"Surviving Progress"

             When Jane Goodall spoke at a book talk in New York she was wrapped in a silk scarf and her hair was pinned in her trademark gray tail.  Her latest book Hope for Animals and Their World described the many successes of the conservationist movement--the reintegration of species like the California condor into their habitats--detailing the extraordinary rescue efforts scientists and advocates make for the smallest progress.  As she concluded she removed a single condor feather from a leather tube; it seemed to stretch longer than one of her own legs.  The crowd, mostly urban and young, roared with approval.  Hope.  It is not just possible, it sells books, too.
              The memory of that talk and her beautiful book came to mind as I watched "Surviving Progress," not just because she is interviewed in the film, but because when confronted with the bleak realities of 21st century's globalized free market capitalism, one needs to hold on to something (even a single feather) of hope.  As she says in her interview, "Humans are a problem-solving species."
               In the documentary scientists, intellectuals, and writers take on the major concern of the next century:  Will humanity change its ways or ask for a bigger shovel?  For cynics, it should be said up front, humans aren't going anywhere.  No matter how much eco-freaks and God-botherers howl at an empty sky.  In Curt Stager's excellent book Deep Future we learn sure enough that we can't kill off the species through climate change, but we can make it miserable for the weakest and poorest among us; we can kill off huge portions of the population; and we can deplete (for us and our progeny) the natural abundance of resources in and on the Earth.  Yet it must be admitted that "Market fundamentalism," or the blinkered faith in progress, has tethered all of us to the crazed horse of a global economy with no stable of regulations and rules large enough to house it.
              One flattering problem the film reveals is that humans have been too successful.  It took 1300 years to add 200 million people to the world's population, now it takes 3 years.  With 6 or 7 billion people, some argue that this is too many by half.  But I don't see the ruling elite changing their behavior or the bottom half of the planet living much better just because there are less people.  Our numbers are going up, space and resources are limited, and as one interviewee says, "every time history repeats itself, the price goes up."
             An intriguing and reoccurring topic in the film is the "progress trap."  In learning and making progress 'we' saw at the very limb on which 'we' sit like the cavemen who discovered that charging a herd of animals over a cliff was easier than hunting them individually--smart but self-defeating if taken to extremes.
             Author Margaret Atwood preempts conservative arguments saying that we should think of the earth not as some holy abstraction but as a finite system.  "Unless we preserve the planet," she argues, "There isn't going to be any 'the economy' left."  Her comments carefully juxtapose with the experience of a middle class Chinese tour guide, made comfortable by the rising industrialism in his country, but one who self-silences:  He refuses to confront the problems of the environment directly for fear of retribution even when he and his own family recognize the drawbacks of development.
              Of course the greatest part of this film is blame.  It is not a conspiracy to speak of an international elite who literally dictate world policy.  It does exist.  And their instruments in the banking industry--who so excellently ensnared the developing world in debt obligations they could not possibly repay--have prepared the track for the great collisions of the 21st century:  Who will pay the debts?  Who says 'we' have to?  What will happen if 'we' don't?
              There are deficits to this sleek and beautiful film.  The pseudo-scientific babbling of Robert Wright never ceases to sound like a mad-chemist's parrot set loose on camera:  "Now more than ever you could argue that there's a unified social brain."  What nonsense is this?  And his imperative that we must make "moral progress" is as fantastical as it is a-historical.  As is one interviewees notion that "we're up against human nature...we have to reform ourselves, remake ourselves."  While he wasn't mentioned, philosopher and Enlightenment critic John Gray's recent (exceedingly bleak) arguments and historical work on this point are fairly conclusive.  (For more see The Immortalization Commission.)  Such a ridiculous frame for change as 'human nature' (whatever that turns out to be) will offer up human nature itself:  mercurial, uncertain, radically alternate.
              More convincing is the notion that we need to "prove nature wrong," as one scientist argues.  In this vein, we must prove that "making apes smarter is NOT a dead end."  (The experiment of civilization could topple, the film purports, unless we shore up our world.)  Human beings may not have a "united social brain" or be able to individually transform "their natures" but humans can arise to a challenge.  They can act collectively.  Perhaps the next challenge of societal progress--as opposed to human progress--is a collective decision to overcome impulses to greed for generations as yet unborn.  It will take reclaiming a simple word:  "We."
         

Deep Future: The Next 100,000 years of Life on Earth

Review by BRETT WARNKE

Curt Stager, author of Deep Future: The Next 100,000 Years of Life on Earth; Thomas Dunne Books, 304 pp. Book Release, US., March 15.

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“Save the Carbon!” It’s not the most popular bumper sticker you’ll see as you speed through a crunchy college town but paleoecologist Curt Stager argues it is not merely a thoughtful slogan, it is a prescient one. In his beautiful new book Deep Future: The Next 100,000 Years of Life on Earth, Stager has elevated science writing to the level of literature and made the case for conserving carbon and the consideration of a changing climate’s consequences.

A sometime writer for National Geographic and a current Professor at Paul Smith’s college in New York, Stager’s arresting book informs us what scientists already know: Humanity has prevented the next ice age and is making decisions that will impact thousands of years of human civilization. This is the book about the next 100 millennia. (Other scribbler’s should note that this is the best idea I’ve yet heard of for keeping a book in print!) Deep Future is a scientific work with a human narrative; an empirical study of a world changing utterly and the horrors and payoffs to come.

“I was a skeptic about climate change,” he admitted in an interview. But once Stager was challenged by physicist Dr. James Hansen to look up the weather records for the Adirondack Mountains, he knew he was wrong. “I added it up and the numbers are in. Now I can see it is due to us.”

Stager welcomes the reader into the Anthroposcene—the Age of Humans. Whether we know it or not the carbon we release and the nukes we have tested have left prints on this planet and 21^st century humans will determine both the acceleration and duration of future warming. But Stager admonishes his readers early on that climate change is “not just a heart-wrenching litany of gloom.” Instead Deep Future excellently summarizes what is known—namely, that modern living has unwittingly causing dramatic climate changes—and Stager offers a global tour through labs and exotic locations anticipating possible decision points and their consequences. Humanity will exist in 100,000 years, he argues. The culprits of our possible destruction—asteroids, disease, nuclear war, a dead sun—are unlikely, impossible, or unthinkably far-off. And since humans have already vaporized 300 Gigatons of fossil carbon and will certainly be around for further millennia, Stager ponders the crucial question: “What will the ‘deep future’ of the Anthroposcene be?”

“I felt like I was a pioneer in a new world,” he said “I had spoken with David Archer (author of The Long Thaw) and he and others were working on modeling--demonstrating how warm and how cool the weather is going to get. But they haven’t yet thought deeply about the future.”

Stager cites meticulous calculations from numerous climatologists, ecologists, glaciologists and uses Archer’s emission models to peer into the mysteries of the future. Then, using the silent stones beneath us he describes a “Super Greenhouse” world 55 million years ago. This is what will happen if humanity hurls itself towards the extreme scenario of releasing 5,000 Gigatons of carbon into the atmosphere. What would this waterworld of pole-to-pole warmth look like? Well, scientists already know; the earth has been there and done that.

“A Super Greenhouse is not just some doomsayer’s morbid dream,” he writes. “It really can happen.” And if the world returns to such a climate it would be a “scarlet mark of shame” on future sediment records. Having now prevented the next ice age that would have turned Canada into an igloo, Stager informs us that the 100,000 year heat spike we have initiated will descend. But then what? Cooling. Animals which migrated to warmer regions of North America and Siberia will, like the doomed polar bears, belugas, Arctic Cod, and walruses before them, be trapped.

Using the most recent data, Stager does not engage in the splashing death-row spectacle that Al Gore and other non-scientist activists have predicted. He admits that a “paleoecologists panic button might not be so easily pressed.” Using examples from Venice to Cameroon to Shanghai Stager explains that in most cases sea level rising will be “slow, unrelenting, costly, exasperating, but rarely deadly to humans.”

Our emissions are already creating winners and losers. A recent article in The Scientific American laid out population density and rain patterns for areas as far apart as Mozambique, Mexico and Vietnam. In these and other regions, who will determine how future resources are allocated? Who will organize the inevitable human and animal mass migrations? How will resource battles be fought? The developed world will be the greatest beneficiary as minerals and resources hidden beneath the ice become available. Stager writes that “shipyards, refineries, and storage facilities will turn formerly remote outposts into major transport hubs and busy ports of call.” This means we must readjust or at least contemplate how we talk about what is happening. Is the Arctic being destroyed or is its biodiversity increasing? Is southern Florida’s demise more important than a tenth of the world’s oil reserves now on tap? And which species are “good”? For every mollusk that acidifies in an increasingly carbonized ocean, pteropods, jellyfish, anemones, scallops, and sea cucumbers are beginning to flourish.

Stager’s is not without targets. He goes easy on “contrarians,” the mild term he slaps on the wrong-headed loudmouths and status quo skeptics who are often funded by the biggest polluters. And again and again he reveals his impatience with a media he argues is driven by front-page spectacle rather than the slow and more disturbing truth of climate change. But surely he protests too much given the rigorous research by major newspapers, bloggers, and public intellectuals on this subject.

But his warning for us to “Save The Carbon” is a serious one. Shouldn’t our descendents, when threatened with a future ice age, have the option to set a few mountains ablaze to warm things up a bit? Stager’s finely-written and compelling analysis poses queries our busy species has not yet considered. Since we’ll be here a while, Stager’s book is (and will be) a nice way to spend our remaining time.