Origin Story, page 29
Though unfashionable at present, the idea of a future without continuous growth has popped up regularly in discussions by philosophically minded economists. Many eighteenth-century economists, including Adam Smith, feared a no-growth future, seeing it as the end of progress. But John Stuart Mill welcomed such a future as a refreshing contrast to the frenetic gold-rush world of the industrial revolution. In 1848, he wrote, “I confess I am not charmed with the ideal of life held out by those who think that the normal state of human beings is that of struggling to get on; that the trampling, crushing, elbowing, and treading on each other’s heels, which form the existing type of social life, are the most desirable lot of human kind, or anything but the disagreeable symptoms of one of the phases of industrial progress.”3
Instead, he argued, “the best state for human nature is that in which, while no one is poor, no one desires to be richer, nor has any reason to fear being thrust back, by the efforts of others to push themselves forward.” Growth was still needed, he stated, in many poorer countries, but the richer countries were more in need of a better distribution of wealth. With basic necessities taken care of, the task for them was to live more fully rather than to keep acquiring more material wealth.
A stationary condition of capital and population implies no stationary state of human improvement. There would be as much scope as ever for all kinds of mental culture, and moral and social progress; as much room for improving the Art of Living, and much more likelihood of its being improved, when minds ceased to be engrossed by the art of getting on.
He warned that the stationary state should be chosen deliberately and on good terms before it was forced on a reluctant humanity on much poorer terms. “I sincerely hope, for the sake of posterity, that they will be content to be stationary, long before necessity compels them to it.”
Many others have recognized that economic growth is not the same as a good life. In 1930, in an essay entitled “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” the British economist John Maynard Keynes argued that within a century, productivity would be high enough to guarantee the necessities of life to everyone. At that point, he hoped, people would stop working so hard and think more about how they lived. In March 1968, just before he was assassinated, Robert Kennedy described the limitations of an economy devoted to never-ending growth in gross national product:
The Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage.… It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl.… Yet the GNP does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or… the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials.… It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.
Our growing understanding of the biosphere tells us why we need to treat it more gently. How resilient is the biosphere, after all? We don’t really know. There may be tipping points that will accelerate damaging changes by setting in motion dangerous positive-feedback cycles. For example, glaciers, such as those that cover most of Greenland, reflect sunlight. When they melt, Earth turns darker and begins to absorb heat instead of reflecting it. This increases the amount of heat retained in the atmosphere, and that melts more glaciers, which reduces Earth’s reflectivity, which increases warming even further. Such mechanisms suggest why we need to think hard about biospheric limits.
The Stockholm Resilience Centre has worked for many years at identifying “planetary boundaries”: limits humanity cannot cross without seriously endangering our future.4 They have identified nine crucial boundaries of which two, climate change and declining biodiversity, are critical because if either one is breached seriously, it could drive the biosphere beyond stable limits.5 Of course, modeling changes at global scales is still a rough-and-ready business. Sirens won’t go off as we cross these boundaries. But, with due caution, researchers at the center conclude that we have already crossed the planetary boundary for biodiversity quite decisively, and we are approaching the boundaries for climate change. We have crossed critical boundaries in our impacts on flows of phosphorus and nitrogen, and we are also close to the boundaries in our use of land, particularly forests. We are beginning to see red warning lights on the control panels of the global machine we humans have built.
If, despite all the challenges, we humans are successful in our quest, what will a “mature Anthropocene” look like?6 It will not be a perfect world, of course. But it is important that we try to imagine such a world as we try to build it. There are so many imponderables here that we cannot produce any sort of architect’s sketch. Nevertheless, we can describe some of the main features of a world that preserves the best of the Good Anthropocene while avoiding the dangers of the Bad Anthropocene.
Population growth will slow, eventually, to zero, and perhaps start falling. Rates of population growth are already falling in most parts of the world, and in some regions, the absolute number of people is beginning to fall. There are many steps that could speed the process, including better health care for poor families and better education for women and girls in poorer countries. Many economists warn about the dangers of slowing population growth, but a biospheric perspective shows why continued population growth is unsustainable. In a mature Anthropocene, poverty will be largely eliminated by better welfare systems and checks on the accumulation of extreme wealth. As we have seen, in relative terms, extreme poverty is already in decline in much of the world. Eventually, as economic growth ceases to become the primary goal of governments, individuals will begin to value quality of life and leisure over increased income. With the support of governments, more and more people will drop out of extreme forms of the rat race. Catering to these people’s needs will boost sectors of the economy that provide services rather than material goods. Education and science will become more important to governments as knowledge begins to replace material goods as a source of wealth and well-being. Ideas will change, too—ideas about what a good life looks like and about the goals of good government.
The world’s economies will wean themselves off fossil fuels sometime later in this century. Production of renewable energy is already increasing fast, so this is not an unrealistic goal, though it will require more vigorous intervention by governments than is apparent at present. When combined with measures to capture atmospheric carbon dioxide, a reformed global energy regime may limit global warming to two degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. Increasing efficiencies in the use of energy and materials will eventually reduce total energy consumption, and recycling of existing materials will reduce consumption of new minerals and resources almost to zero.
Innovations and changes in consumption patterns will be part of a larger transformation of agriculture that makes it less demanding of resources and more efficient. Scientific innovation will surely play a huge role here. Much will be invested in protecting biodiversity, wetlands, and fragile regions such as coral reefs or tundra environments.
As Mill wrote, a more stable world need not be a static world. Indeed, it will offer rich opportunities for new forms of art, expanded and enhanced social life, and new and less manipulative ways of engaging with the natural world. Here, modern societies will have a huge amount to learn from those who have preserved traditions from the past, from societies that lived for thousands of years in a more stable relationship with their surroundings. And is it unreasonable to hope that in such a world, even if average consumption of resources does not increase, the quality of life may improve for large numbers of people?
Many of the Goldilocks conditions for crossing this new threshold are already emerging. They include the staggering intellectual wealth of modern scientific scholarship, a much better understanding of how the biosphere works, and a growing awareness that we humans share a common fate on our one home, planet Earth. We will also need vivid images of a better future to motivate action today. Hope is, after all, a crucial virtue as we try to build a better world, as is alertness (lots of good science will help) and determination (politics will play a crucial role here).
As I write this in 2017, determination is the virtue that seems least present. It is remarkable that governments throughout the world now pay lip service to something like the quest I have described. But there is still not yet a strong global consensus about the quest. Many remain convinced that the flickering warning lights are caused by faulty switches and bad science. And few have the luxury of thinking on the grand scales needed to seriously imagine the near future. Most people, but particularly the very poor, have to concentrate on personal needs and goals. And most politicians and entrepreneurs have to focus on more immediate issues. Governments are national and they are competitive, which means that the wealth and power of each individual nation tends to loom larger in political calculations than the needs of the world as a whole. Most governments are also tied to short-term goals by the methods by which officials are chosen or elected. Few can set firm and realistic goals for twenty or thirty years in the future, yet these are the time frames that will decide the outcome of the quest for a better world. Finally, in a capitalist world, most enterprises are governed by the need to make profits, and at present profit-making all too often points in different directions from the quest for sustainability.
So what chance is there of an emerging global consensus on the importance of the quest? One of the most hopeful signs is the speed with which a scientific consensus has been reached, reflected in documents such as the UN sustainability goals and the Paris climate accords. Thirty years ago, such declarations would have been inconceivable. We may also be close to an economic tipping point at which the quest itself turns out to be profitable and compatible with an evolving global capitalism. If that happens, the colossal innovative and commercial energies of modern capitalism and the power of governments that depend on the wealth generated by capitalism may swing behind the quest and give it the sort of boost that capitalist governments gave to the industrial revolution. But today, in a more complex world, the behavior of governments will depend, in part, on the existence of voters who take the quest seriously. That will depend to some extent on how well and how persuasively people can describe the quest itself.
If we successfully manage the transition to a more sustainable world, a sort of threshold 9, it will become apparent that human history really constitutes a single threshold of increasing complexity culminating in the conscious management of an entire biosphere. We see human history in sections just because we are so close to it. The larger, combined threshold began with collective learning. Just as gravity concentrated clouds of matter in the early universe, collective learning generated denser and more complex human societies, accelerated change, and created new forms of dynamism by giving humans increasing control over the biosphere. Accelerating change could have continued indefinitely until it led to a catastrophic explosion—the human equivalent, perhaps, of a supernova. But if we successfully negotiate the transition to a sustainable world, it will look, in retrospect, as if we humans generated a new and more stable form of complexity, just as fusion generated the new and more stable structures of stars by pushing back against gravitational contraction. Then we will see that thresholds 6 to 9 have created a new type of biosphere on planet Earth, with new thermostats and new and more conscious forms of regulation embedded within the noösphere, the sphere of mind. What should we call that threshold? The Human Revolution?
Beyond Humans: Millennial and Cosmological Futures
Let’s be optimistic and imagine a world in which the quest has succeeded. Threshold 9 has been successfully negotiated and most humans are flourishing within a stable global society based on a more sustainable relationship to the biosphere. That means human societies may be around for several thousand years, perhaps even for hundreds of thousands of years.
Speculating on what comes next takes us into the terrifying, unpredictable, but perhaps Utopian world of the middle future. At this scale, our models are really guesses. Their chances of being right are about as great as nineteenth-century pictures of aristocrats in checkered suits riding bicycles on the moon. The best we can do is run through a list of some possibilities based on trends we can already see.
Will we see the emergence of global governmental structures that partially supersede nation-states and finally eliminate the threat of nuclear war? Will fusion power provide a new energy bonanza? If so, will we use it with greater sensitivity to its disruptive impacts on the biosphere, as a tool that can lay the foundations for a good life for all humans? Or will we find ways of controlling even vaster flows of energy to create civilizations of unimaginable complexity? A Russian astronomer, Nikolai Kardashev, has argued that if there are other civilizations capable of something like collective learning, many will have learned to capture all the usable energy of their home planets, while some may have learned to manage all the energy of their solar system, and some may even have learned to tap the energy of entire galaxies.
Will our descendants migrate beyond Earth? Will they start mining asteroids or setting up colonies on the moon or Mars? Or (if we look far enough ahead) on life-friendly planets around nearby star systems? Will we engineer new life-forms, new, energy-efficient food crops, or microbes that can treat diseases or check cancers? Will we engineer tiny machines, nano-surgeons, that can enter our bodies and fix broken organs, or build buildings without supervision as they follow electronic architects’ designs? Will we build machines much cleverer than us? If so, can we be sure we will keep control of them?
Will we build new humans? Will micro-and macro-enhancements make us bionic, give us longer and healthier lives, and eventually turn us into something different, something trans-human? Will new technologies allow humans to exchange ideas, thoughts, emotions, and images instantaneously and continuously, creating something like a single, vast global mind? Will the noösphere partially detach itself from us humans and turn into a thin, unified layer of mind hovering over the biosphere? When, in all of this, will we decide that human history (as we understand it today) has ended because our species can no longer be described as Homo sapiens?
Will new science transform our understanding of ourselves and the universe, turning today’s origin story inside out? Comparing today’s origin stories with those of one hundred years ago suggests that this could happen very soon, and many times.
And of course, there are also the unknown unknowns that could switch future tracks in a second or two. Our science and technology may already be good enough to see asteroid impacts coming and perhaps do something about them. But there may be other unpredictable catastrophes, such as… encountering other life-forms. If we do meet them, will we peer at them through a microscope (or bionically enhanced eyes)? Or will they pick us up with huge tweezers, put us into vast petri dishes, and peer at us through microscopes?
It’s a relief to turn to even larger scales where we can focus once more on relatively simple things such as planets, stars, galaxies, and the universe itself.
We can track the movements of tectonic plates, so we can guess roughly where the continents will be in one hundred million years. At present, it looks as if continental plates will regather in a new supercontinent that has already been dubbed Amasia because it will join Asia and the Americas. The ultimate fate of planet Earth will be decided by the evolution of the sun. Our sun will live for about nine billion years. But if it evolves like other, similar stars, in a few billion years it will start expanding and turning into a red giant. Earth will find itself inside the sun’s outer layers. As Earth heats up, things will get tougher for big life, and there may be a long period in which the only survivors are tough archaebacteria, like those that survive in hot springs in Yellowstone Park. Eventually, even they will vanish as Earth is sterilized and then gobbled up and evaporated within the outer layers of an increasingly unstable and unpredictable red giant star. That’s the end of planet Earth and of any still-living descendants unless they have traveled to the outer reaches of the solar system or to other star systems. As for the sun, after a long period as a red giant, it will eventually blow away its outer layers, turn into a white dwarf, migrate to the bottom of the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram, and then sit there, cooling, for hundreds of billions of years.
At about the time our sun goes rogue, our galaxy will collide with a neighboring galaxy, the Andromeda. This will be a sedate affair, like a crash between two clouds. But within each galaxy there will be a lot of turbulence as stars tug at one another in unpredictable ways. And the new, combined Milky Way/Andromeda galaxy will be a lot messier than the two beautiful spiral galaxies from which it was built.
What of the universe as a whole? Today, most cosmologists are pretty confident that there is a story to be told, because the future of the universe seems to depend on a small number of variables. The critical ones are the rate of expansion and the amount of matter/energy in the universe. It was once thought that the gravitational pull of matter in the universe would eventually rein in the expansion, put it into reverse, and shrink the universe down again into another primordial atom, which might in turn blow up and expand to create a new universe, and the sequence might be repeated in an infinite series of cosmological bounces. But since it was discovered in the late 1990s that the rate of expansion is increasing, it seems there must exist some kind of dark energy that is powerful enough to override the gravitational pull of all the mass and energy in the universe. That suggests that the universe will keep expanding forever and will do so faster and faster and faster.
