immanence

Marking the passage of the seasons from summer to winter and back again is something people have done for millennia. Seasons are reliable — anyone living outside the equatorial band will continue to have colder and warmer seasons, probably for the rest of our lives. But many of us are realizing that larger cycles may not be so reliable, which means that the relative extent of warmth and coldness is changing. With an eye toward those larger cycles, here are a few propositions about people and the planet that I want to share on this autumn equinox.

1) We live on a dynamic planet. Some of its dynamics are cyclical and somewhat predictable, but others are far from it. Among those that we now know about (thanks to science) are glacial-interglacial cycles, which have waxed and waned over the last two and a half million years or so, with a certain periodicity to them (with cycles of roughly 100,000 years punctuated by other cycles of roughly 23,000 years) but with fluctuations and potentially confounding factors that aren’t that well understood. The current interglacial known as the Holocene is relatively recent. Just 10,000 years ago the lake you see in the distance, in the photograph below, was a salty sea that covered all the land up to the mountains well beyond its other shore. Ten thousand years before that it was a massive mountain of ice. (The lake is Bitawbagok, the Lake Between, more recently known as Lake Champlain. The image is from last night.) Interglacials don’t last too long, and all else being equal this one could be expected to revert to a glacial period.

2) But all else isn’t equal: there’s us. Among other variables are a certain class of mammals called humans. In our nature, humans are intensely social. This means that we know how to get along, for our survival and flourishing, but we also form in-groups and out-groups. And for the first time in our brief history we are operating at a scale we’ve never encountered before — that of the planet. The skills we tend to excel at — among them language and storytelling — have extended our ability to deal with that broader scale; more recently the internet (among other technologies) has also done that. But each of these, and in fact each technological extension of our capacities, carries big risks we have hardly begun to collectively master. That’s one of the tasks ahead of us: how do we form an in-group that would allow us to work collectively and appropriately at the scale of the planet?

3) And then there’s the current crisis. In a relatively short period — barely a couple of centuries — our collective extension of those capacities has resulted in serious impacts on the Holocene (interglacial) environment. The causes that led to this are complex — they include success in agriculture (accompanied by “oversuccess” in population growth), increased competition over land and resources, and all the institutional and extra-institutional developments accompanying worldwide colonialism, capitalist economics, and much more. But we now know, to our own surprise (some coming later to it than others), that climate-ecological patterns are shifting out of the Holocene “safety zone” and that serious disruption of human habitation will ensue over the coming centuries. Parts of the world (particularly in the Arctic and Subarctic) are likely to become more habitable, while others — which currently house the great majority of humans — are likely to become much less habitable. Those with the capacity to adapt will do that (with some effort); those without it will have a terrible time of it.

4) Addressing inequality is foundational to addressing anything else. The scientific and technological challenges of the current crisis are relatively easy to formulate, but successfully addressing them will require addressing the cultural, moral, and human challenges. The latter today are acutely poised on the dramatic inequality between the two categories mentioned: those with the capacity to adapt and those without it. The gap between the wealthiest, most powerful, and least vulnerable among us and the poorest, least powerful, and most vulnerable is not a gap, but a chasm. Billions of the latter are poised to suffer tremendously in the largest explosion of human suffering this planet has ever seen. We now know this. Many of us feel it in our bones. The only way forward is to learn to live together well and to make decisions for maximal benefit… at the scale of the planet. (Of course there’s no way to do that without learning it at smaller scales as well. We ought to start locally, if we can, and scale up.) You might call that the need to learn to expand our “in-group” and to love across and beyond that expanded boundary. Inequalities, in other words, will have to be dealt with — not hidden, not denied, and not relegated to a later date.

As humanity moves into a collective winter (metaphorically speaking), we need to learn the stories that will shelter us collectively through to the next summer. If the hope of a flourishing-humanity-to-come seems distant and ungraspable, at least we know that there are cycles to model that hope on, and patterns to tap into. Sunsets, sunrises, autumns, springs. Happy equinox.