[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] The Silent Running Fallacy

[Bill Totten]

by John Michael Greer

The Archdruid Report (June 25 2008)

Druid perspectives on nature, culture, and the future of industrial society


One of the privileges a wry providence has granted to the arts is that
even their missteps have more to teach than the best productions of more
sensible men. I was reminded of that a few days ago when a discussion
among Druid friends turned to the 1972 SF movie classic Silent Running.

I have no idea how many of my readers remember that film, so I'll
summarize it here. Bruce Dern plays Freeman Lowell, a geeky ecologist on
Valley Forge, one of a fleet of orbiting space freighters with domes
containing the last wild plants and animals from a future Earth where
only human beings and their technologies remain. His fellow crew members
simply want to get through their one-year tours and get back to a world
where there is no more poverty or disease and it is always seventy
degrees Fahrenheit everywhere, but the forest is Lowell's obsession and
his life.

Then the order comes to jettison the domes, destroy them with nuclear
charges, and return the freighters to commercial service. Lowell rebels,
kills the other three crew members on his ship, and flees into the outer
solar system with only the ship's robot drones for company. When Valley
Forge's sister ship Berkshire locates him again months later, Lowell
rigs lights in the last remaining dome to keep the forest viable,
jettisons it on a course into interstellar space, and uses the last of
the nuclear charges to blow up himself and his ship.

It's a powerful and profoundly moving film, and a favorite of mine for
many years. Still, even the first time I watched it - I was ten years
old at the time, dropping most of a week's allowance on a tall root beer
and tickets to the Saturday matinee at the local movie house in suburban
Federal Way, Washington - two of the movie's core plot elements gave me
trouble. The first issue was a vague sense of doubt about the premise
that there could be a world full of healthy, happy humans with no
biosphere to support them. The second was more specific: when Lowell
sent the dome into deep space, I wondered, where did the electricity for
its lights come from?

It took me more than a decade to realize that these two points both
pointed to the same common but disastrous misunderstanding which - with
apologies to an excellent movie - I've named the Silent Running fallacy.
Like most of the garbled thinking that has doomed our civilization and
threatens the survival of our species just now, it's a simple error with
profound consequences, and it's thus best approached indirectly.

Start with some details of the movie's premise, then. How much energy
would it take to maintain the Earth's entire surface at a steady
temperature of seventy degrees Fahrenheit? The Earth's atmosphere does a
relatively efficient job of distributing heat from the sun around the
planet via the intricate heat engine we call weather, but even so, the
temperature on a hot day in the Sahara can differ from the temperature
on the same day at the South Pole by more than two hundred degrees
Fahrenheit. Balancing that out would be ferociously expensive in energy
terms.

How much energy would it take to keep a planet full of people free from
poverty? Our current industrial civilization hasn't even come close;
average out today's income per capita over the population of the Earth
and you get a Third World existence - and of course there's the hard
question of just how long we can maintain today's profligate energy
expenditure of 450 exajoules (that's 450,000,000,000,000,000,000 joules,
for the prefix-challenged) per year.

The short answer to both of those questions, in other words, is "more
than we've got". That's generally the answer when the question comes up
about the costs of replacing any significant process in the biosphere by
human means. When a working group headed by Robert Costanza tried a few
years ago to work out the economic value of the free services provided
to humanity by the Earth's biosphere, for example, the mid-range
estimate they came up with was around three times the total value of all
human economic activity. For every dollar of economic value you get, in
other words, 25 cents was produced by human beings and the other 75
cents was produced by nature.

The reality of our dependence on living nature goes well beyond this,
however. Consider the oxygen in the air we breathe. It doesn't just
happen; it's put there, moment by moment, by complex ecological cycles
centering on photosynthesis in green plants. If those cycles go away, so
does the oxygen, and so do we. The Earth's supply of fresh water,
similarly, is renewed by intricate biogeochemical cycles in which a wide
range of living things play a part. The experiment of producing food by
treating soil as an abiotic sponge into which petrochemicals are dumped
is proving to be a long-term failure; here again, only natural cycles in
which countless living things participate put food on our table and keep
us all from starvation.

It's in this context that we can define the Silent Running fallacy; it's
the mistaken belief that human industrial civilization can survive apart
from nature. It's this fallacy that leads countless well-intentioned
people to argue that nature is an amenity, and should be preserved
because, basically, it's cute. That sort of argument invites the
response, just as stereotyped and more appealing to our culture's
governing narratives, that hard-headed practicality takes precedence
over emotional appeals and nature can therefore be ravaged with impunity.

Yet nature is not an amenity, and the "practicality" that leads current
political and business leaders to ignore the disastrous consequences of
their own actions doesn't deserve the name. If anything, industrial
civilization is the amenity, and it's not particularly cute, either.
Nature can survive without industrial humanity, but industrial humanity
cannot survive without nature - no matter how hard we pretend otherwise,
or how enthusiastically we stuff our brains with science fiction
fantasies of electronic reincarnation and the good life in deep space.

What makes this irony mordant is that nature is also a great deal more
resilient than industrial humanity. A recent book on global warming, Six
Degrees (2008) by Mark Lynas, argues that a global temperature rise of
eleven degrees Fahrenheit or so would cause global catastrophe. It's a
common claim these days, but Lynas apparently failed - as so many
prophets of apocalyptic change have failed - to check his claims against
the evidence of history.

A little more than 14,000 years ago, according to recent research on
Greenland ice core samples, global average temperature jolted up 22
degrees Fahrenheit in some fifty years. A couple of thousand years
later, it lurched back down a similar amount, only to pop back up again
1200 years later. Climate shifts like these are apparently fairly common
in Earth's long history.

Does this mean that we have nothing to fear from global warming? Quite
the contrary. We - meaning here human beings living in industrial
societies - face dire consequences even from so modest a temperature
shift as Lynas' six-degrees-Celsius rise. In such a future, widespread
crop failures caused by unpredictable shifts in rain belts, and the
drowning of half the world's largest cities due to the breakup of the
Greenland and West Antarctic ice caps, are likely events. Even without
the other causes driving modern industrial society down the long ragged
slope of catabolic collapse, a century or more of regular famines and
rising sea levels would likely do the trick; added to the rest of the
predicament of industrial society, they promise a harsh future with far
less room for our species than we have come to expect.

In such a future, on the other hand, the living Earth will be fine.
Temperature changes as large or larger than the one we are facing have
happened countless times in the last 500 million years or so, and the
planet we live on has flourished at much higher temperatures than our
mismanagement can produce even in the most extreme scenario. From the
perspective of deep time, it has to be remembered, the crises of the
present are barely a blip on the planet's radar. They will pass, and so,
in due time, will we.

We have all grown up, in other words, thinking of nature as an adorable,
helpless bunny that some of us want to protect and others, motivated by
the will to power that is the unmentionable driving force behind so much
of contemporary culture, want to stomp into a bloody pulp just to show
that they can. Both sides are mistaken, for what they have misidentified
as a bunny is one paw of a sleeping grizzly bear who, if roused, is
quite capable of tearing both sides limb from limb and feasting on their
carcasses. The bear, it must be remembered, is bigger than we are, and
stronger; it is also better adapted to survival in the world outside the
fragile shell of our industrial society. We forget this at our desperate
peril.

The stunningly beautiful final image of Silent Running shows the last of
Earth's wild plants and animals, cradled in a dome of glass and steel,
lit by artificial lights and tended by a robot drone, as it moves
through deep space toward the stars. Brilliant cinematography though it
is, it also makes a perfect image of the fallacy I've been outlining
here. Long before the industrial civilization needed to build the dome,
power the lights, and manufacture the robot can get around to stripping
the Earth of its green fabric of life, that civilization will have been
overwhelmed by the consequences of its own ecological mismanagement: as
predicted in the Seventies, and as beginning to manifest around us right
now.

Swap out nature for technology and vice versa in that final scene, in
fact, and it becomes a good image of the best hope for what will be left
of our industrial civilization in the future we're making for ourselves
right now. In that image, a frail and vulnerable scrap of modern
society, surrounded and supported by the strong arms of nature, moves
forward through the starry void along with the rest of the living Earth.
How that process might be set in motion will be central to the next few
posts on this blog.
_____

John Michael Greer has been active in the alternative spirituality
movement for more than 25 years, and is the author of a dozen books,
including The Druidry Handbook (Weiser, 2006). He lives in Ashland, Oregon.

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2008/06/silent-running-fallacy.html#links


TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click
on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this
essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/