It’s the Bottom of the Ninth – Now it’s Nature’s Turn to Bat

“Nature is no longer merely the inert stage on which the human drama plays out. Nature…has its own grand narrative…that says you can no longer take me for granted ….”

– Clive Hamilton, 2013

Clive Hamilton

Australian ethicist Clive Hamilton gave an insightful speech in 2013 at La Trobe University in Australia that he called “Political Utopianism in the Anthropocene.” The Anthropocene, or Age of Humans, is a term that was proposed over the past decade by Dutch atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen, a Nobel Laureate in chemistry at the Max Planck Institute in Germany.

With due deliberation, committees of professional geologists are now studying whether the transformations being wrought on the Earth by an exponentially expanding, technologically turbocharged human population are of such a magnitude that in essence they constitute a major geologic force in their own right. If they decide in favor of the change, the name of the geologic epoch in which we are living – the Holocene – would formally be changed to Anthropocene. Where the Holocene ended and the Anthropocene began would also be determined.

The 11,700-year Holocene followed the Pleistocene, a/k/a, the Ice Age, during which at times continental ice sheets covered millions of square miles of North America to depths of up to a mile or two. Imagine Antarctica plopped atop America. These colossal continental glaciers were to the puny mountain glaciers that remain as elephants are to gnats.

During the Pleistocene, so much of the Earth’s water was frozen that sea levels were 200-300 feet lower than today. North America was linked to Eurasia via the Bering Land Bridge, allowing for ancestors of the Paleoindians to cross over from Siberia and begin peopling the Americas.

The gentle Holocene then took over, characterized by a stable, accommodating climate conducive to the appearance and spread of peoples and civilizations. But the legacy of the continent-scraping-and-shaping Pleistocene lives on in such major geographic features as the Great Lakes, Finger Lakes, Minnesota’s 10,000 lakes and Long Island.

Thus, when geologists seriously contemplate whether man’s influence has become so pervasive and so profound that it is worthy of a geologic age named for it, this gives one a sense of just how heavily they think the human project may weigh upon Earth.

But Earth itself is no shrinking violet. This tough, durable planet has survived for 4.6 billion years, roughly half a million times longer than civilization. It is not fragile. It has shrugged off the cataclysmic impact of asteroids and comets.

The biosphere, however, is another matter. This is the thin film of life – and the solid, liquid and gaseous media nurturing life – that envelops Planet Earth. Humans are inadvertently and indiscriminately waging war on the biosphere. But it is a war we will lose, because we ourselves are part of that biosphere and depend on its viability.

Hamilton’s speech highlighted that while right-wingers may deny or dismiss the threat of climate change and other human impacts, utopians on the political left seem to actually welcome these threats to survival. That’s because they hope the collective need to fight climate change will help galvanize widespread political support for greater governmental and global control over private enterprise, which has been their dream at least since publication of The Communist Manifesto in 1848.

To the extent left-wingers actually welcome global warming as a means to an end, they differ from environmentalists and geoscientists, who regard it with dread.

While leftist utopians indignantly accuse the right of climate denial, they themselves appear not to grasp the gravity of the environmental crisis now confronting the human race. They blame the rich, and only the rich, for endangering Earth, but seriously underestimate the environmental backlash from a biosphere and climate that give ominous signs of approaching various “tipping points” – and plunging rapidly into a volatile, perhaps even dangerous, condition.

On this altered, less accommodating world, the leftists’ cherished socialist utopia would be even less attainable than it is now, because that vision depends on greater control over nature, not nature unchecked, or all hell breaking loose.

Brave new world? Australian brushfires in 2013 from the beach.