Nathan Gardels is the editor-in-chief of Noema Magazine.
Noema recently published the two winners of the first annual Berggruen Prize Essay Competition. Together, they capture dissonance within ecological consciousness as the climate crisis intensifies.
One essay by the Vancouver-based writer Pamela Swanigan scores the false hope that a return to the kind of natural wisdom associated with premodern Indigenous peoples can save the planet from the “world destroyers” of the techno-industrial Anthropocene age. Such extreme hope is, for her, only a mirror image of our species’ incapacity to imagine the scale and scope of climate calamity inexorably coming our way. Rather than abide by what she calls “the default trope-of-hope,” she argues that nothing more is possible at this irreversible point in time than making the most of “the long defeat” ahead.
The other essay, by astrophysicist Adam Frank, argues quite the opposite — that, as the Anthropocene technosphere matures into a complex feedback system that mimics and coevolves with the self-regulating biosphere, a new conjoined planetary intelligence will emerge that can sustain the homeostatic equilibrium of Earth into the millennial future.
Dwelling In Middle Earth
Swanigan’s literary approach takes its cue from J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings.” “Tolkien saw us as called upon to fight a valorous but never-ending and ultimately futile battle against the world-destroyers,” she writes. “He termed this ongoing battle ‘the long defeat’ and set the immortal elves of Middle Earth to fighting it through all ‘ages of the world,’ bent on forestalling what they could not prevent: the day when the forces of power-lust would indeed be utterly regnant and the original genius of the living world snuffed out.”
She goes on:
Tolkien’s story of the long defeat could be considered a bespoke oratory instrument for our era. In containing time scales from the cosmological to the organismic, it reflects at scale the deep-time cataclysms expressively upon us.
And in describing human-level battles against a series of diffuse antagonists, Tolkien’s story offers us ways to respond to them: Evoking heroism rather than hope, and courage rather than comfort, are central to this response. So too is involving people in a story instead of hectoring them with information. And, most importantly, we must take inspiration from a colder truth: We may not be able to prevent the end, but if we are willing to fight the long defeat, perhaps we can make a better one.
The Cosmology Of The Planetary
For Frank, information is not hectoring but as important as matter and energy in complex systems, such as our planet, that self-organize their own survival.
Frank looks out to the universe of trillions of planets orbiting their own stars to reflect on Earth’s fate. He recalls how James Lovelock stumbled onto the “Gaia” realization that our planet is one self-regulating system by exploring for NASA the conditions that are necessary for sustainable life anywhere.
Lovelock’s great insight was the recognition that biospheres fundamentally reshape worlds as their life systems mature through building the feedback networks of self-organizing intelligence that enable adaptation to changing conditions in order to survive and flourish.
“Mature biospheres are systems with the capacity to channel infalling stellar energy to serve the goal of maintaining viability. They form a single self-maintaining system,” writes Frank. Just as the biosphere emerged from the nonliving geosphere, so too the technosphere of human agency emerged from the Earth’s biosphere. As human inhabitance scaled up, the political economy of civilization and its fossil-fueled infrastructure added a new dimension affecting the equilibrium of planetary metabolism.
As it stands, according to Frank, the technosphere has yet to develop the mature information feedback systems of the biosphere that would restore balance, thus wreaking disequilibrium in the planet’s viability through climate change.
“Planets have rules,” warns Frank. “Woe be unto the species that believes its creations can trump those rules and the planet on which it depends.” The goal therefore must be to harness human endeavor to “mature the technosphere, bringing it into accord with the biosphere and other geospheres.”
Frank concludes by putting Earth into the context of the possibility of life elsewhere as we search for bio- and techno-signatures across the vast distances of space. “To exist on a planet for more than just a few centuries, any technosphere must become mature by manifesting a new form of self-organization. If it is to persist over even semi-geologic timescales of a few thousand years, it must become self-creating and self-maintaining,” he says. “In becoming so, it must manifest what the supporting biosphere established billions of years earlier: planetary intelligence. This is the only way technospheres can endure and thrive across timescales like those of biospheres.”
If the Earth’s technosphere stalls in immaturity and fails to coevolve planetary intelligence with the biosphere, Tolkien’s “long defeat” beckons. If human agency manages to evolve like the biosphere from which it emerged, life on our spinning orb can continue to exist into the long future ahead.
