VIII. Earth Earns: An Open CoCreative Earthropocene to Astropocene PediaVerse

A. The Old World: Its Archaic, Polar, War Torn, Rapacious Critical Life Support Condition

Smith, Joel, et al, eds. Climate Change, Adaptive Capacity and Development. London: Imperial College Press, 2003. Given that climates are in fact changing, the vulnerability of developing countries around the world are considered with regard to how capable they are to adapt, e.g., to changes in rain or snow runoff and its effect upon crop yields.

Speth, James Gustave (Gus). The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008. In his latest volume, the renowned environmentalist draws sharp relief between a material capitalism in collapse, precipitously since the book’s March publication date, and a revolutionary life, human and earth-conducive future. Speth begins by noting a two foot high stack of books in his study that chronicle our dire plight as consumptive markets, rapacious corporations, energy waste, and so on imperil biospheric support systems. But an alternative path or span will take more than hybrid technologies, rather a societal awakening, a new worldview, of epochal proportions is required. For sage guidance, he turns, among others such as David Korten, to Thomas Berry, Mary Evelyn Tucker, and John Grim, along with a continuing endorsement of the Earth Charter document.

The cultural historian Thomas Berry has described forging a new consciousness as our “Great Work.” “The deepest cause of the present devastation is found in a mode of consciousness that has established a radical discontinuity between the human and other modes of being and the bestowal of all rights on the human… (Berry goes on) “Consistently we have difficulty in accepting the human as an integral part of the Earth Community. We see ourselves as a transcendent mode of being. We don’t really belong here. But if we are here by some strange destiny then we are the source of all rights and all values. All other earthly beings are instruments to be used or resources to be exploited for human benefit.”
Berry believes what is required is “a profound reversal in our perspective on ourselves and on the universe about us….What is demanded of us now is to change attitudes that are so deeply bound into our basic cultural patterns that they seem to us as an imperative of the very nature of our being.” (202)

David Korten in The Great Turning sees humanity at a turning point, a pivot in history, and puts new values front and center: “The Great Turning begins with a cultural and spiritual awakening – a turning in cultural values from money and material excess to life and spiritual fulfillment, from a belief in our limitations to a belief in our possibilities, and from fearing our differences to rejoicing in our diversity. It requires reframing the cultural stories by which we define our human nature, purpose, and possibilities… (Korten continues) “The values shift of the cultural turning leads us to redefine wealth – to measure it by the health of our families, communities, and natural environment. It leads us form policies that raise those at the top to policies that raise those at the bottom, from hoarding to sharing, from concentrated to distributed ownership, and from the rights of ownership to the responsibilities of stewardship.” (206)

Speth, James Gustave, ed. Worlds Apart: Globalization and the Environment. Washington, DC: Island Press, 2004. Leading spokespersons such as Maurice Strong, Jane Lubchenco, Robert Kates and Vandana Shiva weigh in on international aspects of the imperative transition to a sustainable society with regard to energy, resources, economics, governance, feminine concerns and so on. While human degradation of earth’s life support capacity is far along, our corrective realization is seen to be perilously belated and inadequate.

Steffen, Will, et al. Abrupt Changes: The Achilles’ Heel of the Earth System. Environment. 46/3, 2004. A lengthy article which argues that because our life-support biosphere is a single dynamic biogeochemical process, the extreme stress imposed upon it can rapidly and erratically cause a new warmer or cooler state.

In the context of global change, the Earth System has come to mean the suite of interacting physical, chemical and biological global-scale cycles and energy fluxes that provide the conditions necessary for life on the planet.

Taipale, Ilkka, et al. War or Health? A Reader. London: Zed Books, 2002. The Physicians for Social Responsibility of Finland provide an extensive sourcebook on the virulent epidemic of small arms, land mines, grenades, along with nuclear, biological and chemical weapons that is increasingly imperiling the well-being of every person and the supportive planetary environment. Pathways to conflict resolution and the role of NGO’s are considered.

Tennesen, Michael. The Next Species: The Future of Evolution in the Aftermath of Man. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015. In these mid 2010s, akin to Adam Rutherford’s Creation (search), science writers can rise to an overall spatial and temporal scenario of universe to human procreation. The author is an environmental journalist at the Cary Institute for Ecosystems Studies in Millbrook, New York who traveled widely to document both crisis and promise. A vicarious past of earth life’s oxygenated emergence from primordial incipience to global cultures defines the present biospheric moment. Nature is not a balanced equilibrium, but a precarious coming and going of land, sea, and air creaturely diversity. Sapient human beings are no exception, poised between a tinkered evolution and future sustainable survival which requires our informed, respectful renewal and guidance. And this widest vista seems to imply a positive makeover of our Homo Sapiens for the better.

A growing number of scientists agree we are headed toward a mass extinction, perhaps in as little as 300 years. Already there have been five mass extinctions in the last 600 million years, including the Cretaceous Extinction, during which an asteroid knocked out the dinosaurs. Though these events were initially destructive, they were also prime movers of evolutionary change in nature. And we can see some of the warning signs of another extinction event coming, as our oceans lose both fish and oxygen. Tennesen discusses the future of nature and whether humans will make it through the bottleneck of extinction. Without man, could the seas regenerate to what they were before fishing vessels? And what if man survives the coming catastrophes, but in reduced populations? Could the conquest of Mars lead to another form of human? Could we upload our minds into a computer and live in a virtual reality? Or could genetic engineering create a more intelligent and long-lived creature that might shun the rest of us? (Publisher)

Theodoulou, Paul, ed. Nuclear Perils. Global Dialogue. 8/1-2, 2006. A special issue of this journal published by the Center for World Dialogue, located strategically on the island of Cyprus, about how to contain and blunt nuclear proliferation, especially in the Middle East.

Turner, Monica, et al. Climate Change, Ecosystems and Abrupt Change. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.. January, 2020. Thirteen environmentalists from across the USA, the UK, Australia, and Germany including Anke Jentsch and Timothy Lenton emphasize the increasing vicarious occurrence of rapid decadal or even annual system shifts and then offer integral project guidance going forward.

Ecologists have long studied patterns, directions and tempos of change, but there is a current need to understanding empirical observations of abrupt changes as climate warming accelerates. Abrupt changes in ecological systems (ACES) are everywhere increasing in frequency. We highlight insights from diverse ACES studies: ecological systems show ACES in some dimensions but not others; climate extremes are important in generating ACES; contingencies, such as ecological memory, frequency and sequence of disturbances, and spatial context play a role; and tipping points are often associated with ACES. Progress in understanding ACES requires strong integration of scientific approaches (theory, observations, experiments and process-based models) and high-quality empirical data drawn from a diverse array of ecosystems. (Abstract excerpt)

Vallacher, Robin, et al. Attracted to Conflict: Dynamic Foundations of Destructive Social Relations. Berlin: Springer, 2013. Seven authors from Poland and the USA including Peter Coleman (search) and Andrea Bartoli, who are also affiliated with the International Center for Complexity and Conflict at Columbia University, contribute a volume in support of their project to understand incessant human strife as another manifest instance of complex, self-organizing systems. An overview of Conflict in Human Experience is followed by The Promise of Dynamical Systems Theory, which is covered from Origins and Foundations to Patterns, Traps, Escape, and Sustainability as Enduring Peace. Whenever, however, can these 21st century scientific frontiers be availed to heal and save a wildfire of warfare that cannot be put out otherwise?

Wackernagel, Mathis, et al. Tracking the Ecological Overshoot of the Human Economy. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 99/9266, 2002. Largely unawares, industrial civilization is dangerously overstressing the regenerative carrying capacity of the biosphere.

Walker, Gabrielle. The Tipping Point of the Iceberg. Nature. 441/802, 2006. The latest scientific surveys of Arctic regions such as the ratio of sea ice to water, the Greenland glacial cap, summer and winter average temperature rises, indicate an exponentially increasing climate change. Such welling evidence that the Arctic system is running away with itself would have devastating consequences worldwide.

Wallace-Wells, David. The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming. New York: Tim Duggan/Crown, 2019. The author is a national fellow of the New America Foundation, whose website is an alternate place for truth, knowledge and empowerment for all Americans and peoples to face and mitigate climate change, along with many other injustices. Drawing upon much research, many interviews, via lucid vision and prose, the timely work states that to make this land, and the whole stressed bioworld succeed as a cosmic home for hope and futurity, it must first sustainably survive. I cite cosmic because after 200 pages of environmental perils, a novel expansive vista is broached as an incentive. With reference to Adam Frank, Marina Alberti, Axel Kleidon (search names) and others, to fully grasp its auspicious import, we need view our maybe rarest Earth from an astrobiological perspective. A final Part IV is entitled The Anthropic Principle which notes how many evolutionary biospheric breaks in our favor had to occur to get us to this moment. By these lights and reason, a worldwide unity (New Earthica?) need be forged right away so to “think like a planet.”

It is worse, much worse, than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible. In California, wildfires now rage year-round, destroying thousands of homes. Across the US, “500-year” storms pummel communities month after month, and floods displace tens of millions annually. Without a revolution in how billions of humans conduct their lives, parts of the Earth could become close to uninhabitable, and other parts inhospitable. It will be all-encompassing, shaping and distorting nearly every aspect of human life as it is lived today. Like An Inconvenient Truth and Silent Spring before it, The Uninhabitable Earth is both a meditation on the devastation we have brought upon ourselves and an impassioned call to action.

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