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Tony Cartwright The One and the Ten Thousand Things Chapter 1 INTRODUCTION: CLIMATE SCIENCE, MYTH, AND CULTURAL EVOLUTION When studying English Civil War tracts years ago as a young research student in the British Museum reading-room in London, where Marx wrote Das Kapital, I used to marvel at the extent of the library’s vast collection of books. But I would also often think about its destruction - and all the knowledge it embodied - in the event of a nuclear holocaust. At that time the Cold War dominated international affairs and nuclear war, we knew, was tantamount to “omnicide” - the annihilation of all life. How did one make sense of this, I wondered: that the several millennia of human history mirrored on the Library’s shelves - the apparent pinnacle, as I then saw it, of four and a half billion years of the Earth’s evolution - could be obliterated in a matter of hours. It was beyond comprehension - though to the millenarian movements I was studying it might have been no surprise. The British library has remained intact and is now in its new incarnation on Euston Road. The danger of a nuclear holocaust has receded and we are still here. But now there is another apocalyptic threat to our future - the prospect of ecological catastrophe predicted within this century unless we are able to change our way of life dramatically and imminently. As a result of climate change this 21st century could bring unimaginable conflict and suffering. Apart from growing competition for resources, drought may initiate water wars while flooding cause disruption and death on unprecedented scales. In addition to the warming poles and the Greenland ice peninsula, the Himalayan glaciers – those “reservoirs in the sky” or “third pole” – are melting, putting hundreds of millions at risk in Asia. If this happens there will be environmental refugees across the whole world. Geologists - and, increasingly, other natural and human scientists - now talk of the Anthropocene Age, in referring to the huge changes we have made, through our technology, to the surface of the planet. In her book, Field Notes from a 1 Catastrophe, the environmental writer, Elizabeth Kolpert, quoted the work of the Nobel Prize-winning Dutch chemist, Paul Crutzen: No longer, he wrote, should we think of ourselves living in the Holocene. Instead, an epoch unlike any of those which preceded it had begun. This new age was defined by one creature – man – who had become so dominant that he was capable of altering the planet on a geological scale. Crutzen dubbed this the “Anthropocene”. i The consequences of human activity for the biosphere are just as alarming. According to our science we are responsible in the last fifty years for the loss of half the world’s forests, wetlands, and grasslands and we are systematically eradicating many of the habitats that make up the world’s ecosystems. One in four mammals and a third of all amphibians are on the endangered list, including the iconic tiger! We used to lose a thousand species every year. Now it is between 15,000 and 60,000 as we progressively push more and more species to the edge of extinction. And the rate of extinction is accelerating. In E.O. Wilson’s words, “it will reach biblical proportions within a few decades”. ii Thomas Lovejoy, the biologist who was credited with first using the term “biological diversity” pointed out the great irony “that we are living at the optimum moment to date in the history of life on Earth and rather than glorying and revelling in it, we’re busily collectively destroying it”. iii In so doing we may also be destroying ourselves. Martin Rees, the British Astronomer Royal and past President of the Royal Society, has even asked whether this might be “our final century”. iv Geologists seem to show remarkable equanimity in the face of our possible extinction. Iain Stewart, the Scottish geologist, is in no doubt about the very serious threat we currently pose to ourselves and the Earth but, in his television series for the BBC, Earth: The Power of the Planet v he also set out the geological deep-time context for “human civilization”. We are a very recent phenomenon in Earth’s history. Geologists know our planet has experienced catastrophes before and believe it will 2 survive - whatever we do - and regenerate, give or take some tens of millions of years or so. Geologists also maintain that apparent catastrophic episodes in the Earth’s history constitute further evolutionary steps in its development. Although our own extinction would not be a disaster for the Earth, what also stands out in Stewart’s astonishing account - given the staggering violence of the universe and the utterly amazing and complex sequence of conditions that has allowed us to evolve - is what an improbable miracle we - the human race - appear to be. We might begin to ask how it is that with all our ingenious science we have brought ourselves and much of nature to the brink of extinction. Responses to the prospect of ecological collapse vary - ignorance, denial, a sense of helplessness or indifference on the one hand and alarmism or the advocacy of urgent action on the other. Those who claim to be awake to the danger say “business-as usual” is not an option. Among the activists there is a spectrum of opinion with the pessimists – or “realists” - at one end and the optimists at the other. The pessimists think that the Earth is beginning to take her “revenge” on us vi while for the optimists hope is a powerful force which, when marshalled and organised, can be the agency of renewal. vii This is not a simple polarisation, for optimism doesn’t come any easier as the years pass while the danger with pessimism is that it can become self- fulfilling. Most books on climate change focus on the material and technological changes that we need to make to save the environment and the doomsday consequences if we fail. But if all we are looking for is a technological solution, then we will have missed the point. The issue is not just about our survival but our understanding of ourselves and our relationship with the world about us. In the next fifty years we will surely be challenged to reassess many of the scientific, philosophical, political, social, and psychological premises on which Western civilisation is based and from which the current crisis has, arguably, emerged. 3 Myths of Destruction and Renewal Myths pick up the pieces where philosophy throws up its hands. Wendy Doniger When societies or civilisations face a crisis they often draw consolation from the myths that underlie their belief systems. In the modern world not only have we turned our back on our religious and spiritual heritage but we have also relegated the world of myth and mythology to the category of falsehood, in contradistinction to the “truth” of science. No culture, however, lives without its myths even if, in our rational scientific hubris, we have imagined that we do. The European Enlightenment myths of the Eighteenth century were noble ones at the time – encyclopaedic knowledge, the dignity of reason, and the values of liberty, fraternity, and equality – but these have crystallised into our modern secular and unexamined myths: the myth of the universe as a machine; the myth of man as separate from the rest of nature; the beliefs that the Earth is here for us, its resources are infinite, and that we can exploit them without consequences for ourselves; the myths of human progress and endless material and economic growth. Now we are beginning to see these unacknowledged myths. viii But what do we have to put in their place? One of the universal myths of all civilisations is about the central theme of destruction and renewal. Ancient Greece offered us the conflict of Eros and Thanatos – life and death - while ancient India revered the eternal triad of Brahma, the creator, Shiva, the destroyer, and Vishnu, the preserver. In Indian mythology Shiva and Vishnu are twin gods, the same deity but with two faces, unlike Eros and Thanatos who are thought to be in opposition to each other. In Indian thought destruction and renewal are inextricable. The one is inconceivable without the other. In their book, Conversations About the End of Time ix, the French playwright, screenwriter, and Buddhist, Jean-Claude Carriere, discussed with Umberto Eco, Stephen Jay Gould, and Jean Delumeau his preferred stories about apocalypse. In 4 his own section, “Answering the Sphinx“, Carriere refers to the Hindu belief that we are now living in what they call the Kali Yuga, the age of destruction. According to Hindu lore the destruction of the world is an inevitable process and Shiva, who is the god of destruction x, will defeat and prevail against Vishnu, who seeks to preserve the world. At the end of the cycle of yugas the world and everything in it will disappear though this is not for the first time. We cannot resist this destruction because the forces sweeping us away are infinitely more powerful than us. It is difficult to establish how long a yuga is, perhaps because the Indians, unlike us, regard “time’’ as cyclical and think in terms of vast eons while we have different linear and numerical times. We separate cultural, historical time, which is very short, from geological deep time which we have only just appreciated in the last 150 years. Orthodox Christianity’s literal belief until quite recently that the Earth was a mere few thousand years old has blinded us not only to the reality of deep time but to the notion of time as cyclical in the sense of beginning-less and endless.
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