Dianne Dumanoski: The End of the Long Summer

Dianne Dumanoski: The End of the Long Summer: Why We Must Remake Our Civilization to Survive on a Volatile Earth (2009, Crown)

This book tackles one of the great subjects of our time, but it doesn't do much with it. The nearly exponential economic growth of the last few decades/last couple of centuries is bound to run into numerous limits: finite resources, undesired side effects. Such growth is unsustainable, yet the idea is so ingrained that we are going to be hard pressed to think our way out of the coming crises. Dumanoski covers some of this problem -- global warming, the ozone hole -- while aluding to things like peak oil and energy use, and she sketches out a general indictment of growth fetishism. She casts doubt on the notion that we can simply solve problems with easy technological fixes. She appreciates the complexity of the planet, but she ties much of this to Lovelock's Gaia Hypothesis. She also explores recent human evolution, finding perverse hope in our past experience with various climate change challenges. But she must realize that what happened in the Younger Dryas, when we had marginal numbers and no infrastructure, has next to nothing in common with our near future. I don't doubt that the species will survive. But I don't think it's going to be pretty.

1. The Future Head On (pp. 2-3):

In the ultimate irony, however, human domination of the Earth has not brought with it the control of nature promised by the modern era's guiding myth of progress. Nor has it brought "the end of nature" as the author of an early book on global warming lamented. Rather we are already witnessing Nature's return to center stage as a critical player in human history. This development, more than any other, will shape the human future. [ . . . ]

The End of the Long Summer looks anew at the human story and sets forth an account radically different from the onward and upward progress narrative of the modern era. The source of its hope lies not in the belief that humans are destined to achieve dominion but rather in the evidence that we are a stormworthy lineage that has managed to flourish on an increasingly volatile Earth. We come from a long line of survivors who were tempered in the crucible of climatic reversals and catastrophic change.

2. The Planetary Era (p. 13):

Much more than merely an assemblage of ecosystems or a catalog of species, the Earth, not unlike the human body, is a dynamic whole that emerges from the interaction of all of life, the oceans, the air, the soil, and the rocks. It functions as a unified system with a global metabolism that depends on the living organisms that inhabit it -- microbes, plants, and animals -- as well as on chemical and geological processes, including the weathering of rocks, the eruption of volcanoes, and the downward plunge -- subduction -- of tectonic plates that make up the Earth's crust. This great global metabolism is what keeps the Earth a suitable place for life. Without this nonstop planetary maintenance, the Earth would not be the shimmering, inviting, cloud-draped blue and green orb we have only recently come to see as a whole in photographs astronauts have taken from space. Various parts of this system help maintain the balance of gases in the atmosphere, modulate the Earth's temperature, shield our planet from the sun's dangerous radiation, and recycle water and elements vital to life: carbon, nitrogen, sulfur, and phosphorus. In a great flux that developed over billions of years, these four nutrients, which are essential to life on the planet, constantly circulate in endless interconnected cycles far and wide across the face of the Earth as they move through plants and animals to soils, oceans, and atmosphere and back again to plants and animals.

(p. 21):

Around 1820, the long-coupled trajectories of economic growth and population growth parted ways. This unprecedented divergence occurred as steam engines, rather than muscle, wind, water, or animals, powered the second phase of the Industrial Revolution and the process of industrialization grew to dominate the economic organization of the societies where it had taken root. Propelled by access to fossil energy, the world economy began to expand far faster than human numbers and would accelerate over time to attain astonishing exponential growth. The barest statistics here are simply breathtaking. In the past two centuries, while human population increased more than sixfold from 1 billion to now more than 6 billion, energy use has escalated more than eightyfold, and the world's economy (measured in 1990 international dollars) has grown roughly sixty-eight-fold. It took all of human history for the global economy to reach the 1950 level of over $5 trillion; in this decade, the world economy expanded that much in a single year.

(p. 23):

Indeed, the familiar graphs of historical and environmental trends over time -- carbon dioxide emissions, affluence, energy consumption, water use, paper consumption, the number of automobiles, economic growth, fertilizer and water use, ozone depletion -- all trace a path that climbs gently upward from around 1800, and then in the mid twentieth century, the line suddenly shifts into vertical liftoff like a rocket. To emphasize this profound acceleration of human impact on all fronts since 1950, the authors of a definitive volume in global change presented twenty-four such graphs in a memorable two-page centerfold, charting how and why this half century has been "unique in the entire history of human existence on earth."

I first encountered this stunning statistic about the change in my own lifetime almost two decades ago, yet my mind still reels when I pause to contemplate what it says about this time on Earth. It is almost impossible to grasp the magnitude and speed.

3. Lessons from the Ozone Hole (p. 44):

Scientists have not fully explained this great transition to the oxygen-rich atmosphere we know today, and they are still hotly debating various theories about how this pulse of free oxygen figured in the tumultuous planetary events that followed. The span between 2.3 billion and 580 million years ago -- from the beginning of July to mid-October -- was a perilous period in Earth's history, marked by wild instability in which conditions swung back and forth between extremes of cold and heat. Three, perhaps four, extreme ice ages with temperatures averaging 58 degrees below zero F alternated with interludes of equally extreme hothouse conditions with average temperatures of 122 degrees F.

(p. 52):

Once the war ended, the Bug Bomb made its way into peacetime commerce with breathtaking speed. As the formal surrender of the Japanese was taking place in September 1945, Bug Bombs filled with pyrethrum, DDT, and Freon were already hitting the shelves at Gimbels department store in New York City and proving a runaway success. The first 2,500 sold out in two hours, and the consumer stampede was on -- not only for Freon-propelled DDT, sold with such names as RealKill, but for any other products that could be delivered by means of a convenient aerosol spray can. Once the aerosol industry solved initial problems like leaky, clogging valves, America launched into the aerosol age of air fresheners, hair spray, and Reddi Whip in lightweight aluminum cans propelled by a combination of Midgley's Freons, CFC-11 and CFC-12. As air-conditioning and aerosol cans became as much necessities for Americans as refrigerators, CFC production in the postwar years shot upward, growing from some 100,000 tons a year in the late 1950s to 1.5 million tons by 1986. With each pssssttt of a spray can, CFCs floated off into the atmosphere.

(p. 62):

Just a few years before the ozone hole emerged, Robert L. Sinsheimer, a prominent molecular biologist and commentator on matters of scientific risk, noted that our scientific and technological civilization has proceeded on faith in the resilience, even the benevolence, of nature -- "The faith that nature does not set booby traps for unsuspecting species." Writing at the time of the ozone debate in the late 1970s, Sinsheimer discussed CFCs and the ozone layer, assuming that it would require an "extended, large-scale release of fluorocarbons" to cause massive depletion.

We could hardly have been more wrong. The ozone hole was not only a surprise; it far surpassed any worst-case scenario that scientists had thought plausible. Although the destruction occurred in the stratosphere, as Rowland and Molina had theorized eleven years earlier, it proceeded through a completely different chemical process. Most important, this hole in the sky was not caused by gross pollution but rather by vanishingly small concentrations of man-made chemicals in the Earth's atmosphere.The quantity of total chlorine from CFCs and other compounds that caused this loss of the ozone layer over an area larger than North America can be measured not in parts per million, but in parts per billion.

4. The Return of Nature (pp. 81-82):

For the past million years, the Earth has swung between ice ages and these warmer interglacials, but moments on Earth with a climate as warm and benign as ours today have been few, fleeting, and very far between. The warm spells recorded in the slender tubes of ice seem brief punctuations between lengthy, fitful, icebound ages lasting 100,000 years; over the past 430,000 years, then amount to 10 percent or less of this long span of time. The three interglacial respites before ours lasted no more than 6,000 years. The only other time in this ice record when the climate stayed so mild and steady for so long occurred 410,000 years ago -- long before modern humans appeared on the scene -- and lasted 28,000 years. During this time, the Earth's orbit, which changes shape over time and plays a role in climate cycles, was similar to its orbit today, so it provides a reasonable analogue for the natural course of our own interglacial, a course now being disrupted by human alteration of the atmosphere and climate system. Without this interference, this mild time might have lasted another 10,000 to 20,000 years.

This long summer has been critical to recent human history. "It seems unlikely that human societies could have evolved to their impressive level of today in interglacials of 6,000 years or less . . . ," observes James White, who studies the Earth's climate history at the University of Colorado. "We have needed this long period of stable and warm climate to develop modern, complex societies." This unusual climatic interlude has made our current way of life possible.

(pp. 84-85):

A stunning episode some 12,900 years ago known as the Younger Dryas has left "unequivocal evidence" of radical and swift climatic leaps in the not-too-distant past. After roughly 100,000 years of cold and ice, the last ice age finally gave way to a spectacularly sudden warming about 14,700 years ago, and the ice sheets covering North America and Europe began a melting retreat. The transition toward warmer interglacial conditions continued for eighteen centuries. Then, the progress suddenly halted, and the Earth plunged back, within a few generations, to near-glacial conditions in the Younger Dryas, named after a beautiful and rugged white-petaled flower, commonly known as mountain avens, that endures the extremes found in high mountains and the Arctic. Cold, dry, windy conditions persisted for twelve centuries before this interlude ended in an abrupt warming during which the average temperature in Greenland jumped by as much as 18 degrees F. [ . . . ]

Past leaps like the sudden shifts in and out of the Younger Dryas have usually taken place during cold periods, but warm periods have also seen dramatic shifts. The world was fully in the current interglacial 8,200 years ago, and temperatures in northern regions were a bit higher than today, when temperatures in Greenland plummeted again by 10 degrees F over a century.

(pp. 88-89):

If the ice sheets collapse, the world may again face the kind of astonishing surge in sea levels that happened 14,500 years ago.Over the 400 years that followed, sea levels rose an average of 1½ feet a decade -- an unimaginably fast rate. By the time the surge ended, sea levels had climbed 65 feet. The last time the Earth reached the temperatures anticipated conservatively by the end of this century -- 3 to 5 degrees F warmer -- sea levels were 82 feet higher than today. Beacon Hill, the highest spot in Boston's downtown, rising 100 feet above the harbor, will become a tiny island. The rest of the historic district with its revolutionary landmarks will go under along with New York, London, Sydney, Shanghai, Tokyo, Calcutta, Bangkok, Bangladesh, most of Florida, much of the Netherlands, the Nile Delta, many Pacific island nations, and coastal cities around the world. Such a huge, rapid jump in sea levels would drive at least a half billion people inland. Hollywood would be hard-pressed to exaggerate the likely chaos.

5. A Stormworthy Lineage: Mostly on human evolution in the wake of climate change.

6. Playing Prospero: The Temptations of Technofix (pp. 131-132):

A technological fix is the quintessential modern response. The great appeal of geoengineering is that it promises we can escape this dilemma without disrupting the status quo, without making fundamental changes in our energy system or in the global economy. But looking for technological solutions -- whether bold geoengineering or more modest energy alternatives -- is a piecemeal approach that focuses on individual symptoms of this far broader human crisis. It tends to simplify the world and how we perceive what ails us. Thus, the many aspects of global change affecting Earth's metabolism get reduced to a climate problem, and that in turn is reduced to a problem of carbon dioxide and fossil fuels, when other human activities and other greenhouse gases also play important roles. So the "solution" is either alternative energy or geoengineering to offset the problems caused by fossil fuels. Focusing narrowly and simplifying, as is the modern wont, short-circuits thinking about the systematic nature of our dilemma.

(p. 136):

In the quarter century following World War II, the belief that humanity's conquest of nature was within reach spurred U.S. and Russian scientists to chase the dream of controlling the weather or even permanently altering the climate. Various research projects during this period aimed to increase rainfall, to improve the harsh Russian climate by using soot or nuclear devices to melt the Arctic ice cap, and to add climate and weather alteration to the arsenal in warfare. An advisory committee in the late 1950s reported to President Dwight Eisenhower that "weather modification could become a more important weapon than the atom bomb." During the Vietnam War, the United States ventured secretly into climatological warfare with extensive cloud-seeding operations over the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the maze of footpaths, dirt roads, and rivers used to supply the North Vietnamese army. Whether Project Popeye, which flew more than 2,600 cloud-seeding missions, actually succeeded in increasing rains and bogging down the enemy supply line in mud is unclear, but it certainly did not turn the tide of the war in favor of the United States. When news of this weather warfare came to light, it set off controversy and protest that culminated in 1977 in an international treaty banning the hostile use of "environmental modification techniques."

(pp. 138-139):

Over the years, [Edward] Teller championed U.S. nuclear superiority to the Soviet Union, arguing that such an arms race helped ensure world stability. At the same time, he generated a long list of mad-sounding schemes involving the "peaceful" use of nuclear bombs. His memorable brainstorms included proposals to use hydrogen bombs to dig a deepwater harbor in Alaska for coal and oil transport, to excavate a second canal across Panama, to extract oil from the tar sands in Alberta, and even to "modify the weather." A recent biography concludes that Teller may have been crazy like a fox: There is evidence that his "peaceful atom" civilian projects were a cover for military activities -- a ploy to continue weapons testing in the event that international talks then under way ended in a test ban.

All these projects proved unwise, unsafe, and infeasible, but Teller nevertheless wielded substantial influence with U.S. presidents and Congress throughout the Cold War. As a member of the White House Science Council, he helped convince President Reagan of the need for a space-based missile defense system using lasers and satellites that was popularly known as Star Wars. Other leading nuclear scientists mounted a campaign against the proposal, arguing not only that it was a bad idea on several counts but also that it simply would not work. Teller, however, was undaunted. His faith in human ingenuity and technological prowess was so extreme that he ignored or simply dismissed risks and hazards. His response to growing concern about radioactive particles raining down worldwide from nuclear weapons testing was typical: Fallout was "not worth worrying about."

(p. 145):

The various geoengineering schemes to remedy the warming caused by CO₂ fall under three broad categories: blocking the sun, boosting land and ocean processes that naturally absorb carbon dioxide, and capturing and sequestering carbon dioxide so ti does not accumulate in the atmosphere. These approaches all have serious shortcomings, and as a general rule, the low-cost solutions are also the most questionable.

(p. 160):

The escape of carbon dioxide from an underground storage site poses two kinds of hazards. If the gas leaks out slowly, it would defeat the purpose of capture and make the whole effort a waste of time and money. If leaking carbon dioxide were to accumulate in pockets beneath the ground and then escape in a rapid burst, it could kill people, who would be suffocated as the carbon dioxide displaced oxygen. Sudden releases of carbon dioxide near volcanoes and seismic faults have taken a considerable toll. In 1986, 1,700 people in Cameroon died after 1.2 million tons of carbon dioxide exploded out of the depths of Lake Nyos, which lies in a volcanic crater. The gas release killed all living things within a fifteen-mile radius. A blast of carbon dioxide from a volcano in Indonesia suffocated 142 people. If carbon dioxide stored underground escaped and seeped into a basement, it would be odorless and invisible, but it would kill anyone who entered. There is also concern that injecting large amounts of carbon dioxide underground could trigger earthquakes. Because there would always be some danger that carbon dioxide would find a way to escape, any carbon dioxide storage sites on land would require long-term monitoring.

7. On Vulnerability and Survivability (pp. 172-173):

The menacing storm is one of our own making. We haven't, however, recognized the other half of our dilemma: that this civilization is making us ever more vulnerable to the instability and disruption it has set in motion. While industrial civilization has succeeded famously in raising living standards over the past two centuries, at the same time it has been compromising much of the adaptability that characterizes our species. The central fact about this highly specialized social and economic system is that it depends on existing conditions. The modern way of life is "fully predicated upon stable climate, cheap energy and water, and rapid population and economic growth," as environmental historian J.R. McNeill observes -- circumstances that can be only temporary on a finite, changeable Earth. Over the past century, many societies around the world have committed without reservation to this single, specialized, fossil fuel-based strategy. In this respect, the human enterprise now has much in common with the extinct "lawnmower" species of the African savanna, which adapted superbly to one set of conditions and were extremely successful -- until conditions shifted. For most of the human career, as McNeill points out, we have shared far more with rats: another species of nimble, flexible generalists and remarkable survivors.

(pp. 209-210):

The time is ripe to question the economic dogma that has set the course for national policy and shaped the larger world through the policies of the WTO, the World Bank, and the IMF. At the heart of the clash between efficiency and prudence is a deeper question about the relationship of the economy to the larger society. During the modern era in the West, as the economic historian Karl Polanyi observed, "human society became an accessory of the economic system." Whatever the merits of this arrangement in the past, and there have been many, its dangers at this historical juncture are becoming all too apparent. Characterizing climate change as "the greatest and widest ranging market failure ever seen," Sir Nicholas Stern, who headed the Stern report on climate change and the economy for the British government, made it clear that the human future cannot be left to markets. Moreover, the perils of excessive integration became all too apparent again in late 2008 as a mortgage crisis stemming from irresponsible, often fraudulent lending practices in the United States quickly mushroomed into a global financial crisis. The cause wasn't simply "greed on Wall Street" or deregulation policies that were part of the reigning market fundamentalism. It became a global crisis because of "tight chains of financial interdependence," which make the system vulnerable to the kind of cascading collapse described by Simon Levin.

8. A New Map for the Planetary Era: A lot of stuff about James Lovelock's Gaia Hypothesis (p. 240):

The individualism at the core of modern identity begins to lose its hard boundaries when one recognizes that the Earth system is a nested hierarchy made up of many levels and sizes of "individuals," each composed of still smaller individuals. "A good case can be made for our nonexistence as entities," Lewis Thomas maintained. "We are shared, rented, occupied." Even our smallest part, the cell, is a merger between two originally separate organisms. The mitochondria, which provide the cell's energy, bear the stamp of separate origin in possessing their own DNA apart from the DNA in the cell nucleus. In the prescient words of the nineteenth-century English novelist Samuel Butler, "Every individual is a compound creature." Our bodies are the home for a vast population of microbes, numbering roughly 100 trillion, including an estimated 500 species of gut bacteria that contribute to proper intestinal development, digestion, and the health of the immune system. In a similar way, each of us inhabits a larger "individual," the Earth system or, in Butler's words, "this huge creature LIFE." The Gaian lens blurs separateness and illuminates connection and relationship. It reveals that we are so embedded in this living commonwealth and Earthly process that it is difficult to determine exactly where any individual begins and ends. "Life did not take over the globe by combat," says Lynn Margulis, "but by networking."

9. Honest Hope (p. 251):

"Societies founded on a faith in progress cannot admit the normal unhappiness of human life," observes John Gray, the British historian. "We have been reared on religions and philosophies that deny the experience of tragedy." I think he is right when he concludes: "The good life is not found in dreams of progress, but in coping with tragic contingencies."

posted 2009-10-16