Marq de Villiers - The End: Natural Disasters, Manmade Catastrophes, and the Future of Human Survival

Table of Contents

Can We Do It? Will We?

[Can] angels pass from one extreme to another without going through the middle? Do angels know things more clearly in the morning? How many angels can dance on the point of a very fine needle, without jostling one another?

Isaac dIsraeli, Benjamin Disraelis father, quoting Martinus Scriblerus (probably himself) making fun of Thomas Aquinas

We are programmed by our inheritance to see other living things as mainly something to eat.

James Lovelock, Gaias Revenge

T his Earth is the only place weve got. This is already a clich. We need to cherish it, and protect it. This is a clich too.

But how ?

Part of the how is understanding where the boundaries are and comprehending the dangers. It is commonly said that humans are destroying the planet, but this is typical human hubris. It is ridiculous to believe that one small species, no matter what its engines of destruction, can destroy a planet that has survived four and a half billion yearsand survived, at that, against a background of continuous and violent upheaval: mountain ranges rearing up and disappearing, the great chasms that are the oceans opening and closing like some gigantic flower, cometary impacts, titanic collisions, volcanic eruptions, whole continents shifting and grinding

We need to get over this absurd notion that we are endangering the planet.

There have been mass extinctions in the Earths historyand life survived, along with the planet.

Oliver Morton, features editor of Nature , has made the same point:

The Earth doesnt need ice caps or permafrost or any particular sea level. Such things come and go and rise and fall as a matter of course. The planets living systems adapt and flourish, sometimes in a way that provides negative feedback, occasionally with a positive feedback that amplifies the change. A planet that made it through the massive biogeochemical unpleasantness of the late Permian is in little danger from a doubling (or even quintupling) of the very low carbon dioxide level that preceded the Industrial Revolution, or from the loss of a lot of forests and reefs, or from the demise of half its species, or from the thinning of the ozone layer at high altitudes . If fossil-fuel use goes unchecked, carbon dioxide levels may rise as high as they were in the Eocene, some 50 million years ago [but] the Eocene was not such a terrible place.

If the impact of an asteroid wiped out life on Earths surface, or if a supernova radiation storm destroyed all plants and animals (both possible outcomes, as this book has shown), the Earth would survive. So would lifesomewhere, perhaps as bacteria deep under the ground or in the oceans, or frozen in ice. Life can take strange forms, after allmicrobiologist Joan Slonczewski has found organisms living one and a quarter miles below the Earths surface, in gold mines, that feed on hydrogen atoms produced by uranium decay. As she puts it, I have yet to see nuclear-powered creatures [in fiction, even] in science fiction but here they are. And two species of groundwater amphipods apparently made it through the last ice age in Iceland, surviving though trapped beneath the crushing weight of nearly a mile of ice. It could take a billion years or more for life to spread once more over the Earth, but spread it would.

Earth has time. But we dont. There would be life, but it wouldnt be our life, or even life as we more or less know it. The planet wont die, but that version of the planet that makes our existence agreeable or even possible could do so with ease. Either human-caused or natural calamities, or both in concert, could make it happen.

This is the vulnerability we need to confront and then devise policies that would maximize our chances of keeping ourselves alive and well. It remains possible. We are an inventive species as well as a destructive one. We now need to invent not just new science, but a new politics. We are doing plenty of the first. And we are beginning to do the second, with climate change the engine thats driving us. Mike Moore, who was New Zealands prime minister before he took on the thankless job of managing the World Trade Organization, is one of the smartest political operators around. He is one of the optimists. He put it this way: Many good people are endlessly seeking solutions for world problems. Why? Because we can no longer keep our distance from suffering. We now live the pain we see on television every night. We know the dangers of failure. Everyone is our neighbor now; their suffering degrades us all, and their success inspires us all. Ive heard him make the same point in speeches. Lets hope hes right.

My first draft of a postscript opened with this sentence: The very real dangers we face as a species are the best argument for a much broader policy of human cooperation. What a resounding platitude! Even to me it sounded like the peroration of a stump speech by a losing candidate whose audience is already drifting out the door, looking for a hot dog or an ear of buttered corn or a clown or a shooting gallery to brighten their day. But the idea is right.

It has always been a commonplace of science fiction that what the world needs is an external enemy to bring its quarreling populations together. What few of those writers understood was that the enemy was not alien spaceships manned by malevolent monsters, but instead the uncaring, impersonal, value-free operations of entirely natural systems that, quite literally, surround and envelop us. Looked at this way, the political and religious quarrels that consume so much of our energy seem increasingly insane, and so does the ruinous development we are inflicting on our home.

The fight against global warming isnt a fight to maintain the status quo. The status quo isnt ours to keep. Change is coming. The planet adjusts, always, and so must we.

The real question is politics. If fifty million people can be killed by a tiny mutation of a microbe we cant even see, if an entire continentcan be wiped out by a collision with something we cant predict, if the global climate can change when a magma chamber a few miles square suddenly decides to erupt why do we spend so much of our time in fruitless quarreling? It wasnt at all reassuring that, with the American state of Georgia facing critical water shortages in the fall of 2007, one of the most vigorous political controversies was about whether the governor could legitimately pray for rain or whether that would somehow violate constitutional norms. Given the enormity of what is going on around us, surely there are higher priorities? Otherwise we might as well join the debate about whether evolution is true or notof all the quarrels of our time perhaps the most deeply irrelevant, joined in its fatuity only by religious quarrels over, well, nothingProtestant against Catholic, Old Believers versus New, Sunni versus Shia. Perhaps five angels, or fifty, can dance upon the point of a fine needle, but none of their dancing will affect the course of the tsunami that will be rolling someones way quite soon. Or the hurricane that will be coiling its deadly way across the Caribbean this summer. Or the earthquake that will tumble down cities. Or the volcano that will spread its pall of ash and destruction across towns and villages not yet known. Or the rising sea levels that will swamp coastal communities. This is surely where our attention must be focused.