History, Responsibility, Design
To deny the need for earth systems engineering and management is not to protect what we have; it is to condemn it to continued degradation.
One effect of living in the postmodern era is the attenuation of a sense of history, as events, ideas, and cultures from all ages are blended into an atemporal pastiche. This is problematic from a number of perspectives, particularly the environmental: By devaluing an understanding of the relationship between humans and the earth over the past millennia, it encourages two opposite, and oversimplistic, extremes. On the one hand, there is a belief that all environmental perturbations will be solved if the invisible hand of the market is allowed to work; on the other hand, the deep green utopian vision of a depopulated world largely returned to “nature.” Like most ideologies, these both demand a certain ignorance of history.
In this regard, a recent issue of Science (27 July 2001, 293:623-660), focused on “ecology through time,” is worth noting, in particular for the discussion of key ecosystems over periods of decades to centuries.
Many people are aware of recent research indicating ancient peoples had significant impacts on species extinction (for example, megafaunal populations in Australia, North America, and Europe), and recent data indicating human construction activity was widespread in areas such as the Amazon that European explorers in their ignorance considered “pristine” and “natural.” But it is interesting to read that “no coastal ecosystem now resembles its pristine precivilization state” (“Filling Generation Gaps,” p. 623) and that the collapse of fisheries, assumed by many to be a modern phenomenon, reflects centuries of human impact (“Historical Overfishing and the Recent Collapse of Coastal Ecosystems,” pp. 629-638).
A number of implications, most of which challenge the naïve and superficial view of environmental issues that tends to predominate, flow from such studies. Thus, for example, it is becoming clearer that “primitive” peoples were culturally no more sustainable than society today: where their technologies allowed, they drove species extinct, harvested from natural resources such as fisheries in such a way as to drive fundamental ecological changes, perturbed local hydrologic regimes, and the like.
What has changed is technology, human population numbers, wealth . . . but not the cultural drivers behind the success of the human species. Indeed, the overfishing study concludes that developing a “deep history” baseline, rather than one based just on recent experience, indicates that human impact on fish stocks and related biological communities has been far greater over time than even current, quite gloomy, estimates. Put another way, it is a far more anthropogenic world than we care to admit -- or than our ideologies allow us to perceive.
We comfort ourselves that we can just withdraw, and a pristine, pre-human “nature” can reassert itself. Data increasingly indicate that such views are wishful thinking, a product of ideology, not science. We cannot withdraw without substantial human mortality, and there is no “pristine” baseline to withdraw to.
The authors make another key point. The issue-by-issue, species-by-species approach that characterizes current environmental thinking is both profoundly unsystematic and, more importantly, cannot respond to the challenges of the anthropogenic world. Rather, such problems “need to be addressed by a series of bold experiments to test the success of integrated management for multiple goals on the scale of entire ecosystems.” In short, thinking of bits and pieces of “natural” systems without understanding their human context is, in many cases, simply dysfunctional. It is not a particular fish on a Florida reef that is of concern: it is the massive design challenge of building a scientific, policy, and engineered infrastructure that simultaneously speaks to the needs of the Everglades; the Florida reef system as a whole; the increasing population and economic activity of coastal Florida; and agriculture, which itself is driven by a complex system of subsidy and politics.
And thus the final point. Human impacts will continue to dominate in an anthropogenic world and, accordingly, the ethical and rational response must involve design and moral responsibility at scales that have heretofore been beyond our practices and capability. To deny the need for such earth systems engineering and management is not to protect what we have; it is to condemn it to continued degradation.
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Brad Allenby is Environment, Health and Safety Vice President, AT&T, an adjunct professor at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs and Princeton Theological Seminary, and Batten Fellow at the University of Virginia’s Darden Graduate School of Business. The opinions expressed herein are those of the author, and not necessarily any entity with which he is associated.
In this regard, a recent issue of Science (27 July 2001, 293:623-660), focused on “ecology through time,” is worth noting, in particular for the discussion of key ecosystems over periods of decades to centuries.
Many people are aware of recent research indicating ancient peoples had significant impacts on species extinction (for example, megafaunal populations in Australia, North America, and Europe), and recent data indicating human construction activity was widespread in areas such as the Amazon that European explorers in their ignorance considered “pristine” and “natural.” But it is interesting to read that “no coastal ecosystem now resembles its pristine precivilization state” (“Filling Generation Gaps,” p. 623) and that the collapse of fisheries, assumed by many to be a modern phenomenon, reflects centuries of human impact (“Historical Overfishing and the Recent Collapse of Coastal Ecosystems,” pp. 629-638).
A number of implications, most of which challenge the naïve and superficial view of environmental issues that tends to predominate, flow from such studies. Thus, for example, it is becoming clearer that “primitive” peoples were culturally no more sustainable than society today: where their technologies allowed, they drove species extinct, harvested from natural resources such as fisheries in such a way as to drive fundamental ecological changes, perturbed local hydrologic regimes, and the like.
What has changed is technology, human population numbers, wealth . . . but not the cultural drivers behind the success of the human species. Indeed, the overfishing study concludes that developing a “deep history” baseline, rather than one based just on recent experience, indicates that human impact on fish stocks and related biological communities has been far greater over time than even current, quite gloomy, estimates. Put another way, it is a far more anthropogenic world than we care to admit -- or than our ideologies allow us to perceive.
We comfort ourselves that we can just withdraw, and a pristine, pre-human “nature” can reassert itself. Data increasingly indicate that such views are wishful thinking, a product of ideology, not science. We cannot withdraw without substantial human mortality, and there is no “pristine” baseline to withdraw to.
The authors make another key point. The issue-by-issue, species-by-species approach that characterizes current environmental thinking is both profoundly unsystematic and, more importantly, cannot respond to the challenges of the anthropogenic world. Rather, such problems “need to be addressed by a series of bold experiments to test the success of integrated management for multiple goals on the scale of entire ecosystems.” In short, thinking of bits and pieces of “natural” systems without understanding their human context is, in many cases, simply dysfunctional. It is not a particular fish on a Florida reef that is of concern: it is the massive design challenge of building a scientific, policy, and engineered infrastructure that simultaneously speaks to the needs of the Everglades; the Florida reef system as a whole; the increasing population and economic activity of coastal Florida; and agriculture, which itself is driven by a complex system of subsidy and politics.
And thus the final point. Human impacts will continue to dominate in an anthropogenic world and, accordingly, the ethical and rational response must involve design and moral responsibility at scales that have heretofore been beyond our practices and capability. To deny the need for such earth systems engineering and management is not to protect what we have; it is to condemn it to continued degradation.
----------------------
Brad Allenby is Environment, Health and Safety Vice President, AT&T, an adjunct professor at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs and Princeton Theological Seminary, and Batten Fellow at the University of Virginia’s Darden Graduate School of Business. The opinions expressed herein are those of the author, and not necessarily any entity with which he is associated.
