A little bit less either/or

A great insight by the always intriguing Micheal Pollan. The notion of wilderness is a beautiful thing but it has made it all too easy for us to dismiss the not-wilderness as beyond redemption – as outside the circle of care. What’s needed is an ethic of sustainability that applies to all the other part of nature not given wilderness status.

Here he is:

We’ve had in this country what I call a wilderness ethic that’s been very good at telling us what to preserve. You know, eight percent of the American landmass we’ve kind of locked up and thrown away the key. That’s a wonderful achievement and has given us things like the wilderness park.

This is one of our great contributions to world culture, this idea of wilderness. On the other hand, it’s had nothing to say of any value for the ninety-two percent of the landscape that we cannot help but change because this is where we live. This is where we grow our food, this is where we work. Essentially the tendency of the wilderness ethic is to write that all off. Land is either virgin or raped. It’s an all or nothing ethic. It’s either in the realm of pristine, preserved wilderness, or it’s development– parking lot, lawn.

Soldiering on

“Things are getting worse in terms of climate change and it’s clear that we’ll have to act before it’s to late and there is no hope left.”

This is an intellectual cul-de-sac. No matter how bad things get I cannot imagine that we’d ever decide that it was “too late” and that “there was nothing to be done”.

I guess I’m arguing that we’re misunderstanding something about ourselves when we bring arguments like that forward. There may come a time when it’s too late to do anything to save the world as we know it (and need it to be if we’re to survive). But at the same time, I just can’t see that it’s ever going to be intellectually possible for us to go “That’s it. It’s now too late to do anything.”

We’ll have to keep going until we drop.

Real climate on the wisdom of geo-engineering as a solution of climate change:

Think of the climate as a small boat on a rather choppy ocean. Under normal circumstances the boat will rock to and fro, and there is a finite risk that the boat could be overturned by a rogue wave. But now one of the passengers has decided to stand up and is deliberately rocking the boat ever more violently. Someone suggests that this is likely to increase the chances of the boat capsizing. Another passenger then proposes that with his knowledge of chaotic dynamics he can counterbalance the first passenger and indeed, counter the natural rocking caused by the waves. But to do so he needs a huge array of sensors and enormous computational reasources to be ready to react efficiently but still wouldn’t be able to guarantee absolute stability, and indeed, since the system is untested it might make things worse.

So is the answer to a known and increasing human influence on climate an ever more elaborate system to control the climate? Or should the person rocking the boat just sit down?

K.I.S.S.

One world. Don’t fuck it up.

Convergence

I’m not seeing much (any?) talk about the intersection of climate change and peak oil.

There’s a prima facie case to say, of course, that since we’ll be running out of oil soon that global warming will just end up being automatically corrected by us managing to run out of oil at an opportune moment. I don’t know how seriously to take this particularly since there’s still a lot of coal in the ground and it could be a huge global warming offender.

That said, the possiblity that really interests me is that we run out of oil and have an economic crash right around the time it becomes inescapably clear that we need to take radical steps to mitigate climate change. So, we end up with a coincident need to take probably incredibly expensive steps at the same time as our ability to do so tanks.

Ouch.