This is the ninth of 18 installments in the Metastatic Modernity video series (see launch announcement), putting the meta-crisis in perspective as a cancerous disease afflicting humanity and the greater community of life on Earth. This episode asks how we landed ourselves in this unfortunate meta-crisis. Nobody planned it, but here we are!
As is the custom for the series, I provide a stand-alone companion piece in written form (not a transcript) so that the key ideas may be absorbed by a different channel. The write-up that follows is arranged according to “chapters” in the video, navigable via links in the YouTube description field.
Introduction
This is the usual short naming of the series, of myself, and the topic of this episode (how we got into this mess) as part of our effort to put modernity into context.
Sudden Destruction
Modernity might be characterized as a period of rapid ecological destruction: a sort-of nosedive in a relative blink-of-an-eye, as discussed in Episodes 7 and 8. The situation looks pretty dire: a sixth mass extinction appears to be underway. The community of life on Earth is reeling, struggling to survive in the face of significant change and decline.
How did it come to this? I will offer a three-step process that led us down this track.
Step 1—Agriculture
The first significant step is the initiation of agriculture, about 10,000 years ago. Agriculture took us out of our ecological context. The practice was new to the planet—new to the community of life, which was not adapted to this novelty. We could classify it as an experiment that was not vetted by ecological communities on timescales that are relevant to evolution.
Agriculture upends nutrient cycles that have been established and tested over long periods by ecological communities. The practices of agriculture might artificially supplement soils with fertilizers, but not in a way that the system is adapted to handle. The miracle of life is in the ability of a local ecology to set itself up around available flows of materials in circulation within each region. Outside of flood plains, which refresh nutrients in a longstanding rhythm, it’s not clear that our meddling has a durable future. This is part of why arable land is used up and lost over time (e.g., the formerly fertile crescent): salinization, desertification, nutrient depletion. Bear in mind that even ten thousand years is very short in evolutionary/ecological terms.
Just as importantly, the adoption of agriculture also went to our heads. We came to consider ourselves as masters of the land, controlling nature. We asserted ourselves as owners of the land (property rights!)—as owners of the Earth, in fact. No longer believing we belonged to the planet, we thought it belonged to us. Religions sprang up to reinforce this thinking—elevating humans over all life on Earth. I can’t overemphasize how crucial this development was in changing how we view ourselves in relation to the community of life, and thus justifying our actions. This is when the divorce started: our separation from nature and an acquired air of human supremacy.
Step 2—Science & Technology
The Enlightenment brought us a lot of sharp new tools that we could use to pick the locks of nature’s secrets. Indeed, we learned tons about the inner workings of the universe.
What did we do with this new set of insights? We used it to increase our mastery, control, and manipulation of the natural world for short-term gains among humans alone (and not all humans, it should be noted).
The focus became increasingly narrow, and increasingly distant from ecological concerns as our world became more disconnected, decontextualized, reduced, abstracted, linearized, objectified, and increasingly virtual in character. The resultant world lacks basic ecological sense—a state of affairs that, like a raging party, is not possible to maintain beyond the short term.
In the meantime, we’re very impressed with our inventions. It turns out that brains are impressed by brains—flattering themselves as having unlimited potential, in blatant disregard of plain facts. I’m sure lots of people can rattle off their favorite impressive accomplishments of civilization. No one asks, for each one, what as been the net benefit to the entire community of life, on balance? How is the world beyond the isolated (thus temporary and artificial) human domain better as a result? Huh? Don’t expect people to even understand the question. As a consequence of this glaring oversight, the harms just pile up and will bite us in the butt when our Club membership is terminated by our destroying Club functionality.
Step 3—Fossil Fuels
Fossil fuels utterly transformed how we went about our business. They dramatically turbo-charged our ability to manipulate and control. We now had the means to carry out almost any fool notion that popped into anyone’s head.
It’s as if we gained super-powers. We could move mountains, divert rivers, hold back the sea, build submarines to dive deep, airplanes to fly high, and rockets to even reach space. We did not swim or fly as elegantly as life, but achieved a sort of awkward impressiveness in our kludgy ways. It seemed a sort of transcendence: breaking free of the limiting shackles of nature. Yet all of this, remember, is temporary—illusory.
The Green Revolution transformed agriculture by inserting fossil fuels at every turn. Fertilizer came from natural gas. Diesel allowed large-scale mechanization of plowing, planting, harvesting, processing, and transporting large amounts of food. Petrochemical pesticides smote economically-worthless (but ecologically-invaluable) products of evolution into the foul dust. We fed a growing human population, now 8 billion strong. It boils down to a diet of fossil fuels: again, temporary.
Hockey Stick Gallery
Increasingly heavy use of fossil fuels translated into a world characterized by “hockey stick” curves. A hockey stick is straight for a long time, then suddenly sweeps up. Almost any absolute measure one plots in the human sphere takes on this shape. Not only has human population followed a hockey-stick curve, but even per-capita measures have done the same thing so that the absolute scale of such things as energy, materials, and waste shot up as even more exaggerated hockey sticks. CO2—a necessary product of fossil fuel combustion—naturally shot up as well, and is the main reason many people know the term “hockey stick curve.”
In the presentation, I show a gallery of hockey stick curves that I won’t belabor here, as a post called Death by Hockey Sticks has already done that job. Suffice it to say that plots of human population, energy, CO2, copper (as a proxy for mined materials), and plastic disposal (as a proxy for waste) all rocket upward in heroic fashion. Where are they going? Back down, as they must. More on this later.
Ecological Hockey Sticks
I also show some ecological measures:
- Extinction rates for amphibians, mammals, and birds. Is it to be celebrated that these measures are also shooting up in hockey stick style?
- Forest cover, which is declining globally and projected to hit zero by 2200, if the current inverse hockey stick is maintained.
- Old-growth (primeval) forest cover, on track to zero-out by 2100
- Wild land mammal mass, plummeting toward zero frighteningly fast—the curve hitting zero by 2050!
Now, the projections (when the curves hit zero) are not to be taken literally. I mean, the mathematical curves as such keep going and become (impossibly) negative. On the other hand, PANIC! The trends can’t be spun to be fine, normal, or healthy in any way. The history has been tragic for the more-than-human world, who receive none of the benefits and the lion’s share of the cost. I show again the mammal mass per person, as featured in Episode 7 and in the Ecological Cliff Edge post. The rate of descent is truly alarming and clearly way out of whack.
What do these trends make you think about our trajectory, given the accompanying stark downsides? Are we applauding? Are we excited?
Fossil Fuel Spike
I show the following recurrent cartoon of fossil fuel use over time, which can’t be far from being accurate, given the nature of the beast.
It’s just a spike. The hockey sticks we’ve seen are directly tied to the left side of this feature, rocketing upward for a time. We haven’t crawled over the peak yet, but…wait for it…we will—and perhaps as soon as the 2030s.
I can say this with confidence, because the fossil fuel curve necessarily self-terminates. It must go back to zero. We don’t have the freedom to draw it any way we wish, because the area under the curve is set by the total resource amount, which pays no attention to anything our neurons decide they might wish it to do. I know from teaching students that this fact comes as a surprise to many, which says a lot about the narratives we use to condition our culture.
Our individual lives are short enough that we have each ridden up the ascending top portion of this curve, and therefore perceive the state of affairs for the handful of decades we’ve been around as normal (and fun, for some). Can you believe that? Wow! Whatever we use our brains for, it’s not for appreciating the broader context, by-and-large. In any case, the emerging narrative is both wrong and dangerous.
The River
Next, I pop up the graphic from a post called Our Time in the River. I don’t belabor it, but I mention a list of consequences of our stepping into the agricultural stream 10,000 years ago. The story mirrors the three steps outlined above.
Agriculture led to settlements, then possessions, surplus, armies to protect (and raid) surplus, property rights, patriarchy and monotheism, division of labor, hierarchy, classes, and subjugation of animals and humans. Many negative ecological impacts also accompanied agriculture such as deforestation, soil erosion, salt accumulation, desertification, among others.
Then, science joins the flow as a powerful tributary that serves to accelerate these patterns. Shortly after, fossil fuels flooded the river to super-charge our degree of control and speed. The river then goes over a waterfall, self-terminating as it must—given its erosion of the ecological riverbed.
How Should We Live?
All of this leaves us confused about how to live on this planet. We are now far removed from our ecological context and struggle to define the right way to live in this messed up, artificial, temporary, human-constructed “world.” The way we live now is unusual, exceedingly new, and never quite feels right. Note that animals (aside from domesticated ones, perhaps) are not at all confused about how to live in this world, when immersed in their ecological context (they can become confused about how to function in our artificial, novel context—frozen in the headlights, as it were).
No one planned this. One thing just led to another, as in the metaphor of the river with its tributaries. No one sat around a table and plotted this course. It operates more like a trap: once you start going, this is where you end up, given the resources at hand.
We’re executing a sort of “look what we can do” behavior, like kids trying to impress each other doing stupid stunts on bikes, as I frequently did as a kid. It’s part of testing our limits—learning what we are—and are not—capable of doing. It’s time for us to abandon this adolescent phase and start asking bigger-picture questions about the consequences of our actions. Right now, we are accumulating a lot of collateral damage on the ecological front—endangering the entire community including ourselves.
The core failure is in forgetting our ecological context. We are (for now) members of the Club of Life. We are not, at present, prioritizing long term sustainability or overall ecological fitness.
Next time I’ll address the question: can’t we just get rid of the bad stuff and keep all the things we like about modernity? If only.
