by Alex Evans | Aug 3, 2011 | Climate and resource scarcity, Global Dashboard, Global system, Influence and networks
I just read Mark Lynas’s new book, The God Species
, in one sitting. I hardly ever read books in one sitting. So yes, it’s very good. And you should pack it along with the sun cream, shades and flip-flops, even if you’re not a nerd like me (which is, let’s face it, unlikely if you’re reading foreign policy blogs on a day as sunny as this).
I didn’t think it was going to be this good. Not because I don’t rate Mark as a writer – his previous books, High Tide
and Six Degrees
, are both great – but because the blurb on the back made it sounds less than it was, with its its proclamation that the book is “a radical manifesto that calls for the increased use of controversial but environmentally friendly technologies, such as genetic engineering and nuclear power”.
That sounded a bit underwhelming, given that views like these are rapidly becoming mainstream rather than radical, following the trail blazed by people like Jim Lovelock on nuclear and Gordon Conway on GM. (Even former head of Greenpeace UK Stephen Tindale is pro-nuclear these days – I remember him being so outraged that a 2002 IPPR report of mine should have argued in favour of nuclear that he phoned up my boss to tell him that the Institute’s green credentials were being damaged.)
And besides, if Mark’s book was really just an argument that things like cities, geoengineering, nuclear power and biotech are part of the environmental solution rather than part of the environmental problem, then it wouldn’t be saying anything that hadn’t been said two years previously in futurist Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Discipline: Why Dense Cities, Nuclear Power, Transgenic Crops, Restored Wildlands, Radical Science, and Geoengineering are Necessary
.
But actually, Mark’s book has a lot more to say than this – and two new ideas stand out in particular.
One is that The God Species is the first mainstream exposition of the concept of nine planetary boundaries that Johan Rockstrom and others at the Stockholm Resilience Centre first set out in a seminal Nature article back in 2009.
The idea here is that humanity must remain within nine safe and sustainable operating spaces, which in turn are defined by nine key boundaries. These boundaries are biodiversity; climate change; the nitrogen cycle; land use; freshwater; toxics; aerosols (like soot); ocean acidification; and the ozone layer. Rockstrom and co reckon we’re already beyond safe limits on the first three, and not far off most of the others.
Mark knows Rockstrom and his colleagues, and as a participant at some of the earliest conversations on planetary boundaries was ‘present at the creation’ of a defining agenda for the century ahead. More than that, he wrote this book with Rockstrom’s explicit blessing – as he puts it, “to do what the scientists could not: get this scientific knowledge out into the mainstream and demand that people – campaigners, governments, everyone – act on it”.
The book achieves that goal with aplomb, and that’s the first reason why you should read it. If, as seems increasingly likely, next year’s Rio summit focuses in part on the idea of Sustainable Development Goals as a potential replacement for the Millennium Development Goals beyond 2015, then expect the nine planetary boundaries to assume centre stage in discussions.
The other thing I like about The God Species is its framing of humans as, well, gods. This is a rich narrative seam, breathtaking in its apparent arrogance. Humans, like gods? Isn’t that sacrilege, heresy, the pride before the Fall?
Mark’s answer to that, in a nutshell, is that it doesn’t do us or the planet any favours to affect a faux-humility about our degree of power, choice and agency over the planet. The question isn’t whether we or not we have a Zeus-like capacity to hurl thunderbolts from our Mount Olympus; clearly, we do. Rather, the question is whether we’re going to start exercising that decision-making power consciously, rather than pretending we don’t have it, all the while sleepwalking closer to the edge. As he argues,
“The Book of Genesis is full of instances of Man being punished for his attempts to become like God. After the woman and the serpent combine forces to taste the forbidden fruit from one tree, in Genesis 3:22 the Lord complains: ‘See, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil; and now, he might reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever’ …”
He continues a moment later,
“With the primacy of science, there seems to be less and less room for the divine. God’s power is now increasingly being exercised by us. We are the creators of life, but we are also its destroyers. On a planetary scale, humans now assert unchallenged dominion over all living things.”
My one regret about this aspect of the book is that Mark only half develops this theme. He’s clear about how badly things will turn out if humans continue to bury their heads in the sand about their god-like powers – as he says in a quote from Stewart Brand in the introduction, “we are as gods and have to get good at it”. Amen to that, as he says.
But you’re left wondering: what would it look like if we did get good at it?
What the book sort of sets out, but never quite states explicitly, is the notion that not only are humans not guilty of Original Sin; they’re on the verge of growing up as a species, assuming their responsibilities and starting to Create consciously.
Which is quite an interesting prospect, if you think about it. Presumably if we’re operating at that sort of level, then averting planetary catastrophe is just the overture, no, the tuning up of the orchestra before the main symphony gets underway. That’s one way of reading Genesis 1:27, anyway.
One last thought: what is it with Oxford and books about creation myths? Richard Dawkins, Philip Pullman, Mark Lynas – is there something in the water?
by Richard Gowan | Aug 1, 2011 | Africa, Climate and resource scarcity, Conflict and security, Cooperation and coherence, Economics and development, Europe and Central Asia, Global system, Influence and networks
Here’s a rather odd bit of UN-bashing from last Friday:
The United Nations Security Council is looking into forming a new environmental peacekeeping force to deal with potential conflicts caused by so-called “global warming.”
Er, really?
The “green police,” as some are calling it, would wear green helmets, rather than the blue ones currently worn by U.N. forces. James Taylor is senior fellow at The Heartland Institute, a non-profit group that works to discover, develop and promote free-market solutions to public policy problems. He speculates on how seriously this should be taken.
“Anytime that somebody is talking about raising a standing army, giving it weapons, militarizing the world … in a way that hasn’t been the case before, I don’t find that a laughing matter at all,” he explains. “And given the extremism of the environmental activists here in the United States and around the globe, that gives me great cause for concern, considering that the enemy that they say is destroying the planet is Western civilization and, more specifically, free-market nations such as the United States.”
Where is all this coming from? It’s true that the Security Council recently held a contentious debate on climate change, but I can say with 100% confidence that there was no talk of a standing army. But the Heartlanders aren’t just dreaming this up. Instead, their website points us to this story from the Guardian:
A special meeting of the United Nations security council is due to consider whether to expand its mission to keep the peace in an era of climate change. Small island states, which could disappear beneath rising seas, are pushing the security council to intervene to combat the threat to their existence.
There has been talk, meanwhile, of a new environmental peacekeeping force – green helmets – which could step into conflicts caused by shrinking resources. [Emphasis added.]
Hm, so this is a lefty fantasy as well as a right-wing one. What is the Guardian’s source for the claim? Answer: an op-ed over at the Huffington Post by Germany’s Permanent Representative to the UN, Peter Wittig. After offering a rather effective overview of the the security challenges deriving from climate change, Amb. Wittig notes that “there are governments that — in allusion to the ‘blue-helmet’ UN peacekeepers — are already calling for ‘green-helmets to close down coal-mines.'”
As far-fetched as the idea of “green-helmets” might sound, consider the tasks that the United Nations peacekeepers already perform today — e.g. emergency aid, development and recovery, state — and peacebuilding. Repainting blue helmets into green might be a strong signal — but would dealing with the consequences of climate change — say in precarious regions — be really very different from the tasks the blue helmets already perform today?
I’ve made a brief effort to track down the origin of the “green-helmets to close down coal-mines” quotation, but failed. Perhaps a better-informed reader can enlighten me. However, a close reading of Amb. Wittig’s op-ed reveals that he patently does not want to (i) forcibly shut any mines; (ii) create a green-helmeted environmental peace army; or (iii) destroy the free market or indeed the West. In fact, he specifically writes that “it is too early to seriously think about Council action on climate change.”
The Guardian story took the Ambassador’s allusion and converted it into an easy and misleading headline. The Heartland Institute simply swooped on the Guardian’s tale and spiced it up a little. And so a new anti-UN myth has been born.
by Alex Evans | Aug 1, 2011 | East Asia and Pacific, Economics and development
An interesting weak signal from Beijing:
Foxconn, the world’s largest contract electronics manufacturer by revenue, plans to increase the use of robots in its factories 100-fold to 1m within three years, according to Terry Gou, chairman and chief executive. The move underlines the drastic changes China-based manufacturers are forced to make as the country’s unlimited supply of cheap labour is running out […]
Foxconn, which makes iPhones and iPads for Apple and other electronic gadgets for more than a dozen branded vendors, has said before that it will increase automated production. But Mr Gou outlined the scale of the changes for the first time in a speech on Friday at a party organised for workers at its largest plant in Shenzhen.
According to people in the audience, the chief executive said the group currently uses just 10,000 robots, but that number would increase to 300,000 next year and to 1m in three years. The numbers are likely to cause jitters among local governments in China as several provinces have set high hopes on the group, China’s biggest employer, to create jobs for their young people.
If this is an indication of things to come, then it answers one of the questions I wondered about in my 2020 Development Futures report in January this year, in which I speculated on whether we’d see the phenomenon of jobless growth arriving in the emerging economies:
In some developed economies (and especially the US), research suggests that job opportunities are increasingly being polarised into high and low skill jobs, while middle class jobs are disappearing due to “automation of routine work and, to a smaller extent, the international integration of labour markets through trade and, more recently, offshoring”. Meanwhile, data also show that while more women are entering the global labour force, the ‘gender gap’ on income and quality of work is widening between women and men. These trends raise a number of critical uncertainties for employment and development to 2020.
If automation of routine work genuinely is a more significant factor in developed economy job polarization than international trade or offshoring, then the implication is that developing economies may increasingly also fall prey to job polarisation as new technologies emerge and become competitive with human labour between now and 2020. Chinese manufacturing and Indian service industry jobs could increasingly be replaced by technology, for example, and find their existing rates of inequality exacerbated still further.
