Children of the Wasteland: Experimental Biology vs. Global Catastrophe ch.1

Children of the Wasteland: Experimental Biology versus Global Catastrophe.

"The force that through the green fuse drives the flower drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees is my destroyer, and I am dumb to tell the crooked rose my youth is bent by the same wintry fever." Dylan Thomas.

"Our capacity to find new ways to understand and manipulate complex systems is strongly related to how we categorize agency in our world." Michael Levin.

Chapter One: Will the Wasteland Blossom? How will life evolve in response to the rapid and profound changes the planet is experiencing? That's the broadest phrasing of the thesis question of Children of the Wasteland.

The more concrete and specific form of it that I am asking is, can synthetic biology prevent catastrophic Earth system changes? It isn't clear to me where this question belongs in the modern world's vast landscape of political ideas and tendencies.

More to the point, it seems an awful lot like the question really isn't being asked, at least in a very serious or interesting way among, say, environmental organizations, governments, or academics, not in a way that tangibly identifies useful paths forward.

I've spent a good deal of my life participating in environmental politics, and it is quite clear that the movements, organizations, and political strategies I have been exposed to have not equipped me to grapple with this subject.

The stories I inherited from environmentalism were all a lot more apocalyptic and honestly a lot more one-dimensional than that.

They always trafficked in a language of irreversibility, catastrophic loss, and hasty timelines.

We tried to save old-growth forests because there was only two to five percent of old-growth forests remaining, and the tangled web of species that relied on them were in rapid decline.

And beyond a certain point, the whole thing starts to unravel even if you stop logging.

We tried to keep the composition of the atmosphere within a range that's compatible with the climate to which life is adapted by preventing fossil fuel extraction.

Now, one of the obvious reasons these stories are difficult for some of us to give up is because they are true.

Taken on their own terms, the major scientific claims upon which modern environmentalism has tried and utterly failed to advance its agenda are valid.

But they are also the product of a certain frame of reference, the usefulness of which is no longer apparent to me.

The frame of reference is not one I have great language for, nor wish to characterize too extensively on its own terms.

We might call it the nature's delicate balance, everything is connected, let's act before it's too late way of thinking about things.

It emphasizes how complex, interconnected, and contingent on specific conditions ecosystems are.

It seems constituted in opposition to the heedless certainty of the technocratic worldview.

Wait a second, this frame says, your plan for logging the forest doesn't take into account how the owls are dependent on the trees, which are dependent on the root-penetrating fungus, which are dependent on the voles, which are dependent on the trees.

The land managers made confident and cheerful proclamations about the limited effects their logging would have.

And we, with a kind of mournful reverence for the complexity of ecosystems, would point out the webs of causality which would cause their effects to reverberate through those ecosystems in ways they weren't understanding.

Again, it's worth pointing out that we were right.

But this way of thinking is only one way of thinking, and it's also worth pointing out what it excludes.

That's the idea of a frame of reference.