Playing God is good for the planet

Playing God is good for the planet
We have the tech to save the world, but we must put aside doubts about nuclear energy, geo-engineering
by Mark Lynas 04:45 AM Jul 14, 2011
In May 2010, for only the second time in 3.7 billion years, a life form was created with no biological parent, out of a collection of inanimate chemicals. This transformation took place not in some primordial soup, still less the Garden of Eden, but in a Californian laboratory. And the Divine Creator was J Craig Venter, a world-renowned biologist, highly successful entrepreneur and one of the first sequencers of the human genome.

The Book of Genesis is full of instances of Man being punished for his attempts to become like God - yet with the primacy of science, God's power is now increasingly being exercised by us. It is not just the dawn of Venter's "synthetic biology" that gives humanity the potential to design and create life from scratch.
On a planetary scale, humans now assert unchallenged dominion over all living things. Our collective power already threatens or overwhelms most of the major forces of nature, from the water cycle to the circulation of major elements like nitrogen and carbon.
We have levelled forests, ploughed up the great grasslands and transformed the continents to serve our demands. Our detritus gets everywhere, from the highest mountains to the deepest oceans. The productive capacity of a major part of the planet's terrestrial surface is now dedicated to satisfying our demands for food, fuel and fibre, whilst the oceans are trawled around the clock for the fishy fats and proteins our brains and bodies demand.
Somewhere between a quarter and a third of the "net primary productivity" of the planet - everything produced by plants using the power of the Sun - is devoted to sustaining this one species.
Human beings have, therefore, clearly been an unprecedented evolutionary success story. Yet there is a dark side to this momentous achievement. For the biosphere as a whole, the Age of Humans has been a catastrophe.
Our domestication of the planet's surface to provide food and fuel has displaced all competing species to the margins. The Earth is now in the throes of its sixth mass extinction, the worst since the ecological calamity that wiped out the dinosaurs. No other species can control our numbers and return balance to the system.
And most amazing of all is how blissfully unaware of this colossal transformation we remain. Even most Greens - ever hopeful that vanished wild nature can one day be restored - still recoil from the real truth about our role.
Climate-change deniers are successful partly because they tap into a powerful cultural undercurrent that insists we are small and the planet is big, ergo nothing we do - not even in our collective billions - can have a planet-scale impact.
"It's an act of egotism for humans to think we're a primary source of climate change," said American politician Newt Gingrich last year. "Look at what happened recently with the Icelandic volcano. The natural systems are so much bigger than man-made systems."
True, we may not be able to stop earthquakes or tsunamis. But the idea of perennial human victimhood is now somewhat out of date. We need to recognise that we are now in charge - whether for good or ill - and to take conscious and collective decisions about how far we interfere with the planet's natural cycles and how we manage our global-scale impacts.
For the overwhelming weight of scientific evidence suggests that we are fast approaching the point where our interference in the planet's great bio-geochemical cycles is threatening to endanger the system itself, and hence our own survival as a species.

NO NEED TO DITCH CAPITALISM
My moment of revelation came two years ago in Sweden, when I was invited to join a group of scientists to discuss the concept of "planetary boundaries", a term coined by the Swedish director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre, Professor Johan Rockström.
The scientists were trying to nail down which parts of the Earth system were being most affected by humans, and what the implied limits might be to human activities in these areas.
Some, like climate change and biodiversity loss, were familiar and obvious contenders. Others, like ocean acidification and the accumulation of environmental toxins, were newer and less well understood.
For the first time, experts were not just listing our problems, but putting numbers on how we should approach and solve them. Its global approach is actually very new and potentially revolutionary. Unlike, say, the 1972 report by the Club of Rome, the planetary boundaries concept does not necessarily imply any limit to human economic growth or productivity. Instead, it seeks to identify a safe space in the planetary system within which humans can operate and flourish indefinitely.
Certainly, this will require limiting our disturbance to key Earth-system processes - from the carbon cycle to the circulation of fresh water - but in my view this need constrain neither humanity's potential nor its ambition. Nor does it necessarily mean ditching capitalism or the market.
Many will find my analysis rather unsettling - not least my colleagues in the Green movement, many of whose current preoccupations are shown to be ecologically wrong.
Until now, environmentalism has been mostly about reducing our interference with nature. Central to the standard Green creed is the idea that playing God is dangerous: Hence the reflexive opposition to new technologies from splitting the atom to cloning cattle.
My thesis is the reverse: Playing God is essential, if creation is not to be irreparably damaged or even destroyed by humanity unwittingly deploying its new-found powers in disastrous ways. At this late stage, false humility is a more urgent danger than hubris.

GREENIES AS ECO-VILLAINS
This means jettisoning some sacred cows. Nuclear power is, as many Greens are belatedly realising, almost completely benign environmentally - so anyone who still marches against nuclear today is just as bad for the climate as textbook eco-villains like the big oil companies.
The same goes for genetic engineering. The genetic manipulation of plants is a powerful technology that can help humanity limit its environmental impact and feed itself better in the process. I campaigned against it in the past: a well-intentioned but ignorant mistake. The potential of synthetic biology I can only begin to guess at. But the lesson is clear: We cannot afford to foreclose such powerful technological options because of Luddite prejudice and ideological inertia.
Indeed, if we apply the metric of planetary boundaries to the campaigns being run by the big environmental groups, we find that many of them are irrelevant or even counterproductive.
Carbon offsetting is a useful short-term palliative that the Green movement has discredited without good reason. Some Green groups have also made it very difficult to use the climate-change negotiations as a way to save the world's forests by insisting that rainforest protection should not be eligible for carbon credits.
In addition, environmental and development NGOs have been much too easy on rapidly emerging carbon emitters like China and India, whose governments need to be pressed or assisted to eschew coal in favour of cleaner alternatives.
Most Greens also emphatically object to geo-engineering - the idea that we could consciously alter the atmosphere to counteract climate change, for example by spraying sulphates high in the stratosphere to act as a sunscreen. But the objectors seem to forget that we are already carrying out massive geo-engineering every day, as a hundred million people step into their cars, a billion farmers dig their ploughs into the soil and 10 million fishermen cast their nets.

HUMANS ARE NOT ALL BAD
Certainly, deciding on something as epochal as intentional climatic geo-engineering would involve us in some awesome collective decisions, which we have only just begun to evolve the international governance structures to manage.
But if we want the world of tomorrow to resemble the world of today, we will need to act fast. ?On climate change, meeting the proposed planetary boundary means being carbon-neutral worldwide by mid-century, and carbon-negative thereafter. The former will not be possible without nuclear new-build on a large scale, and the latter will need the deployment of air-capture technologies to reduce the concentration of ambient CO2.
On biodiversity loss, we need rapidly to scale up "payments for ecosystem services", schemes that use private and public-sector approaches to make planetary assets such as rainforests and coral reefs worth more alive than dead.
To meet the other boundaries, we will need to deploy genetically engineered nitrogen and water-efficient plants, remove unnecessary dams from rivers, eliminate the spread of environmental toxins and get much better at making and respecting international treaties.
Most importantly, environmentalists need to remind themselves that humans are not all bad. We evolved within this living biosphere, and we have as much right to be here as any other species.
The Age of Humans does not have to be an era of hardship and misery for other species; we can nurture and protect as well as dominate and conquer. But the first responsibility of a conquering army is always to govern. The Daily Telegraph



Mark Lynas is an environmental activist and the author of 'The God Species' and 'Six Degrees', winner of the Royal Society Prize for science books.
http://www.todayonline.com/Commentary/EDC110714-0000046/Playing-God-is-good-for-the-planet

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