Bill McKibben has been a warrior in the arena of climate change for many years. One of the co-founders and leaders of the climate group 350.org, he has researched, written, demonstrated, gone to jail numerous times and helped sue the government for failing to act to stop the rise in carbon emissions in our atmosphere. His books, beginning with The End of Nature, have been bestsellers over many years and galvanized millions around the world to protest the inaction of governments regarding the existential threat of global warming. Now he has a new book, Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? and the theme is similar. But this time, McKibben takes aim at bigger game.
This is not to say that Falter neglects to warn about the threat of climate change. He devotes several chapters not only to the dangers accelerating from the rising levels of carbon in our atmosphere (now at over 414 ppm, well above the 350 ppm that 350.org proclaimed to be the upper limit of sustainability), but also to the vicious and deliberately deceptive campaigns long mounted by the fossil fuel industry. For example, he cites this infuriating instance when, in 1977, one of Exxon’s senior scientists, James F. Black, addressed the company’s top leaders:
“There is general scientific agreement that the most likely manner in which mankind is influencing the global climate is through carbon dioxide release from the burning of fossil fuels.” McKibben then comments: That is to say, ten years before James Hansen’s Senate testimony made climate change a public issue, Exxon, the world’s largest oil company and, indeed, in those days, the world’s largest company period, understood that its product was going to wreck the planet (72).
For another example, this one new to me, McKibben documents one of the oft-overlooked side effects of excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere—that the basic foods we now grow are losing their nutritional value. Citing a paper in the journal Environmental Research, McKibben points to the conclusions that rising carbon dioxides levels, by speeding plant growth, are reducing the amount of protein and other key nutrients in basic food crops:
When researchers grow grain at the carbon dioxide levels we expect for later this century, they find that minerals such as calcium and iron drop by 8 percent, and protein by the same amount…In 2018, rice researchers found “significantly less protein” when they grew eighteen varieties of rice in high-carbon dioxide test plots (38).
As one researcher of the study put it, “We are completely altering the biophysical conditions that underpin our food system” (39). Indeed we are, and not only for our food. The protein content of pollen from goldenrod, a plant we call a weed but one needed by bees (whom we need for our domestic crops as well) “has declined by a third since the industrial revolution” (39), e.g. when the carbon dioxide increase really took off.
As to the campaign by fossil fuel companies and their cronies in the political establishment to deny outright or confuse the public over the reality and threat presented by climate change, McKibben sums it up in one paragraph:
So: global warming is the ultimate problem for oil companies because oil causes it, and it’s the ultimate problem for government haters because without government intervention, you can’t solve it. Those twin existential threats, to cash and to worldview, meant that there was never any shortage of resources for the task of denying climate change (121).
In other words, the money accumulated by oil companies and which they see at risk, married to the hatred of politicians, especially Republicans, for truly significant government intervention, have formed an almost impregnable wall against the information and government action that’s needed to stop global warming from truly wrecking our planet for human habitation.
All this might be predictable in a new book by McKibben. What is not so predictable is the emphasis he devotes to the alarming effects of new technology—both as a solution to the dangers of global warming, and as a distraction from the painful realities it presents. He cites some alarming statistics (alarming at least to me) about, for instance, the habitual use of cell phones:
The average person now touches, swipes, or taps his phone 2,617 times a day. Eighty-seven percent of people with smartphones wake up and go to sleep with them (176).
But he doesn’t stop with just these frightening stats. McKibbben cites a recent article in the Journal of Physical Therapy and Science that found “significant differences in the craniovertebral angle, scapular index, and peak expiratory flow depending on duration of smartphone usage” (177). McKibben comments:
That is, having taken a few million years to stand up straight, we are hunched once more—text neck, iPosture…We spend roughly ten hours a day looking at a screen and roughly seventeen minutes a day exercising (ibid).
McKibben, like others, is clearly disturbed by this dependence on our devices. Or rather, on our growing lack of distinction between machines and humans. As he notes with a pungent quip, but one meant to be taken very seriously: “a man with a phone more or less permanently affixed to his palm is partway a robot already” (ibid; emphasis added).
Mckibben is also clearly alarmed by the growing power and influence of the anti-human ethic presented by Silicon Valley engineers and billionaires. This includes the not identical but closely related biotech industries. Given the rapid advances in CRISPR technology, for example, biotech scientists are drawing ever closer to the ability to modify the human genome before babies are born (McKibben cites the example of the now-disgraced Chinese bioengineer, He Jiankui, who has actually done this). Thus, the real possibility exists that parents can have their babies designed to be more intelligent, or healthier, or taller, or more agile. McKibben relates this danger to the related danger of climate change: “As climate change has shrunk the effective size of our planet, the creation of designer babies shrinks the effective range of our souls” (172). And of course, the additional danger is that those who can obtain pre-designed babies will be those who can afford it—thus magnifying the already critical problem of wealth inequality by giving the progeny of the wealthy even greater advantages.
For McKibben, though, it is the moral stance of the technologists that presents the greatest risk. One of his prime examples is the renowned computer nerd, Ray Kurzweil, the “director of engineering” at Google. Kurzweil, interviewed by McKibben, compares the coming linkage of our brains with computers to the development of the neocortex two million years ago—“the enabling factor to invent language, art, music, tools, technology, science” (113). Then he notes how humans can advance even more without having to grow the bigger brains that would make our skulls unviable:
“My thesis is we’re going to do it again, by the 2030s. We’ll have a synthetic neocortex in the cloud. We’ll connect our brains to the cloud just the way your smartphone is connected now. We’ll become funnier and smarter and able to more effectively express ourselves. We’ll create forms of expression we can’t imagine today, just as other primates can’t really understand music” (135).
Apparently, Kurzweil’s boss, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, thinks the same way: “You should presume that someday we will be able to make machines that can reason, think, and do things better than we can” (ibid). Given computers’ recent success at beating humans at chess and the even more complicated game of Go, and the advances in language learning, and driving by computers, not to mention robotic simulation, there seems little reason to doubt these forecasts.
For McKibben in this book, though, the critical question is not “can we?” but “should we?” And that is where the moral heart of this book lies. McKibben gives us some instances of the kind of technological initiatives that are already under way. Jeff Bezos, for example, the world’s richest man as CEO of Amazon, has already invested in the hunt for extending life, possibly indefinitely. He is said to have “diverted some of his cash” to San the Francisco-based startup, United Biotechnology, which is said to be “hard at work on a ‘cure for aging’” (184). Then there is a company called Alcor, which “currently has 147 human beings on ice, each of whom paid $200,000 to preserve their whole bodies.” Alcor also offers a cheaper, or ‘neuro’ option, costing only $80,0000, which involves sawing off the individual’s head and preserving only that relevant (to the brainiacs in Silicon Valley) part (184). This appears to be the macabre direction in which the “best and brightest” are headed—preserving themselves and their precious embodied existence, if possible forever. And if that involves becoming more and more robotic, that’s perfectly fine with them. The life of the individual human is, after all, to them the most precious commodity of all.
And it is here that McKibben cries halt. His cri de coeur is worth citing at length.
…it’s that incredible self-absorption that should be the clue to what a bad idea all this really is. I’ve taken the time to lay out the various advances we may be capable of if we fully embrace the newest technologies—we can “improve” our children; we may be able to live without work (or we may have to); we may be able, in some sense, to live forever—but none of that is living, not in the human sense (187).
So what, exactly, does McKibben think is ‘living in the human sense’? He gives us another one of his little aphorisms:
Those who exalt humans too highly devalue humanity (188).
Not a bad way to put it. Here is what he means. The technologists, he grants them, value individual humans—which is, after all, the core of our western heritage. But, he insists, they actually place too much value on individuals: “no one can be allowed to die; we must collect their heads in a giant thermos.” The result of this hyper-valuation of the individual is that “they value humanness far too little.” Humanness. Humanity. The full spectrum of humanity, which involves, whether we like it or not, sickness, aging and death, which must come to us all. The knowledge of which end is what makes us humans. The ancient Greeks knew this too, the centrality of this knowledge of death, and had a felicitous way of putting it. Animals, they said, don’t know they are going to die, and so are less than human. Gods, they said, don’t die at all, and so are deprived of the aching sense of their mortality that humans have. Only humans, said the Greeks, know they are going to die, and that very knowledge amounts to both a sadness, and a glory, for it gives our life its human savor.
McKibben puts it in a similar but slightly different form.
A world without death is a world without time, and that in turn is a world without meaning, at least human meaning. Go far enough down this path and the game is up (188).
That is it exactly. Give humans a world without death, give them indefinite life extension, albeit robotized or preserved in a giant thermos, and life no longer has meaning. And humans without meaning, as we’re already seeing, will never be able to organize sufficiently to save humanity. If only individuals matter, then the game, the human game—which has always involved, preeminently, humans working together, for each other, even or especially in the face of death—is lost. So says Bill McKibben. And I think he’s right, not just about global warming and the existential threat it presents, but about our future at the human game itself. One can only hope that enough humans believe him—in time.
Lawrence DiStasi
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