Geology Reference
In-Depth Information
Havana, Cuba. In the cities, many buildings would have been ecologically retrofitted
with super-insulation and solar or wind-powered energy generating systems. Corridors
of free nature, either as woodland or rough grassland, would weave through the city and
out into the wider countryside, where there would be a great network of large, inter-
linked areas of nature largely free of human interference where every citizen could roam
without let or hindrance. As has been the practice amongst humans for countless millen-
nia, adolescents would come of age by means of deep experiences in wild nature guided
by qualified adults, in which our young people would encounter the deep mysteries of
the cosmos.
I can hear you thinking that all of this probably sounds like a typical hippy-dippy pipe
dream—laudable, but totally impractical. Am I really saying that everything will work
out just fine if we get ourselves into straw bale houses in the countryside, growing our
own vegetables and chickens? Wouldn't it be nice if it were that simple? Alas, it isn't,
because we need some drastic action to curb carbon dioxide emissions before the critical
thresholds are crossed. In order to achieve this we are going to need a wide range of ap-
proaches. Some people will need to pioneer feasible, enjoyable, post-industrial planet-
friendly lifestyles. Others will have to work on solving the severe problems of energy,
food provision and sea level rise that will come about out as a result of climate change.
Others will have to work on the economic arrangements for a steady-state economy, in-
cluding the reform or dismantling of the major instruments of the war against nature,
such as the multinational corporations, the IMF, World Bank, WTO and so on. Ecopsy-
chologists will be needed to engage in the most difficult task of all—how to shift our
collective world-view towards the
anima mundi
perspective of experiencing the cosmos
as a living being in which we all fully participate. But whilst all of this is going on we
will need to get on with the most urgent task in this desperate situation: cooling the earth.
This seems like an impossibly difficult thing to do, but it must be done, for the latest
research suggests that to avoid catastrophic climate change the average global temperat-
ure must not exceed 0.5
0
C relative to pre-industrial levels, which translates roughly into
300-350ppm carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Currently, global average temperature
has increased by almost 0.8
0
C relative to pre-industrial levels, with another 0.6
0
C in the
pipeline in part due to additional heat that is slowly being released from the ocean.
But how to cool the earth? I have major reservations about the strategies suggested by
the discipline known as Earth System Engineering, which aims to find high-tech solu-
tions to the problem of climate change. People in this field have proposed all sorts of
daring schemes, including putting mirrors out in space to deflect solar energy away from
the Earth, stimulating the biological pump by seeding the oceans with iron, or triggering
cloud formation by spraying sea salt into the air above the oceans using solar-powered
windmills. I used to think that there was one strategy that might have worked as a band-
