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

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

Sagan, Scott. A Call for Global Nuclear Disarmament. Nature. 487/30, 2012. A Stanford University political scientist, who has been sounding this alarm for two decades, warns of a new cycle of clandestine proliferation, that we really ought to recognize, address and resolve. I don’t know if there is a relation, but I remember hearing Carl Sagan speak eloquently in the 1980s about nuclear winter, which in the 1990s was thought to be mostly abated. Again in these 2010s, ever bent on Armageddon, male monkeys with atomic arsenals can’t stop fighting over tribe and turf until all is ashes.

Sale, Peter. Our Dying Planet: An Ecologist's View of the Crisis We Face. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. Due in September, (the book not demise) a University of Windsor ecologist laments what appears to be, if not immediately remediated, an inexorable, precipitous decline and senescence of Earth’s life and human support systems. An example is fisheries, both for their own survival, and that of people. But an insidious cause, one might add, might be our cultural vacuity and loss of a nerve and will to live. This subject edition could be bracketed between two other 2011 UCP books: David Deamer’s First Life: Discovering the Connections between Stars, Cells, and How Life Began which alludes to an intrinsic drive and direction, and The Atheist's Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life without Illusions. by Alex Rosenberg, Duke University philosophy chair, which buys into the pointless physics and aimless evolution view so as to praise a “nice nihilism.”

Coral reefs are on track to become the first ecosystem actually eliminated from the planet. So says leading ecologist Peter F. Sale in this crash course on the state of the planet. Sale draws from his own extensive work on coral reefs, and from recent research by other ecologists, to explore the many ways we are changing the earth and to explain why it matters. Weaving into the narrative his own firsthand field experiences around the world, Sale brings ecology alive while giving a solid understanding of the science at work behind today’s pressing environmental issues. He delves into topics including overfishing, deforestation, biodiversity loss, use of fossil fuels, population growth, and climate change while discussing the real consequences of our growing ecological footprint. Most important, this passionately written book emphasizes that a gloom-and-doom scenario is not inevitable, and as Sale explores alternative paths, he considers the ways in which science can help us realize a better future. (Publisher)

Scheffer, Martin, et al. Scheffer, Martin, et al. Anticipating the global redistribution of people and property.. One Earth. 7/7, 2024. Eight environmental scholars in the Netherlands, the UK and USA, Sweden, Canada and China including Tim Lenton and Gaia Vince proceed to acknowledge increasing climate changes over a finite biosphere which will drive population movements especially from already imperiled places. With this in mind, we would do well to prepare in advance with suitable infrastructures, resource allocation, social policies and so on.

Climate change will worsen conditions for people in the Global South, while conditions in large parts of the North will improve. Migration seems an effective adaptation strategy. However, making that a win-win for migrants and receiving communities requires revision of the food system, rules for mobility, and strategies for social integration.

One Earth is a Cell Press prime sustainability journal. It provides a home for high-quality research and perspectives that advance our ability to better understand and address today’s many challenges. We publish monthly thematic issues that aspire to break down barriers between the natural, social and applied sciences and the humanities, stimulate the cross-pollination of ideas, and encourage transformative research.

Schell, Jonathan. Genesis in Reverse. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. January/February, 2007. The author of the 1982 classic tract against nuclear war The Fate of the Earth decries that a quarter century later a real threat remains not from superpowers but through an insidious spread of armaments with the same terminal consequence. Moreover, this article leads off a special issue called Approaching Midnight. The Doomsday Clock this journal set in place after WWII has now been advanced from seven to five minutes before twelve in response not only to rogue weaponry but a host of apocalyptic climate, technological, political, and religious perils. Martin Rees, Freeman Dyson, Sam Keen, Stephen Schneider, Tony Hallam, and others weigh in with trenchant commentaries. Schell concludes that only a profoundly new palliative social vision will turn the tide.

Schell, Jonathan. The Seventh Decade: The New Shape of Nuclear Danger. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007. Some 25 years after The Fate of the Earth, and 70 years after the release of the atomic genie, Schell is compelled to restate his case. Rather than two superpowers, today nuclear technology is morphing and proliferating to rogue, disenfranchised groups, large and small, while first world nations rearm with next generation designs and deployment. All efforts at environmental sustainability will be for naught unless such this rampant weapons addiction is shown to be the death wish it is, and a 21st century culture of life can flourish. In the quote, Schell compares global warming to this terminal threat.

The two perils have a great deal in common. Both are the fruits of swollen human power – in the one case, the destructive power of war; in the other, the productive power of fossil-fuel energy. Both put stakes on the table of a magnitude never present before in human decision making. Both threaten life on a planetary scale. Both require a fully global response. Anyone concerned by the one should be concerned with the other. It would be a shame to save the Earth from slowly warming only to burn it up in an instant in a nuclear war. (7)

Schellnhuber, Hans. Tragic Triumph. Climatic Change. 100/1, 2010. The Chief Government Advisor on Climate for Germany and Director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research laments in an invited essay for the 100th volume of this journal that the combined impact on climate studies of political and media attacks, along with deeply flawed international conferences and agendas such as Copenhagen, burdened by its own data deluge, have led to a terminal impasse. Instead of an imperative “planetary enlightenment,” it is worried that we are descending into a fatal phase of global “cognitive dissonance.”

Schellnhuber, Hans Joachim, et al, eds. Global Sustainability: A Nobel Cause. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. A noble volume drawn from the 2007 Potsdam Laureate Symposium, hosted by Angela Merkel, with luminaries such as Nicholas Stern, Susanne Kadner, Geoffrey West, Murray Gell-Mann, Annette Schavan, and others. Some 27 chapters are displayed in 6 Parts: The Great Transformation, Climate Stabilization and Sustainable Development, Institutional and Economic Incentives, Technological Innovation and Energy Security, A Global Contract between Science and Society, and The Potsdam Memorandum. Gell-Mann, always on message, rightly calls for a “planetary consciousness” guided by novel complex system understandings.

I therefore propose that the key factor in taking a crude look at the whole is a belief, maybe even merely a hope, that the human mind – in this case the collective mind of networked humanity – will be able to construct mental images of the whole that are more than mere figments of cultural or scientific projection. These mental images have to take the form, I propose, of new cosmologies, cosmologies that blend cultural narratives of the position of humans in the world with the findings of Earth system analysis, encompassing both the natural world and the human condition in its cultural expression. (30-31, Wolfgang Lucht, Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research)

Schellnhuber, Hans, editor-in-chief. Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. These proceedings of the noted 2005 International Symposium on Stabilization of Greenhouse Gas Concentrations provide a copious survey by leading players such as Stephen Schneider and Tom Wigley of impending impacts we really ought to get in front of. Balmy gradual warming is a misnomer, rather the erratic weather outside our windows and on the nightly news is a harbinger of sudden catastrophic instabilities if mindful mitigation of emissions and lifestyle does not promptly commence.

Schneider, Tapio, et al. Possible Climate Transitions from Breakup of Stratocumulus Decks under Greenhouse Warming. Nature Geoscience. Online February, 2019. As if we need another climate alarm, CalTech researchers note that Earth’s relative cloudiness plays an important part in maintaining a moderate temperature. But if the clouds go away due to excessive greenhouse gases, as they will, this disappearance will lead to runaway heat waves. The results are braced by paleoclimate studies which show that when this happened in the past, the planet did experience high temperatures. The work merited a news report A World Without Clouds by Natalie Wolchover in

Stratocumulus clouds cover 20% of the low-latitude oceans and are prevalent in the subtropics. They cool the Earth by shading large portions of its surface. However, as their scales are too small to be resolvable in global climate models, the effect of greenhouse warming has remained uncertain. Here we report how stratocumulus decks respond in large-eddy simulations that explicitly resolve cloud dynamics in a subtropical region. We find the stratocumulus decks become unstable and break up into scattered clouds when CO2 levels rise above 1,200 ppm. In addition to rising CO2 levels, this instability triggers a surface warming of about 8 K globally and 10 K in the subtropics. Once the stratocumulus decks have broken up, they only re-form when CO2 concentrations drop substantially below the level at which the instability first occurred. (Abstract)

Schrader-Frechette, Kristin. Environmental Justice: Creating Equality, Reclaiming Democracy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. A professor of environmental philosophy draws on her own life experience in the rural south to present a cogent case for this vital subject.

Simons, Gregory and Iulian Chifu. The Changing Face of Warfare in the 21st Century. London: Routledge, 2017. While the authors are European scholars of conflict studies and prevention, we are concerned that even a work this seems to accept perpetual, violent conflict as a situation we have to accept. Rather, why can’t it be seen as an archaic male tribal aberration, now of nuclear scale, a new barbarism which bombs hospitals, that in these early years needs to be forever banished.

This study discusses salient trends demonstrated by contemporary warfare of these first years of the 21st century. The authors reinforce previous notions of Fourth Generation Warfare, but most importantly explore the workings of new components and how these have modified the theory and practice of warfare beyond the basic divisions of conventional and unconventional warfare as witnessed in the preceding century. Throughout history there has been a close interaction between politics, communication and armed conflict and a main line of investigation of this book is to track changes that are presumed to have occurred in the way and manner in which armed conflicts are waged.

Smith, H. Jesse. The State We’re In. Science. 302/1171, 2003. An introduction to a series of articles here and in the next three issues entitled State of the Planet. Typical subjects are Human Population, Global Freshwater Resources, Tropical Soils and Food Security, Energy Resources and Global Development and Modern Global Climate Change. The subsequent December 12th issue presents a special retrospective of the “Tragedy of the Commons” metaphor conceived by the late ecologist Garret Hardin.

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