The Sixth Extinction
Posted: Sat Jan 03, 2015 6:31 am
Light Hearted Prophet of Doom
The Sixth Extinction – An Unnatural History, by Elizabeth Kolbert
Book Review by Robert Tulip
Clear-eyed, superbly informed and informative, remorseful, engaging, well-structured, balanced, lucid, elegiacal ecology.
This wonderful book is the best summary I have read of our planetary predicament. The human situation appears to vindicate the extreme alternatives posed by Carl Sagan and I. S. Shklovskii in their 1966 book Intelligent Life in the Universe that a technical civilization would either destroy itself or evolve to a long lifetime by expanding into its surrounding galaxy. Fermi’s Paradox, that intelligence should be common in the cosmos given the available time and space but is undetected, suggests that the intelligence threshold at which our planetary civilization stands now has immense risks.
I say with some whimsy that The Sixth Extinction is light-hearted, because Kolbert has brilliantly combined deep scientific understanding with a simple and entertaining and immensely readable presentation. But the breezy wit is the vehicle for a deadly serious message. Humans are busily killing off frogs and bats by spreading funguses, destroying the wonderful biodiversity of coral reefs and rainforests using heat, acid and plunder, and basically cooking the planet with carbon emissions, leaving animals and plants with nowhere to live and move and have their being.
Human activities result from the combination of intelligence and instinct. The tragedy is that our social evolution has not kept pace with our technical evolution. Social values are failing to appreciate the fragility of life, the fact that our planet has in the past seen extinction events that have killed off vast numbers of genetic families, and we are now causing a sixth extinction that on the business-as-usual scenario will be as bad as the Permian event that eliminated about 90% of planetary life 252 million years ago. Gaia will probably survive this onslaught, but humans might not.
Kolbert provides the accurate prognosis that global interconnectedness is producing an Anthropocene, a new virtual super-continent of Pangaea in which species that evolved in isolation are thrown into a common era, with rapid mass extinction the likely fate of biological species and whole families of organisms that cannot keep pace with the unprecedented systemic change introduced by human technology.
The remorse for the loss of biodiversity arises from the ethical view that complexity is good, and that it is bad to destroy in the blink of a geological eye ecosystems that have evolved over millions and billions of years. The destruction of the biological basis of life on earth now underway will lead to a remorseless collapse of created human systems and their enabling ecology if unchecked. So the question posed by the sixth extinction is whether the inference from Sagan and Fermi is correct that the threshold of intelligence may itself be a common tipping point for the evolution of life, like a critical mass at which the system either collapses into the simplicity of a desert or transforms into a new more complex and abundant and sustainable paradigm.
The natural apocalypse of the sixth extinction is already underway, and will inevitably get rapidly worse as a simple causal product of physical system inertia and momentum. But this physical Armageddon can also usefully be analysed against the frameworks of cultural collapse predicted by religious myths of doom. I raise this comparison to open a discussion about strategies to mitigate the impact of the sixth extinction. My view is that the scientific evidence amassed by Kolbert and her numerous sources should provide the basis for philosophical and ethical study of how our predicament may have been anticipated in the past, and how old ideas may provide valuable resources to help address current problems. I understand my view is controversial, but wish to present it here as commentary on the matters arising from the facts of global impacts, to ask how humans can evolve in ways that use our intelligence as our main adaptive advantage.
There is a strong religious undertone in Kolbert’s work. I say this as a positive comment, not as the negative criticism that it might be considered in a solely scientific analysis. The great scientist Richard Dawkins has perceptibly shifted his view on religion, recognising that while the concept of a transcendental God is delusional, religious attitudes do have some adaptive traits, notably a sense of awe and reverence and wonder for the beauty and complexity and grandeur and order of nature.
Kolbert implicitly sees complexity as good and destruction as evil. This value system seems at face value to contradict the Biblical ethics which alienate spirit from nature by placing the highest value on obedience to the imagined messages of a personal transcendental God, rather than on evidence and logic. But this conflict between science and religion, between reason and faith, overlooks the considerable extent to which a natural rational ethic informs religious mythology, and how this ethic in faith provides essential precedents that can assist our adaptation to the new earth on which we find ourselves.
A little known Biblical verse, Revelation 11:18, says that the wrath of God is against those who destroy the earth. This idea can be interpreted in a purely natural and pantheistic way, with the idea that divinity is a quality of natural complex order, not an externally imposed supernatural order. Similarly, the concept of blessedness proposed by Christ in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5) can be repurposed as a purely natural and rational understanding of reality, as an evolutionary perspective that recognises that humanity requires a paradigm shift from domination to care.
Evolution works via what author Steven Johnson explains in his superb book Where Good Ideas Come From – The Natural History of Innovation as the “adjacent possible”. Changes that jump steps don’t happen. A path of connected causality is necessary, moving through adjacent links of the natural chain to explore what is possible, opening the cumulative doors of mutation into new adaptive rooms. In terms of human culture, that means we require what Johnson explains as the evolutionary process of ‘exaption’, the use of existing things for new evolving purposes. Religion, as a primary mode of human organisation, can exapt and adapt to provide resources and ethics for a global ecological transformation into a stable and harmonious world. Similarly, the capitalist system can exapt and adapt to a sustainable state, bringing the resources, expertise, systems, trust and political will needed for alliance against the common peril of system collapse.
Against the millennial timeframe of recent geology, the dating of the Anthropocene, when human activity began to leave distinctive global traces in the geological record, goes back at least to the extinctions of megafauna in Australia 40,000 years ago caused by human invasion, and similarly in Eurasia and the Americas to the times when these new lands were colonised and humans imposed steady downward pressure on the numbers of formerly unpredated and therefore slow-breeding peak organisms.
Kolbert usefully discusses this obvious causal correlation between human arrival and mass extinction throughout history. The anthropogenic impacts in geological sediments include the sudden change in pollen and charcoal levels as plant systems went haywire in the sudden absence of their former grazers. The pace of change accelerated after the ice age with the rise of agriculture and metal technology, producing what could poetically be seen as planetary decline from a golden age of plenty at the dawn of the Holocene through worse ages of silver and bronze to the depth of the iron age of scarcity in recent millennia, as the old myth would have it. Another example of early anthropogenic impact on climate that Kolbert could have mentioned from the early Holocene is how methane from rice cultivation prevented the earth from slipping back into glaciation, but instead allowed the stable temperature and sea level of the ten thousand years of the Holocene, up until now, when industrial emissions are producing geologically instant destabilisation.
The Sermon on the Mount claims divine blessing for the meek, the pure of heart, those who mourn, the peacemakers, the merciful and the righteous. These ideas have well entrenched conventional religious connotations, but my view is that religion has largely missed the point of the original natural intent, which can usefully be approached in scientific terms by considering these blessings as directed towards secure complex ecosystems. Nature can be considered meek, peaceful, pure, righteous and mournful, understood at the planetary and broader cosmic level of a natural divine blessing for our stable and productive global ecology.
In answer to the risk from humans wantonly punctuating the equilibrium of earth’s complex systems, the divine blessing is for those who chart a path of evolutionary reform and progress over the next ten thousand years to a new golden age. The scientific prospect of slow steady improvement over this long time period derives from what the astronomer Milutin Milanković discovered to be the main orbital driver of climate, the date of the earth’s perihelion, its closest approach to the sun. Perihelion causes glacial maxima at the December solstice and minima at the June solstice due to its effect on northern sunlight levels against the seasons. The annual date of perihelion moves slowly forward around the year every twenty one thousand years, advancing by one day every fifty eight years. The perihelion now happens around 4 January every year, and will steadily progress until it reaches the June solstice in ten thousand years.
The social and technological challenge presented by the sixth extinction is to find methods to establish a reconciliation between culture and nature. Religious concepts that are conventionally understood as supernatural can and must be repurposed as natural to achieve this task. Atonement and reconciliation, salvation and damnation, heaven and hell, grace and depravity, blessing and curse, faith and order, the advent virtues of peace, hope, love and joy, are essential components for an understanding of how humanity can deliberately evolve into a sustainable stable future on a flourishing diverse planet. But as Rachel Carson, author of Silent Spring, is quoted by Kolbert, ‘time is the essential ingredient, but we have no time.’
I was really pleased to read in The Sixth Extinction about Elizabeth Kolbert’s meeting with atmospheric scientist Ken Caldeira of Stanford University at the remote One Tree Island in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. I have followed Ken’s work on geoengineering with some interest, and was fascinated to learn about how his scientific work on the danger posed to coral reefs through ocean acidification caused by carbon emissions inspired his search for practical solutions. Ken tells Elizabeth that things are looking grim. He also says, interestingly, that he likes surprising and provocative computation. That is the spirit in which the search for solutions to the sixth extinction should be framed.
Kolbert notes that humans are shifting nine billion tonnes of carbon from the earth to the air every year. She comments approvingly about the scientific consensus that reducing these emissions by phasing out fossil fuels is the only solution. In Caldeira’s spirit of provocative computation, I challenge this consensus. Sanitation is not achieved through reducing defecation, but through treatment of waste. Similarly, climate stability should require a focus on treatment of waste carbon, as a more significant factor than emission level. Carbon dioxide and methane can be removed from the air and sea on a scale larger than total emissions, if we can develop new carbon based infrastructure as a profitable storage method, using carbon for roads, buildings and fabric for ocean based algae production systems. With such technology in place, we could still shift more carbon from the earth to the air even while the CO2 level declines.
Here are some surprising and provocative computations. Using five tonnes of carbon per metre of road would use up all human carbon emissions on two million kilometres of road per year. Using one tonne of carbon per square metre of floor space would use all emissions for one thousand square kilometres of buildings with ten floors. Using a tonne of carbon for twenty square metres of fabric would sequester all annual emissions in 200,000 square kilometres of algae farm on the world ocean. Such artificial algae production islands, using bags of fresh water for buoyancy, stability and energy, could float around the great currents of the world ocean or be tethered in place, powered by tide and wave to mix deep rich water with CO2 to make controlled algal blooms. Such floating islands could also provide ecological arks for species like frogs and rhinos which can no longer live in the wild due to human impacts.
Algae was the source of petroleum, and is likely to prove the silver bullet to slow the sixth extinction. The world ocean is more than three hundred million square kilometres in size, more than twice as big as total land surface. Algae farms on one percent of the ocean surface area could be built using total emissions in fifteen years, based on the above rough figures.
As a new Apollo Project, carbon mined from air and sea could be processed into stable useful forms using algae and sunk in bags to the bottom of the sea, aiming to store twice as much carbon as we emit within the next decade. Annual emissions equate to a cube of carbon about two kilometres high, a volume that could readily be located in the vast areas of the world ocean. The ocean has average depth of four kilometres and holds more than a billion cubic kilometres or teralitres of water. The scale and power of the ocean makes it the key frontier for innovative systems to stabilise the world climate and stop the march towards extinction.
The beauty of this idea of large scale ocean based algae production includes that it presents what may possibly be the only feasible way to protect coral reefs from extinction due to the looming threats of heat and acid. Algae production could cool the waters of the Great Barrier Reef and reduce their level of dissolved acidic carbon. Algae production at scale offers a rapid method to drive carbon levels in the air back down to the stable Holocene level of 280 parts per million. The sunk carbon would serve as a carbon bank, a stable resource which could itself be mined in the future to further the use of our global carbon stocks in productive infrastructure.
As you can tell, this wonderful book The Sixth Extinction has got me thinking! The challenges of adaptation and innovation and mitigation posed by the sixth extinction requires new humble dialogue. Science has to a large extent caused the problem by enabling technology whose destructive potential was not understood. Science can also help fix the climate, protecting and cherishing the amazing complexity and diversity of life that still flourishes on our planet, enabling planetary evolution to continue to flourish and grow in natural symbiosis with human intelligence.
The Sixth Extinction – An Unnatural History, by Elizabeth Kolbert
Book Review by Robert Tulip
Clear-eyed, superbly informed and informative, remorseful, engaging, well-structured, balanced, lucid, elegiacal ecology.
This wonderful book is the best summary I have read of our planetary predicament. The human situation appears to vindicate the extreme alternatives posed by Carl Sagan and I. S. Shklovskii in their 1966 book Intelligent Life in the Universe that a technical civilization would either destroy itself or evolve to a long lifetime by expanding into its surrounding galaxy. Fermi’s Paradox, that intelligence should be common in the cosmos given the available time and space but is undetected, suggests that the intelligence threshold at which our planetary civilization stands now has immense risks.
I say with some whimsy that The Sixth Extinction is light-hearted, because Kolbert has brilliantly combined deep scientific understanding with a simple and entertaining and immensely readable presentation. But the breezy wit is the vehicle for a deadly serious message. Humans are busily killing off frogs and bats by spreading funguses, destroying the wonderful biodiversity of coral reefs and rainforests using heat, acid and plunder, and basically cooking the planet with carbon emissions, leaving animals and plants with nowhere to live and move and have their being.
Human activities result from the combination of intelligence and instinct. The tragedy is that our social evolution has not kept pace with our technical evolution. Social values are failing to appreciate the fragility of life, the fact that our planet has in the past seen extinction events that have killed off vast numbers of genetic families, and we are now causing a sixth extinction that on the business-as-usual scenario will be as bad as the Permian event that eliminated about 90% of planetary life 252 million years ago. Gaia will probably survive this onslaught, but humans might not.
Kolbert provides the accurate prognosis that global interconnectedness is producing an Anthropocene, a new virtual super-continent of Pangaea in which species that evolved in isolation are thrown into a common era, with rapid mass extinction the likely fate of biological species and whole families of organisms that cannot keep pace with the unprecedented systemic change introduced by human technology.
The remorse for the loss of biodiversity arises from the ethical view that complexity is good, and that it is bad to destroy in the blink of a geological eye ecosystems that have evolved over millions and billions of years. The destruction of the biological basis of life on earth now underway will lead to a remorseless collapse of created human systems and their enabling ecology if unchecked. So the question posed by the sixth extinction is whether the inference from Sagan and Fermi is correct that the threshold of intelligence may itself be a common tipping point for the evolution of life, like a critical mass at which the system either collapses into the simplicity of a desert or transforms into a new more complex and abundant and sustainable paradigm.
The natural apocalypse of the sixth extinction is already underway, and will inevitably get rapidly worse as a simple causal product of physical system inertia and momentum. But this physical Armageddon can also usefully be analysed against the frameworks of cultural collapse predicted by religious myths of doom. I raise this comparison to open a discussion about strategies to mitigate the impact of the sixth extinction. My view is that the scientific evidence amassed by Kolbert and her numerous sources should provide the basis for philosophical and ethical study of how our predicament may have been anticipated in the past, and how old ideas may provide valuable resources to help address current problems. I understand my view is controversial, but wish to present it here as commentary on the matters arising from the facts of global impacts, to ask how humans can evolve in ways that use our intelligence as our main adaptive advantage.
There is a strong religious undertone in Kolbert’s work. I say this as a positive comment, not as the negative criticism that it might be considered in a solely scientific analysis. The great scientist Richard Dawkins has perceptibly shifted his view on religion, recognising that while the concept of a transcendental God is delusional, religious attitudes do have some adaptive traits, notably a sense of awe and reverence and wonder for the beauty and complexity and grandeur and order of nature.
Kolbert implicitly sees complexity as good and destruction as evil. This value system seems at face value to contradict the Biblical ethics which alienate spirit from nature by placing the highest value on obedience to the imagined messages of a personal transcendental God, rather than on evidence and logic. But this conflict between science and religion, between reason and faith, overlooks the considerable extent to which a natural rational ethic informs religious mythology, and how this ethic in faith provides essential precedents that can assist our adaptation to the new earth on which we find ourselves.
A little known Biblical verse, Revelation 11:18, says that the wrath of God is against those who destroy the earth. This idea can be interpreted in a purely natural and pantheistic way, with the idea that divinity is a quality of natural complex order, not an externally imposed supernatural order. Similarly, the concept of blessedness proposed by Christ in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5) can be repurposed as a purely natural and rational understanding of reality, as an evolutionary perspective that recognises that humanity requires a paradigm shift from domination to care.
Evolution works via what author Steven Johnson explains in his superb book Where Good Ideas Come From – The Natural History of Innovation as the “adjacent possible”. Changes that jump steps don’t happen. A path of connected causality is necessary, moving through adjacent links of the natural chain to explore what is possible, opening the cumulative doors of mutation into new adaptive rooms. In terms of human culture, that means we require what Johnson explains as the evolutionary process of ‘exaption’, the use of existing things for new evolving purposes. Religion, as a primary mode of human organisation, can exapt and adapt to provide resources and ethics for a global ecological transformation into a stable and harmonious world. Similarly, the capitalist system can exapt and adapt to a sustainable state, bringing the resources, expertise, systems, trust and political will needed for alliance against the common peril of system collapse.
Against the millennial timeframe of recent geology, the dating of the Anthropocene, when human activity began to leave distinctive global traces in the geological record, goes back at least to the extinctions of megafauna in Australia 40,000 years ago caused by human invasion, and similarly in Eurasia and the Americas to the times when these new lands were colonised and humans imposed steady downward pressure on the numbers of formerly unpredated and therefore slow-breeding peak organisms.
Kolbert usefully discusses this obvious causal correlation between human arrival and mass extinction throughout history. The anthropogenic impacts in geological sediments include the sudden change in pollen and charcoal levels as plant systems went haywire in the sudden absence of their former grazers. The pace of change accelerated after the ice age with the rise of agriculture and metal technology, producing what could poetically be seen as planetary decline from a golden age of plenty at the dawn of the Holocene through worse ages of silver and bronze to the depth of the iron age of scarcity in recent millennia, as the old myth would have it. Another example of early anthropogenic impact on climate that Kolbert could have mentioned from the early Holocene is how methane from rice cultivation prevented the earth from slipping back into glaciation, but instead allowed the stable temperature and sea level of the ten thousand years of the Holocene, up until now, when industrial emissions are producing geologically instant destabilisation.
The Sermon on the Mount claims divine blessing for the meek, the pure of heart, those who mourn, the peacemakers, the merciful and the righteous. These ideas have well entrenched conventional religious connotations, but my view is that religion has largely missed the point of the original natural intent, which can usefully be approached in scientific terms by considering these blessings as directed towards secure complex ecosystems. Nature can be considered meek, peaceful, pure, righteous and mournful, understood at the planetary and broader cosmic level of a natural divine blessing for our stable and productive global ecology.
In answer to the risk from humans wantonly punctuating the equilibrium of earth’s complex systems, the divine blessing is for those who chart a path of evolutionary reform and progress over the next ten thousand years to a new golden age. The scientific prospect of slow steady improvement over this long time period derives from what the astronomer Milutin Milanković discovered to be the main orbital driver of climate, the date of the earth’s perihelion, its closest approach to the sun. Perihelion causes glacial maxima at the December solstice and minima at the June solstice due to its effect on northern sunlight levels against the seasons. The annual date of perihelion moves slowly forward around the year every twenty one thousand years, advancing by one day every fifty eight years. The perihelion now happens around 4 January every year, and will steadily progress until it reaches the June solstice in ten thousand years.
The social and technological challenge presented by the sixth extinction is to find methods to establish a reconciliation between culture and nature. Religious concepts that are conventionally understood as supernatural can and must be repurposed as natural to achieve this task. Atonement and reconciliation, salvation and damnation, heaven and hell, grace and depravity, blessing and curse, faith and order, the advent virtues of peace, hope, love and joy, are essential components for an understanding of how humanity can deliberately evolve into a sustainable stable future on a flourishing diverse planet. But as Rachel Carson, author of Silent Spring, is quoted by Kolbert, ‘time is the essential ingredient, but we have no time.’
I was really pleased to read in The Sixth Extinction about Elizabeth Kolbert’s meeting with atmospheric scientist Ken Caldeira of Stanford University at the remote One Tree Island in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. I have followed Ken’s work on geoengineering with some interest, and was fascinated to learn about how his scientific work on the danger posed to coral reefs through ocean acidification caused by carbon emissions inspired his search for practical solutions. Ken tells Elizabeth that things are looking grim. He also says, interestingly, that he likes surprising and provocative computation. That is the spirit in which the search for solutions to the sixth extinction should be framed.
Kolbert notes that humans are shifting nine billion tonnes of carbon from the earth to the air every year. She comments approvingly about the scientific consensus that reducing these emissions by phasing out fossil fuels is the only solution. In Caldeira’s spirit of provocative computation, I challenge this consensus. Sanitation is not achieved through reducing defecation, but through treatment of waste. Similarly, climate stability should require a focus on treatment of waste carbon, as a more significant factor than emission level. Carbon dioxide and methane can be removed from the air and sea on a scale larger than total emissions, if we can develop new carbon based infrastructure as a profitable storage method, using carbon for roads, buildings and fabric for ocean based algae production systems. With such technology in place, we could still shift more carbon from the earth to the air even while the CO2 level declines.
Here are some surprising and provocative computations. Using five tonnes of carbon per metre of road would use up all human carbon emissions on two million kilometres of road per year. Using one tonne of carbon per square metre of floor space would use all emissions for one thousand square kilometres of buildings with ten floors. Using a tonne of carbon for twenty square metres of fabric would sequester all annual emissions in 200,000 square kilometres of algae farm on the world ocean. Such artificial algae production islands, using bags of fresh water for buoyancy, stability and energy, could float around the great currents of the world ocean or be tethered in place, powered by tide and wave to mix deep rich water with CO2 to make controlled algal blooms. Such floating islands could also provide ecological arks for species like frogs and rhinos which can no longer live in the wild due to human impacts.
Algae was the source of petroleum, and is likely to prove the silver bullet to slow the sixth extinction. The world ocean is more than three hundred million square kilometres in size, more than twice as big as total land surface. Algae farms on one percent of the ocean surface area could be built using total emissions in fifteen years, based on the above rough figures.
As a new Apollo Project, carbon mined from air and sea could be processed into stable useful forms using algae and sunk in bags to the bottom of the sea, aiming to store twice as much carbon as we emit within the next decade. Annual emissions equate to a cube of carbon about two kilometres high, a volume that could readily be located in the vast areas of the world ocean. The ocean has average depth of four kilometres and holds more than a billion cubic kilometres or teralitres of water. The scale and power of the ocean makes it the key frontier for innovative systems to stabilise the world climate and stop the march towards extinction.
The beauty of this idea of large scale ocean based algae production includes that it presents what may possibly be the only feasible way to protect coral reefs from extinction due to the looming threats of heat and acid. Algae production could cool the waters of the Great Barrier Reef and reduce their level of dissolved acidic carbon. Algae production at scale offers a rapid method to drive carbon levels in the air back down to the stable Holocene level of 280 parts per million. The sunk carbon would serve as a carbon bank, a stable resource which could itself be mined in the future to further the use of our global carbon stocks in productive infrastructure.
As you can tell, this wonderful book The Sixth Extinction has got me thinking! The challenges of adaptation and innovation and mitigation posed by the sixth extinction requires new humble dialogue. Science has to a large extent caused the problem by enabling technology whose destructive potential was not understood. Science can also help fix the climate, protecting and cherishing the amazing complexity and diversity of life that still flourishes on our planet, enabling planetary evolution to continue to flourish and grow in natural symbiosis with human intelligence.