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The Planet Strikes Back
Why We Underestimate the Earth and Overestimate Ourselves
In his 2010 book, Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, environmental scholar and activist Bill McKibben writes of a planet so devastated by global warming that it’s no longer recognizable as the Earth we once inhabited. This is a planet, he predicts, of “melting poles and dying forests and a heaving, corrosive sea, raked by winds, strafed by storms, scorched by heat.” Altered as it is from the world in which human civilization was born and thrived, it needs a new name -- so he gave it that extra “a” in “Eaarth.”
The Eaarth that McKibben describes is a victim, a casualty of humankind’s unrestrained consumption of resources and its heedless emissions of climate-altering greenhouse gases. True, this Eaarth will cause pain and suffering to humans as sea levels rise and croplands wither, but as he portrays it, it is essentially a victim of human rapaciousness.
With all due respect to McKibben’s vision, let me offer another perspective on his (and our) Eaarth: as a powerful actor in its own right and as an avenger, rather than simply victim.
It’s not enough to think of Eaarth as an impotent casualty of humanity’s predations. It is also a complex organic system with many potent defenses against alien intervention -- defenses it is already wielding to devastating effect when it comes to human societies. And keep this in mind: we are only at the beginning of this process.
To grasp our present situation, however, it’s necessary to distinguish between naturally recurring planetary disturbances and the planetary responses to human intervention. Both need a fresh look, so let’s start with what Earth has always been capable of before we turn to the responses of Eaarth, the avenger.
Overestimating Ourselves
Our planet is a complex natural system, and like all such systems, it is continually evolving. As that happens -- as continents drift apart, as mountain ranges rise and fall, as climate patterns shift -- earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, typhoons, prolonged droughts, and other natural disturbances recur, even if on an irregular and unpredictable basis.
Our predecessors on the planet were deeply aware of this reality. After all, ancient civilizations were repeatedly shaken, and in some cases shattered, by such disturbances. For example, it is widely believed that the ancient Minoan civilization of the eastern Mediterranean collapsed following a powerful volcanic eruption on the island of Thera (also called Santorini) in the mid-second millennium BCE. Archaeological evidence suggests that many other ancient civilizations were weakened or destroyed by intense earthquake activity. In Apocalypse: Earthquakes, Archaeology, and the Wrath of God, Stanford geophysicist Amos Nur and his co-author Dawn Burgess argue that Troy, Mycenae, ancient Jericho, Tenochtitlan, and the Hittite empire may have fallen in this manner.
Faced with recurring threats of earthquakes and volcanoes, many ancient religions personified the forces of nature as gods and goddesses and called for elaborate human rituals and sacrificial offerings to appease these powerful deities. The ancient Greek sea-god Poseidon (Neptune to the Romans), also called “Earth-Shaker,” was thought to cause earthquakes when provoked or angry.
In more recent times, thinkers have tended to scoff at such primitive notions and the gestures that went with them, suggesting instead that science and technology -- the fruits of civilization -- offer more than enough help to allow us to triumph over the Earth’s destructive forces. This shift in consciousness has been impressively documented in Clive Ponting’s 2007 volume, A New Green History of the World. Quoting from influential thinkers of the post-Medieval world, he shows how Europeans acquired a powerful conviction that humanity should and would rule nature, not the other way around. The seventeenth century French mathematician René Descartes, for example, wrote of employing science and human knowledge so that “we can… render ourselves the masters and possessors of nature.”
It’s possible that this growing sense of human control over nature was enhanced by a period of a few hundred years in which there may have been less than the usual number of civilization-threatening natural disturbances. Over those centuries, modern Europe and North America, the two centers of the Industrial Revolution, experienced nothing like the Thera eruption of the Minoan era -- or, for that matter, anything akin to the double whammy of the 9.0 earthquake and 50-foot-high tsunami that struck Japan on March 11th. This relative immunity from such perils was the context within which we created a highly complex, technologically sophisticated civilization that largely takes for granted human supremacy over nature on a seemingly quiescent planet.
But is this assessment accurate? Recent events, ranging from the floods that covered 20% of Pakistan and put huge swathes of Australia underwater to the drought-induced fires that burned vast areas of Russia, suggest otherwise. In the past few years, the planet has been struck by a spate of major natural disturbances, including the recent earthquake-tsunami disaster in Japan (and its many powerful aftershocks), the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti, the February 2010 earthquake in Chile, the February 2011 earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand, the March 2011 earthquake in Burma, and the devastating 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake-tsunami that killed more than 230,000 people in 14 countries, as well as a series of earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanic eruptions in and around Indonesia.
If nothing else, these events remind us that the Earth is an ever-evolving natural system; that the past few hundred years are not necessarily predictive of the next few hundred; and that we may, in the last century in particular, have lulled ourselves into a sense of complacency about our planet that is ill-deserved. More important, they suggest that we may -- and I emphasize may -- be returning to an era in which the frequency of the incidence of such events is on the rise.
In this context, the folly and hubris with which we’ve treated natural forces comes strongly into focus. Take what’s happening at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power complex in northern Japan, where at least four nuclear reactors and their adjoining containment pools for “spent” nuclear fuel remain dangerously out of control. The designers and owners of the plant obviously did not cause the earthquake and tsunami that have created the present peril. This was a result of the planet’s natural evolution -- in this case, of the sudden movement of continental plates. But they do bear responsibility for failing to anticipate the potential for catastrophe -- for building a reactor on the site of frequent past tsunamis and assuming that a human-made concrete platform could withstand the worst that nature has to offer. Much has been said about flaws in design at the Fukushima plant and its inadequate backup systems. All this, no doubt, is vital, but the ultimate cause of the disaster was never a simple design flaw. It was hubris: an overestimation of the power of human ingenuity and an underestimation of the power of nature.
What future disasters await us as a result of such hubris? No one, at this point, can say with certainty, but the Fukushima facility is not the only reactor built near active earthquake zones, or at risk from other natural disturbances. And don’t just stop with nuclear plants. Consider, for instance, all those oil platforms in the Gulf of Mexico at risk from increasingly powerful hurricanes or, if cyclones increase in power and frequency, the deep-sea ones Brazil is planning to construct up to 180 miles off its coast in the Atlantic Ocean. And with recent events in Japan in mind, who knows what damage might be inflicted by a major earthquake in California? After all, California, too, has nuclear plants sited ominously near earthquake faults.
Underestimating Eaarth
Hubris of this sort is, however, only one of the ways in which we invite the planet’s ire. Far more dangerous and provocative is our poisoning of the atmosphere with the residues of our resource consumption, especially of fossil fuels. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, total carbon emissions from all forms of energy use had already hit 21.2 billion metric tons by 1990 and are projected to rise ominously to 42.4 billion by 2035, a 100% increase in less than half a century. The more carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases we dump into the atmosphere, the more we alter the planet’s natural climatic systems and damage other vital ecological assets, including oceans, forests, and glaciers. These are all components of the planet’s integral makeup, and when damaged in this way, they will trigger defensive feedback mechanisms: rising temperatures, shifting rainfall patterns, and increased sea levels, among other reactions.
The notion of the Earth as a complex natural system with multiple feedback loops was first proposed by environmental scientist James Lovelock in the 1960s and propounded in his 1979 book, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth. (Lovelock appropriated the name of the ancient Greek goddess Gaia, the personification of Mother Earth, for his version of our planet.) In this and other works, Lovelock and his collaborators argue that all biological organisms and their inorganic surroundings on the planet are closely integrated to form a complex and self-regulating system, maintaining the necessary conditions for life -- a concept they termed “the Gaia Hypothesis.” When any parts of this system are damaged or altered, they contend, the others respond by attempting to repair, or compensate for, the damage in order to restore the essential balance.
Think of our own bodies when attacked by virulent microorganisms: our temperature rises; we produce more white blood cells and other fluids, sleep a lot, and deploy other defense mechanisms. When successful, our bodies’ defenses first neutralize and eventually exterminate the invading germs. This is not a conscious act, but a natural, life-saving process.
Eaarth is now responding to humanity’s depredations in a similar way: by warming the atmosphere, taking carbon from the air and depositing it in the ocean, increasing rainfall in some areas and decreasing it elsewhere, and in other ways compensating for the massive atmospheric infusion of harmful human emissions.
But what Eaarth does to protect itself from human intervention is unlikely to prove beneficial for human societies. As the planet warms and glaciers melt, sea levels will rise, inundating coastal areas, destroying cities, and flooding low-lying croplands. Drought will become endemic in many once-productive farming areas, reducing food supplies for hundreds of millions of people. Many plant and animal species that are key to human livelihoods, including various species of trees, food crops, and fish, will prove incapable of adjusting to these climate changes and so cease to exist. Humans may -- and again I emphasize that may -- prove more successful at adapting to the crisis of global warming than such species, but in the process, multitudes are likely to die of starvation, disease, and attendant warfare.
Bill McKibben is right: we no longer live on the “cozy, taken-for-granted” planet formerly known as Earth. We inhabit a new place, already changed dramatically by the intervention of humankind. But we are not acting upon a passive, impotent entity unable to defend itself against human transgression. Sad to say, we will learn to our dismay of the immense powers available to Eaarth, the Avenger.
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76 Comments so far
Show AllKurt Vonnegut, on the 2004 elections:
"The planet’s immune system is obviously trying to get rid of us, and high time! But sure, go vote for somebody. What the hell."
While I see a lot of truth in Vonnegut's statement (much more than you'll find in the Democratic Party shill rag in which it was published), Prof. Klare underestimates the degree to which the Ea(a)rth's victory over mankind will be pyrrhic. If we equate "earth" with "life on earth," it could well happen that the earth will die in its desperate effort to rid itself of us.
Humans may become extinct, but life will certainly continue as the microbes will still prosper and continue their evolution. Do read "Microcosmos" by Lynn Margulis.
What worries me more than the 'natural disasters', IMHO, is the possibility of an un-natural disaster of nuclear war.
Thank you for this essay. What is most amazing, is that so few people notice. Our entire Congress, the Pentagon, and the Presidency of the USA, along with the leaders of many EU/NATO nations, don't notice. They still think that the most important priority for the US nation is to bomb poor farmers on the other side of the planet who simply want to be religious in their own way. That is our national priority. It serves us no benefit. Bombing other people in their own villages is a bad habit we have, left over from WWII. But do it we must. Strange.
Why not just come out and say it: Pachamama is alive! Conscious. Sentient.
And if we don't start treating her with the respect and reverence she deserves, she'll slough us off like the bunch of parasitic fleas which we are.
Bolivia knows this -- see Evo Morales UN proposal in yesterday's CD.
From what I know mostly from TV documentaries, previous mass extinctions which killed off most of the creatures who were living at the time, left enough things alive so that, having millions of years to play with, life could re-evolve. Now thanks to human ingenuity and the global interconnectedness of everything, it would actually be possible to kill off the entire biosphere and eliminate all of life. That probably won't happen. It may just be we the people, it may be all of us, or a few may survive. It may happen quickly or it may take a few decades.
We may have the capacity to turn things around or it may be too late.
Interesting and unusual essay by Michael Klare who tends to stick close to energy politics & policy in his analysis. McKibbin's book Eaarth starts well but then somehow gets itself off track in a rather long and flaccid discussion of American history and 'bigness'.
Joseph Romm and Mark Hertzgaard offer more trenchant accounts of what is coming:
http://www.grist.org/article/book-review-hell-and-high-water
http://markhertsgaard.com/
The paleontological record attests to recoveries from mass extinctions but initially it is very simplified ecosystems lacking diversity. It appears to require millions of years of evolution to recover from mass extinction events:
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-01/uob-rfa011808.php
Human greed and hubris is incapable (small consolation) of knocking off all of life-- but is happily engineering mass extinctions and the annihilation of rich diverse ecosystems. How bad can it get?
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2011/march/permian-mass-extinction-032411.html
http://science.nationalgeographic.com/science/prehistoric-world/permian-extinction.html
On occasion, I get confident climate change deniers explaining to me that humans are far too small to impact the atmosphere of the entire planet. (This appears to be one of their official scripted 'talking points'.)
They are unaware that the current planetary atmosphere is a remarkable byproduct of some of the smallest & simplest organisms in existence.
One of the most extraordinary events in the history of life on earth is the development of an oxygen rich atmosphere by cyanobacteria over 2 billion years ago. Earth went from an atmosphere lacking free oxygen to an initially highly toxic atmosphere that now contains 21% oxygen.
http://www.draget.net/hoe/index.php?p=p6
http://www.astrobio.net/exclusive/541/the-rise-of-oxygen
It's also extraordinary to consider that both mitochondria and chloroplasts were probably symbiotic captures by other cellular units in the evolution of eukaryotes -- but that's another topic:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endosymbiotic_theory
Damn! Now I'm going to have to take a whole day, follow all those links, and read all that. I'll try but sometimes reading scientific language turns my brain into chunky peanut butter. That's why I like TV documentaries.
I've encountered that about the cyanobacteria making all the oxygen, terraforming the planet into a place suitable for the kind of life that did evolve. I don't believe in "intelligent design" of the stand-in-for-Christan-God variety, but it is amazing how things did work out so perfectly. One scientists on one show I watched said he'd come to have faith in a "higher power" because he couldn't believe it was a random accident that the moon happened to turn out to be just the right size to cover the sun during an eclipse making scientific observations of the sun's surface easier. I don't know what to make of that.
the stand-in-for-Christan-God variety, but it is amazing how things did work out so perfectly. One scientists on one show I watched said he'd come to have faith in a "higher power" because he couldn't believe it was a random accident that the moon happened to turn out to be just the right size to cover the sun during an eclipse making scientific observations of the sun's surface easier. I don't know what to make of that.
PP, the inuit and aleuts when they first saw photographs were convinced that the cameras that took them were instruments for snatching away souls. it is perhaps equally impressive that sheep exist, providing us with wool that can be spun into yarn that can be knit into gloves that can cover all five of our fingers (and provide us with more wool in time to knit new mitts when our old ones wear through.)
What to make of the fact that our quests for knowledge are dependent on that world that is present to our senses in the way that it is? Well, for one thing, i suppose we can conclude that if we had the eyes of dragonflies, our scientific measurement systems might be radically different in kind as well as degree. The universe came first; we humans are products of it and in radically significant ways adapted to it. i can't understand how one might argue that the results of these adaptations support the view that it was all tailor made for us. from the point of view of, say, a highly successful virus, we would, by parity of reasoning, be highly evolved environments specifically tailored to their needs, no?
Randy G, thanks for the links. And re the mitochondria, how else to explain why they are not in our DNA but only in the egg? And where would we be without mitochondria? Out of gas. Matriarchy rules!
Paranoid Pessimist, that part about the size of the moon was interesting. There are so many fortuitous random accidents that together make this planet habitable for life as we know it that one does wonder. On the other hand, maybe what is inhabitable for us is just what some other intelligent life needs to be habitable. Who knows?
Meanwhile, while we are destroying the narrow range of acidity, temperature and oxygen within which we and the other species can exist on this planet, who knows what might tolerate the habitat we are creating?
"Quoting from influential thinkers of the post-Medieval world, he shows how Europeans acquired a powerful conviction that humanity should and would rule nature, not the other way around. The seventeenth century French mathematician René Descartes, for example, wrote of employing science and human knowledge so that “we can… render ourselves the masters and possessors of nature.”"
Notice that the author describes the "thinkers" as "influential". This is a classic rhetorical deception. He can't describe them as level-headed or justice-minded because they aren't. So he had to use the familiar label "influential" to try to reinforce in the reader the idea that his story remains worthy of the reader's attention. But he should have called a spade a spade regarding Rene Descartes, et al.
Rene Descartes is one of a group of 19th/18th century philosophical thugs who succeeded in burying the wisdom of the ages articulated by Plato et al. Plato had defined appropriate roles for civic institutions, public servants, and citizens, to maximize the health of civilizations. Descartes, et al, came along like Ayn Rand et al and smashed the wisdom of the ages for egotistical reasons, for their own personal self-aggrandizement, at massive expense to the health of civilizations! Look into it yourself. So how do YOU evaluate Descartes and Plato, and arrive at the truth? Hint: Correlate their messages with the proposition that everything is connected and universal equity/justice, i.e. nirvana, is achievable. If it correlates, then it is the truth. Plato correlates. Descartes conflicts - miserably.
With all due respect, Plato's Republic is just another recipe for the repression of the masses by an oligarchy. So I can't say I have any use for his civil ethics either.
Right! Thank you. The allegory of Plato's Cave was to show that only a certain elite could see clearly the "truth" and therefore should rule over the masses who only could see the "shadows" of reality. It was a justification for an authoritarian society.
I think the delusion of human superiority goes back further, to the Old Testament Bible, to Genesis 1:26 telling people to "rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground." Those are among the most destructive words ever entered into human language both in telling people that they should and that they could do all that.
It used to be that Western Civilization had an appropriate response to the delusion of human superiority. It was the seven deadly sins, of which pride was the greatest sin.
These days, we have converted pride to a virtue. That truth is evident in the "power of pride" bumper stickers and the idea that one gains "bragging rights" if one's football team wins a game. The right to brag is as dependent upon the elevation of pride over esteem as is the right to condemn people on the bottom of the hierarchy (or the economy) as undeserving (of, for example, health care) and those at the top deserving (of, for example, all of the bailout money paid to the banks and pocketed by the "deserving" millionaires).
This is the fundamental moral problem in America.
The American Empire is supported by a frame of reference rooted in the field of pride. In this frame, people are not esteemed for their human qualities. The universal valuation of humans disappears. In a pride frame of reference, people are valued in proportion to their accomplishments (the party line) or their position in the hierarchy (the actual partiers).
In an esteem frame of reference it is not possible to dehumanize others and then "justifiably" kill them. Everyone has inalienable value.
In a pride frame of reference it is necessary to dehumanize others (because then we can be proud to be not-other) and killing the dehumanized people becomes, at the extreme, a moral imperative.
Big difference.
recapitulationistUU,
Thank you. That is one of the best comments I have ever read at CD.
The self aware naked killer ape species called homo sapiens has perspective distortion hard wired into their brains. They think they are IT. As mankind has crushed, subjugated and generally preyed on other humans and a huge portion of the ecosphere, the "influential" thinkers have become even more convinced that homo sap is IT. A few of us have observed that we are not IT and should show some humility as well as admit our limited knowledge in many areas of science. But the scientists are having none of it. They said they knew all there was about physics around 1900. You know how that worked out. Over and over again the pack of ossifed idiots with doctorates in this or that field of science proclaim that we have the full picture NOW on what's going on. This changes every 10 or 20 years with new proclamations straight from Orwell's 1984. Every time some hard scientific fact comes up that challenges the prevailing accepted wisdom surfaces, it is ignored, doubted or ridiculed. They hate to admit they are wrong. Only when a new generation of scientists embraces the overwhelming evidence that contradicts the erroneus previous data does the truth progress a little. As a small example of an inconvenient scientific fact that has been hurriedly swept under the rug, consider the plate techtonics in geology theory. Did you know this a theory and not a proven fact? Did you know there is a competing theory WITH proven facts that has been deep sixed? The biggest event in plate techtonics in our generation was the Japanese mega quake, right? Right! Well, you would expect a bit of proof about subduction plates moving under Japan causing all this, right?
Fact:
1) The Quake involving an allleged subduction plate moving UNDER Japan caused some land in Japan's sea side to DROP about a meter.
Fact:
2) Some markers placed on the ocean bottom years ago by the Japanese misbehaved. The ones on the Japanese plate did not rise, they sunk a little. But here is the best part. The ones on the pacific plate (you know, the one that supposedly moved WEST to subduct under Japan) moved several meters (a huge amount for geologists) EAST-south east.
Now a logical person would say, gee, that looks like expansion to me. The competing theory for plate techtonics is global expansion. The stretch marks on all the ocean bottoms are proof. The fact that there is zero evidence of Africa or Antartica ever drifting in any direction is further proof (all the other continents have moved away from them).
But, you see, that's not acceptable to our holy priesthood of geologists. They have all the answers. The earth is not expanding. We've got it all figured out. Trust us.
Human leadership is full of shit. Plato's elitism aside, the idiots interpreting shadows on the wall and killing you if you didn't agree to their interpretations is where we are still.
As to what the planet is going to do about all this, remember that not a single tree has ever joined with it's fellows like in the Lord of the Rings and attacked mean humans. I think a more valid concern is what are the ETs that monitor this experiment going to do to the naked killer ape species for fucking up the garden?
Here's a fun thought. The evil corporations planned in the 1940s to use mind control to mess up humans so they would become pliable serfs. The problem was that the mindfork frequency could be easily countered by wearing headgear. More specifically, headgear with a certain metal used in canning food blocked the signal completely.
How come most people don't wear hats anymore, huh? And now you know why anyone who smells a corporate rat in government or science is accused of wearing a TIN FOIL HAT. We should start a Tin Foil Hat fad to piss off corporations and government!
Ridicule is the main corporate tool of the media. If you love truth, question accepted scientific wisdom repeated over and over in the media. For some reason I haven't figured out yet, an expanding earth hypothesis drives scientists up a tree. Could it be that the massive size of reptiles, giant roaches and dragonflies millions of years ago be a function of lower gravity from a faster spinning and smaller earth? They have admitted it did spin faster. But as to a smaller size, mass and less gravity, that's just tin foil hat stuff.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJfBSc6e7QQ
Utter bilge. What are you smoking? I want to avoid it.
>>In its justification of secession, Texas sums up its view of a union built upon slavery: "We hold as undeniable truths that the governments of the various States, and of the confederacy itself, were established exclusively by the white race, for themselves and their posterity; that the African race had no agency in their establishment; that they were rightfully held and regarded as an inferior and dependent race, and in that condition only could their existence in this country be rendered beneficial or tolerable."
This is what those "patriots" of the "Great State of Texas" felt about Slavery in 1861.
They have not really changed their viewpoint in the past 150 years.
Quite so but I would venture to bet this is the attitude across the USA. White folks really have to understand and deal honestly with Indigenous and Black rage. Would not hurt at all to read Black Rage at this point and to heed Readbetween's suggestion of Red Alert!
ALL the deadly sins are American virtues. USA USA
Mmmmm greed, Mmmmmm sloth, Mmmm envy, Mmmmm anger, Mmmmm gluttony,
Mmmm lust.
Yet another guy--Descartes--I'm supposed to get angry at? The pantheon is getting too big. He invented analytic geometry as I recall. Don't remember much about his philosophy except that he was a dualist--accepting the notion that the soul and the physical body somehow came together in the pineal gland, a collision neuroscientists have yet to demonstrate. And Plato was talking about nirvana? Must have missed that. Can't imagine Descartes as a philosophical thug. Instead, I see him lying in bed late in the morning, looking at the cracks in the plastered ceiling and imagining that equations could be represented graphically, given a proper set of coordinates. I guess he was hatching a plot to overturn Plato's World of Ideals, not doing mathematics at all--that poser!--or is it hoser?
I'm surprised no one has started singing praises of Jules Verne. Rockefeller must have hated him. Jules Verne predicted that machines would burn hydrogen which was extracted from water through electrolysis in a continuously renewing cycle. Sure, he was a writer and didn't have all the scientific details down, but if things had gone that way it would be a different world. Think of all that crap about how "hard and dangerous" it is to store and transport hydrogen from our pro-coal, pro-oil and pro-nuke media while neglecting that minor detail that water is pretty easy to transport and central plants by the ocean or large lakes could make electricity from hydrogen to send all over hill and dale with zero pollution. Think of the pure poisons foisted upon humanity from mining coal, Uranium and drilling for oil that would have become totally unnecesary. Rockefeller is one of the "influential" thinkers that really messed up the planet.
Jules Verne should have been listened too. It may be too late now.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJfBSc6e7QQ
You are dead wrong on Plato. The first time I read Plato's "Republic" I thought he was kidding. Plato fathered Plutocracy.
Plato - - Pluto - you do know the difference, yes?
Plato is a toy for kids and Pluto is a coonhound.
To rtdrury: I am quoting from wikipedia because you are obviously too lazy to inform yourself of the facts, and it's late, but I consider this an emergency.
First, Descartes lived between 31 March 1596 and 11 February 1650.
He is considered influential becuase he was and still is. "...dubbed the 'Father of Modern Philosophy', and much subsequent Western philosophy is a response to his writings, which are studied closely to this day."
He was one of the greatest figures of the Age of Enlightenment, that cultural trend that influenced the world to reconsider man's position in society, in nature, and in the cosmos and led to the consideration of human rights as they inspired the Founding Fathers.
Bad enough that you accuse the author of deception, but your ignorance of both Descartes (et al, no less) and Plato (no nature lover he) and your ridiculous criticism of their motivations are shocking.
clogged toilet make big stink!
not only is the planet no longer the same, none of the creatures here, including humans, are, either...
we all carry within our very cells the molecular markings of chemical and industrial activity...
there is no such thing as a seminal human anymore...nor a seminal cat, or bee, or what have you...
all has been compromised, and will only continue to be ever more so, unless we cease industrial activity...
by the way, we have the tools to make earthquakes, among other things...
this is important, and not irrelevant to this article...
I do not hold with planetary consciousness...
this is a sphere that has a thin covering of life, not a living sphere...
we not only have the potential to utterly destroy that thin living veneer...
we are actively doing it right now
potentially for hundreds of thousands of years, without any intervention...
our folly is both the worst fear, and best hope, any other entity here has...
We are living a change in the force. God put us here to 'Tend and keep His garden'. We have made a mess of it. The Chinese tell a story of an ancient forest outside a city that was lush and full of trees and wildlife. The people from the city went to the forest year after year with their axes to cut fire wood. Over a long period of time the beautiful forest disappeared and became a barren hill. In time all living memory of the beautiful forest was lost.
The earth was once that beautiful forest, the Garden of Eden itself. Man has deflowered mother earth for the greed of the few. So that kings, emperors and other noblemen could ‘hold the gold' in their lifetimes. The same gold that once topped the pyramids, the very same gold, has changed hands many times in the past 4,000 years at a cost of God's inheritance to all mankind. We are not gods ourselves and do not have the power to recreate what has been lost for all time to come.
There was a time when it seemed man could keep taking and destroying nature with impunity. Some great thinkers even had contingency plans. A great thinning of the herd would bring things right again. An 80% decrease in population would certainly end global warming in a century and earth would begin to mend itself. The greedy few could ride out the storm in their compounds, bunkers and on their vast properties.
That has all changed with the gene altering activities of man. Nuclear contamination and biological gene enhancement have opened Pandora's Box. What man does today will reverberate through time and leave man's signature on God's creation. Man has no idea what molecular changes made today will look like in ten thousand years. Man does not care. Tomorrows problems are someone else's worries.
I hope The Planet Strikes Back, and not - Man morphs earth into living hell.
We Ain't Got Time To Bleed. It's Time for the Revolution.
"You control our world. You've poisoned the air we breathe, contaminated the water we drink, and copyrighted the food we eat. We fight in your wars, die for your causes, and sacrifice our freedoms to protect you. You've liquidated our savings, destroyed our middle class, and used our tax dollars to bailout your unending greed. We are slaves to your corporations, zombies to your airwaves, servants to your decadence. You've stolen our elections, assassinated our leaders, and abolished our basic rights as human beings. You own our property, shipped away our jobs, and shredded our unions. You've profited off of disaster, destabilized our currencies, and raised our cost of living. You've monopolized our freedom, stripped away our education, and have almost extinguished our flame. We are hit...we are bleeding...but we ain't got time to bleed. We will bring the giants to their knees and you will witness our revolution! "
-Former Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura, April 12, 2011
The solar carrying capacity of the Earth is going to return with a vengeance.
It is merely a matter of time: don't forget that Earth operates on a time scale that is very different from our short-lived and narrow perspective.
It will in all likelihood be very painful, but, hey, apparently, the majority of human beings seems to learn more through pain than by empirical observation and rational argument.
A good article as far as it goes. One major problem that many may miss: Klare's use of the word "we". There are many billions of people (the majority of the world's population) that have not contributed (or have contributed in only a minor way - w/o a choice in the matter) to the problems that Klare outlines. Michael Klare never mentions or even intimates the "grow-or-die" economic exigencies inherent in capitalism that are the driving force behind the environmental problems of global climate disruption. Despite all the clarity that Michael Klare provides here in enumerating the problems, he remains a Liberal: the source of the problem is not a tiny ruling class of capitalists exploiting the planet, it's "we", it's us. Since we can't change "human nature" we are doomed to let the capitalists get away with it. Ultimately, his use of "we" i.e, blaming all of humanity for crimes of a few, is a recipe for inaction, which is exactly what liberalism wants.
Liberalism wants to blame all of humanity for the crimes of conservative capitalists so the cons can get away with it? How Limbaughesque!
Liberalism and conservatism are two sides of the same capitalist coin. By referencing Rush Limbaugh you demonstrate that you are limited by the false dichotomy of the Republican/Democrat, conservative/liberal view of the world. Both the good cop (Dems) and the bad cop (GOP) work for the same corporate boss. What we need is a real dichotomy, i.e. a real choice. Our electoral system offers us only the illusion of choice.
To paraphrase a famous philosopher:
The abolition of the illusory progress of people is the demand for their real progress. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition [i.e. liberalism] that requires illusions.
Hahaha. How Glenbeckesque!
How so?
You seem as dumb as likeitornot. And that's really dumb.
Whew, I was starting to think I would have to be the commenter to point this out. Tom Larsen, you get a high-5.
I find Michael Klare writing from a ridiculously non-scientific perspective. He knows something about the problem, but starts fantasizing about the outcome.
The earth's changes will not affect those responsible. It will affect the longest lived beings, the poorest, the most trusting, the most dependent on a very specific ecosystem.
Klare's focus on humans is like one of us focusing only on the color infra-red. Humans don't matter in the climate change outcomes. The rest of planetary life does.
Finally, Klare bizarrely says we don't know what is going to happen. Well, Mr. Man, could you consult the scientists? Because they have a spectacularly compelling idea of what is currently happening and what's coming up in the near and not so near futures. And it isn't pretty.
American hubris. We can't be sure what will happen, indeed. Let's just cling to that "uncertainty" and it could all go away!
"Weapons of the Weak" - It's not just the planet that's changing against us humans; the other animals, too, in their own ways, intentionally challenge us back. Here's an excerpt from a review regarding this issue:
The most interesting front in the multifaceted war of position to influence the outcome of the future for the planet – in the most tempestuous and consequential struggles of the day involving the politics of nature -- as it becomes ever-clearer to elephants, primates, and birds that human aggression and invasion has reached crisis proportion, awakening survival instincts and precipitating vengeance.
Giving this dynamic the sustained attention it merits, Jason Hribal's essays and recent book, FEAR OF THE ANIMAL PLANET: THE HIDDEN HISTORY OF ANIMAL RESISTANCE, chronicle acts of rebellion, defiance, resistance, and revolt within the animal kingdom against their human oppressors. A systematic study of anecdotal reports, Hribal goes beyond the established facts of mental, emotional, and social complexity among animals to argue that they have agency. One finds numerous accounts of animal personhood and agency in the field of animal studies, but Hribal takes this disciple to task as well for its abstract and one-dimensional treatments that ignore the political dimension of animal action and the pervasive phenomena of resistance to oppression and slave rebellion.
In an earlier essay, “Animals, Agency and Class: Writing the History of Animals from Below,” Hribal describes the various forms of slavery nonhuman animals are subjected to, such as endured by urban transport animals:
In the cities, the production situation was even more precarious. Animal-powered carts, wagons, carriages, cabs, street-cars, and omnibuses filled the streets of the 19th century … For urban horses and mules, it took two years to become properly trained for this type of work. For coachmen, it took three years. Shifts lasted on average eight to 14 hours per day. The work week ranged from six to seven days. As populations continued to grow, traffic and congestion increased. By the early 20th century, the number of horses and mules working in American cities stood at approximately 35 million — an increase of six-fold from the beginning of the previous century. There were more and more vehicles on the road. The intensity and volume of work continued to accrue — more emphasis on speed, more night-work, greater distances, more routes, fewer breaks, longer shifts, heavier loads, and more starts and stops.
In the 17-19th centuries, with the agricultural and urban exploitation of animals, humans could see domination of animals in its sordid tyranny and ubiquitous evil:
Over the course of the 17th, 18th, 19th, and early 20th century, an ever increasing number of animals were working. Humans witnessed this agency everyday. Some participated in it — as fellow laborers. Some profited from it — as farm, factory, or market owners. Few, if any, could ever avoid dealing with it. Oxen, bulls, cows, and goats were producing the leather industry. Sheep were producing the wool industry. Cows were the ones who produced the milk, cheese, and butter industries. Chickens produced the egg industry. Pigs and cattle produced the flesh industry. This was the labor of reproduction: feeding, clothing, and reproducing a continuously growing number of humans with their skin, hair, milk, eggs, and flesh.
On the agricultural farms, it was oxen, horses, mules, and donkeys, as well as the occasional cow, ewe, or large dog, which pulled and powered the plows, harrows, seed-drills, threshers, binders, presses, reapers, mowers, and harvesters. In the mines, they towed the gold, silver, iron-ore, lead, and coal. On the cotton plantations and in the spinning factories, they turned the mechanical mills that cleaned, pressed, carded, and spun the cotton. On the sugar plantations, they crushed and transported the cane. On the docks, roads, and canals, they moved the carts, wagons, and barges of mail, commodities, and people. In the cities, they powered the carriages, trams, buses, and ferries. On the battlefields, they deployed the artillery and supplies, they provided the reconnaissance, and they charged the lines. This was the labor of production: producing the power necessary to propel the instruments of capitalism. Indeed, the modern agricultural, industrial, commercial, and urban transformations were not just human enterprises.
The history of capitalist accumulation is so much more than a history of humanity. Who built America, the textbook asks? Animals did.
As political agents, animals did not just labor and suffer mindlessly and helplessly, rather they frequently refused work and exploitation, at least past a given limit, and subsequent labor had to be negotiated in some way and to varying degrees. Increased production only meant increased resistance, especially notoriously stubborn and rebellion-prone animals such as donkeys. Hribal adds to an already rich account of animal resistance to human oppression, describing a wide range of animal resistance tactics from intentional sabotage and property destruction to revenge killing and popular violence.
Faking ignorance, rejection of commands, the slowdown, foot-dragging, no work without adequate food, refusal to work in the heat of the day, taking breaks without permission, rejection of overtime, vocal complaints, open pilfering, secret pilfering, rebuffing new tasks, false compliance, breaking equipment, escape, and direct confrontation, these are all actions of what the anthropologist James C. Scott has termed “weapons of the weak”…Hence, while rarely organized in their conception or performance, these actions were nevertheless quite active in their confrontation and occasionally successful in their desired effects. For our purposes, these everyday forms of resistance have not been historically limited to humankind — as each of the above listed methods have been used by other animals.
cool info
if only the animals had a fighting chance
in a bipartisan action, Congress has just opened the door to the evaporation of the Endangered Species Act
Nature needs to be placed in the center of our Constitution -- like what Ecuador and Bolivia have done.
There is a difference between the earth, which is a big rock, and the biosphere and biomass, the sum total of all life forms that live on that rock. I don't know if the total biomass has a combined consciousness or not, but that's what's being raped and plundered. Individual living things have consciousness and human conduct is hurting a lot of them.
In outlining his Gaia Hypothesis, Lovelock provided an experiment he named Daisy World to show how it's possible for the Biota to control a planet's environmental conditions. It's not "New Age horsecrap;" it's now an accepted theory and now termed Earth Systems--theory meaning factually proven, not horseshit.
RE: New Age horsecrap
There's plenty of New Age horsecrap, but this article has nothing to do with it.
RE: The planet does not have a consciousness.
Where did you get that? Klare doesn't argue that it does. "[A]ll biological organisms and their inorganic surroundings on the planet are closely integrated to form a complex and self-regulating system, maintaining the necessary conditions for life -- a concept they termed “the Gaia Hypothesis.”
RE: It is an inert thing...
Huh? You call an earthquake the size that hit Japan "inert"? Are the rain, snow and wind "inert"?
RE: ...we are supposed to be the stewards and keepers of the earth.
No, we are not. We are part of nature. We are not set aside to be its "stewards and keepers". Since the writing of the Bible the Judeo-Christian tradition has proven with almost unique inability, to keep or steward anything without disastrous consequences for nature. The Christian dominion (read domination) of nature, the alienation of humanity from its Mother is a root cause for the problems we face today: from the alienation from nature comes patriarchy, from patriarchy comes class divided societies, from class divided societies comes empire, capitalism, racism, endless wars and the environmental degradation that threatens millions of species right now.
How did you arrive at the certainty that only humans have consciousness? Nothing is bigger or more powerful than you? Nothing can possibly be more intelligent than you? I'm pretty sure that's where the whole concept of hubris originates. You're proving Klare's point here. Nothing is conscious but human beings. So go ahead and plunder and rape this "inert" Earth. How's that been working out?
The Earth is indeed your mother and composes your actual being--You are made from the planet--Sagan took it further and exclaimed we are all made of Star Stuff. The point at issue is What defines sentience. I've had several long debates with physics, geology, humanities, and biology professors regarding the topic, and have always argued that ANY thing capable of altering its behavior in reacion to envionmental change is sentient--A specific form of action is performed in reaction to stimuli. Microbes exhibit such behavior all the time. "Microcosmos" by Margulis is so fascinating it can be read in two days and is quite revelatory.
Eaarth isn't specifcly targeting humans; it's merely trying to maintain an equlibrium in association with the biota. As you can see from the info and maps presented at Earth History, http://www.scotese.com/earth.htm the biota has had to adapt and evolve to the planet's ever-changing physical configuration and concomitant environmental conditions. Without microbes, we wouldn't have the great troves of iron ore to build all our machines--ore that is the feces of microbes.
Not mind, but consciousness. How does a plant "know" which way is up? Planet isn't as inert as you claim. Otherwise, I agree with your point about respecting it.
The earth responds to global changes in a global way, which can be only approximately captured by physics models simulated by computers. Forced changes take from decades to centuries to work their way through the earths geologic and biologic systems in surprising and sometimes unrecognized ways, mostly not good for us.
The extra carbon dioxide we already put in the air will take centuries to be reabsorbed. Its about time we woke up to our senses and stop adding more, especially when ways and means already exist to replace coal burning. If what we have added already has instigated climate change for the next 50 years or more, then what we are adding even faster today, will extend the rate and amount of change further over centuries. Tipping points in the earth systems will guarantee there is no easy going back to our former moderate climates in our human time frames.
There is a problem. We will not see the benefits of change of human policy and politicians on climate change within the lifetime of the policy makers. More immediate benefits to human health and economies will occur as result of a complete shift to renewable energy sources. Zero carbon emission plans can bring cost benefits within decades. There is heaps of money to be made investing in fuel and emission free technologies. Even if you do not believe in climate change.
USA has dug in to wringing the last dollar out of the oil economy. Besides using the most oil of any institution in the world, the Pentagon also protects its ability to keep slurping it up.
Our economy doesn't even change on a collapse.
Our only hope is watching the BRICS nations grapple with this. That, and maybe the US can come up with a presidential plan to declare no oil drilling ever in the Arctic. If only we had that cold war thing still going.
Don't be surprised if those decades tend to be shorter then you think. We are already exceeding the worst case scenarios of most models. As George Carlin would say "circling the drain" So long and thanks for all the fish!
hey, B3nign!
please don't take this personally, as I skim the comments, and stop when something strikes me...
your position is not unique, and I favor much of what you say...
my issue is with the emphasis on 'renewable' energy...
how does one, like yourself, aware of the physicdal trauma the planet is undergoing at human hands, to the point of advocating for an alternative energy process, not also see the direct connection between the damage done and the products that would require the very energies you propose we generate in less harmful ways?
even if we get the energy differently, we have done nothing to halt the industrial damge done by the manufacturing of all of the attendant infrastructure, from the metals and mechanisms required to store and deliver the energy, to the chemicals and processes involved in the making, servicing, and disposing of each and every piece of electro-toy we create entirely from our initially limited, and increasingly waning, store of unique, and vital, biological ingredients, the same ingredients necessary for both our immediate survival, and our future reliable reproduction...
we need to stop the industry of energy...
do you see any other way? a compromise with the living world?
do most of you out there?
peace...