Origin Story, page 28
Paradoxically, increasing wealth also means increasing inequality, and even as the numbers living above subsistence are rising, the numbers living in extreme poverty remain higher than ever before in human history. Thomas Piketty estimates that in most modern countries, the wealthiest 10 percent of the population controls between 25 percent and 60 percent of national wealth, while the bottom 50 percent controls no more than 15 percent to 30 percent. This represents a decline in inequality in comparison with the era just before World War I. But in the early twenty-first century, inequality seems to be on the rise again, and the huge number of people alive now means that, in absolute terms, there are far more people living in extreme poverty today than there were in the past. In 2005, more than three billion people (more people than the total population of the world in 1900) lived on less than $2.50 a day. Most people in this group have seen few benefits from the fossil-fuels revolution and suffer from the unhealthy, unsanitary, and precarious living conditions of the early industrial revolution that were described so vividly by Dickens and Engels.
Nevertheless, a growing proportion of the human population has benefited from increasing energy and wealth flows and is living well above subsistence. These flows have raised consumption levels and also levels of nutrition and health for billions of people. The measure that best captures this change is probably life expectancy (column E). For most of human history, life expectancies at birth were less than thirty years. This was not because people didn’t live into their sixties and seventies but because so many children died young and so many adults died of traumas and infections that would not have killed them today. Life expectancies barely changed for one hundred thousand years. Then, in just the past one hundred years, average life spans have almost doubled throughout the world because humans have acquired the information and resources needed to care for the young and old much better, to feed more people, and to improve the treatment and care of the sick and injured.
The contrast between the energy bonanzas from fossil fuels and from farming is striking. The energy bonanza from fossil fuels was so vast that, in addition to expenditure on reproduction, elite wealth, waste, and the infrastructure for complexity, there was enough left over to raise the consumption levels and living standards of an increasing proportion of humanity. This was a revolutionary transformation. It occurred mostly in just the past one hundred years and primarily during the Great Acceleration of the second half of the twentieth century.
This is the face of the Good Anthropocene (good from a human perspective). The Good Anthropocene has generated better lives for billions of ordinary humans, for the first time in human history. (If you doubt the improvement, think again about having surgery without modern anesthesia.)
But there is also a Bad Anthropocene. The Bad Anthropocene consists of the many changes that threaten the achievements of the Good Anthropocene. First, the Bad Anthropocene has generated huge inequalities. Despite colossal increases in wealth, millions continue to live in dire poverty. And though it is tempting to think that the modern world has abolished slavery, the 2016 Global Slavery Index estimated that more than forty-five million humans today are living as slaves. The Bad Anthropocene is not just morally unacceptable. It is also dangerous because it guarantees conflict, and in a world with nuclear weapons, any major conflict could prove catastrophic for most of humanity.
The Bad Anthropocene also threatens to reduce biodiversity and undermine the stable climate system of the past ten thousand years. The flows of energy and resources that support increasing human consumption are now so huge that they are impoverishing other species and jeopardizing the ecological foundations on which modern society is built. In the past, coal miners took canaries into mines to detect carbon monoxide. Today, rising carbon dioxide levels, declining biodiversity, and melting glaciers are telling us that something dangerous is happening, and we should take notice.
The challenge we face as a species is pretty clear. Can we preserve the best of the Good Anthropocene and avoid the dangers of the Bad Anthropocene? Can we distribute the Anthropocene bonanza of energy and resources more equitably to avoid catastrophic conflicts? And can we, like the first living organisms, learn how to use gentler and smaller flows of resources to do so? Can we find global equivalents of the delicate proton pumps used to power all living cells today? Or will we keep depending on flows of energy and resources so huge that they will eventually shake apart the fantastically complex societies we have built in the past two hundred years?
PART IV
The Future
CHAPTER 12
Where Is It All Going?
It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.
—YOGI BERRA (ATTRIBUTED)
Man has too long forgotten that the Earth was given to him for usufruct alone, not for consumption, still less for profligate waste.
—CHARLES PERKINS MARSH, MAN AND NATURE
Future Games
In the introduction we met the fantastic motley cavalcade of all things, with its stars and serpents, its quarks and cell phones, all marching to the distant thunder of supernovas under the unblinking but weary gaze of entropy. Where is the cavalcade going?
Oddly, few modern educational systems spend much time teaching systematically about the future. This neglect is surprising, because thinking about the future is something all brainy organisms do, and we humans do it better than any other species. Whether they belong to humans or chimps, brains create simplified models of the world as it is right now. They also create models of how the world could change. Brains, like stockbrokers and climatologists, are in the business of modeling futures. By doing so, they alert their owners to approaching possibilities and dangers.
Today, we humans can play future games with fantastic skill and on a fantastic scale. Our models are rich and powerful because human language and the sharing of information allow us to combine billions of individual models. That means we can refine, enrich, and improve our models as they are added to, tweaked, and corrected by feedback and new information from billions of other humans over many generations. Today’s models of the world incorporate information from every part of planet Earth. We build them using the best of modern science and run them on networks of computers that can play through millions of different scenarios. “If all the glaciers in Greenland thaw, do sea levels rise enough to drown Miami and Dhaka?” That’s a question we couldn’t have asked seriously one hundred years ago. Today, rich and carefully tested answers to these kinds of questions can guide policy decisions that will affect billions of people, many of whom are young today, or not yet born. (And, yes, Miami and Dhaka would drown.)
Or we could ask much more grandiose questions about the remote future, such as “Will entropy win? Will it eventually break down all structures and forms?” As it happens, we have some pretty confident answers to such questions, because at cosmological scales, we are asking about relatively simple types of change. We’re back with the complex physical systems of the early universe. Answers to cosmological questions about the future can’t give us much practical guidance today because they are about events that are fantastically remote in time. But they can give shape to our modern origin story because they tease us with hints about where it is all going. They offer deep understanding, perhaps, and even a sense of closure, but not guidance.
Between the human and the cosmological time scales, there is another scale, of a few thousand years. What will the Earth look like in two thousand years? What will humans look like, for that matter? Or corncobs or cities or colonies on Mars?1 Curiously, this in-between scale is the hardest to model. The interesting questions at this scale are about fantastically complex systems such as the biosphere, and in two thousand years, the tree of possibilities will have sprouted so many branches that even the most powerful computer models cannot pick the most likely. But it’s not just the number of branches that stymies us. As quantum physics has shown, at the smallest scales, the universe is not deterministic. Unexpected things do happen, and, like the flapping of a butterfly’s wings, they can cascade through causal chains with sufficient power to send the future off in many possible directions. So there is a lot of plain old-fashioned contingency. Neither our brains nor the best computer models can yet factor in a pandemic based on one tiny genetic mutation in a virus or the impact of a nearby supernova explosion, though we may be close to predicting a possible asteroid impact (knowledge the dinosaurs would have died for). At this intermediate scale, we enter the realm of science fiction. The stories we tell about the next few millennia are fascinating, haunting, and important. But we have no way of deciding which we should take seriously.
The Human Future: The Quest
For us humans, the next hundred years are really important. Things are happening so fast that, like the slow-motion time of a near accident, the details of what we do in the next few decades will have huge consequences for us and for the biosphere on scales of thousands of years. Like it or not, we are now managing an entire biosphere, and we can do it well or badly.
Myths of all kinds can tell us a lot about how to face an unpredictable future, because they are full of stories about near misses, catastrophic failures, and quests that succeeded. What’s new today is a potential crash involving seven billion people, with millions of other organisms as bystanders and casualties. So, modern humans, like the heroes and heroines of all good myths, have a task. Our task is to avoid the crash and get to a good place for both humans and the biosphere, because we know there is no good place for humans in a ruined biosphere.
In the best myths, there are no guarantees. The crash really could happen. We could mishandle the intricate global machine we humans have built and lose the benefits of the Good Anthropocene. That is particularly likely if different drivers try to steer the machine in different directions or if we ignore the red warning lights appearing on its control panels. If the machine breaks down and productivity plummets, we won’t be able to support seven billion people. We will face a grim period of social chaos, warfare, famine, and unchecked disease. This is the Arthashastra’s “law of the fish.” If and when things finally settle, a much smaller number of survivors will be living once again within the energy limits of the agrarian era, in which only a tiny minority can enjoy more than a bare subsistence. If we do serious damage to climate systems, even agriculture may no longer work in much of the world. Farming depended, after all, on the stable climates of the Holocene.
Then, who knows? As in some science fiction, maybe remnant human populations will slowly rebuild something like our world, guided, perhaps, by memories and charred books and manuscripts or the broken-down vestiges of cities, factories, machines, and microchips. Or is it possible, as some have suggested, that there is a limit to the complexity we humans can manage? Have we reached a level of complexity that is simply beyond us? Is it, perhaps, the fate of all species capable of collective learning to hit a wall of complexity, at which point their societies collapse? Is that why we have not yet contacted any other species capable of collective learning? In the Greek myths, the gods punish Sisyphus, the king of Corinth, for being too clever and too ambitious. Advised, presumably, by entropy, they condemn him to push a boulder up a mountain and watch it roll down again, forever and ever.
These are bleak scenarios, but we cannot ignore them. The universe really is indifferent to our fate. It’s a vast ocean of energy for which individual wavelets such as us are ephemeral, passing phenomena. “The hardness [of all great myths],” Joseph Campbell writes, “is balanced by an assurance that all that we see is but the reflex of a power that endures, untouched by the pain. Thus the tales are both pitiless and terrorless—suffused with the joy of a transcendent anonymity regarding itself in all of the self-centered, battling egos that are born and die in time.”2 Modern science captures the universe’s terrifying indifference in the first and second laws of thermodynamics.
But we humans, like all living organisms, have goals, and we set out on long journeys to achieve those goals, despite the indifference of the universe. And stories from all cultures describe these dangerous journeys, journeys that don’t always succeed but sometimes do. The journeyers endure periods when everything seems lost, periods of great suffering. There are sudden, unexpected interruptions to their quest. Helpers appear, too, gods or friends. And there are lucky breaks. So, in all mythological traditions, quests can and do succeed. Alertness, determination, and hope—these are the crucial virtues of anyone on a quest, because the journeyer who misses opportunities or who gives up too soon or who despairs must fail. Any traditional storyteller could have told us that these are the qualities we humans will need as we face an unpredictable future full of both dangers and opportunities.
Our discussion of the Good and the Bad Anthropocenes tells us what the goals of the human quest are right now. The first is to avoid a crash. If we can do that, there are two further goals: to ensure that the benefits of the Good Anthropocene are available to all humans, and to ensure that the biosphere continues to thrive, because if the biosphere fails, no quest can succeed. Our challenge is to achieve these goals, even if they often seem to point in different directions, sometimes toward indulgence, sometimes toward restraint.
Lest this sound too grandiloquent, here is how the human quest is described in the preamble to the United Nations document “Transforming Our World,” published in 2015:
All countries and all stakeholders, acting in collaborative partnership, will implement this plan. We are resolved to free the human race from the tyranny of poverty and want and to heal and secure our planet. We are determined to take the bold and transformative steps which are urgently needed to shift the world on to a sustainable and resilient path. As we embark on this collective journey, we pledge that no one will be left behind.
The document continues:
People: We are determined to end poverty and hunger, in all their forms and dimensions, and to ensure that all human beings can fulfil their potential in dignity and equality and in a healthy environment.
Planet: We are determined to protect the planet from degradation, including through sustainable consumption and production, sustainably managing its natural resources and taking urgent action on climate change, so that it can support the needs of the present and future generations.
Prosperity: We are determined to ensure that all human beings can enjoy prosperous and fulfilling lives and that economic, social and technological progress occurs in harmony with nature.
There follow 17 sustainable-development goals and 169 specific targets that are to be achieved, if all goes well, over the next fifteen years.
It is easy to be skeptical. And some cynicism is appropriate. Nevertheless, for someone who grew up in the mid-twentieth century, when there was little understanding of the dangers of the Bad Anthropocene, it is remarkable to read such declarations from a body that represents most nations on Earth.
Soon after the sustainable-development goals were published, another landmark document appeared: the Paris Accord on Climate Change. This was adopted on December 12, 2015, at a UN conference attended by 195 nations. It came into force on November 4, 2016, when enough nations had formally ratified it. Its aims are as follows:
(a) Holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, recognizing that this would significantly reduce the risks and impacts of climate change;
(b) Increasing the ability to adapt to the adverse impacts of climate change and foster climate resilience and low greenhouse gas emissions development, in a manner that does not threaten food production;
(c) Making finance flows consistent with a pathway towards low greenhouse gas emissions and climate-resilient development.
The tension between these two documents captures many of the difficulties of the quest for a better world, because it is really not clear that carbon dioxide emissions can be held to the declared targets without drastic cuts in use of fossil fuels. Are those cuts compatible with sustained growth? Perhaps, if renewable energy output increases rapidly enough. But the task would surely be eased if there were a greater commitment to redistribution and a willingness to accept slower rates of economic growth.
Our modern origin story suggests a helpful analogy, that of chemical activation energies. Activation energies provide the initial kick that gets vital chemical reactions going. But once they are under way, less energy is needed. Perhaps we can think of fossil fuels as the activation energy that was needed to kick-start today’s world. Now that this glossy new world is in motion, can we keep it going with smaller and more delicate energy flows, like the tiny flows, electron by electron, or proton by proton, that are managed by enzymes and that energize living cells? Can we imitate respiration, big life’s delicate, nondisruptive equivalent of fire?
The idea of fossil fuels as activation energy suggests something else about today’s world. The turbulent dynamism of recent centuries is typical of all periods of creative destruction. It is the human equivalent of the gravitational energies that create stars. But once the violent energies of creation have done their work, we expect a new and more stable dynamism, as something new takes its seat in the universe. Like our sun, we can perhaps settle into a period of dynamic stability, having crossed a new threshold and built a new world society that preserves the best of the Good Anthropocene. Perhaps the idea of endless growth is completely wrong. Perhaps the disruptive dynamism of recent centuries is a temporary phenomenon. After all, living life within a framework of social and cultural stability has been the norm for most of human history and for most human societies. And that is why an understanding of what it means to live richly and dynamically in a less changeable world is preserved within the cultures of many modern indigenous communities whose people see themselves primarily as custodians of a world larger and older than themselves.
