Authors: Bill Bryson
This line of thinking runs the risk of leading us into futility and sin. Take the futility first. The Earth and its biosphere have, after all, been through far greater, if not faster, fluctuations in temperature than those
currently underway. At the hands of those pesky asteroids it has undergone calamities far more sudden. Its seas have frozen; its continents have been licked with flame. Yet even when it has lost species by the bushel, the biosphere has endured, and in the aftermath flourished. Human agriculture, by contrast, is terrifyingly fragile, largely developed during ten millennia of climatic stability, already thin-stretched over too much of the Earth, with ever more people to feed. The late, great comedian George Carlin summed up the true stakes with foul-mouthed pith: ‘There is nothing wrong with the planet – the planet is fine. The people are fucked.’
This leads on to the question of morality. To focus on the planet, and not on its people, is wrong; to assume that their interests are identical is to ascribe to the planet attributes it does not possess. It is not an abstracted Earth floating in the velvet vault of space that needs protecting; it’s the people inhabiting that world who are at risk of harm, particularly poor people who lack the resources to adapt, to migrate or otherwise to opt out of what is happening to them.
And yet ‘planet in peril’ rhetoric and attendant catastrophic imagery is everywhere. A quick Google search reveals there to be seven, ten, five, four or eight ‘years to save the planet’, depending on your headline writer and expert of choice (‘Eleven years to save the planet’ seems at the moment a rallying cry still up for grabs). It may be that ‘planet’ here is being used simply to mean the environment on which humanity depends. But this way of talking still acts to raise some abstract notion of the environment above the problems that people actually face, many of which are not environmental. The debates needed to assign priorities to human development, to the reduction of consumerism, to the health of the world’s children – important topics all – cannot be reduced to a question about what is good for the planet. Using the planet as a polar bear writ large, a photogenic emblem of the imperilled, obscures more than it illustrates.
At the same time, rather reprehensibly, planet in peril rhetoric trades on a terrible new form of the feeling of the sublime. We are so powerful and so bad, it says, that we threaten the tough old planet itself; we flatter our human power even while condemning it, seeing ourselves as a problem too big to solve. Thus the old vision of humans as vulnerable to an overpowering nature is reversed. The unstoppable threat is us – and we stand aside, wringing our hands but secretly in awe, as that threat sweeps on.
How better, though, can people see the world than as a fragile blue marble separated from their own experience, cut off from any cosmic continuity by a sharp 360° horizon? And why, given the objective truth of the world as revealed by Apollo, should we even try? To the second question, the answer is that there is more than one way of seeing, just as there is more than one way of speaking. There are times when seeing the Earth as a discrete object, a thing in a picture, is peculiarly helpful; there are times when something else is called for.
Contemporary artists have been confronting this issue for decades. History offers any number of fine traditions of landscape art, in both paint and photography, and invoking a variety of responses in their intended viewers. But more recently something new has arisen: art that seeks not merely to reproduce, or evoke, what it looks like, but to involve it in the artistic process directly, to provide art in which viewers meet the world, rather than just contemplate it – an art that interacts. The British artists Ackroyd and Harvey use the growing of grass as a medium with which to reimagine architecture and photography; Richard Long is fascinated by the traces, material and immaterial, left by walking, and how they can be shared; David Nash grows trees into sculpture while Tim Knowles lets them trace out their own drawings, guided only by the wind; and Andy Goldsworthy imprints and erases ideas on the landscape. As David Nash puts it: ‘I think Andy Goldsworthy and I, and Richard Long, and most of the British artists’ collectives associated with Land art, would have been landscape painters a hundred years ago. But we don’t want to make portraits of the landscape. A landscape picture is a portrait. We don’t want that. We want to be in the land.’
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Ingold’s response to the inadequacy and contradiction he perceived in the Earth seen as a blue marble was very similar: to look for ways of thinking that put you in the land, rather than just looking at a portrait. He contrasted the outside-in view with cosmologies that look on the world, or cosmos, as a set of spheres experienced from the inside out. Cultures from Ancient Greece to the Inuits have found ways to layer and interpret their worlds in such nests, privileging the local while connecting it to the cosmos. I would not want to suggest that cosmologies should be chosen on aesthetic or practical grounds, assembled piecemeal from those of other cultures, or generated on the basis of what they have to offer. But it seems to me that there is an appealing way of casting the nested-sphere view in the concepts of modern science that does no disservice to that science: transform the spheres into cycles.
Throughout the twentieth century, the Earth sciences have increasingly treated their subject in terms of cycles, whether the oscillations of the atmosphere or the circulation of the core. The past fifty years have seen acceptance of the Milankovitch cycles – subtle variations in the Earth’s orbit and attitude – as the causal framework for the ice ages, with ice sheets waxing and waning to their heavenly rhythms. They have seen Earth’s magnetic field revealed as a creature that rocks back and forth from North to South, the plaything of dynamic currents circulating in the planet’s core. Most fundamental of all, they have seen the uncovering of the great three-dimensional cycles of plate tectonics, in which the slow and mighty overturning convection of the mantle is coupled to the opening and closing of oceans, the merging and scattering of continents.
In the 1950s Victor Goldschmidt, frequently described as the father of modern geochemistry, put cycles at the centre of that discipline’s study of the Earth, defining it in terms of ‘the circulation of elements in nature’. Both geochemistry and biogeochemistry remain studies of cycles – in the latter case, quite intimate ones: the carbon dioxide given back to the plants with each animal breath, the nitrogen returned to the world in each drop
of urine. The ‘Earth Systems Science’ that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s, often informed by Lovelock’s Gaia, assembled ideas from all these disciplines and subdisciplines into further cycles, cycles made not of matter, but of cause and effect: feedback loops that could stabilise the Earth system or force it into flip-flop oscillations.
Like the components of an astrolabe, the cycles of the Earth system seem to nestle within each other, arranged not by size – they are all, in the end, the size of the planet – but by intimacy and speed, reaching out from the food in our bellies and the wind on our faces to the vastest of vegetable empires and the yet slower, greater mineral realm. Our sweat, once evaporated, spends only days in the sky before falling back as rain. The carbon dioxide we breathe out may be in the air for decades before being eaten up by plants, or take refuge in the oceans for millennia before resurfacing. Other cycles are slower still. While nitrogen compounds can be pumped from sea to sky by microbes, once phosphorus makes its way from soil to the sea it has no easy way back to the atmosphere, and must wait millions of years before, incorporated into sediments, it is lifted up into new mountains to fertilise the soils again. The cycles interpenetrate in such ways all the time, passing through each other in a daunting clockwork of teeth and differentials, their nesting anything but neat, their gearing prone to glitches.
Such a vast machinery seems more daunting to the imagination than a blue marble in space. But while what is circulating, and how it circulates, can be hard and complex questions to fathom, the idea that the world is endlessly recycling itself is an easy perception to train oneself into. The growth of a plant, or the erosion of a gully, are easily seen. And to see a plant grow armed with the knowledge that it does so out of thin air – that is, after all, where the carbon that makes up most of its mass comes from – is to realise that something else must be restoring that nutritive goodness to the atmosphere. To see water cutting into highland rock and washing soil downstream is to realise that, if this is going to go on indefinitely, there must be some way of making new highlands to replace those endlessly
whittled away. When Joseph Priestley and James Hutton first had these insights in the eighteenth century they were hard-won breakthroughs. But once known, they become compellingly obvious; it is hard to see how things could be otherwise in a world that endures.
This dynamic image of the Earth is a corollary of one of the most striking aspects of that timeless, static image of the Earth in space: its limits. The Earth is, in material terms, isolated. Very little arrives (those asteroid impacts are few and far between), and only a whisper of gas escapes. Everything else must be endlessly recycled: and so it is. The rain becomes the ocean and the ocean becomes the rain, the mountains are ground down to cover the sea-floors with silt, ancient silts rise up to make new mountains. Nothing stays the same, and yet the system, mostly, persists. Everything is in flux, but nothing is at risk.
And this flux illustrates perhaps the most useful sense of that unhappy phrase, the ‘balance of nature’. Nature was not designed to balance, any more than it was designed for anything else. It does not have preferred states with which people meddle at their peril, or that carry some sort of moral weight, or to which it wishes necessarily to be restored. It is precisely to the extent that the Earth is off balance that it works; its rolling cycles are like wheels on slopes. But if there is no static equilibrium, there is balance of another sort – a balance like that of a bank account, its debits and credits constrained always to match over time. For every output there must be an input. Any earthly process not looped back on itself in some way, anything that does not carry the seeds of its own recreation, will either be remarkably slow, or will have run its course long ago, or only just have started. Otherwise it will simply run out of credit.
The existence of the Earth’s great recycling can thus be explained by the fact that, in terms of material, it is a closed system. But to explain it this way is immediately to need something more; a source of energy that comes from beyond the system that it powers, and provides the slopes down which the wheels roll. There is work going on in those cycles – pumping, breathing,
lifting, grinding – and work can only be done where there are flows of energy. The second law of thermodynamics, the bane of the perpetual-motion-machine designer, means that such flows of energy cannot, themselves, be recycled; the same energy cannot do the same work twice. If work is to be done continuously, fresh energy needs to be provided continuously, and old energy – waste heat – needs to be disposed of. A world closed in one way must be open in another. The Earth depends on there being a beyond.
The Earth’s circulating carbon atoms and continents and other constituents depend on three streams of energy from the beyond – and, in the case of the heat of the Earth’s interior, from the before as well. Almost all the energy that now comes from within the Earth was put there, in one form or another, at the time of its creation (a tiny amount is now added by the flexing of the planet under the tides of Moon and Sun, but it is the merest smidgen). One stream of energy stems simply from the immense store of heat generated when a planet’s worth of gas and dust fell in upon itself, the ingredients smashing into each other in ever larger pieces and at ever greater speeds as the process went on. The Earth thus started off with vast supplies of heat inside it, and a rocky planet, like any other rock, takes a long time to cool down. Stones in a campfire may still be hot the morning after; a stone the size of the Earth can hold heat for billions of years.
Then there is the heat generated since the Earth’s creation from energy stored up long before. The chemical elements on Earth that are heavier than helium were created in stars that burned out before the Sun and Earth were born, the vast pressures in their hearts squeezing hydrogen into carbon, silicon, oxygen, nitrogen and iron. When such stellar furnaces explode into supernovae, the energies unleashed become great enough to forge elements even heavier. In the case of elements such as uranium and thorium, those great energies will, in time, leak out. The radioactive elements gathered into the Earth at the time of its creation have steadily meted out the supernova energies stored within them. Thus energy from dying stars helps drive the great internal convection currents which move tectonic plates.
Both these streams of energy, though, are small compared to that which rains down from above. The most easily overlooked and perhaps most fundamental feature of the Apollo 17 picture of the Earth is its brilliant over-the-shoulder illumination. Yes, the Earth floats in pitch-black space – but it floats in sunlight, too. It floats in a torrent of the stuff. The upward flow of ancient heat to the Earth’s surface is measured in tens of milliwatts per square metre; the flow from the Sun above is measured in hundreds of watts per square metre. This is the energy that warms the surface and the sky above it, that drives the circulation of atmosphere and ocean. This is the energy of cloud and rain, of sand dune and hurricane. This is the energy which powers the cycles of the biosphere. When plants fix carbon, when bacteria fix nitrogen, when plankton release sulphur from sea-water back into the sky, they do so, directly or indirectly, with solar energy. It is the energy of forest fire and Sunday lunch.
These solar-powered cycles of the biosphere are the ones in which humans are most intimately involved, both as beneficiaries and as rearrangers. Since the development of artificial fertilisers, the nitrogen cycle has come under human control to a remarkable extent, though not in a centralised way. The plough, the field, the roadworks and the building site have increased the rate of erosion far beyond its geological average; the rate at which water flows out of rivers depends on farmers and dam-makers.