risky ways to extract the world's last remaining reserves of fossil fuels in the name of corporate profits and economic development. Furthermore they all seem to be willing to fight each other for resources that will pour even more carbon into the atmosphere, thus pushing the climate system into unknown territory.
How can this be? If it was simply the storyline to the latest James Bond movie we would applaud such imaginative fantasy and gasp at the implausible stunts. But Dr No and Spectre are no more than naive delinquents in this political playground. This is real. No repeated denials or political posturing is going to make it all vanish. Science is telling us that nature has limits and that we need to dismantle the fossil fuel industry (as it is currently structured) as fast as we possibly can. We cannot win. Yet we persist, choosing to ignore science, preferring the hubris of inaction and denying the risk to future generations and to the poor who have few means to protect themselves from the impacts of a changing climate.
It appears we are not fully awake to this reality but sleepwalking. Sleepwalking towards a crisis that is of our own making and that might still be avoided – if only we were more sensitive to the dangers and can see the wisdom of changing our minds about how we choose to live our lives.
Nor is being awake the only issue. As I have repeatedly said, changing our minds entails a shift in consciousness so that we perceive the systemic nature of the risks confronting us with greater clarity and can take appropriate and rapid corrective action. Only then will we be in a position to transcend potentially catastrophic consequences. In view of the implacable nature and recklessness of those who continue to pollute the atmosphere I wonder if this is really possible, especially in view of the increasing urgency of our predicament, given that individual epiphanies must necessarily occur along with any collective shift of consciousness.
After the debacle at the COP15 climate change talks in Copenhagen (and in spite of scientists warning us that climate change poses the greatest threat to our species in its history, that we are running out of time, and that we may even be facing the prospect of our own extinction) it is clear that many political and business leaders are inept at dealing with complexity. Moreover the majority are ill-prepared to tackle intertwined issues that would loose them votes or profits. Leadership has become a lost art. Disregarding autocrats and the existence of ingrained corruption in most sovereign states, nearly all representatives of the modern world-system are either unwilling or incapable of putting aside self-interest for the common good. Meanwhile public awareness will increasingly lead to frustration and protest. More attuned to the truth, yet distressed by its existential nature, communities around the world are increasingly opting to vent their anger and bemusement in various forms of civil disobedience and protest.
But if we are bemused by the extent to which human behaviours are causing climate change, concerned by the lack of clarity concerning the potential impact of continuing fires, droughts and floods on our lifestyles, and puzzled by the lack of concerted and coherent government action, at least let us be clear about one thing. We the people, social witnesses to official dithering, scare-mongering and apathy, are no longer the revolutionaries. Nor for that matter are the scientists, environmentalists or outliers crying out for societal transformation via a shift in consciousness. In this instance the real radicals are those political and industry militants, together with their benefactors, who refuse to relinquish their financially-driven motives, who will go to any lengths to protect their collapsing ideology and who mindlessly insist that climate change is a left-wing conspiracy designed to bring down capitalism. In due course this open defiance of rationality, coupled with a reluctance to put the common wealth before individual profit, must be called to account. Through inaction and hubris these radicals are pilfering the prosperity and viability of future generations. They are now the anarchists and their selfish sedition must not be allowed to succeed.
But how can we overcome such a compelling force when most of the investment capital required for securing even easy gains (e.g. the rapid advancement of energy efficiencies in conjunction with the deployment of proven renewable technologies) is stashed away in the vaults of governments and corporations fixated on quick profits, big profits and gratuitous homage to obsolete economic theories?
For me the real crisis facing homo sapiens is not climate change per se, nor any of the resulting effects articulated above, but the erroneous set of assumptions about human nature that condones excessive production and consumption at a time when the impact of such behaviours on those who do not have access to similar resources and opportunities are self-evident. Most of these assumptions, with their emphasis on individual self-interest and competitive materialism were laid down during the 18th century Enlightenment. They have been taken, incorrectly as it happens, as fundamental to human endeavour ever since. Indeed these beliefs are trotted out with tedious regularity as the primary defence and rationale for globalisation. It is worth examining how these assumptions are flawed in today’s context.
In his topical book The Empathic Civilization US economist and futurist Jeremy Rifkin is unequivocal about this issue. Human beings, he says, are naturally empathic. It is built into our biology. Yet most of our assumptions and hence our business, social and governance institutions, are founded on an entirely different set of cultural and behavioural norms. Namely, that we are intrinsically competitive. “In 19th century Europe this impulse regarding human nature was mindlessly embraced by the newly-conceived sovereign states where they were commonly perceived as autonomous agents entangled in a relentless and never-ending battle with other sovereign states in the pursuit of material gain and the protection of its citizens.”
Rifkin notes that recent discoveries in neuroscience and child development (for example mirror-neurons - nerve cells that enable human beings and some other species to feel and experience another's situation and emotions as if they were one's own) pose a credible challenge to these long-held assumptions. The detection of mirror neurons suggests we are social and empathic creatures after all and that we constantly seek intimate participation and companionship with our fellows. This view also happens to reinforce observations made by Russian zoologist Pyotr Kropotkin who, barely 25 years after Darwin’s pioneering work, observed cooperation within and between species in the icy tundra of Siberia. Such discoveries overturn many of our previous beliefs concerning human motives. The growing scientific evidence that we are a fundamentally empathic species has profound and far-reaching consequences for society.
Uppermost in any ontological re-framing of the human condition, Rifkin postulates, is the proposition that human evolution can be measured not merely by the expansion of supremacy over nature “but also by the intensification of empathic connection to a broader diversity of living beings.” Throughout the sweep of human history we have seen successive technology revolutions leading to leaps in economic prosperity. They have also brought about shifts in consciousness, which has then led to further technological advancement… This cycle has also been accelerating until today’s scientific innovations have the potential to change paradigms in decades rather than over centuries.
Once again Rifkin’s assessment is precise. “Forager-hunter societies relied on oral communications and their consciousness was mythologically constructed. The great agricultural civilizations were, for the most part, organized around script communication and steeped in theological consciousness. The first industrial revolution in 19th century Europe was managed by print communication and ushered in ideological consciousness. Electronic communication became the command and control mechanism for arranging the second industrial revolution in the 20th century and spawned psychological consciousness.”
Like Rifkin I have no doubt that today’s distributed technologies, peer-to-peer social media and the potential for cleaner, renewable, open source energies, will create an opportunity for human civilisation to transcend current dilemmas by virtue of the most momentous evolutionary step we will ever have taken. By abandoning parochial self-interest and embracing an appreciative sensitivity towards the diverse richness of life we will step into a new epistemology (a biospheric consciousness) where the depth of social intimacy and interaction will become both the primary design principle and central nervous system for a new pangaian society.
With good fortune and foresight that giant step might also steer the human narrative away from fear to one of hope and inclusion. In an age where information frequently overwhelms us, where faith has been torpedoed by its own institutions, where we can design, manufacture and acquire more or less anything we can imagine, and where our access to a range of mind-blowing experiences is virtually unlimited, we lack just one thing: an overriding sense of purpose for this Anthropocene age.
Why have we been given the skill to invent technologies that enable instant communication and constant connectivity? Where is the real added value? Is it just to be entertained or to hasten commercial exchange? Surely not. But what additional benefits are created, over and above material gain? What (if anything) in all of this nourishes the human soul or our deep desire for empathy through connection? What is the transcendent purpose that extends beyond mere tribal or religious affiliations and national identity to embrace the whole of humanity? And how should we engage with this?
Along with these unknowns there are many reasons to be optimistic. Transcending the civilizational worldview can help create a new global ethos in which the rich and diverse variety of relationships comprising the planet’s life-sustaining forces can harmonise and come into a new equilibrium. It can move us beyond the disconnected, self-interested and utilitarian ideals that burden our daily lives with matters of ultimate inconsequence. It can rise above the state-dominated geopolitical mess we have fashioned to allow new forms of planetary management and governance to evolve. Above all it can restructure our lives to become more collaborative and empathic.
