Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 178

Here are some excerpts from a book I recently read, "Origin Story: A Big History of Everything," by David Christian.

The spooky thing about life is that, though the inside of each cell looks like pandemonium—a sort of mud-wrestling contest involving a million molecules—whole cells give the impression of acting with purpose. Something inside each cell seems to drive it, as if it were working its way through a to-do list. The to-do list is simple: (1) stay alive despite entropy and unpredictable surroundings; and (2) make copies of myself that can do the same thing. And so on from cell to cell, and generation to generation. Here, in the seeking out of some outcomes and the avoidance of others, are the origins of desire, caring, purpose, ethics, even love.

Why are primate brains so big? This may seem (pardon the pun) a no-brainer. Aren’t brains obviously a good thing? Not necessarily, because they guzzle energy. They need up to twenty times as much energy as the equivalent amount of muscle tissue. In human bodies, the brain uses 16 percent of available energy, though it accounts for just 2 percent of the body’s mass. That’s why, given the choice between brawn and brain, evolution has generally gone for more brawn and less brain. And that’s why there are so few very brainy species. Some species are so disdainful of brains that they treat them as an expendable luxury. There are species of sea slugs that have mini-brains when they are young. They use them as they voyage through the seas looking for a perch from which they can sieve food. But once they’ve found their perch, they no longer need such an expensive piece of equipment so… they eat their brains. (Some have joked, cruelly, that this is a bit like tenured academics.)

Thinking about such processes in ecological terms reminds us that wealth never really consists of things; it consists of control over the energy flows that make, move, mine, and transform things. Wealth is a sort of compressed sunlight, just as matter is really congealed energy. Mobilizing this compressed energy from the rest of the population, along with the flows of resources that it made possible, became the fundamental task for rulers and governments, and that task would shape all aspects of the evolution and history of agrarian civilizations.

The most important mega-innovations were usually those that released new flows of energy, such as fusion or photosynthesis. Farming counts as a mega-innovation because it let farmers tap larger shares of energy flows from recent photosynthesis. Those increasing flows drove the turbulent changes of the agrarian era. But there were limits to the energy flows from farming, because it tapped only recently captured sunlight. Burn a piece of wood, eat a carrot, or harness a horse to a plow, and you are tapping energy flows captured from sunlight in the past twelve months or at most in recent decades. By the late eighteenth century, some economists in Western Europe began to suspect that European societies were exploiting these flows to the fullest. Their calculations were simple. The energy flows that powered human societies came from croplands and woodlands, with a small bonus from wind and rain. So growth meant finding more arable land and woodland. By 1800, it seemed that most farmable land was already being farmed. Adam Smith, the founder of modern economics, argued that societies would soon be using all available energy. Then growth would stall; wages would fall, and so, too, would populations as farming societies came face to face with the limits on energy flows that all other organisms do when they have filled up their niche. Some societies, such as the Netherlands and England, already seemed to be pushing at these limits. In the Netherlands, farmers had to gouge farmland from the sea, while England faced growing shortages of timber for heating, housing, and shipbuilding. By Adam Smith’s time, as Alfred Crosby puts it: “Humanity had hit a ceiling in its utilization of sun energy.”

Pressure to find new sources of energy would eventually conjure up the mega-innovations that we describe today as the fossil-fuels revolution. These gave humans access to flows of energy much greater than those provided by farming—the energy locked up in fossil fuels, energy that had accumulated not over a few decades but since the Carboniferous period, more than 360 million years earlier. In seams of coal, oil, and gas lay several hundred million years’ worth of buried sunlight in solid, liquid, and gaseous forms. To get a sense of the energies locked up in fossil fuels, imagine carrying a car full of passengers over your head and running very, very fast for several hours, then remind yourself that a few gallons of gasoline pack that much energy and more (because a lot of the energy is wasted). Like a gold strike, this energy bonanza generated frenzied and often chaotic new forms of change and created and destroyed the fortunes of individuals, countries, and entire regions. Charles Dickens, Friedrich Engels, and others saw the terrible price that many paid for these changes. But from the frenzy would emerge an entirely new world.

England was the first country to benefit from the energy bonanza of fossil fuels, and production took off. By the middle of the nineteenth century, England produced a fifth of global GDP (gross domestic product) and about half of global fossil-fuel emissions. Not surprisingly, global levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide began to rise from about the middle of the nineteenth century. And as early as 1896, the Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius recognized both that carbon dioxide was a greenhouse gas and that it was being generated in large enough amounts to start changing global climates. 

But such fears belonged to the future. (Arrhenius actually thought global warming was a positive development because it might stave off a new ice age.)

In the twentieth century, we humans began to transform our surroundings, our societies, and even ourselves. Without really intending to, we have introduced changes so rapid and so massive that our species has become the equivalent of a new geological force. That is why many scholars have begun to argue that planet Earth has entered a new geological age, the Anthropocene epoch, or the “era of humans.” This is the first time in the four-billion-year history of the biosphere that a single biological species has become the dominant force for change. In just a century or two, building on the huge energy flows and the remarkable innovations of the fossil-fuels revolution, we humans have stumbled into the role of planetary pilots without really knowing what instruments we should be looking at, what buttons we should be pressing, or where we are trying to land. This is new territory for humans, and for the entire biosphere.

Attitudes toward families and children have changed profoundly. In recent centuries, improved nutrition and health care began to lower child mortality, so more children survived into adulthood. Yet traditional peasant attitudes ensured that families kept trying to produce as many children as possible. Such attitudes, along with increasing food production, high fertility, and declining mortality helped drive the extraordinarily rapid population growth of recent centuries. Eventually, though, traditional attitudes began to change as families moved into towns, as educating and rearing children became more expensive, and as more children survived to adulthood. Urban families began to have fewer children, and fertility rates began to fall. The fall in fertility rates after the earlier fall in mortality rates is what demographers call the demographic transition: the emergence of a new demographic regime of low fertility and low mortality. And that explains why, in the twentieth century, rates of population growth began to slow, first in more affluent countries, and then throughout the world. It also helps explain fundamental changes in gender roles. Reduced pressure on women to spend their entire adult lives bearing or rearing children blurred traditional divisions between male and female roles and allowed women to take up roles from which they had been excluded during most of the agrarian era.

This is the face of the Good Anthropocene (good from a human perspective). The Good Anthropocene has generated better lives for billions of ordinary humans, for the first time in human history. (If you doubt the improvement, think again about having surgery without modern anesthesia.) 

But there is also a Bad Anthropocene. The Bad Anthropocene consists of the many changes that threaten the achievements of the Good Anthropocene. First, the Bad Anthropocene has generated huge inequalities. Despite colossal increases in wealth, millions continue to live in dire poverty. And though it is tempting to think that the modern world has abolished slavery, the 2016 Global Slavery Index estimated that more than forty-five million humans today are living as slaves. 

The Bad Anthropocene is not just morally unacceptable. It is also dangerous because it guarantees conflict, and in a world with nuclear weapons, any major conflict could prove catastrophic for most of humanity. The Bad Anthropocene also threatens to reduce biodiversity and undermine the stable climate system of the past ten thousand years. The flows of energy and resources that support increasing human consumption are now so huge that they are impoverishing other species and jeopardizing the ecological foundations on which modern society is built. In the past, coal miners took canaries into mines to detect carbon monoxide. Today, rising carbon dioxide levels, declining biodiversity, and melting glaciers are telling us that something dangerous is happening, and we should take notice. 

The challenge we face as a species is pretty clear. Can we preserve the best of the Good Anthropocene and avoid the dangers of the Bad Anthropocene? Can we distribute the Anthropocene bonanza of energy and resources more equitably to avoid catastrophic conflicts? And can we, like the first living organisms, learn how to use gentler and smaller flows of resources to do so? Can we find global equivalents of the delicate proton pumps used to power all living cells today? Or will we keep depending on flows of energy and resources so huge that they will eventually shake apart the fantastically complex societies we have built in the past two hundred years?

Our modern origin story suggests a helpful analogy, that of chemical activation energies. Activation energies provide the initial kick that gets vital chemical reactions going. But once they are under way, less energy is needed. Perhaps we can think of fossil fuels as the activation energy that was needed to kick-start today’s world. Now that this glossy new world is in motion, can we keep it going with smaller and more delicate energy flows, like the tiny flows, electron by electron, or proton by proton, that are managed by enzymes and that energize living cells? Can we imitate respiration, big life’s delicate, nondisruptive equivalent of fire? 

The idea of fossil fuels as activation energy suggests something else about today’s world. The turbulent dynamism of recent centuries is typical of all periods of creative destruction. It is the human equivalent of the gravitational energies that create stars. But once the violent energies of creation have done their work, we expect a new and more stable dynamism, as something new takes its seat in the universe. Like our sun, we can perhaps settle into a period of dynamic stability, having crossed a new threshold and built a new world society that preserves the best of the Good Anthropocene. Perhaps the idea of endless growth is completely wrong. Perhaps the disruptive dynamism of recent centuries is a temporary phenomenon. After all, living life within a framework of social and cultural stability has been the norm for most of human history and for most human societies. And that is why an understanding of what it means to live richly and dynamically in a less changeable world is preserved within the cultures of many modern indigenous communities whose people see themselves primarily as custodians of a world larger and older than themselves. 

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.”

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.