How to design a future on Earth
When asked how to find life on another planet, James Lovelock came up with the Gaia Hypothesis. If you want to find life, he proposed look for weirdness, anomalies. The unexpected, he proposed, is life’s fingerprint. This idea was rooted in the knowledge that life shaped Earth’s atmosphere. Therefore, should life be found on elsewhere, a planet’s atmosphere would tell us. Anomalous, unexpected molecules of life’s design.
On Earth, we see this in water, nitrogen, Carbon Dioxide, oxygen, and other trace gases in the atmosphere. If it weren’t for life, Earth would look very different from above. We see the forests of the planet inhale and exhale every year. Planetary respiration.
Before life, Earth’s atmosphere was an inhospitable mess of toxic gases. The tiny microbes in the oceans, Earth’s earliest inhabitants, slowly replaced the toxic soup some of the air we breathe. Those same microbes that produce some “unexpected” molecules that inspired Lovelock’s astrobiology strategy.
Gaia Hypothesis proposes that life creates the conditions that support life. This idea is rooted in the observations that the biosphere (all things living) shape the movement of matter on the planet. The planetary engineering has given us a stable climate, abundant food, and clean water. Life is makes things good for the living.
In other words, life supports life. Collectively, this is a positive feedback loop on a whole-planet scale. The living support each other by maintaining the air, water, and soil of our planet. Positive feedback loops are self-reinforcing. Like a snowball that grows as it rolls down the hill, picking up more snow as it rolls. Life supports life. The more life there is, the better things get on Earth.
Where do we humans fall into this? We all have experiences of the goods nature give us, freely and without expectation of reimbursement. People have added up all the stuff nature gives us in dollar value. It’s more than all of the economies of the world combined. Whether we recognize it or not we are linked to nature. Our linkages have become less obvious as technology has replaced our direct involvement with nature with the “comfort” of indoor, sedentary, and distracted living.
The health benefits of nature are intuitively known to us all. Fresh air, water, and good soil are what makes us healthier and happier. The self-reinforcing connection between humans and our habitats is the same mutually beneficial agreement with the Earth (Gaia if you like) that every other species has. These linkages, collectively produce and maintain the anomalous improbability of life on Earth.
The challenge of our time is to align our modern lives with Gaia. She has some rules we have to follow:
Energy comes from the sun. What lands on the Earth in the daylight is the basis of the planetary energy budget. Staying within this budget will ensure planetary energetic balance. The current solar income is the basis of a sustainable energy budget for any particular location. Ecosystems creatively convert solar energy to energy-rich matter. Sometimes this matter gets buried. Carbon sequestration, on a planetary scale, produced the petroleum we enjoy so much. This leads to the next “law”
Life is negentropy. Entropy is disorder. It is the measurement of how unorganized stuff is. Matter is stuff. The stuff we are made of. Our bodies are matter, organized. Life, amazingly, can select bits and pieces of dirt and water to make bones, hair, brains, and eyeballs. All with differing amounts of the Earth’s elements. Concentrated, organized, structured: negative entropy, “negentropy”.
All things are linked. No species is self-sufficient. We all need the support of the other species on this planet. No place on this planet is unaffected by life. The living shape the land, as we are shaped by it.
Certain substances are not compatible with life. Xenobiotics they are called, which means “foreign to life”. Lead, for example is a xenobiotic. There is no biological requirement for lead by any species on this planet. Some have figured out how to use lead to scare away predators. The plants that evolved to tolerate lead-rich soils tasted bad to the local plant-munching animals. But this comes at a cost. The toxic effects of Lead require a lot of work to avoid cell damage and death. The plant Thlaspi, that evolved to grow in polluted soils left over from Roman Lead smelters in the UK for example, is a tiny, slow-growing little thing. It has to invest heavily to keep the Lead that protects it from being munched on, from causing damage to itself.
Water is the vehicle of life. As far as we know, life cannot exist without water. The planet is mostly water. We are mostly water. There is a reason for this: water makes life possible. Without the “fourth-phase” (solid, liquid, and gas are the three phases of matter) of being in water, life is impossible. Life is water based. It is the courier molecule that allows matter to flow in and out of our bodies, in and out of our cells.
Diversity = strength. Ecosystems that loose enough diversity eventually fail. Consider the “rivet popping” analogy for diversity. Imagine you are in a plane flying through the blue sky. As you look out your window, you see a rivet (those buttons that hold sheets of metal together) pop out of the wing. That one rivet, while discomforting, probably doesn’t critically weaken the wing, so you ignore it. “Maybe I was imagining it? What-ever.” Then another one pops out and flies away. You are getting worried, but it is just two rivets of the thousands that hold the wing together. How many rivets does it take for you to stand up and start shouting? 10? 20? 100? More importantly, how many rivets does it take for the wing to fall off and the plane to fall to the ground? Species diversity in ecosystems can be viewed in this way (albeit simplistic). Loose one species to extinction, bummer but, we’ll live.. two.. o.k…. two-million…two billion…2 trillion ? We are in the midst of the 6th mass extinction. Millions of species are being lost. Whole ecosystems are beginning to fail as a result. Increasing ecological (and cultural) diversity is central to re-establishing healthy, resilient human habitats.
Love concurs. E.O. Wilson proposed that we (humans) are naturally predisposed to enjoy nature for a reason. That is not to say that we are all environmentalists, but that we find beauty, joy, and pleasure in nature. Biophilia (love of life/nature) he said, is an evolutionary adaptation to help us survive. Logic would have it that people who an affinity for nature will want to interact with it and therefore understand it. If we find beauty in the species around us, we pay attention to them, and they teach us where the food is, what is safe, and how to navigate. If you love it, you get it.
Today, things are very different (duh). We don’t need nature to survive. Not in the Anthropocene. We are inside, on a screen, heated, cooled, medicated, and entertained. Our food resembles no living entity on Earth in shape or taste. The images we consume are no longer organic, three-dimensional objects, but renditions of purely human constructs. The divorce from Nature is not a new phenomenon, yet has reached a crescendo of tsunami proportions. It threatens the fabric of our planetary ecosystem. And it all has to do with love, love, love…(biophilia actually).
Unless we actively design nature into our lives our separation from it will only grow further. That separation is the root cause of all environmental issues.
Ecological design is the science of designing nature into our modern lives to solve problems. As we adapt to a human dominated planet, we must transition from unwittingly blundering down a path of self-destruction to intentionally designing solutions. Ecological design aims to achieve just that.
