Nature is now an actor

The ongoing pandemic has laid out with clarity that Nature is now an actor.?Since the scientific revolution, Nature has been increasingly de-sacralised and treated as a passive-something-out-there that one could blithely take resources from or add to a corporate balance sheet without consequences. That period is plainly over, and Nature is striking back.

This is a sharp change in how we have seen Nature in recent years, which is now mainly through the lens of climate change, where human activity and technological progress was the problem. One popular solution in the West is to reduce the overall human footprint through degrowth models or decentralised, downscaled living.

Instead, the pandemic has proven Nature to be dangerous. To quote WB Yeats in?The Second Coming, “That twenty centuries of stony sleep/Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle.”??You can almost say?humans have?reawakened a predator, a lethal predator, that is finding its way into our ecosystem.

Throughout history, human societies dealt with predators far bigger and stronger than us by mobilising families, tribes, societies.?Now,?how do we mobilise our societies when Nature herself is the predator?

We can see one version of mobilisation from cli-fi, or climate science fiction.?The?Ministry for the Future?by Kim Stanley Robinson paints an?image of millions dying in India in a heatwave, leading to?Children of Kali?climate terrorists blowing up leading figures in the finance, energy, transport industries, including piercing the safety bubble of Swiss conferences by hijacking Davos(!), bringing the war of climate consequences to the doorsteps of the developed world. There is also geoengineering - India sprays dust into the atmosphere in attempts to bring down temperatures.

What I found most intriguing is the idea of a?carbon coin?which is paid out in return for sequestering carbon in the ground for at least a century. These coins trade on currency exchange markets, and central banks around the world agree on its floor value set by issuing long term bonds for investors. Some multilateral agency certifies the work is done and facilitates the payment. This is the part that most resembles IRL the promise of the Network for Greening the Financial System. From this carbon coin flows paid work at all levels to keep carbon in the ground. Petro-states like Saudi Arabia could declare they leave proven reserves in the ground and get paid in carbon coins. Cities could decarbonise their transport infrastructure and get paid. Farmers could change their practices e.g. thin their cattle herds and get paid. Growing forests could get paid. And so on.

Kim Stanley Robinson calls this state seizure of the power of finance, recognising that?the invisible hand never picks up the check, and in a crisis the state needs to override the market in a QE spree to restore the biosphere.

But there are other ways of mobilisation, and we see glimpses from the ongoing pandemic.

Twenty months in, the pandemic has become a poor-world problem. Africa is barely 4% vaccinated while the developed world rolls out third doses. The value of a human life starkly depends on nationality. We?know?it is in the interest of the developed world to vaccinate everyone, else mutant strains cross borders and generate new waves of the sick and dying. We also?know?this is true for global warming, the destruction of rainforests leads to heat waves in the developed world. While the developed world slowly sends vaccines to emerging countries, it is far easier to seal borders and raise walls for fortress America, Europe, and Australia. The emerging world cannot place its hope on some moral awakening. It can only hope to be useful in a supply chain – providing rare earths for EVs that run on the streets of some developed economy perhaps – else it is a blank spot on the global map.?

Rather than banishing geopolitics, the energy transition imperative intensifies state competition. In past transitions, a rare moment appears to create a new order and states that lead this new order ascend to commanding heights. England led the fossil fuel revolution to rule an empire and in similar fashion, the US led the 2nd?and 3rd?Industrial Revolutions. The rise of the industrial?electro-state, the diminishment of?petro-states, the realignments of supply chains and formation of climate blocs are part of this new order.

But this feels?inadequate – almost a 19th?century answer to a 21st?century question?of how to mobilise our societies when Nature returns as an apex predator.

I think the arrival of vaccines has obscured how societies can be better mobilised.?Starkly,?there is no magic single-fix solution for climate change in the way vaccines might have been a magic single-fix solution for COVID. The equivalent to vaccine is massive decarbonisation which takes decades to take effect.??

Korea, Taiwan, China, Vietnam, and other Asian societies have mobilised better, but this leads to unhelpful confusion comparing authoritarian, Confucian states versus democratic states. An alternative, and perhaps more helpful perspective, is that in these societies?the process of building out a state from nothing is recent. The process of building a state out from nothing is within living memory and not ossified.

The answer to the question of how to deal with Nature is to be more modern, more aggressive.?The conquest of Nature is not finished, Nature needs to be tamed again through geo-engineering, terra-forming the skies and land, and re-designing viruses and other life forms.

Some thoughts on climate futures for [y]our2040, by LEE Chor Pharn,?csf.sg, 16 Sept 2021