Mourning the Land

Any reading of the ecological literature makes clear that ours is a time of significant ecological loss. Evidence accrues that the sixth mass extinction is well under way, that global ecosystem productivity is in steep decline, and that the biosphere as a whole is becoming irreparably damaged by human actions.

In addition to being the subject of intense scientific scrutiny, global environmental change and regional ecological decline are increasingly embedded within everyday experience, evoking strong mental and emotional responses across the population.

Although most people are generally aware that climate change is occurring, it continues to seem distant: something that will happen to others, in another place, at some unspecified future date. Psychologists refer to this idea as ‘psychological distance’. 

Terms such as ‘climate change’ and ‘global warming’ draw attention to the global scale, rather than the personal impacts. Additionally, the signal of climate change is obscured by the noise of daily and seasonal weather variation. All this makes the issue easier for people to push aside, particularly when faced with other pressing life issues.

Perhaps one of the best ways to characterize the impacts of climate change on perceptions, is the sense of loss. Loss of relationship to place is a substantial part of this. As climate change irrevocably changes people’s lived landscapes, large numbers are likely to experience a feeling that they are losing a place that is important to them - a phenomenon called solastalgia. 

This psychological phenomenon is characterized by a sense of desolation and loss, similar to that experienced by people forced to migrate from their home environment. Solastalgia may have a more gradual beginning due to the slow onset of changes in one’s local environment. 

Hence, we can argue that recognising ecological grief as a legitimate response to ecological loss, is an important first step for humanising climate change and its related impacts; and for expanding our understanding of what it means to be human in the Anthropocene. 

How to grieve ecological losses well - particularly when they are ambiguous, cumulative and ongoing - is a question currently without answer. However, it is a question that we expect will become more pressing as further impacts from climate change, including loss, are experienced.

The loss of local knowledge, or traditional ecological knowledge, may be a key trigger for ecological grief. Various groups have reported having lost confidence in the seasonal rhythms of the weather; and in their ability to ‘know it’. Such experiences are often associated with anxieties related to the long-term future.

Indigenous people, in particular, identify feeling deep sadness and distress that much of their environmental knowledge - gained from generations of sharing; with ‘on-the-land’ observation and learning - are suddenly shifting and eroding. 

Elders express worry about giving advice around travel routes and weather conditions, as parameters for prediction and risk, have shifted so much in recent years that they no longer have confidence in their knowledge. This causes grief at the loss of their own identity associated with ‘knowing the land’.

However, ecological grief should not be seen as submitting to despair, and neither does it justify ‘switching off’ from the many environmental problems that confront humanity. Instead, we should find great hope in the responses ecological grief is likely to invoke. Just as grief over the loss of a loved person puts into perspective what matters in our lives.

Being open to the pain of ecological loss may be what is needed to prevent such losses from occurring in the first place. Indigenous populations have been, and continue to be, the tripwire for humanity. City dwellers, in an urbanizing world, are in denial if they think that the effects of climate change is a rural problem. 

Cities, as the highest concentrations of people, will be particularly vulnerable. Laboratory experiments have demonstrated a causal relationship between heat and aggression. As the temperature goes up, so does aggression; which also reduces the ability to resolve conflict without violence. 

Furthermore, research indicates that many individuals identified feeling anticipatory grief, for ecological changes that had not yet happened. In these cases, grief for anticipated future ecological losses is also tied to grief over future losses to culture, livelihoods and ways of life. 

Given that we are living in a time of extraordinary ecological loss, and that these losses will not end any time soon, we can anticipate - along with a small, but growing, number of scholars - that ecological grief will become an increasingly common human response to the losses encountered in the Anthropocene. 

To bear witness to ecological losses personally, or to the suffering encountered by others as they bear their own losses, is to be reminded that climate change is not just an abstract scientific concept. Rather, it is the source of much hitherto unacknowledged emotional and psychological pain, particularly for people who remain deeply connected to, and observant of, the natural world.

History, Herstory, Ourstory

In modern science we've gotten used to the idea that science doesn't offer meaning in the way that institutional religions did in the past. This idea that modernity puts us in a world without meaning - philosophers have banged on about this for a century-and-a-half - may be completely wrong. We may be living on an intellectual building site, where a new story is being constructed. It's vastly more powerful than the previous stories because it's the first one that is global. It's not anchored in a particular culture or a particular society.

This is an origin story that works for all humans. Ourstory sums over vastly more information than any early origin story. This is very powerful stuff. It's full of meaning. We're now at the point where, across so many domains, the amount of information - of good, rigorous ideas - is so rich that we can tease out that story. We need such a history of humanity, because as long as we teach history as a story of competing tribes, wars of all kinds are going to repeat themselves.

What would it look like? Chronologically, most of human history was spent in the Stone Age. In Africa, the Stone Age survived until very recently. To talk about human evolution, we have to go beyond the borders of the history discipline and talk about how humans evolved. To do that seriously we have to talk about the origins of life, which means talking about how the planet was formed and getting into geology. And, to do that seriously, we have to look at astronomy; with the Big Bang.                

Can we tell Ourstory that begins with the origins of the universe? That would be the way to give a sense of humanity, as a single species facing shared problems in the modern world. We need to cross the divide between the sciences and the humanities. But, what happens at that borderline? The claims of science are powerful today, but also, they're not absolute. Most of us have a simple epistemology with two default positions: either science is right, and therefore everything before science is wrong, or they're all stories. The origin stories of the past are not completely wrong either. However, we need to manoeuvre into a more complex (and unstable) central position.                  

What is this cosmos we’re part of? What does it mean to be human? What is our place in the cosmos? Are we a large part of it? Are we central? Are we marginal? Is there anything distinctive about humans? What sort of story would emerge at the end of this? In the past, in all cultural traditions, we had unifying stories. Currently, we don't seem to have one in the modern world. As it turns out, there is a coherent story that’s possible though.

We can tell it across eight thresholds of increasing complexity. The first is the Big Bang itself, the creation of the universe. The second is the creation of stars. Once you have stars, already the universe has much more diversity. Stars have structure; galaxies have structure. You now have rich gradients of energy, of density, of gravity; so you've got flows of energy that can now build more complex things.                

Dying stars give you the next threshold, which is creating a universe with all of the elements of the periodic table, so it's now chemically richer. You can now make new materials. You can make the materials of planets, moons and asteroids. On some planets, particularly rocky planets, you get an astonishing chemical diversity. The reason is because most of the hydrogen and helium from the inner solar system was driven away by the solar wind. In the inner planets you're left with an environment that's remarkably chemically rich, and that's the environment that eventually gave birth to life on this planet. The odds are increasing that the universe is crawling with life.                

Life is a fifth threshold; planets are a fourth threshold. One of the wonderful things about this story is that, as we widen the lens, we’re increasingly convinced that all these very big questions that we're asking (that seem impossible) begin to look manageable from the large scale. Organic life itself, for example. With life, we get complex entities appearing in extremely unstable environments. They need to be able to manage energy flows to maintain their complexity. As their environments are constantly changing, they need some mechanism for detecting changes. That is the point at which information enters Ourstory.                

Something like choice happens, because no longer do living organisms make choices mechanically; they make choices in a more complex way. They can't always guarantee that they're going to make the same choice. That's where natural selection kicks in. There are billions of organisms making different choices, and natural selection allows the right choices to get preserved within the lineage. Making the right choices matters. That means, in a sense, that purpose has arrived at this point. That is why living organisms are so complex; and why they give the appearance of purpose.

Human beings (the 5^th threshold of increasing complexity) are the only organisms that can ask the question: what makes humans different? It's a question that the humanities have struggled with for centuries. Within this very broad narrative of Ourstory, there's a fairly clear answer to that. All living organisms use information to control and manage their energy flows. Biologists call it metabolism. When a new species appears, its numbers will increase until it's using the energy that its particular metabolic repertoire allows it to fill.

Yet, look at graphs of human population growth and something utterly different is going on. Here, you have a species that appears in the savannah lands of Africa, but it doesn't stay there. During the Stone Age - over perhaps 200,000 years - we can watch our species, certainly in the last 70,000 years, slowly spreading into new niches. By 10,000 years ago our species had spread around the world. This is utterly new behavior. This is a species that is acquiring more, and more and more information. That is the key to what makes us different.

We can ask what it is that allows us not to be locked within a limited, metabolic repertoire, but to keep expanding that repertoire. There may be a very simple answer. There's got to be one thing that, like a key, unlocks a door. I suspect it's linguistic. We know that information does not seem to accumulate generation by generation in other species. If it did, we would see evidence of it. We would see a species that was gradually widening its niche. Thus, humans have crossed a linguistic threshold. It's as if suddenly human language is more efficient; information accumulates faster than it's lost.

That means something profound. It means we're the first species in 4 billion years in which information accumulates across generations, through the cultural mechanism, not through the genetic mechanism. The cultural mechanism, of course, is orders of magnitude faster than the genetic mechanism. That is the foundation for explaining everything that makes us different. If we add in that more information for a living organism gives us more control over resources and energy flows, then what we're doing is watching a species whose control over the energy flowing through the biosphere increases, and increases at an exponential rate.

If such species exist on other planets, we can guarantee one thing: hang around for a few hundred thousand years, and there will be something like an Anthropocene. This species will dominate flows of energy on its planet. That's where we are right now. We're managing these colossal flows of energy; we're benefitting from them; they can make us staggeringly wealthy; they also give us a buffer against crude needs that is something utterly new, but they are on such a scale that they're beginning to disrupt old biospheric cycles - the carbon cycle, the nitrogen cycle - they're disrupting biodiversity.

So, can we maintain the good things, the things that make a good life for us as a result of our increasing control of energy, without undermining the Goldilocks conditions (not too hot, not too cold) that allow us humans to build this extraordinarily complex civilization? One of the reasons why this approach to Ourstory, this attempt to put everything together, is so important is partly because specialization, for all its achievements in the last century-and-a-half - and they've been staggering - is part of the reason why so many people struggle. One of the things that Ourstory can do, is help us see that there is a coherent narrative across the ages.

If I'm right, then telling Ourstory is about our place in space and time. In this sense, it's a mapping process. It tells us where we are. And that mapping process, which is present in all origin stories is powerful and meaningful because it tells us who we are. By doing that, it tells us what possibilities are open to us. It explains why communities are so various, because each community accumulates information in slightly different ways. It explains why, when communities meet, the synergies are so powerful. It's the source of civilization. It's what makes humanity.                

If that's right, to explain what makes us different, we need to distinguish between two problems. One is how our ancestors crossed that linguistic threshold. Explaining that is a fiendishly complex, technical problem that involves a vast range of evidence, some of it neurological, some of it archaeological, some of it anthropological. The second problem is much more manageable: defining the threshold itself, what it changed. That we can do, and we can do quite simply.

In summary, we can define the general nature of the threshold that makes humans different. We can say that it's a language so efficient that information accumulates across generations. We know exactly how that happened. When the first anatomically modern humans started their rock art 73,000 years ago, which is evidence of symbolic activity. In this way our Stone Age ancestors encoded a future past on stone; which our current spiritual teachers, linguists and neuroscientists may solve one day. As more and more people begin to take seriously the idea of an overview of all modern knowledge - Ourstory - it'll generate astonishing synergies with the power of a Big Bang cosmology. 

The future of the human narrative is anything but dark.

Digitopia

Has your mobile phone turned you into a Pavlovian dog? George Dyson, author of Turing’s Cathedral and Darwin Among the Machines, explains that nations, alliances of nations and national institutions are in decline; while a state perhaps best described as Oligarchia is on the ascent.

All revolutions come to an end, whether they succeed or fail. The digital revolution began when stored-program computers broke the distinction between numbers that mean things and numbers that do things. Numbers that do things now rule the world. But who rules over the machines?

Once it was simple: programmers wrote the instructions that were supplied to the machines. Since the machines were controlled by these instructions, those who wrote the instructions controlled the machines.

Two things then happened. As computers proliferated, the humans providing instructions could no longer keep up with the insatiable appetite of the machines. Codes became self-replicating, and machines began supplying instructions to other machines. Vast fortunes were made by those who had a hand in this. 

Then something changed. There is now more code than ever, but it is increasingly difficult to find anyone who has their hands on the wheel. Individual agency is on the wane. Most of us, most of the time, are following instructions delivered to us by computers rather than the other way around. 

Childhood’s End was Arthur C. Clarke’s masterpiece, published in 1953, chronicling the arrival of benevolent Overlords who bring many of the same conveniences now delivered by the Keepers of the Internet to Earth. It does not end well. The digital revolution has come full circle and the next revolution has begun. None dare speak its name.

The search engine is no longer a model of human knowledge, it is human knowledge. What began as a mapping of human meaning now defines human meaning, and has begun to control, rather than simply catalogue or index, human thought. No one is at the controls. This is why it is a winner-take-all game. 

We imagine that individuals, or individual algorithms, are still behind the curtain somewhere, in control. We are fooling ourselves. The new gatekeepers, by controlling the flow of information, rule a growing sector of the world. What deserves our full attention is what is happening as these powers escape into the wild and consume the rest of the world.

The next revolution will be the ascent of analogue systems over which the dominion of digital programming comes to an end. Nature’s answer, to those who sought to control nature through programmable machines, is to allow us to build machines whose nature is beyond programmable control.

Friendship

Friendship is a mirror to presence and a testament to forgiveness. Friendship not only helps us to see ourselves through another’s eyes, but can be sustained over the years only with someone who has repeatedly forgiven us for our trespasses as we must find it in ourselves to forgive them in turn.

A friend knows our difficulties and shadows and remains in sight, a companion to our vulnerabilities more than our triumphs, when we are under the strange illusion we do not need them. An undercurrent of real friendship is a blessing exactly because its elemental form is rediscovered again and again through understanding and mercy. All friendships of any length are based on a continued, mutual forgiveness. Without tolerance and mercy all friendships die.

In the course of the years a close friendship will always reveal the shadow in the other as much as ourselves, to remain friends we must know the other and their difficulties and even their sins and encourage the best in them, not through critique but through addressing the better part of them, the leading creative edge of their incarnation, thus subtly discouraging what makes them smaller, less generous, less of themselves.

Friendship is the great hidden transmuter of all relationship: it can transform a troubled marriage, make honorable a professional rivalry, make sense of heartbreak and unrequited love and become the newly discovered ground for a mature parent-child relationship.

The dynamic of friendship is almost always underestimated as a constant force in human life: a diminishing circle of friends is the first terrible diagnostic of a life in deep trouble: of overwork, of too much emphasis on a professional identity of forgetting who will be there when our armored personalities run into the inevitable natural disasters and vulnerabilities found in even the most ordinary existence…

Friendship transcends disappearance: an enduring friendship goes on after death, the exchange only transmuted by absence, the relationship advancing and maturing in a silent internal conversational way even after one half of the bond has passed on.

But no matter the medicinal virtues of being a true friend or sustaining a long close relationship with another, the ultimate touchstone of friendship is not improvement, neither of the self nor of the other, the ultimate touchstone is witness, the privilege of having been seen by someone and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another, to have walked with them and to have believed in them, and sometimes just to have accompanied them for however brief a span, on a journey impossible to accomplish alone.