Backing Up to Go Forward

There’s a series of short docs on PBS called Weathered, about the weather events resulting from current climate changes that most affect human settlements. It is not a hand-wringing plea to “do something before it’s too late.” We need to be past that. This is focused on what we can do to mitigate these events, and what we can’t—or, as the presenter phrases it, when to adapt and when to leave (“leave” meaning “abandon to nature”). It’s not doom-ism; it doesn’t assume that we will do nothing about the underlying cause of this stuff. It just acknowledges that serious effects are already here, and there are things we can do to avoid the worst disasters and disruptions possible from them.

One of the segments is about coastal Louisiana, which is being submerged by the Gulf of Mexico and the Mississippi Delta almost fast enough that we can watch it happen. Places that were habitable when my Dad was a kid are now underwater or are tiny swampy islands surrounded by water. This is not a “natural” process. Much of the coastal wetland that arrested or at least retarded coastal erosion and inundation was destroyed so that some humans could make money with which to amuse themselves and feel important for a portion of their short lives before dying and leaving behind a mess so much bigger than they were that it’s comparable to the difference between the size of an atomic bomb and the size of its blast radius and mushroom cloud. I think that’s a good analogy in general for what modern human civilization has managed to do in such a short time.

Here's why this is not doomer-ism: just as we were smart enough to figure out how to “engineer” one of the biggest rivers on Earth, we’re also smart enough to figure out why maybe we shouldn’t do that, or do it differently. We didn’t screw up the natural functioning of things because we weren’t capable of understanding it. We screwed it up because we didn’t give a shit. That’s all. We weren’t interested in understanding it. The goal of “civilization” was to “conquer nature” and replace it with the fruits of human ingenuity.

So here we are.

To a significant extent, the problems highlighted in the series are much older than the obvious effects of today’s climate change, and that’s where this piece comes in. For example, the rapid subsidence of the Louisiana coast around the Mississippi Delta goes back to the decisions to “re-engineer” the Mississippi River—ironically, to “control flooding”—and the near-complete disruption of the coastal wetlands system to accommodate shipping and the oil and gas industry. I’ve written a lot about the central role of unintended consequences in the history of technology. What the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers did to the Mississippi River is a classic, large-scale example of that phenomenon at work. Even when those in charge were thinking of something besides making money, they did not understand the ramifications of what they were doing, because they had not taken seriously the importance of understanding those ramifications. Their cultural inheritance strongly discouraged it.

It's common to ascribe that attitude to the period of rapid industrialization in the second half of the nineteenth century. That’s not wrong; that attitude was certainly a driving cultural factor in that process. But the attitude itself is older.

I study sail-powered watercraft used to move people and stuff before, and during, that period. Sail has become somewhat romanticized—it was being romanticized, like the rest of the “pre-industrial” world, even as it was still commercially-viable as ocean transport, as internal-combustion-powered vessels offered increasingly stronger competition for business—and for labor. But the European and colonial societies that built and used sailing vessels before there were any steamers on the oceans were not interested in concepts like the balance of nature or sustainability or ecology or anything of the sort. Sailing-ship fleets were perfectly capable of facilitating the extermination of entire populations of sea mammals from the world’s coasts and open oceans. And they did so. To build sailing ships, England practically de-forested itself. The culture of grow, exploit, profit, and do it again ad infinitum was in full power by the end of the eighteenth century.

So, what can we learn from this history, besides the history itself—which is valuable enough? We can learn that the cultural biases that got us into the most pressing problems we’re now grappling with are pretty old. As for the technology, that gets trickier.

As hyper-aware as we now are of the urgent need to transition away from the mass use of fossil fuels as quickly as possible, we’re naturally going to think of sail as an intriguing technology—if we don’t dismiss it out of hand as impractical. Sailing vessels could do most of the things powered vessels can do, and their fuel was free and “carbon-zero.” And we have alternative auxiliary propulsion options for when sail doesn’t work, either because of the way the ship needs to go, or because the wind is too light.

But the reasons sail was abandoned are still with us; we’d still have to reckon with them. Nineteenth-century European culture—at least, those elements of it that considered themselves “progressive”—practically worshiped the opportunity presented by the new powered-transport technologies to run society by the clock. It started with the railroads, and the way we use clock-time in “the West” is still firmly grounded in railroad practice. Think about how precise train—and airplane—departure times are (or, at least, are supposed to be). 7:25 a.m. 3:40 p.m. Factory clocks meant managers could require workers to “clock in” at eight o’clock sharp, instead of sometime just after daybreak.

The steamship offered a similar opportunity to defy “nature” and run water transport on a much more “rational” basis. Steamers could—at least, more than sailing vessels—make way against contrary winds and currents, and they had much more control over their average speed, since that speed was not constantly changing with wind strength and direction. In the late eighteenth century, a commercial vessel making an ocean crossing would be expected to do so within a margin of up to two weeks, and even that might well be exceeded. Now, commercial vessels are expected in port at a certain time on a specific day. We can turn a Panamax container ship around in 24 hours, maybe less. Eighteenth-century ships routinely spent weeks to months in port between sailings.

We’re not going back to sail, at least as we used to practice it. We’re not going back to any old technology. Perhaps we’ll adapt elements of it to new technology. But I think that’s beside the main point.

All of the promising and interesting things people are doing now to change how we do things, whether to mitigate the effects of both climate change and other ecologically-destructive consequences of our nature-be-dammed culture, or to find less resource-intensive ways of getting what we want in the face of dropping water tables and a seven-billion-human population, have one thing in common: they all take nature very seriously. They all start from an assumption that we humans, and the things we do, are part of the natural world, not outside of it. They take seriously, one could say, the fact that we too are animals who depend on the same things other animals do—a basic fact fought tooth-and-nail by nineteenth-century European and European-colonial culture. These approaches try to work with nature, not against it, in spite of it, or in ignorance of it. The natural world is our world.

But none of this is new—at least, the approach isn’t. Some of the most frustrating history I know of is that of European-colonial history of technology, in which Europeans (and, later, European-Americans) went to other places, took them over for their own purposes, and set about implementing “civilized” ways of doing things, belittling and dismissing the way the “savages” did things—as they had done for the millennia they had lived in intimate relationship to these places. So often—big surprise—the “civilized” way didn’t work, and caused great damage, as the natives knew it would. This process is just as twentieth-century as it is nineteenth. We are still actively reckoning with it. That reckoning is a large component of post-colonial history of technology.

Nowhere is all of this more obvious than in agriculture, which currently uses 80% of the world’s fresh water gathered by humans in all the various ways we gather it. We tend to think of farming as traditional, of farmers as deeply-conservative people—and there are reasons for that. But if we want to keep up with the leading edge of technological change in the service of long-term ecological sustainability, there’s no better bellwether than agriculture. Some of that is new: quadcopter drones that can apply fertilizer with surgical precision. Some of it is reclaiming sound old practices: converting non-profitable land to more sensible uses than cash-crop production. Moving farms out of dry areas and into areas with plenty of water. There’s so much more.

The earliest English settlers in North America were appalled at the natives’ practice of controlled-burns in woodlands. The natives now watch the news as our wildfires sweep out of control across hundreds of thousands of acres, and they shake their heads. The regular controlled burning of underbrush makes those wildfires far less likely to spread that much. They knew that. Now we are willing to know that.

As for rivers, we’re blowing up dams and the salmon can go upstream and spawn in clean water again. And we, and the bears, can catch and eat them again.

We’re learning—to a large extent, we’re re-learning. Or we’re learning things that we, as a culture, should have learned from the people whose homelands we expropriated and have, in so many cases, nearly ruined. All of it is salvageable. Nature is still far more powerful than we are. When we align our technological cleverness with natural processes, we “shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.” (Thank you Obi-Wan Kenobi.)

It's just that our power will look different. It will be much less at the expense of everything and everyone else on this planet—especially those not yet born. It may not be wooden sailing ships with canvas sails, but it will, like them, harness the forces of Earth for our practical use without doing harm.