If China’s government and its critics agree on one thing, it’s that there is an analogy between contemporary China and the Soviet Union, whose collapse continues decades after it formally ended. The Red Empire tried to swallow up the continent of Eurasia until eventually, as late Soviet thinkers like Lev Gumilev would have it, Eurasia swallowed it. Today, Chinese exports and infrastructure are trying to bring order to the Eurasian continent, following in Soviet footsteps.

The U.S.S.R. was many things, but above all, it was an organized project of reconfiguring the resources within a territory to achieve material outcomes under a formal, centralized hierarchy. In that, it was a failure — the machine stopped working. “Anyone who doesn’t regret the passing of the Soviet Union has no heart. Anyone who wants it restored has no brains,” Vladimir Putin famously put it. Can it be true that China’s leadership falls into the second category?

But the U.S.S.R. was a bankrupt idealism forced onto colonized nations by military power, and China is a savvy entrepreneurial technocracy that has solved the problem of providing basic necessities to its population and is now exporting that model elsewhere. Maybe your country is next. The gap between reality and the “plan” that was so typical of Soviet life hasn’t been seen in China for a while, though some fear it’s coming back.

From climate infrastructure to agriculture to finance, China is reverting to the structure of a command economy, rather than that of a free market economy — in the Chinese phrase, “国进民退” (“the state advances as the people retreat”). This is dangerous in China’s 60/70/80/90 economy: private sector actors contribute 60% of GDP and are responsible for 70% of innovation, 80% of urban employment and 90% of new jobs. Can the state really replace this?

When the U.S.S.R. collapsed, it was because the multivariable equation of the economy blew a fuse; the supply and demand, capital and labor, stopped working. Oceans dried up. The world stopped behaving in a predictable way. Marxists like Mikhail Gorbachev believed that the system could work if you let air into it; it turned out that it blew away like a handful of dust. The decentralized decision-making structure of the markets in the West triumphed over the planned economy.

Today, scholars of the Soviet Union such as Stephen Kotkin argue that the command economy was one source of Soviet fragility. These historical debates have been lent piquancy by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. They certainly have significance in the party schools of the CCP, which has focused on exploring why the Soviet Union collapsed ever since it happened. In China today, statistics (literally the science of the state) are suppressed because they might jeopardize the government’s ability to control flows of capital, data and everything else related to human life.

By its nature, power seeks to perpetuate itself, but China’s meditations on the collapsed U.S.S.R. are contextualized by climate change, whose challenges will make or break the Chinese system and its ability to plan and forecast. Chinese science and technology are brandished by the leadership as the solution to all problems, but there is not just one form of science — nor is science a golden ticket to escape from political contradictions.

As Ben Peters, the historian of Soviet science, told me, “Like a mountain range with many canyons and cliffs, the state of science may appear a single hulking monolith from afar but [is] a labyrinth for those who live it.” In the crises to come, will Xi Jinping’s return to a command economy seem like a sage choice or will it prove as disastrous as Joseph Stalin’s economy of production without consumption, of a “great plan for the transformation of nature”? And what sort of people will dwell in the labyrinths, waiting for a new sort of world to dawn?

The Time Traveler

“Hundreds of miles of desolate, monotonous, sun-parched steppe cannot bring on the depression induced by one man who sits and talks, and gives no sign of ever going.”
— Anton Chekhov

We drove for six hours through a desert that sprayed up white dust in a place with no roads. Once upon a time, visible in filmstrips and paintings, even in preserved cans of tinned fish, Karakalpakstan, the largest province of Uzbekistan, was a marine community of fishermen living on the banks of an inland ocean. The Aral Sea owes its name to a Mongolian root that means “sea of islands.” Today, it is a toxic desert, one which the government of Uzbekistan is trying to heal by planting saxaul trees to hold down the soil.

This ocean was turned into a desert by Soviet irrigation projects intended to grow cotton, or by subterranean bomb blasts, or both. Once the ecological transformation began, there was no stopping it. It was above 120 degrees Fahrenheit when I visited on a trip organized by the Aral Culture Summit, which brought a group of writers and artists to swim in what remains of the sea’s salty waters. I was reminded of nothing so much as H.G. Wells’ time traveler, who voyaged deep into the future and discovered a red sun hanging low in the sky, a salt-encrusted shore by a dull, black ocean, with no signs of life except for crabs the size of human beings.

We saw no crabs, but having taken several commercial flights to arrive and obsessively looking for places to charge my iPhone, I wondered if I was the crab. A ravaged planet was the inevitable future that Wells, one of Victorian England’s most visionary thinkers, foresaw — and here we are.

I found myself trying to explain Lake Mead to our guide Oktyabr, and my fears that Los Angeles would dry up in the near future. He nodded politely. For him, that future happened a long time ago. He grew up in a town called Moynaq, footage of which appeared in an archival film shown at the local museum; it reminded me of working-class Chinese communities of today: a fish-canning factory, a self-contained community, pride in work done for the country. Today, Moynaq is a waystation on what feels like an interminable drive through the desert, where you stop for lunch in one of the remaining buildings on your way across what used to be seabed but is now a dusty wasteland.

The Soviets knew what they were doing; the Aral was collateral damage. After it started to run dry, the Soviets planned to divert Lake Baikal, the spiritual homeland of Buryat Mongols, to refill it, but by then the machine was already breaking down, only slightly faster than the Aral ecosystem itself. Today, both are wrecks. Tying natural flows up in knots, the Soviet project suffocated itself and its corpse continues to rot on the terrain of Eurasia, a graveyard of a socialism that is attempting to return in zombie form.

Back in China, the politics of water are impossible to escape; my flight was delayed by terrible flooding that made the Beijing airport unusable. The Chinese government at its most Ozymandian engages in water-related engineering projects that make the Soviet Aral project look like a child’s sandbox play. The Three Gorges Dam, whose collateral damage was to flood towns like Fengdu, displacing 1.3 million people in the process, looks like the first of an increasingly ambitious list of terraforming projects, with more — the massive dam at Yarlung Tsangpo, the north-south water diversion project — on the horizon. 

The Chinese government’s mentality is that ecological and economic problems can be engineered away and that technology applied at the highest level can solve them. The Soviets thought so too. Is Karakalpakstan a sort of prophecy in miniature, a vision of unintended consequences of interfering with ecologies at scale?

The Great Northern Wasteland

“A thing that has not been understood inevitably reappears; it cannot rest until the mystery has been solved and the spell broken.”
— Sigmund Freud

As we trudged our way through the summer of 2023, I found myself contemplating buying a tract of land in Heilongjiang, China’s northernmost province and the one that has always felt most Soviet to me. Today, it is being deserted by outbound migration. The thing is, Shanghai and Beijing look like they’ll be 100 degrees or hotter for months every year in the foreseeable future. Wasn’t there some way to escape? I browsed property listings in Yichun, a city of 1.3 million that was a base for forestry in the socialist period. As climate change unfolds, maybe being in the middle of a Siberian forest, with pure air and water and pleasant temperatures even at the height of July, would make for a good life.

During the Maoist period, students were sent down from urban areas to camps there, and they made a huge swath of Heilongjiang into agricultural land. Today, many of these collective farms are owned by the Beidahuang Group — the name literally means “the great northern wasteland” — and they produce around 10% of China’s grain crops.

Beidahuang is a state-owned enterprise — really, it is almost a state within a state. In the 1960s, its “employees” skirmished with Soviet troops. It’s not the only Chinese state-owned enterprise to assume these contours. The Xinjiang Bingtuan — which engages in agricultural and industrial projects in Xinjiang Province and provides healthcare, education, police and judiciary services in the communities where it operates, some of which have populations in the hundreds of thousands — has the same Communist ethos.

These organizations have never been oriented primarily to profits, even if they list on stock exchanges in Hong Kong or New York to raise capital. They reflect political needs — food security, political security. Recently, the former deputy commander of the XPCC was expelled from the CCP for “interfering with the implementation of carbon peaking and carbon neutrality strategic goals.”

All this is to say that the Chinese government is not new to collective, militaristic enterprises in terraforming, nor did it ever stop engaging in them. On the surface, Beidahuang, with its proactive uptake of automated agricultural practices, seems pretty modern. But it is an organization with roots in the reddest of China’s red history.

Historically, Chinese troops were sent to border regions to settle and engage in agriculture — “屯田” or “tuntian” literally translates to “military-agricultural colonies” — a policy that had practical outcomes like producing food and securing territory if that was in doubt. Today, China is building large-scale wind and solar plants on the fringes of the nation, state-owned enterprises are taking up a larger and larger role in the economy, and the logic of GDP or profit as such is being discarded in favor of a different logic — a political logic, one more akin to war communism than the Chinese economy that we’re used to.

This doesn’t mean that there are no market practices embedded within the Chinese economy. The government sets the parameters and goals and pits different state-owned entities in competition with each other. Moreover, companies like Beidahuang function very differently than they did in the 1960s: Instead of unskilled labor wasting time in gulag-style encampments, today young engineers are supervising farms that are largely automated, earning high salaries for skilled and technical work.

Nevertheless, this work is done in the service of centralized planning and national reserves of pork or grain, and the market is tightly controlled. It looks like communism from the outside, but on the inside, it increasingly resembles American agriculture.

In 2001, Andrew Solomon wrote of the artists in Beijing, “In the eyes of many Chinese, the Cultural Revolution was like a game; interaction with the West is another version of the same game, perhaps a less interesting one.” Chinese socialism, and more specifically state-owned enterprises like Beidahuang, has integrated practices from the globalized capitalist economy without losing the “Chinese characteristics” (centralized control by the CCP) that it began the journey with.

Eldridge Colby, a leading Republican China hawk, and others have a habit of suggesting that China’s newfound emphasis on food security reflects preparation for war. But Chinese grain yields keep suffering “one-off” climate events, which are increasing in frequency. Last year, China’s agriculture minister told reporters that “crop conditions this year could be the worst in history.”

What if China is simply preparing for a rapid energy transition and food security in case the worst climate eventuality comes true — the “war against heaven and Earth” that Mao talked about? By 2020, China was the largest food importer in the world, a fact that made China’s leadership deeply uneasy. Lodged deep inside of millenarian ideologies like Chinese communism is the idea that everything will change, that some sort of apocalypse is around the corner.

Xi has taken to saying that the world is experiencing changes not seen for a hundred years. The economy that he is directing from Beijing isn’t really following the logic of good times and prosperity anymore. Instead, it’s more like Mao’s slogan: “Dig tunnels deep. Store grain everywhere. Never seek hegemony.”

The Soviet Prophecy

“The novelty of the coming politics is that it will no longer be a struggle for the conquest of control of the State, but a struggle between the State and the non-State (humanity), and insurmountable disjunction between whatever singularity and the State organization.”
— Giorgio Agamben

The basic feature of the Chinese landscape is the Chinese themselves — “人山人海” or “crowds of people.” The state is forever trying to keep up with them, shaping human flows as it guides rivers, terraforms the land and otherwise modifies nature according to some grand plan. Can the flow of people — their desires and fears — be tamed to generate economic growth in the way a river can be dammed to generate electricity? It seems doubtful, but that never stopped anyone from trying.

Visitors to China are often told that Beijing symbolizes China’s traditional culture. Considering that 95% of its population and footprint were built after 1949, that’s a bit of a stretch — unless we take the view that Chinese culture is not about superficial appearances but deeper, more profound social structures. Crawling through traffic on the ring road that used to be a city wall before it was demolished to allow “qi” to flow, observing the various mountainous headquarters of this or that state-owned enterprise, the city can appear to be the realization in urban form of Walter Benjamin’s parable:

The coagulation of different, seemingly incompatible historical experiences into a city has given Beijing an irrational, almost mystical quality. It is exactly that quality, of glancing back into historical catastrophe while being pushed forward almost against one’s will into future challenges — which may yet end in disaster — which makes Beijing a world capital. There are subway stations named “Earth City,” parks named “Temple of the Sun”; under the Qing, the city’s urban plan was intended as a mechanism to control cosmic flows.

The fight against nature is becoming more intense every year; Beijing will suffer from heat more than almost any other Chinese city, and it is being fiercely guarded against climate disruptions as if from a marauding army. It is the capital of China’s technocracy, which is willing to change everything — the courses of rivers, the placement of mountains, the homes of millions — in order for nothing to change.

Economists speculate that if China’s state doesn’t manage to cut emissions, the collapse of the state might do it. As an atmosphere of crisis mounts, the deep memories of the state, which long ago became instinct, recur and re-manifest themselves. For China, the only way out is through.

The post China’s Soviet Shadow appeared first on NOEMA.

Her poem below, which we publish in memoriam and courtesy of MIT Press, is indicative of her unique vision that traced the interconnected lineage of life on Earth from primordial times to the digital device on which you are reading this. It will be included in her posthumous volume, “Gaia’s Web.”

As Claire Isabel Webb, director of the institute’s Future Humans program, writes: 

Parable Of Tree And Stone

Long before dinosaurs roamed our planet, in a time called the Carboniferous, a tree was born. A seed fell to Earth, rooted in swampy soil, grew over a hundred feet tall and a hundred years long. When the tree died, its body became home to cockroaches as big as house cats, and dragonflies with wings as wide as hawks. Bacteria fed on the rotting wood, and mosses grew. Covered by Earth’s blanket, the tree’s body sunk deep, compressing into coal, a slow-motion burial. Millenia later, the coal was unearthed, heated, deprived of oxygen, splintered into plastic pellets, liquified and poured into molds, and polished into small black jewels. Tree, reborn: the keys on my computer.

The stone is even older than the tree.

In Precambrian time a volcano rift opened, and lava flowed from Earth’s core. Cooled by rain, the lava sunk deep, compressing into stone. Millennia later, the stone was lifted from a mine shaft, crushed and bathed in caustic fluid, liquefied and poured into molds, and polished to a shine as sharp as a knife. Stone, recast: the casing for my computer, cradle for the keys.

In deep time, trees and stones are descended from stars.

Tree once drank sunlight and mixed it with air, storing energy for future generations. Stone was forged in the furnace of a long-ago star which — with the cosmic clap of a supernova — dispersed itself as stellar dust, the raw ingredient of our planet. These are the ancestors of our digital devices:

Mother Tree, Father Stone, Grandmother Star, Grandfather Time.

Our computers, then, are made of stardust and tree flesh. Their memories live on machines whose breath warms the sky. Our digital devices are ecological, our ecologies are growing digital.

The post From Stellar Dust To Digital Devices appeared first on NOEMA.

If so, you likely caught me holding a dollar-store happy birthday banner rearranged into the phrase “HAPPY DEATH DAY.” Or you might’ve seen my second poster, “THIS IS THE CLIMATE EMERGENCY.” But what you didn’t see was the third poster, “MINING STOLEN LAND FOR INSTAGRAM PHOTOS.” And you definitely didn’t hear the song I sang to the crowd that day:

You didn’t see that other poster or hear that song because every news crew that filmed me out there cut that part of my protest. In a short video segment, Reuters journalists captured the gist of what I was doing — trying to convey that any celebration of our overheating world is grossly offensive in the face of the climate disasters already devastating the planet. But they and the other reporters chose not to air footage of what happened the second day, when I spent an hour singing “Happy Death Day” to 50 or so tourists and park rangers, was nearly arrested by two armed National Park Service officers, and argued (while singing) with a gang of climate deniers, one of whom tried to fight me. 

So, I’m here today to fill in some of the gaps, to talk about what would inspire a performance artist turned writer to squash any semblance of journalistic impartiality and revolt.

I have a deep love for Death Valley — its vastness, its sublime juxtapositions of ice-cream-colored hills hugging vast stretches of white, hot alkali, its sand-dune sunrises and volcanic-crater sunsets. I first fell for this place watching Antonioni’s “Zabriskie Point” and the feeling grew once I finally saw it for myself. 

Every winter while living in L.A., I would strap my mountain bike to the back of my car and head to Death Valley. Given how vast the park is, it’s easy to find yourself completely alone and enwrapped in near silence — so silent that, if you listen closely, you can hear the blood pulsing through your ear drums. 

When my partner and I moved across the country to New York, I was so distraught that the first thing I did was try to buy land near the park. I knew I didn’t have the money, but I was desperate for a way to return. 

I instead chose to write about it, finding inspiration in the pioneering film director George Kuchar’s “Weather Diary 1.” In the video, Kuchar goes to Oklahoma at the height of tornado season. Armed with just a camcorder, he documents the experience of himself and everyone around him living their lives while awaiting total destruction. I became obsessed by Kuchar’s unrefined blend of diary and documentary and cooked up a plan: go to the hottest place in the world (Death Valley) at the hottest time of the year (July).

The idea was not to create a story in the park but to search for narratives and events that could only exist in such an extreme place. The story would revolve around heat — what it feels, looks, smells and tastes like, how the body responds to it, how the mind contorts under it. I wanted to know what drives people to visit a place experiencing temperatures as high as 130 degrees Fahrenheit, let alone live there. 

My process would be open to much improvisation and many unknowns. It would be an attempt at textual documentation, of rendering a present, a reality, into language. I knew my material would be a mess, like life itself: fickle, subjective, transformational, a patchwork. What I didn’t know was that it would turn into a protest.

From previous trips, I knew the basics: that Death Valley National Park is “the size of Connecticut” or “two Rhode Islands” (for some reason everyone compares it to New England); that it includes the vast basin of Death Valley as well as the Amargosa and Panamint Mountains; that the incredible landscape diversity inside the park, from sand dunes to salt flats to DayGlo mountains, was the result of volcanic explosions, an ancient inland sea and millennia of tectonic jolts; that the natives of the land, the Timbisha Shoshone, had lived in the valley for, in their words, “time immoral”; that the first white settlers, now known as “the Death Valley 49ers,” were nearly decimated by the valley’s harsh climate when they attempted a shortcut on their way to find gold. 

But I’d only been to Death Valley in the winter, when temperatures max out around 85 degrees Fahrenheit. Spending seven days under some of the strongest solar radiation in the world could easily barbeque a human body. 

So I started doing research and gathering gear. I pieced together a sunsuit that would cover me completely. Desert dwellers and serious heat tourists (of which there are few) don’t wear shorts and T-shirts. They cover themselves head to toe. I procured pants, hoodies, hats and blankets — all high on the ultraviolet protection factor (UPF) scale, which measures the sun-blocking properties of clothing. I even bought UPF gloves. Dressed in full, I looked like a cross between Julianne Moore in “Safe” and a Star Wars cosplayer.

Then I turned to my devices. Apple lists the iPhone’s heat maximum at 95 degrees. Even the best consumer voice recorders apparently quit at around 105. Same with video cameras. It seemed extreme heat created a documentary dead zone — at least for the finest and most modern consumer devices — where nothing that could record could operate. Perhaps only the ancient forms of writing, drawing or verbal storytelling reliably functioned here. 

Having few options, I leaned into these constraints. I would still bring my devices, but if they conked out, so be it. I procured a small arsenal of audio recorders, including a cassette recorder, which my research suggested could endure the dead zone. A classic Walkman doesn’t contain a minicomputer that can overheat — they’re completely mechanical. According to multiple studies, the tapes themselves are capable of handling far worse than Death Valley temperatures; only at 140 degrees does their magnetism disappear. This brought me inordinate delight: A solution to a global warming problem might come in the form of a vintage, nearly forgotten technology.

I did other, perhaps more important, homework on how to not die: drink two gallons of water per day, monitor myself for signs of heat exhaustion like heavy sweating and dizziness, take electrolyte tablets every 15 minutes when outside. I read several books, including Richard Lingenfelter’s 600-page, highly annotated history, “Death Valley and the Amargosa: A Land of Illusion,” which became my guide. 

Lingenfelter’s book helped me develop a hypothesis — perhaps one that’s not really in doubt — that the history of white settlement in Death Valley is a history of greed and absolute idiocy. Just about all the early prospectors were punished by the valley’s harsh climate in their quest for gold. It wasn’t until borax, a form of salt still used in pesticides and laundry detergent, was discovered that any white settlers managed to strike a profit. Even then, death and disaster abounded. And yet, the miners’ efforts brought hotels, train tracks and roads, literally paving the way for the establishment of the National Park, an environmentalist “success” that would ensure the displacement of the Timbisha Shoshone.

When I finally arrived at the Ranch at Death Valley — a hotel in Furnace Creek, where the park headquarters and museum are located — it was 3 a.m. on Saturday, July 8, and the temperature was a mild 100 degrees. I stepped out of my car and was immediately hit by a form of wind I’d never felt before: a wind that did not cool but blew like a hair dryer. 

For the first two days, I made regular temperature notes as the heat increased. I walked around the hotel grounds, asking tourists and employees about the heat, why they’d come to such a hot place, how they were coping with it. 

Then I got bored. Yes, it was fucking hot. And yes, I had never felt anything like it before. But people’s answers to my questions were predictable. What does heat feel like? “An oven.” “A furnace.” “A sauna.” When I asked tourists why they were here and why now, the responses were even duller: Almost everyone was either checking off national parks in their great American road trip or en route to Las Vegas. 

Some visitors had come specifically for the extreme heat, but when I asked them why, no one gave an answer beyond “I just like it” or “I can’t explain it” no matter how much I pestered. It got more depressing when I asked people how to survive this kind of heat: stay in air conditioning. That’s it. If you don’t want to die from heat exhaustion or heat stroke, you stay inside. 

And so, my gonzo project to document life in a warming world had come to the grand revelation that the antidote to extreme heat was human refrigeration. Here we all were in one of the most beautiful places on the planet and all anyone could do was experience it in hasty jaunts between the safety of their cars or hotel rooms. Either that or risk death: A few days before I arrived, in 123-degree heat, a tourist’s car A/C cut out; suffering heat stroke, he passed out, drove his car off the road and died. This happens several times every year.

The effects of extreme heat seemed particularly troubling for those living there year-round. The only member of the Timbisha Shoshone tribe that I was able to meet said that while some members of the tribe have air conditioning, she made do with a swamp cooler. At the height of summer, to cool off, she would lay in bed and blow as many fans her way as possible. 

Worker conditions at the Ranch turned out to be similarly unbearable. Owned by the ominously named Xanterra, the Ranch does not equip its employees with head-to-toe UPF gear to shield them from the sun, and many employees have to work outside in 110+ temperatures for hours. Many of them are international students on summer break; they do not have access to company vehicles, which made it difficult to see the beauty of the park that hotel guests witness. While I was there, one of the workers was fired for gifting a coworker a scoop of ice cream while on the job. She was abruptly kicked out of staff lodging and denied any assistance to return to Las Vegas to fly home. It’s hard to quantify how cruel this is: to be made homeless in the hottest place in the world at the hottest time of the year, to fend for yourself while tourists wallow in a strange heat fetish.

For millennia before the 49ers and their descendants, the National Park Service and Xanterra, rolled in, the Timbisha Shoshone and other tribes living in the valley would head to the mountains for the summer. For the Timbisha Shoshone, that meant Wildrose Canyon, up in the Panamint Range. I decided I would follow in their footsteps.

On day three, at the hottest point in the afternoon, I drove down to the lowest place in the U.S., Badwater Basin — 280 feet below sea level — and checked the thermometer: 120 degrees. Then I started up Badwater Road toward the top of Wildrose (8,200 feet), checking the temperature along the way. It took nearly an hour before my car thermometer registered any significant temperature drop — somewhere around 1,500 feet above sea level.

Winding up Emigrant Canyon Road, I started to see why the Timbisha Shoshone had come this way: Unlike the famed barrenness of the valley below, up here the land was full of particolored bushes of pastel pink and neon green. The land was still dry, but there were flowers and even a few Joshua Trees. The views were just as sublime: vast basins and rolling hills. And there were wild burros. Lots of them.

On my drive up into the hills, I became convinced that the park was designed completely wrong. The Park Service and the hotels had created a place that encouraged people to risk their lives in the summer, funneling them into the smoldering valley of death while a peaceful, bucolic, temperate land lay just a few miles away. Up here in Wildrose Canyon lay the simple solution that the Timbisha Shoshone had known for millennia: When it gets hot, you go to where it’s cooler. That’s it. No climate-crushing A/C required.

And yet, the Timbisha Shoshone have no land in Wildrose Canyon today. The tribe’s wise way of life was cut short by the establishment of the national monument (which preceded the national park) in 1933. At that time, the federal government conveniently declared the area uninhabited, rendering the tribe landless; to make it worse, the U.S. then took children from the tribe and “re-educated” them in white-run boarding schools. Then in the late 50s, while members of the tribe were summering up in Wildrose Canyon, the Park Service created yet another convenient rule: Any unoccupied buildings could be demolished. When the tribe returned to the valley after the weather had cooled, they found their homes destroyed.

This is of course just a fragment of a long and fraught history. Eventually, in 2000, the Timbisha Shoshone received several parcels of land — none of it up in the mountains. I tried multiple times to speak with official representatives of the tribe to learn more about current living conditions and potential further land cession, but I either reached disconnected phone numbers or wrote emails that went unreturned. I learned from “The Women in the Sand” (2017), a documentary about the tribe’s history, that younger members of the tribe have moved out of the area, many to the nearby city of Bishop, where the tribal offices are located. According to the film, the tribe had tried to build its own hotel in the valley but lacked sufficient investment. 

By the time I arrived at the Mahogany Flats campground, the head of Wildrose Canyon, it was nearly sunset and my car’s thermometer measured 80 degrees. (At that very moment, it was 115 in Death Valley proper.) I got out of my car and saw it right away: The landscape’s greens and blues were just starting to dip into purples. Birds swung in the setting sun. Evergreens and grasses swayed in the breeze. And just beyond the hills was the Amargosa Range and the dim, red wasteland of the valley. Here was calm and coolness, down below was a smoldering inferno begging tourists to test their luck.

In the following days, I returned to Wildrose Canyon three more times, finding myself increasingly allergic to my hotel and everything that the Park Service-designed park was suggesting I do: sit in air-conditioned rooms or drive around in my air-conditioned car. My conversations with tourists, hotel employees and park rangers began to veer toward the canyon. Instead of talking about the weather, I asked people if they’d ever heard of it or the story of what happened to the Timbisha Shoshone when they were away for the summer. Only a few had.

At the same time, news began to spread that the following Sunday, July 16, might be the hottest day in world history, breaking the previous (and contested) record of 134 degrees Fahrenheit. The internet was abuzz with heat tourists boasting about flying out to witness this purportedly monumental occasion. I started to wonder if I’d have to extend my stay.

On what was supposed to be the last day of my weeklong trip, I requested a formal interview with the National Park Service. It seemed they were waiting for the news media to arrive; in minutes, I had an appointment with the park’s acting PR representative. Waiting for my meeting, I overheard two rangers speaking excitedly about not only the upcoming possible heat record, but also about a 5k race they’d planned for the same day. When the PR representative appeared, she too seemed giddy. She guided me to a small conference room, set her ranger hat on the table and laid out a series of talking points.

It’s hard to say which part of the interview set me off. Was it that she had no problem with the 5k? That the Park Service had made no plans to use Sunday’s bleak milestone to educate visitors about the dangers of climate change and what we can all do to try to combat them? That instead they were encouraging people to risk their lives in what might be record-breaking heat? Or was it the fact that she’d never heard of what the Park Service had done to the Timbisha Shoshone while they were away for the summer? She had only been on the job for six months; maybe her bosses were to blame for not ensuring the staff knew the history of the park. Still, she seemed more interested in talking about preserving historic ranger housing and mining sites than the park’s historical and contemporary problems.

By the end of the conversation, I was convinced that the Park Service had turned Death Valley into a kind of junk food for heat tourists. Their mission to be stewards of the land seemed like a joke in the face of the slow violence of all the CO2 being pumped into the atmosphere from the park’s air-conditioned cars and hotel rooms each summer. (Note: Only 30% of the power for Xanterra’s properties in Death Valley, possibly the sunniest place in the world, comes from solar energy.) It also didn’t help that when I left the interview, an ambulance wailed by, presumably racing to save yet another unnecessary victim of heat stroke. 

This is when I started to plan my protest. I was certain that the news media would show up for the heat record, so I decided to attempt to infiltrate their narrative, to take a stand for reason in the face of mounting absurdities. 

But I hesitated — what was I doing here? Was I a reporter? A novelist? An artist? Would protesting mean the essay I was working on would be rejected? Was my editor going to be pissed? (It also wasn’t lost on me that I too had participated in burning fossil fuels by coming here, and that buying carbon offsets was a weak attempt to redeem myself.) 

In the end, I thought of my one-year-old child. I tried to imagine what she would be proud of me for doing years from now if I told her about this. Fuck reporting about global warming. I decided to make some signs. 

At the Family Dollar in Pahrump, Nevada, I strolled past the usual display of posters, colored makers, plastic trinkets, greeting cards and birthday supplies until something clicked. In an instant, a plan came together: I’d make it a party. Happy Death Day. 

I bought party hats and noisemakers, Sharpies and five different versions of the “Happy Birthday” banner. I drove back to my hotel and spent the rest of the night cutting, pasting and writing in all caps.

The next day — the day before what was forecast to be the hottest day on record — I drove back to Badwater Basin and parked my car. I covered my face in sunscreen, made sure I had enough water and electrolyte tablets, grabbed my posters and noise makers, and froze. I choked. Looking out the window, I watched tourists getting out of their cars, strolling around, taking selfies before the smoking alkali. I understood their type at this point. They were mostly from abroad, here for a taste of the extreme and the bizarre. There were kids. Who was I to get in their faces? To make a scene and disrupt their vacations? 

I almost gave it up right there. But then a two-person news crew walked by. One held a clipboard, the other a TV camera. I knew I had to go. 

I opened the door, stepped out into the 125-degree heat and made my way to the alkali. I pulled a noisemaker out of my pocket, held up my signs — “HAPPY DEATH DAY” and “THIS IS THE CLIMATE EMERGENCY” — and began blowing. The noisemaker was sharp, it was annoying. It sounded like a dying animal. The party had begun.

Eventually, the TV crew came my way. They introduced themselves as journalists from Reuters, and I happily gave them an interview. I voiced my severe disappointment with the Park Service and tourists’ excitement over this grim world record. I talked about Wildrose Canyon and the Park’s treatment of the Timbisha Shoshone. I even offered a climate-change reading list.

After the reporters got their bit, I blew on my noisemaker for another half hour, then made my way across the park to the Furnace Creek Visitors Center where I continued my noisemaking beside the Park’s famed thermometer — a tourist attraction designed for snapping pics and the focal point of all activity in Death Valley in the summer. I raised my third sign, “MINING STOLEN LAND FOR INSTAGRAM PHOTOS,” and continued to blow my dying horn.

Not long after, the visitor’s center closed. I had already checked out of my hotel and packed my car, intending to return to L.A. and fly home. My partner had been caring for our one-year-old for a week straight, and I needed to get back. But on the way to the airport, I stopped the car three times. I was convinced I wasn’t finished with my protest. It was the day before what was supposed to be the hottest day on record. How could I get this close but miss it? 

I called my partner. She wasn’t happy, but agreed. I turned the car around. Happy Death Day 2, here we go.

To mix things up, I decided day two would be something of a guerilla opera: I’d sing for a full hour at the hottest time of the day, offering educational information about climate change — the same information I felt the Park Service should be providing to visitors — set to the tune of “Happy Birthday.”

When I arrived back at the Furnace Creek Visitor’s Center the next day, it was 2:45 p.m. and my car marked 126 degrees. The place was swarming with people watching the thermometer tick up and up, hoping for that record to break. 

At 3 p.m., I downed a bottle of water, grabbed my signs and noise makers, and made my way to the thermometer. I propped my iPhone on a rock and hit record. 

It did admirably well in the heat, but it didn’t survive long enough to capture my confrontation with the climate deniers. Soon after that video cut out, the guy who had been challenging my climate science got a little bolder and louder. Other climate deniers banded together with him. For about 10 minutes, things stayed reasonable, with them mockingly quizzing me about climate solutions, and me firing back (with vibrato) everything I’d learned from books like “The Uninhabitable Earth” and “How to Prepare for Climate Change.” 

At some point, things escalated. The Park Service representative who I’d interviewed two days before asked me to move to a “free speech area” far away from the thermometer. In my best tenor, I told her I could not, that my protest only made sense next to this thermometer. Five minutes later, two armed Park Service officers approached me, telling me to leave or I would be arrested. 

I kept singing, chanting about how the Park Service was encouraging daredevil behavior and failing to educate people on how to live safely and more sustainably in the cooler parts of the park during the summer months — or, better yet, shutting down completely for the summer. I sang about how Wildrose Canyon and much more land should be ceded back to the Timbisha Shoshone and Indigenous peoples all over the U.S., and about how worker conditions at the Ranch are abysmal. 

Eventually the climate denier bros had had enough. To protect the unalienable right to take selfies in peace, they crowded in front of me to block me from the tourists. I hopped around, still singing. At some point, I must have said something offensive — was it that I called them fascists? — and one of the bros raised his fist. Two of his pals grabbed him to hold him back. Deciding, perhaps, that I wasn’t worth the sweat, he backed off, and one of his buddies loudly declared they were off to eat a big, juicy steak — a retort to my suggestion that eating less meat is good for the environment.

When 4 p.m. hit, I thanked the crowd and did a bow. No one clapped. Nonplussed, I gathered up my posters and got back in my car. It seemed that that would just about do it for me here in Death Valley, but then half a mile down the road, I spotted someone dressed all in black jogging through the desert. The 5k!

I drove ahead and parked my car, watching as the figure lumbered through the sunbaked landscape. Peering closer, I wondered: Is that person in a Darth Vader costume? Yes, I answered, yes — that person is most definitely wearing a Darth Vader costume. I checked the thermometer: 128 degrees. Eventually, he approached me, the Sith lord panting and wheezing in white running shoes and ill-fitting gear. He gave a friendly wave and hobbled on.

The post Happy Death Day To You appeared first on NOEMA.

In 2022, climate change and climate-related disasters led nearly 33 million people to flee their homes and accounted for over half of all new numbers of people displaced within their countries, according to data from the United Nations’ High Commissioner for Refugees and the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre. This amount will surely increase over the next few decades.

Outside the United States and Canada, the World Bank predicts that climate change will compel as many as 216 million people to move elsewhere in their countries by 2050; other reports suggest that more than one billion people will become refugees because of the impacts of a warming planet on developing countries, which may exacerbate or even precipitate civil wars and interstate armed conflict.

A 2020 report by ProPublica, meanwhile, estimates that at least 13 million Americans will be forced to migrate from coastal areas and that wildfires and other natural catalysts could potentially multiply that amount significantly. Regardless of how such displacement is measured and reported, it seems likely given current trends that slower-moving migration flows will be routinely punctuated by extreme weather events and climate-aggravated infrastructural collapses. This has already been exemplified by the devastating floods in Libya earlier this month, which claimed thousands of lives and reportedly displaced over 43,000 people.

The extraordinary pressure that continued international and domestic climate migration will impose upon state resources and social goods like schools, hospitals and housing is difficult to fathom. Over the past year, city and state governments in the U.S. have feuded over the distribution of migrants stemming from the Southern border, with New York Mayor Eric Adams declaring that the current migration wave will “destroy” the city.

Though such rhetoric is plainly demagogic, Adams’ remark nevertheless channeled deep-seated fears about whether U.S. cities can absorb new migrants amid the ongoing crises of homelessness and food insecurity. The episode is a preview of the public anxiety and ugly politics to come in this age of the Anthropocene.

Beyond Industrial Policy

In conceiving how to manage internally displaced persons and high-risk populations in a wealthy country such as the U.S., policymakers must factor in how regional inequality, deindustrialization, and other structural changes in the national economy have conditioned the migration flows of recent years.

They must consider that climate migrants can not be simply relocated to other densely populated areas or to more rural locales that might seem to benefit from an influx of people but need capital and ample federal support to accommodate this sort of demographic transformation.

Such a task demands an unprecedented level of economic planning and federal-regional coordination — no less so than the process of building out climate infrastructure. Unless progressives begin to contemplate seriously how climate migration policies must dovetail with the goal of a green economy, the social, political and economic upheaval that climate migration portends could easily overwhelm efforts to realize any clean energy transition.

And yet, the dynamic between large-scale climate migration and the pace of decarbonization remains a distant concern in day-to-day governance: There is virtually no public debate about how climate change itself may constrain the spread of green technology.

The Biden administration has heralded the preliminary investments sparked by the year-old Inflation Reduction Act — the manufacturing basis of a sustainable green economy — and the prospect of a long boom generated through manufacturing and installing various components of climate resilience like solar panels, advanced batteries and electric vehicle charging stations. But while it is encouraging that the IRA and other industrial policies have pushed the private sector to announce new factories that produce such technology,  the administration’s renewable energy agenda has not addressed the economic viability of large swathes of the U.S. over the next several decades.

The administration’s 2021 report on climate migration, for instance, only focuses on international impacts and contains few specific prescriptions about how to manage said flows. Beyond a brief mention in the report of the need to take a future look at how to coordinate domestic “migration/relocation” with special consideration for high-risk, densely populated areas, the U.S. government has still not detailed how it plans to address climate migration. Instead, the administration has trumpeted fixed investment in renewables that, outside of Michigan and Ohio, looks to be especially concentrated in the Southeast and Southwest.

While this is a worthy goal under normal conditions, encouraging a disproportionate amount of manufacturing investment in the South could be ill-conceived given the risk of annual, prolonged heatwaves with increasing wet-bulb temperatures and multifarious floods that threaten to severely undercut the region’s future labor productivity.

According to a 2019 report by the International Labour Organization, the expected productivity loss from heat stress in 2030 will be equivalent to 389,000 full-time jobs and will primarily affect outdoor workers in Southern states. The potential for adverse feedback loops is significant given that hundreds of thousands of installation-based clean energy jobs are projected to involve outdoor work.

And yet, despite these realities, the current approach to green industrial policy treats the regional distribution of the nation’s demographics and economic sectors as essentially static factors and overlooks how extreme weather and climate migration will likely destabilize important nodes of the energy transition.

The stark fact is that the amount of carbon dioxide already amassed in the atmosphere all but assures that certain zones will become uninhabitable by the end of the century, regardless of whether global greenhouse gas emissions reach net zero by 2050. If factories cannot operate at full capacity due to life-threatening climate conditions, periodic grid failures and difficult-to-replace labor shortages over the next two decades — and these challenges reverberate throughout their surrounding economies — the output of the renewables sector will falter and stall projects to decarbonize businesses, government agencies and households.

To the extent these shifts can be forecasted, the flow of future subsidies to prospective new plants and fiscal support for things like energy-efficient municipal retrofitting should be adjusted to reflect local adaptability to climate change in the aggregate. Regardless of where the IRA has helped allocate green industry investment to date, any additional federal investments in local green infrastructure cannot go to places that will end up unlivable fiscal sinkholes.

More prudently, government officials should begin evaluating which regions are likely to experience reverse migration or rapid, temporary and extended growth due to shifting notions of “climate security.” Accordingly, planners should formalize a system that ranks zones based on habitability and draw up industrial, rural and urban redevelopment policies to match this modeling.

Drivers Of Displacement

Based on projections for lost productivity, recurrent bouts of oppressive, life-threatening heat will likely have the most pervasive and enervating effects on society. Modeling indicates that by 2060, dozens of counties across the Southwest and Southeast could experience temperatures above 95 degrees Fahrenheit for a third or more of the year.

The creation of new labor regulations and other rules governing market activity, alongside new business practices, could conceivably adapt parts of those regional economies to extreme heat. But not every locale will be preservable.

While extreme heat threatens a public health crisis for vulnerable demographics and is predicted to overwhelm hospitals in states like Georgia and Arizona in the event of a major blackout, it also disrupts schooling, family recreation and routine business operations. And it also promises to increase the frequency and intensity of wildfires. The most exposed locales will likely fall into a state of semi-permanent emergency, making it impractical and unwise to rebuild homes, businesses and farms destroyed by past conflagrations.

Conditions that prompt sudden evacuations could swamp neighboring regions with needs that cannot be readily met by their existing housing stock, educational facilities, commercial districts and supply chains. In the longer term, the steady desertion of afflicted places will force policymakers to shutter towns and disincorporate municipalities whose infrastructure must be abandoned. Just as the 2.5 million migrants of the 1930s Dust Bowl left behind ghost towns, so too will those who flee immiserating heat — shrinking the local tax bases for those that do remain.

Ruinous flooding from rising seas and storm surges in coastal cities will be another major catalyst of domestic migration. For over a decade now, scientists and reporters have warned about the hazards facing the populations along the Gulf Coast and South Florida, where significant territory is expected to be continuously flood-prone or underwater within 30 to 50 years.

But several metropolises and smaller coastal communities across the Eastern seaboard and Pacific coast are at considerable risk as well. Changing market perceptions of sustainability underscore that there is a threshold at which rebuilding after a storm of the magnitude of Katrina or Sandy becomes prohibitive even for affluent zip codes and lucrative real estate markets.

A leading indicator of this is in the insurance market, where some of the largest property insurers have started pulling out of zip codes that their modeling has deemed high-risk because they are expected to generate billions in property destruction from fires and floods.

Should previously rare powerful storms and other extreme natural hazards strike regularly, we will likely experience damage to municipal services and infrastructure that leads to ongoing reductions in economic output and escalating social disorder. The subsequent steady retreat of large private investment in goods like housing, commercial facilities, supply chains and financial services for small businesses would make it more difficult to ever regain equilibrium in these places again.

Today’s movements championing mixed-use neighborhood development to address acute urban housing shortages must realize, like local and federal legislators, that an economy dominated by major coastal hubs is unsustainable and, frankly, unwise given already emerging climate threats. These generally laudable goals cannot be pursued in a vacuum.

As with industrial policies in the IRA that aim to reinvest in places left behind in recent decades, proposals to make today’s superstar cities more equitable and more focused on community amenities must take into account the gravest obstacles posed by the climate crisis. In particular, outmigration will permanently hollow out the worst-affected neighborhoods while potentially inundating other nearby cities similarly plagued by inequality with new demands upon already constrained resources.

Any viable solution to the profound pressures of climate migration cannot settle for a system of nearest “safe” havens. To ease the socioeconomic and geographic impacts of displacement, policymakers must commit to reversing the trends of regional inequality that have persisted over the last 30 years.

In short, planned migration must be part of a comprehensive reinvestment strategy for places formerly hit hard by globalization that may now present an opportunity for renewed economic resilience because they are more likely to avoid the worst effects of climate change.

Where Migrants Might Go

Should extreme heat and severe coastal erosion become as prevalent as expected, modeling suggests that cooler regions along the old manufacturing core and Northern farm belts could be suited to helping a national green economy mature.

In the future, these revitalized regions could support denser populations through ambitious investment in high-speed rail, an array of urban cooling strategies and social goods that raise individual and family welfare. Any investment in social goods must encompass universal child care, new medical centers, revamped public schools and research universities, an expanded parks system and a coordinated interstate agenda to achieve “Housing For All.” Such efforts would be a boon to both migrants and existing residents, thereby buttressing planned migration’s political legitimacy.

More specifically, policymakers should survey the interior Northeast and Midwest, as well as the least humid parts of the Upland South, for mid-sized cities and micropolitan areas that could become revitalized sites of economic and civic development. Assuming the U.S. begins to substantially reduce emissions in the next two decades, the high probability of shorter durations of extreme heat in these regions could help steady the national economy, aid efforts toward sustainable agriculture, and preserve, to some degree, familiar societal rhythms.

Well-structured inflows of labor and demand could generate more goods for both local consumption and export, if absorbed by capital and public expenditures that prioritize social needs. Sensing the increasing unsustainability of other regions and the threat of climatic events to their livelihoods, working-class families and entrepreneurs alike would come to associate the Rust Belt with opportunity. But this confidence has to be built by policymakers through bold developmental projects. The region’s fading and derelict engines must be converted into vehicles of collective welfare that allow future generations to advance rather than simply maintain a constricted and impoverished existence.

Many will regard these goals as herculean because of their sheer technical demands. The process of determining migration flows is complicated, moreover, by the chicken and egg problem of regional economic growth. Specifically, how does government enlist people to move to regions it has committed to redeveloping and ensure that such a vision of renewal is actually realized?

At a minimum, a successful system of planned migration must feature easy-to-use transition benefits, such as advanced tax credits, and guarantee high-quality public services for individuals and families willing to resettle; potential migrants must be convinced that the government has spared no reasonable expense to ensure redeveloped zones meet their expectations for comfort and productivity.

In practice, this entails overcoming the narrative of irreversible decline that has plagued much of the Rust Belt and is reflected in demographic trends that militate against facile notions of whatever economic resurgence might be orchestrated.

In the Midwest, the percentage of the population age 65 and older generally rose from 2010 to 2019, and by as much as 60% in certain areas — a demographic inevitability given the region’s failure in most cases to retain or attract prime-age workers and those who want to start families.

The pandemic has also inflicted a clear toll: Since 2020, Ohio and Michigan’s populations have both shrunk by 0.4% and Illinois by 1.8%; in contrast, well over two million people moved to the South during this period. An excessively “business-friendly” growth strategy bereft of amenities or efforts to attract long-term residents and families has further exacerbated the decades-long decline of small postindustrial cities across the Midwest and the greater Northeast.

Despite these challenges, the relative proximity of several large metro areas with significant potential for more growth suggests new settlement patterns from New England to the upper Midwest could emerge as the climate crisis worsens, making a new set of public and state-steered investments even more prudent.

Those who are skeptical of the scale of a program that combines regional reinvestment with planned migration should also consider the astonishing industrialization of the South in the mid-20th century, which was facilitated in large part by pragmatic leaders who could countenance forms of economic planning — from cornerstones of the New Deal such as the Tennessee Valley Authority and Rural Electrification Act to other federal policies that kickstarted public-private regional development boards, local infrastructure projects and R&D at new technical institutes.

These accomplishments remind us that the only true limits to large-scale economic planning are political. With the right incentives and support — including new home construction — regions from upstate New York to downstate Illinois could be seen less as relics of Fordist growth and more as part of an “industrial commons” essential to the country’s cohesion.

An expansive view of economic planning could, in turn, help avert bottlenecks and ensure climate migration policies support inclusive and intelligently dispersed growth. Large reinvestment zones afford policymakers an opportunity to reduce the stark inequalities between rural and urban areas that have dogged the knowledge economy. Incentives should be tailored to overcome local intransigence, whether in affluent districts or insular depressed areas, that blocks new avenues for growth, fixed investment and economic diversification.

In general, policymakers need to structure different yet complementary types of migration subsidies that compel local authorities and private enterprise to expedite development and meet the collective needs of expanding populations in formerly stagnant areas. From targeted “supply-side” measures and worker retraining programs to generous packages that draw skilled labor to regions suffering a deficit of tradespeople and care work, these programs should be designed to fulfill many of the promises to revitalize the Rust Belt and Northern rural communities that have been deferred since the 1980s.

To be sure, programs that combine redevelopment with mandates to provide security and opportunity to climate migrants will rest on deft negotiations that forge local and regional coalitions in support of the federal government’s objectives. As in past periods of state-led development, planned migration will need more than a semblance of decentralized and democratic decision-making in its initial stages.

Coordination between the federal government, municipalities and regional planning bodies should respond to local population needs and concerns while also steadfastly promoting the establishment of new industry and the integration of newcomers. Widespread environmental literacy must also be promoted in order to prevent fundamental threats to the nation’s food supply like topsoil erosion and groundwater depletion.

Daunting as it sounds, migration policy can be implemented in a manner that appeals to, and revives, what is at present a dormant tradition of civic mobilization. There is a surfeit of towns and small cities desperate for a new raison d’être — an impetus to produce critical goods, attract creative people and play some positive role in the national imagination.

The reciprocity between migration policy and the country’s long-term industrial strategy has enormous potential to provide this and thereby emulate the virtuous cycle of productivity, innovation and rising living standards that drove the second industrial revolution and postwar growth.

Navigating Uncertainties

Regardless of its economic benefits and humanitarian objectives, there is no question planned migration presents many challenges. One looming objection is that inducing a more organized migration in the near future could prematurely depress some local economies decades before they might experience the worst ravages of climate change.

Elected officials in more vulnerable districts may insist they have mitigation strategies sufficient to protect most property and maintain the productivity and safety of their populaces for years to come. And for individuals and families, the personal sacrifice migration requires may not be quantifiable nor convincingly offset by financial aid or other resources provided through official resettlement programs.

As policymakers deploy various carrots and sticks to direct sustainable flows of people, they cannot be deterred by the inevitable resistance they will meet. The very worst-off locales must understand that their sole choice is either a controlled, orderly shutdown that is cushioned by finite federal aid or a chaotic unraveling of societal fabric sans fiscal support.

At the same time, progressive political leaders must recognize how past developmental agendas and economic transitions involved very steep social costs for specific regions and groups to better prepare for the transitions that lie ahead.

For example, the manufacturing growth of the Gilded Age entailed a sectional wealth transfer that led to the underdevelopment of the South until the New Deal programs of the 1930s; the deindustrialization of the 1970s especially undercut the upward mobility of Black Americans in the urban North; and the trade shocks of the 1990s and 2000s deprived many formerly unionized and middle-class locales of future paths to prosperity.

Policymakers must take pains to avoid similar inequities but also be forthright about what cannot be undone in the Anthropocene: The trade-offs the country faces are unlike any other experienced during previous eras of rapid transformation.

Simply put, our habitable terrain is inescapably contracting. Ultimately, the human development indices of the U.S. — its educational levels, life-expectancy rates, infant and maternal mortality, improvement in life chances and general protection from disease and indigence — can only progress if the zones of economic activity shift and become more concentrated in the interior Northeast and upper Midwest.

It hardly needs to be said that this vision will require an extraordinary level of political capital and grassroots support. Far beyond anything contemplated during the height of the Cold War — when the threat of nuclear exchange promised to incinerate entire cities — ­­­planned migration proposes an exercise of the state’s infrastructural power and economic authority that has no obvious democratic precedent.

One can imagine vitriolic opposition to planned migration from anti-government conservatives, but also Americans who simply cannot conceive of giving up their local attachments. As every major hurricane or wildfire in recent memory has demonstrated, there are countless, otherwise rational people who refuse to abandon their homes, belongings and pets in the face of impending danger. Convincing them to move when mortal threats are not imminent will involve a bevy of incentives, robust educational campaigns and staggered mandates that clarify the risks of staying behind.

There are other unnerving contingencies to consider. Even the most sophisticated, rigorous and humane policy of planned migration will have to contend with high-risk cities where tenacious populations continue to function at a much-diminished capacity. Ethically, the decision to cut off an ill-fated rural town or suburb from fiscal support is problematic enough. The prospect, a few decades from now, of maintaining pockets of tens or hundreds of thousands of people on economic life support, through government programs like basic income, food subsidies and remedial urban maintenance, could also generate new political grievances and forms of polarization.

To avoid this scenario, while also preventing the Midwest and Northeast from becoming overwhelmed by additional unplanned flows, policymakers will have to strategically accept higher gradations of risk in select Southern and coastal regions and spur more aggressive adaptation strategies within them.

That decision-making process will likewise prove highly contentious given that, in the most extreme cases, planned migration will transform the composition of local districts for elected office and even possibly redistribute congressional power away from the least preservable Sun Belt states.

But federal agencies, in some consultation with climate scientists, Congress and state government delegations, must have the power to set population quotas and order permanent neighborhood evacuations in high-risk zones while also determining which municipalities have the most time to deploy plausible climate mitigation strategies.

The development of small nuclear reactors, the construction of hundreds of cooling centers and an array of inventive, biodiverse “green corridors” and “living shoreline” defenses for the most salvageable cities, comprise a few of the methods that may help preserve local ways of life.

A final and sobering “known unknown” must factor into any system of planned migration: An unexpected turn of events that renders previously optimal zones into new sites of destruction and disorder. Like the rest of the country, the Midwest faces its own profound set of challenges if it does not rapidly implement adaptation strategies that protect agricultural output, support biodiversity and forest management, and limit the heat island effect in key metro areas.

Although some Northern farm regions may experience less hardship under global warming and even see some benefits extend to their harvests, neither the Midwest nor the interior Northeast will be spared from devastating droughts, floods, storms, polar vortices, heatwaves and other threats. Securing the nation’s food supply in these regions through crop diversification and careful ecosystem management will be paramount to any successful resettlement program.

Upgrading the infrastructure of older cities considered prospective “climate havens,” moreover, remains an expensive and time-consuming problem to solve. As the catastrophic flooding in Vermont this past summer illustrates, climate change is rapidly challenging our assumptions about the places expected to be better off in the long run. Even with advanced modeling, our criteria for what makes for safer ground are bound to be unsettled.

Visionary policymakers and politicians must therefore recognize there is no new Eden — no perfect solution to the chaos, hunger and loss of work and shelter unfolding. There are only better and worse choices. Among those who reject bold interventions and try to paralyze federal action, many will dissemble about the costs of planned migration while others will cynically invoke the chilling and deadly forced expulsions of World War II as a warning against too much state authority.

Those who resist will do so for a simple reason: The use of positive government actions to coordinate mass climate migration would reshape the country’s entire political economy and would, at last, retire the myths of rugged individualism that impede clear thinking about the crisis at hand. It would base national economic resilience on a more circular and “pre-distributive” model, thereby irrevocably legitimating economic planning along quasi-socialist lines.

These transformations, however, need not extinguish all ideals of self-government. The purpose of planned migration is to not only avoid future untold horrors, but also to invest in citizens; to counter receding borders and lost vistas with new roads toward collective welfare, while upholding, as best as possible, the liberty of humans to pursue their talents and vocations. When such possibilities are juxtaposed with visions of a forbidding world of urban anarchy, mere subsistence and climate apartheid, we have few choices but to propel society forward.

Correction: On Sept. 29, 2023, this essay was edited to make clear that the estimate of at least 13 million Americans who will be forced to migrate from coastal areas could multiply significantly but not by “tens of millions.”

The post The Bold Idea To Move Millions To Climate Havens appeared first on NOEMA.

But Gradlon had a daughter — a wild and irresponsible youth named Dahut, who was given to drink and revelry. According to the oldest version of the tale, one night, she and her lover grew so blinded by wine that they decided to steal King Gradlon’s key and unlock the dikes of Ys. The seas rushed in through the open gates and, before the sun rose, swallowed up the island — with its towers and great halls — whole. Even to this day, it is said, the bells of Ys can sometimes be heard chiming beneath the waters of the Bay of Douarnenez.

The legend of Ys is not the only story of a lost land in the seas off the coast of Britain. The lost isle of Lyonesse, home in ballads to King Arthur’s knight Tristan, is told to have held 140 churches and many fair towns, and to have been taken by the sea, like Ys, in a single terrible night. In Wales, stories were told of Cantre’r Cantref Gwaelod, a drowned kingdom said to lie beneath what is now the Cardigan Bay.

It is perhaps not altogether strange that the ancient Celts told such stories, for when the tides draw away from many shores in Britain and nearby lands, a peculiar sight is revealed: tree stumps on the muddy flats, stretching in places far out into the sea, into depths hidden save at the lowest of tides. Their very existence betokens a mystery to which even medieval-era people were not insensible, and our earliest written records of these so-called “submerged forests” date to at least the 12th century.

The first of these comes from the Welsh-Norman priest Gerald of Wales, in his work Itinerarium Cambriae, where he said of them that “[they] looked, not like a shore, but like a grove cut down, perhaps, at the time of the Deluge, or not long after, but certainly in very remote ages, being by degrees consumed and swallowed up by the violence and encroachments of the sea.” This connection to the Biblical Flood would persist, and for centuries the mysterious drowned forests would be known in folklore as “Noah’s Woods,” testament, it was thought, to that ancient calamity.

Despite this knowledge and enduring curiosity, many long years would pass before a more academic eye was turned upon the subject. The ancient stumps were too natural for the archaeologist, too petrified for the botanist, too recent for the geologist and, at any rate, too inaccessible, out among the treacherous, muddy tide zones, for all parties to dare venture. It would not be until the dawn of the 20th century that one man, Clement Reid, a Victorian geologist nearing retirement, took a scientific approach to explaining the strange phenomena.

The notion of Earth’s true antiquity, and its changing nature over time, was still a comparatively recent epiphany in Reid’s day, and he was among the first great paleontologists. Drawing together observations of one particular forest’s placement and distribution, he worked through a string of potential explanations, discounting them all, in turn, to conclude finally that “nothing but a change of sea level will account for its present position.” In a slim, 1913 publication, Reid proposed on this basis the existence of a lost land bridge, which had once bound together the continent and the isles. It would be the first time in nearly 8,000 years that anyone had grasped upon the truth of the North Sea and the world that lay forgotten beneath it.

The study of prehistory was still in its infancy when Reid submitted his thesis, and there were many uncertainties he could not firmly answer. He did not know the full loop extent of this ancient land bridge, nor the nature of its geography or ecology, nor even precisely when it had ultimately succumbed to the waves. Indeed, it would still take many decades before advances in methodology, combined with accumulating evidence, could enable us to grasp a fuller picture.

With his limited means and incipient research, he suspected the country to have been an inhospitable landscape, boggy and miasmic, passed through solely by fleeting travelers as they migrated between more important uplands. His reliance on nearby archaeological artifacts for dating purposes was overly simplistic and led him astray, as he suspected the floods began with the first farmers and ended by the Bronze Age, around 3,000 years ago. Though Reid’s work remains fundamental, great leaps have been made in our knowledge since.

We now know that ocean-levels did not start rising about 5,000 years ago, as Reid thought, nor end as late as 1000 B.C. The beginning was far earlier, tied up in the ending of the Ice Age, circa 10,000 B.C., and had finished already by 7-8,000 years ago. We now also know that this flooded country was not merely a treacherous wasteland. It was a rich land, a fertile land, a world unto itself. And, in the last few decades, owing to magnitudes of sensory work done by oil-surveyors, wind-mill prospectors and construction firms charged with laying undersea pipes, we have at length begun the long, exciting process of mapping the very contours of the drowned landscape itself. Since the 1990s, we have even had a name for this country: Doggerland. A picture of its history, its advent, and its loss has at last begun to emerge, and with it a story — and a warning, too, for future generations about the changing tides of our planet and dangers we may face today.

According to our most comprehensive histories, this is how that story goes:

Doggerland Inhabited

Let us step back into the past and try to grasp the picture these discoveries have painted. The origins of Doggerland lie far, far back before the first bronze was smelted or the plow ever yoked to a horse or cow, before the long ice — before, even, a certain gangly, upright primate made its first stumbling probes beyond its ancient, savanna home. There is a sea over Europe; there is no Britain and no continent. It is hot, and the world is strange and old and full of life, at times familiar, yet odd.

Ages go by and, slowly, the waters retreat. The seas become islands, become a great, single landmass, connected in its eastern extremities to the greater land of Asia. Northward from its western shores extends a long peninsula, tethered to the continent by a vast upfold of the Earth’s crust — a wall of rock and chalk ridges. This is the Wealden Anticline, which runs from the hills of the South Downs in southern England to Artois in our time’s France. 

There is no France in this era, no England, but we are moving closer to their day. The hot skies are cooling and the snows growing longer and deeper at the planet’s poles. For the first time in many millions of years, since before the age of the dinosaurs, the world is entering an Ice Age. The cycles of the Earth’s orbit have decreed a period of long cooling — not one single event, as many think, but a vacillating dance of cold spells and reprieves, of thaws and freezes and thaws again, each lasting many thousands of years. Each new freeze gathers up glaciers and each new thaw melts and disperses them. 

A freeze is ending. It is the melting-time. Northeast of prehistoric, or “ur” Britain and ur-France, above the wall which connects them, stretches a wide, sandy plain. It is a shallow sea in the warm-spells, and naked land in the cold. It is the ur-Doggerland. As the masses of ice retreat from it, they leave in their wake great streams of meltwater — gathering confluence by confluence, into a vast ice-lake.

The lake has no outflow, no drainage; fed by the shrinking glaciers, it can only grow. Pressure builds. Finally, a day comes when it is too much. Breaking through the low hills that dammed it, the lake collapses over the low plain, surging south, where it crashes into the Wealden Anticline. The chalk and stone cannot withstand it and is broken and flushed away. For the first time since Europe rose from the hot, ancient seas, Britain is severed from the continent.

A shallow ocean now spreads between the islands and the mainland, the plain beneath only exposed when the seas are unusually low. Yet the seas do lower. The warm spell cannot last. Heat gives way to chill gives way to heat and, by 50,000 years ago, the planet is in the grips of its final cold epoch — the Ice Age of popular culture.

Once more, the glaciers have crept down from the north, drawing up the world’s oceans like great sponges. Doggerland stretches as a vast, arctic plain from the uplands of Britain to the hills of Denmark, from the river-valleys on the bed of the English Channel to cliffs of Orkney and Shetland. Nor is it alone, for seas are shrunken across the world.

In Southeast Asia, the continental shelf between Malaysia and the Indonesian archipelago lies exposed, such that a tiger might walk from Cambodia to the tip of Indonesia’s Java, or a monkey could swing across the carpeting rainforest. Far in the north, between Siberia and Alaska, the Bering Strait is likewise dry, and a broad landmass, Beringia, opens easy crossings from one continent to the other. Even in Australia, the Arafura Sea, which today severs Top End from New Guinea, is gone, and in its place lies a vast savanna, grazed by rhinoceros-sized marsupials. Yet in Europe, in the bed of the North Sea, all is cold and barren.

Time ticks on, millennia pass by. It is 20,000 years ago and we are closer to the end of the long freeze than to its beginning. But not quite. Before it finally relents, it gathers all its strength and its chill for one great glacial pulse, thrusting down shoulders of ice deep into the south. From buried Scandinavia, the ice reaches as far as Germany; the permafrost runs beneath tundra into Austria and Hungary, meeting there the glaciers of the Alps.

It is colder than ever before, and colder than it ever will be again. It is the Maximum, the zenith of the world’s deep freeze. The plain of Doggerland barely reaches to the sea; east, west, over much of the north, it is walled by ice and an impassable chill. It is a hard land, an empty one.

But despite the cold, the frost and the featureless landscape, Doggerland is teeming with life. There are snow hares and lemmings and grouse and arctic foxes, and the megafauna — the great beasts. Vast herds drift across the plains, larger by far than any found today beyond the parks of Africa, grazing, browsing and fertilizing.

Unlike the poor, often acidic soils of modern tundras — boggy and coated in unpalatable shrubs — the fields of Doggerland are rich and fertile. They are blanketed in green herbs and grasses, and flush with flowers in the short summer months. They are what we call the Mammoth Steppe, among the richest ecosystems ever known, now nearly lost to time. And Doggerland is the heart of the steppe in Europe. Where the herds go, predators follow: wolves, bears, lions, hyenas — and, now, humans. 

These are not the first Men in Europe. Some 50,000 year ago, their earliest antecessors had crossed the straits of the Bosporus, beginning their great migrations westwards through the continent. In the process, the character of Europe would change forever, and our ancient cousins, the Neanderthals, would first be displaced and in time, destroyed. Moving forward to 20,000 years ago, it is still nearly 10,000 years to the end of the Ice Age.

The vastness of time can be difficult to comprehend. Yet for all their antiquity, even at this ancient date, these early settlers, who traveled into the heart of the steppe in Europe, likely made little headway in Doggerland. Not all the rich game in the world will aid much in the glacial cold if no wood can be found to burn in the flat grasslands. For the time being, save perhaps probing, seasonal expeditions, the expanses of Doggerland remained a steppe too far.

Still, tribes cling to the southern outskirts of the great plains, biding their time, stalking any meandering herds which wander out. They are peoples of surprising sophistication — artisans, gatherers, hunters of the horse and reindeer. They sew garments pinned with bone-needles, make rich ornaments of cowry-shells, even build turf houses from the tusks and limbs of slaughtered mammoths. They are ingenious, adaptable. And their time in Doggerland will come.

Years pass, the sky warms. Things begin to change. About 15,000 years ago comes the Bølling–Allerød warming, when temperatures shoot up across the continent and forests of birch, aspen, willow and pine invade Doggerland. Briefly, the cold will swing back, circa 13,000 years ago, but the greater trend is set and the Ice Age running to its end. With the glaciers retreating, water flows back into the seas, fraying the northern shores of Doggerland and eating away at its outer reaches.

Just under 12,000 years ago, the Norwegian Trench breaks into the Kattegat, reconnecting the Baltic. The breadth of dry land linking Britain east to Jutland is diminished, yet what remains is a vast, green and now hospitable plain. For millennia, this land will become the center of human habitation in Western Europe.

With the end of the long cold, life on the continent sees many changes. The vast herds that trekked the mammoth steppe are gone or fading: destroyed, most likely, by the growing presence of Man. For the duration of the Ice Age, the wide, unpopulated expanses in the north were a refuge and a safety for the abundant populations of megafauna. No matter how many animals these hunters might kill in the south, there were always more to take their place, as stocks of game seemed to be continuously refilled by migrating animals from the glaciers’ distant fringes.

Now, however, matters have changed. Enterprising tribes — hunters, explorers, ancient adventurers — have populated the continent from east to west, and even to the fringes of the Arctic Sea. For the big game, there are no more safe havens, save the mountains and deep forests into which they increasingly retreat, their numbers dwindling in obscurity. 

In the absence of the old herds, the sustenance of countless generations, novel foods and livelihoods are needed. It is a new age, the Mesolithic, the last period of hunter-gathering in European history. People increasingly take to the shores and waterways and to the swiftly swelling wetlands, fed by the encroaching seas.

The warming climate has turned Doggerland into a river-country and a land of fens, or bogs — perhaps not the most inviting prospect to the modern eye, yet a bounty to the hunter and forager. No direct evidence of permanent human occupation survives from Mesolithic Doggerland, owing to the victory of the North Sea, yet it seems overwhelmingly probable. The land is ripe for settlement.

To the marshes and reed-forests flock geese, mallards, cormorants and swans, whilst the shorelines brim with eiders, wigeons and flightless auks. There are oysters to be collected, crabs to be caught, and vast migrations of spawning fish — eel, salmon, shad, to name but a few — more abundant by far than anything seen in later years.

There are monsters in the waterways, enormous sturgeons, up to six meters long, and there are all the twigs, reeds and willow-branches one could ever need for basketry and wickerwork. In the forests, not all the hunted game is lost. Deer stalk the underbrush, wild boars as well. There are elk among the fens. Doggerland in the early Mesolithic is rich and plentiful — and it cannot last.

Far to the north, the last glaciers are still melting. The seas have not ceased rising. Beach by beach, headland by headland, the waves are gnawing at the coasts. Their forays are not altogether disastrous: where the waters inundate a field or forest, salt marshes and tidal flats are born — optimal hunting-grounds, overflowing in fish and wildfowl. Until, that is, these too, in turn, are swallowed by the sea. Slowly at first, increasingly quickly, those same processes that once gave life to Doggerland are beginning to destroy it.

It is now 9,000 years ago. Less. The landmass of Doggerland has shrunk dramatically: In the north, the shores are rapidly retreating, river-mouths sinking into estuaries into flooded bays and firths. In the south, the great delta where the Thames and Rhine once joined is swiftly eroding into a deepening inlet. Soon enough, these growing introgressions will connect off the hills of Jutland, linking the waters into a single, contiguous seaway, reducing Doggerland to an island.

The Earth’s climate is not steady, nor has it ever been. The pace of warming varies due, in this era, to the planet’s unsteady axial tilt, and with it, the rate of the rising seas. There are periods of slowing — even of temporary reversal. Enough, we may imagine, to feed fortunate generations the hope that the floodings may be drawing to their end. Any such reprieves are but brief and illusory.

Doubtless, as in more recent ages, these floods are often disastrous and deadly. Countless lives on countless occasions are lost to the planet’s fickle seas. Yet evidence from nearby countries suggests folk do not simply abandon the shores. They cling to them and the wealth of food and resources they offer. We need not imagine these people as unduly primitive or itinerant — though our knowledge of the ancient denizens of Doggerland is severely limited, buried now beneath layers of sea and sediment, what clues we do have point to a substantial degree of sophistication, and even of some permanence.

By the estuaries, they build sizeable houses, inhabited by successive generations, whilst inland survives evidence of mysterious, wooden posts, perhaps the Doggerlandish equivalent of Amerindian totem poles. These point to a landscape not just ephemerally inhabited, but integrated, understood and sacralized, as witnessed among indigenous peoples around the world. The loss of a seasonal territory or hunting ground is not merely an economic, but a cultural, even spiritual bereavement. Graves of buried ancestors are swept away, sacred pools and springs drowned in the tides, as whole nations are unmoored and set adrift. 

We are at the end now, or near to it. Where once stretched the vast expanse of unbroken plains, linking Scandinavia to the continent and Britain north to Shetland, remains only a small, tattered archipelago. People still likely inhabit it, though we lack conclusive evidence. A boating-people, a fishing-people, paddling in dugout canoes between the low islands. These had been an upland of the greater landmass, called the Dogger Hills — today, it’s the eponymous Dogger Bank. They are the last remnant of the flooded country, and they, too, are on borrowed time. At the edge of Norway’s continental shelf, at a place called Storegga, a series of three enormous submarine landslides occur, among the largest ever recorded. They trigger a wave of tsunamis across the North Sea, bearing against the last remains of Doggerland, where waters sweep over the isles, killing, presumably, anyone still inhabiting them. This may not have been the very end — devastated, depopulated, a few pieces of land and scattered sandbars may have struggled above the waves for some further centuries. But by 7,000 years ago, all is gone. The entirety of Doggerland has been swallowed by the sea and, soon enough, by forgetfulness, save perhaps in murky legend.

Doggerland Lost

Why does the story of Doggerland so captivate modern minds? From novels to documentaries to the flurry of recent research, the ancient, flooded landmass is — for the first time in over 7,000 years — approaching the status of a household name. Plato said of legendary Atlantis that “there fell one day and night of destruction; and the warriors in your land all in one body were swallowed up by the earth, and in like manner did the island Atlantis sink beneath the sea and vanish away. ”

His story of how the greatest and richest of human cities could suddenly be lost and destroyed captured people’s imaginations for more than 2,000 years. If Atlantis fascinates for its parable of Man’s hubris, then Doggerland is perhaps a story of our impermanence and our ultimate futility against the elements. Its relevance in an age of climate change and rising seas is evident, for within its story seems to lie a warning, and a picture, maybe, not merely of the past, but of the future.

The (pre)historical significance of the events is evident, even apart from their drama. The loss of Doggerland brought irreparable fractures in the human landscape of Europe as well. Earlier Stone Age cultures, such as the traditions known to archaeologists as the Ahrensburgian and Maglemosian, had been shared across a broad, northern world. From the flat plains of Poland fringing the Baltic Ice Lake to the English uplands and the vanished lands between, there had stretched one single, common, mingling cultural sphere, and the result was a unity both of ancestry and tradition.

When Doggerland sank, this sphere was broken. The cultures that arose in the following millennia, such as the Ertebølle in southern Scandinavia, would develop isolated from Britain. The newly formed sea was a barrier too great for Mesolithic boat-craft, and though the narrow English Channel remained navigable to canoes, connecting England southwards to the continent, it would not be until the coming of the Anglo-Saxons and then the Norse, many thousands of years later, that a particular link between Britain and the North Sea’s eastern shores was re-established.

Beyond merely an explanation for archaeological trajectories — a curious anecdote of the ancient past — it is clear that the drowning of Doggerland was something more. It was, in a very real sense, a human tragedy. One we have only now begun to grasp. We may imagine recurring scenes of exodus, of one group fleeing inland from the sinking coast, settling in the territory of another tribe, subsequently displaced. Unhomed, they, in turn, must migrate further into the interior, continuing the unfolding chain of violence and dispossession. This is the dark insinuation of Doggerland’s story that frightens us — a vision of migration, exile and shattered identities setting off the dominos of strife and conflict. It is the vision we fear for ourselves.

The flooding that drowned Doggerland was the result of more than 100 meters of rising seas since the glacial maximum, about 20,000 years ago. Such a scenario is more extreme than anything we face by this century’s end by around two  orders of magnitude, yet even a fraction of this increase could bring catastrophe today. Island nations such as the Maldives — strung along a series of low atolls — are rarely more than a few meters above the surf, and for most of the Maldives’ meager land-area, less than one meter. Permanent inundation, under such conditions, is not merely a hypothetical worry, but an imminent concern, even under more conservative estimates of future sea-level rise.

Even in mainland countries such as Bangladesh, the majority of its land mass is less than 10 meters above sea-level, whilst the majority of the population inhabits the rich and fertile Ganges Delta, which is even closer to the waves, in places only a meter away. Mangrove forests, where intact, may shoulder some of the swelling waters and storm surges, but only to a point. Major floods are already increasing in their frequency and severity and are only projected to worsen in the decades to come.

The drowning of Doggerland is not a one-to-one analogy for the dangers we face today, and it is unclear what precise lessons, if any, may be extracted. Its loss was, ultimately, a natural and inevitable product of Earth’s celestial cycles, and for all its relative rapidity, the work of many millennia. Yet in the picture painted, and the tragedy we glimpse therein, we seem to spy ominously a warning and a premonition. For the story of Doggerland — its drama and its draw — that may, in the end, be enough.

The post Climate Lessons From A Lost Land appeared first on NOEMA.

But something felt off.

“I felt so disconnected from nature and people,” Loïc, 38, said. “I wanted to live in alignment with my values.”

In Tokyo, the couple tried to make their lives more eco-friendly. Loic quit his job in the automobile industry to work in renewables; Emmy, 36, tried incorporating teachings on the environment into her classroom at the Lycée Français International de Tokyo. Yet every time the couple bought plastic-wrapped food at the grocery store or found themselves stuck in a sea of people, they felt like their efforts to reconnect with nature were in vain. 

In 2019, the couple decided they needed a break. One evening, Emmy searched for nature holidays online and stumbled upon a week-long sustainability event organized by an ashram in northern France, where participants share their knowledge about everything from how to build an energy-efficient home to how to cook wild plants. “I booked it without expectation,” she said. “I just knew that we needed something different.”

That summer, the family traveled to the ashram, located in a medieval fortified farmhouse in northern, rural France. Over the course of the week, the couple sat in circles with other visitors who wanted to learn about permaculture and sustainable architecture; their daughters climbed trees and visited the apiary. When Emmy overheard that followers of the ashram were building an ecovillage next door, she knew immediately that she wanted to be a part of it. 

“We were seduced by this place, by the people and the values,” said Loïc. “We wanted to live in connection to nature.”

Less than a year later, the Leruste family packed up their Tokyo life, leaving their skyscraper apartment to build a small house on a wheat field in Eure-et-Loir county, northern France. Their home is made of wood and insulated with straw. It is the ultimate ecologically friendly house, running on renewable energy, dry toilets and phytodepuration, and a natural water treatment system.

Outside the house, the Lerustes are surrounded by 25 other families who have also upended their lives to build the eco-hamlet known as Plessis. The families hope it will be an oasis for others also wishing to take their climate commitments to the next level. 

Those commitments mean trying to live off the land, building sustainable homes and incorporating eco-friendly behavior into every facet of daily life, from consumption to children’s education. But the community’s goal is not simply to be energy efficient: They want to reimagine community life entirely, building new democratic models, childcare systems and a spiritual orientation that aligns people with each other and nature. 

“I love being surrounded by people who have an awareness that this Earth is so much bigger than us,” said Emmy. “It is so much easier to live sustainably when you are part of a community.”

The Rise Of Ecovillages

An increasing number of people around the world are joining or creating ecovillages, spurred by concerns about climate change to reconsider their way of life.

Today, there are more than 10,000 ecovillages globally, mainly in rural areas, where people are building societies that are socially, economically and ecologically sustainable. These ecovillages are extremely diverse: they can be secular or spiritual, traditional or intentional, on or off the grid. While some ecovillages are quite radical in their politics, sharing everything from financial resources to bedrooms, others are rather mainstream, with people still living in separate homes, working day jobs but also sharing garden spaces and utilities. Despite these differences, ecovillages typically share the worldview that capitalism and industrialization have disconnected us from ourselves, each other and, especially, nature. Ecovillages are an attempt to restore these links. 

“Most people leave mainstream society for ecovillages to escape neoliberalism and capitalism that dominate their daily lives,” said Nadine Brühwiler, a doctoral student studying the rise of ecovillages at the University of Basel in Switzerland. “Although they are all vastly different, most ecovillages ask themselves: What do we want to sustain?”

Ecovillages have existed for decades. Some of the biggest and most famous ecovillages in the world today, such as Findhorn in Scotland and Auroville in India, were founded in the 1960s when rural hippie communes were on the rise. At the time, ecovillages were emerging independently of one another with little conversation or coordination occurring among them.

This changed in 1995 when the Findhorn ecovillage organized a conference that brought together ecovillages worldwide for the first time. The conference was an unexpected success. Over 400 people from 40 countries attended, with many more turned away due to lack of space. It became clear to the organizers that there was an appetite for alternative, ecological ways of living but that the movement needed more structure. 

Following the conference, 20 people from different ecovillages around the world met to create the Global Ecovillage Network (GEN), an association of communities dedicated to finding ways to live more communally and sustainably. GEN’s primary focus is connecting existing ecovillages with one another and providing training and resources for those wanting to join or sustain an ecovillage.

Since its founding nearly 30 years ago, GEN has blossomed from a small, niche network of grassroots projects to an established international organization. Today, the network is home to intentional communities where people opt to live together, as well as existing, traditional villages looking to transition toward solely using renewables. While GEN used to be brushed aside as a hippie project, today the network is taken much more seriously: GEN has consultative status at the United Nations’ Economic and Social Council, and the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change mentions ecovillages in their report and features one of GEN’s founding members on its cover.

“When we used to go to the United Nations Climate Change Conference in the early 2000s, politicians would walk by and laugh at us,” said Martina Grosse Burlage, a UN representative for GEN who goes by the name “Macaco.” “Now, when the ministers walk by, they stop at our booth.” 

The number of people wanting to join ecovillages has also grown in recent years, according to Francesca Whitlock, GEN’s communications director. In France alone, the number has grown considerably: Since the country’s national ecovillage network Cooperative Oasis began in 2014, over 1,000 ecovillages have registered with the organization.

Mathieu Labonne, the network’s director and founder of the Plessis ecovillage, estimates that roughly 100 new villages are created in France annually. There is even a quarterly magazine for French ecovillages called Passerelle Eco, which over the course of its 81 editions, has featured the latest news about ecovillages around France. “We are seeing an emergence of these villages,” said Christophe Monnot, an expert on eco-spirituality and an assistant professor on the sociology of religion at the University of Strasbourg. “It’s not a tsunami but it’s a movement.”

Brühwiler believes that climate change is the main reason ecovillages have experienced a sudden wave of interest and are becoming more mainstream. “The values in our society at large are changing, and everyone is looking for solutions,” she said.

The demographic of people interested in joining ecovillages today looks different from the hippies who created intentional communities in the 1960s. At the ecovillage of the Plessis, residents include engineers wearing golf shirts and Parisians looking to gain practical gardening skills. 

“Ecovillages have always attracted young idealists and older people with money and new-age sensibilities,” Whitlock said. “But now you have a lot of families living mainstream lives who are looking for something different.”

Loïc and Emmy see themselves as part of this new wave. While environmentalism has always been important to the couple, they were never dogmatic about their values. 

“It was climate change that made me want to move faster,” said Loïc. “It made me feel that this life isn’t so radical. I started asking myself, if someone like me who claims to have convictions about the environment doesn’t make this change, who will?”

Sustainability Becomes Spirituality

When Loïc and Emmy arrived in the ecovillage of the Plessis, their lives changed dramatically. The couple, who had spent years anonymously roaming the streets of Tokyo, suddenly knew everyone they passed on these country roads. Loïc went from being an engineer working a desk job in a sterile high-rise building to a man who spent his days in the dirt planting vegetables. At their front door, leather shoes were now replaced by rubber boots. 

But one of the biggest changes was the sudden presence of eco-spirituality — a modern belief system that brings together humans and the environment — in their everyday lives. Taking inspiration from cultures worldwide, including Buddhism and Indigenous traditions, eco-spirituality aims to reconnect people with nature.

While the exact value system changes depending on the community or individual, eco-spiritualists typically reject the human/nature divide and disavow the capitalist system, believing that the only way to change our world is to change our spiritual and emotional mindset.

Early iterations of eco-spirituality emerged in 17th century and later in the 19th century, with the rise of environmentalism but boomed during the counterculture movements of the 1960s, in the aftermath of Hiroshima. Julia Itel, an expert on eco-spirituality, says this was a time when people began expressing disenchantment with modernity, believing that not all of capitalism’s promises would be kept and that not all forms of progress should be celebrated.

“Eco-spirituality is a demythologization of modernity whereby people are falling out of love with the utopias promised by neoliberalism,” said Itel, who authored a book on “Spirituality and Sustainable Society.” “They are turning toward more ancient traditions, such as pagan beliefs, to restore links with our planet”.

Around the world, eco-spirituality is on the rise, which experts attribute to a growing consciousness about our ecological crisis. Eco-spirituality can take many different forms: some create forest rituals; others revive neo-pagan practices. People’s level of engagement can also vary, from casual participation in eco-spiritual rituals to making the radical move of living full-time in an ecovillage.

“Though not all ecovillages are spiritual, many of the people drawn to these places want to reconsider every aspect of their life, from their lifestyle to their spirituality,” Brühwiler said.  

In the Plessis ecovillage, various forms of eco-spirituality are at play. The village was created by a group of people who wanted to live next to the local ashram, a center dedicated to the spiritual Hindu leader Amma, revered as the “hugging saint” by her following of globetrotting devotees. Amma is neither prescriptive nor dogmatic in what she preaches. She speaks in broad terms about the need for greater selflessness, interreligious harmony and critically, environmental protection in our society.

While the ashram was created for Amma in 2002, today it serves as a kind of eco-spirituality laboratory where people can come to reimagine their belief systems. Though some members of the Plessis ecovillage are followers of Amma — participating in morning meditations and evening chants — others like Loïc and Emmy are not, but want to reimagine their spirituality within the context of the climate crisis. 

“I personally don’t connect with Hinduism or Amma,” Loïc said. “I’m here because I want to be surrounded by people who want to be connected to the environment.”

Loïc and Emily were both raised Catholic but they have experimented with how they live out their spirituality in their adult lives. For example, the couple had a Catholic marriage ceremony in a Japanese temple. “What I like here is the spiritual openness and willingness to question the values that govern mainstream society,” Emmy said. “It’s a chance to reimagine a new belief system.”

Commune Or Cult?

When Loïc and Emmy told their parents they were leaving city life for an ecovillage, their parents were concerned: “They thought we had joined a cult,” Emmy said.

Ecovillages are often accused of being cults and improperly linked to the new-age communes of the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s; those famously included Jonestown, an American cult in Guyana where 918 people engaged in mass suicide/murder and Rajneeshpuram, a religious intentional community in Oregon that deliberately contaminated food at local restaurants and plotted to assassinate Charles Turner, the former U.S. Attorney for the District of Oregon. In France today, ecovillages are regularly characterized as sects in the press. 

“There is a tendency to immediately dismiss ecological communities as being cults,” said Frédéric Rognon, a professor of religion at the University of Strasbourg. “Sure, some people who are interested in these villages may have sectarian characteristics but that isn’t the norm. The real issue is that environmentalism still seems radical to many people.” 

As the Plessis ecovillage project gained momentum in 2017, many people from the nearby village of Pontgouin protested. Locals were concerned that it would impose on their way of life — from their spiritual practices to their sustainability habits — forcing residents to change their cultural practices

“The [ecovillage] has a different way of living,” said Jean-Claude Friesse, mayor of Pontgouin. “People thought it was a cult.”

But as the ecovillage has established itself in the greater community, locals have started to embrace it. 

Like many ecovillages worldwide, the Plessis ecovillage is a diverse community where individuals and families make different choices about their lifestyles, spirituality and environmental engagement. While some people like Loïc have given up city jobs to work the land, others work remotely, traveling to Paris a few times a month for meetings.

Unlike cults, the ecovillage is home to a diversity of belief systems, where people constantly negotiate what it means to live sustainably and collectively. “I think people saw that this wasn’t a group of fanatics,” Friesse said. “They realized that much like their community, it was simply a group of people trying to learn to live together.”

Since the project began, the ecovillage has brought in young families to the neighboring aging village of less than 2,000 people. Today, a host of locally grown vegetables are available to locals. New shops and services have popped up in the town square: Emmy has started her own Montessori school committed to teaching children how to protect nature.

“This project has rejuvenated the village,” Friesse said. “It has been a really positive thing for everyone.” While not all locals share the ecovillagers’ ecological or spiritual convictions, they do value the intangible thing these villagers are trying to build: community. 

As France has become more urbanized, the country’s rural areas have seen its residents flock to cities. In rural France today, there are abandoned towns and plots of land, where previously central community spaces — from bakeries to local churches — have shut down as an aging population is left to fend for itself.

“People here used to be together, there was a community,” Friesse said. “The ecovillage has brought this back.” 

The more time locals spend with their new neighbors, the more they realize that they are re-creating what locals have yearned for — a place thought lost to modernity, where parents can leave their kids with their neighbors; where elders can rely on others for a helping hand.

Aurore Delemotte, 32, who lives in Plessis with her husband, a newborn and toddler, said parenting has been easier since the move. In the ecovillage, she has found “what people are missing in other places,” she said. “It’s a place where people can find meaning in things other than money or jobs.”

Eveline Bertrand, 77, plans to move into the elderly home being built in the Plessis ecovillage. “I like chopping the vegetables with everyone around the picnic table and being around people who are young and vibrant,” she said. “Plus, when I move here, there will be no more solo dinners.”

Researchers who study the motivations of people joining ecovillages say that loneliness is often a driving factor. After Covid forced many people into extended periods of isolation, GEN received a record number of inquiries, according to Whitlock. One ecovillage in Switzerland has seen its population grow by nearly 30% since Covid. “It wasn’t just an ecological consciousness growing but a social one,” said Brühwiler. “Covid got people thinking about how they want to live.”

For many people, Covid highlighted how lonely our society has become. Even before the pandemic, experts were decrying our “loneliness crisis”. Around the world, people are reporting unprecedented levels of loneliness. In Europe, 18% of people—the equivalent of 75 million people — are socially isolated, according to a 2019 European Social Survey. A 2021 report indicated that 61% of young Americans feel “serious loneliness” and lack community. While the pandemic exacerbated this trend, the systematic closing of public spaces due to fiscal cuts, as well as the proliferation of technology, has made people more alone — physically, emotionally and spiritually — than ever before. Ecovillages are helping fill this existential, and growing, gap in our society.

“It isn’t always just the climate-minded people who join,” said Burlage. “These villages can respond to a very human impulse of not wanting to be alone.”

Expectations Meet Reality

Like all utopic dreams, the romantic expectations people have of ecovillages are rarely matched by reality. Conflict can often erupt over small, mundane things: someone’s dog pooping on the shared lawn or a teenager making too much noise in the middle of the night.

In the Plessis ecovillage, two neighbors are already arguing over how to share land situated between their two homes. “We’re not used to living with so many people, or sharing everything,” Itel said. “It’s a form of cultural organization that we were not educated on.”

But arguments are also often ideological. Because each ecovillage defines its own values, there can be friction and disputes over how much personal freedom should be sacrificed for communal well-being.

“There are always bigger conflicts: conflicts about power, about anarchy, about consumerism and materialism,” Yves Michel, an ecovillage scholar who lives in Éourres, an ecovillage in the lower Alps, told me. “People come with amazing dreams but after a while, they realize it’s not paradise and that you need to hustle: you need to build a life.”

For many people in these ecovillages, environmentalism is their shared culture — with many believing that it can supersede other markers of identity bound by geography, ethnicity or political orientation.

Yet most aspiring ecovillages fail. Around 90% of projects never see the light of day, either due to external constraints, like the inability to get building permits, or more often because of internal disagreements over how a community should live.

When ecovillages do succeed, there is often huge turnover among residents. “There is a nomadism of ecovillages,” Rognon, the religion professor, told me. “There are people who will never stop searching for their utopia.”

This reality raises larger questions about ecovillages as chosen communities: Can communities we create be as strong as those we are born into? Can rituals we invent be passed down as easily as those we inherit? 

These questions poke holes into the worldview that belies the ecovillage project. “People always ask us how long we will stay here,” Emmy said. “But no one asks this (of) people living in ‘traditional’ communities.”

But, she added in the same breath, “for now we are happy; and if that changes, we can always move.”

Insular To Influencer

As climate change has become a more pressing issue, the ecovillage movement has increasingly taken steps to influence mainstream society.

On nearly every continent, there are ecovillages serving as “living and learning centers,” where people can learn about sustainable and communal living. From the Institute of Permaculture and Ecovillage of the Cerrado in Brazil to the Sarvodaya center in Sri Lanka, ecovillages are opening their doors to the wider public, offering exchange programs to young people. 

There are also many examples of ecovillages supporting vulnerable people: In Ukraine, ecovillages have welcomed people fleeing the country’s war-stricken cities; in Germany, ecovillages have invited environmental activists to come rest and recharge.

But despite a growing interest in ecovillages, many in the movement feel that change is not happening quickly enough given the ongoing ecological crisis. Part of the challenge is getting people interested. In the global north, there remains a deep skepticism about these communities, which many regard as cults by a different name. In the global south, the concerns are different; many feel the European ecovillage model is for the privileged, not the poor. 

“In the global south, people still have these social bonds that ecovillages in the global north are trying to revive,” said Ousmane Pame, the president of REDES, the ecovillage network of Senegal. “People here are not ‘trying to live in accordance with their ecological values’. They are trying to survive.”

Some communities in the global south already live in an ecologically friendly way, making it hard for them to grasp why it’s necessary to brand village life as “eco-friendly”. For GEN, this is one challenge of creating a global ecovillage movement that speaks to the needs and desires of diverse communities. Labonne believes the key is to decentralize efforts, with each community demonstrating what’s possible through their cultural and economic context. 

“In an ideal world, everyone would have an ecovillage in their backyard,” he said. “This would make people realize, the idea isn’t that radical.”

In early July, I traveled to the Plessis ecovillage during their sustainability week, the nature holiday that Loïc and Emmy attended years ago, to better understand the event that inspired them to change their lives. 

When I arrived on an early, summer morning, I found groups of people scattered across the grass, talking about everything from spirituality to sustainability. By the apiary, a dozen people were learning how to listen to nature. Next to the garden, children were making toys out of recycled materials. The event, which draws crowds from across France, was understated: there were no flashy signs, no caterers, no stringent rules to follow. At dawn, those who wanted to prayed and chanted. At dusk, people slept alongside each other on thin mattresses on the floor.

“The goal is not to be prescriptive or preachy,” said Labonne. “It’s about generating ideas and showing people what’s possible.”

Although the participants had different motivations for attending, the majority expressed a desire to reconnect: with nature and with a community.

“I’m here to get inspired,” said Severine Lefebvre, 46, a Parisian who wants to start her own ecovillage. “When I see places like this, I think, maybe there is hope.”

It’s been four years since the Leruste family attended this event and decided to change their lives dramatically, leaving behind everything to start anew. The journey has not been straightforward: both Emmy and Loïc say they now work more than they ever have, not only to earn an income but to help build their ecovillage.

“There is always something that needs to be done, always something new we don’t yet know how to do,” said Loïc, who is training to be a vegetable farmer. “There is inevitably a mental charge that comes with trying to reimagine how you want to live and build community.”

Yet despite the work, the couple says they feel less stressed than they did living in Tokyo. Although life there was easier, for years they struggled with feelings of restlessness and the guilt of living a life that failed to align with their values. 

“Don’t get me wrong, I’m exhausted at the end of every day,” Emmy said. “But I’m also energized by the feeling that I’m living out what I believe in.”

Halfway through our conversation, Emmy looked up and waved at a group of local women from nearby Pontgouin as they walked in equipped in hairnets and gloves: They had come to help the ecovillage make lunch for everyone. To her right, a few picnic benches over, her two daughters playing with a group of other kids, searching for bugs in the grass.

“Living sustainably and communally isn’t a radical idea,” Emmy said, pausing to survey the scene. “Just look around you.”

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That morning, over 53,000 gallons of bunker fuel spilled into San Francisco Bay. It spread quickly: northeast to Richmond, to the beaches of San Francisco, to the rugged coasts of the Marin Headlands and then out to the Pacific and up and down the coast. In an urban area known for its natural beauty, over 50 public beaches across multiple counties were soon closed. The oil killed thousands of shoreline birds, damaged fish populations and contaminated shellfish. It derailed local fisheries for years. 

In San Francisco, a woman named Lisa Gaultier had been preparing for a disaster like this. Lisa is the founder of a nonprofit called Matter of Trust that promotes sustainable living through recycling, reuse and the repurposing of surplus. Since the early 2000s, she had partnered with a retired hairdresser from Alabama named Phil McCrory who had invented an unusual technique for getting oil out of water using discarded hair. The hair technically adsorbs oil, attracting it to the surface like a magnet. (This is why our hair gets oily if we don’t wash it.) Matter of Trust began collecting discarded hair from salons and dog groomers and felting it by machine into large mats that were stored in a warehouse next to the nonprofit’s headquarters in San Francisco. After the spill, people spontaneously showed up at the beach wanting to help clean up, and Lisa was there with the hair mats.

Paul Stamets, a successful businessman, author and spokesman for the expanding world of do-it-yourself mycology, happened to be in town just a few days after the spill to headline the Green Festival, an expo for “sustainable and green living.” Stamets promoted relatively accessible techniques for cleaning up the environment using mushrooms — including oil spills. Lisa had heard about Stamets’s work and had already been in touch with him “about our hair project.” Lisa called him from the beach where, she recalled, “there were 80 surfers out there using our hair mats, trying to clean up the oil washing up onto the shore.” Stamets told her that if she could find a place to put the oily hair, he would donate $10,000 worth of mycelium.

As the days wore on, a range of government entities moved in, from the Coast Guard to the Department of Homeland Security, in addition to private companies contracted to clean up the spill, all vying for funds. Meanwhile, law enforcement and legal teams began their investigation into the spill’s causes. 

After a flurry of phone calls to city and state officials, Lisa got permission to put what she called a “mountain” of hair and oil next to a composting facility at Presidio Park. But then, the oil-soaked hair mats were impounded by authorities: The oil was evidence in a criminal investigation. (In the end, the shipping company paid $10 million in fines and restitution and the captain was sent to federal prison for 10 months.)

Undeterred, Lisa found a local freighter company that would give her some fresh bunker fuel, which a crew of volunteers mixed with used motor oil and then sopped up into new hair mats. Stamets trucked down the promised blocks of mycelium from Washington; several hundred more were donated by Far West Fungi, a local mushroom farm. About 30 volunteers layered it lasagna-style: straw (a common mushroom substrate), blocks of mycelium, hair mats soaked in oil. Photos of the stack show a mound about 30 feet by 12 feet. 

Some weeks later, mushrooms had sprouted from the top of the pile. A few news sites picked up the story. In one photograph, Lisa holds a clump of soil and straw, mushrooms popping out the side, over a caption that describes: “Mushrooms grown out of toxic oil, themselves now containing no toxins.” 

Unfortunately, that’s not exactly what happened. As Ken Litchfield, a local cultivation teacher who helped organize the installation, explained, “The mushrooms were growing on the top where there’s enough oxygen, but underneath, nothing was growing except anaerobic bacteria.” Lisa told me that months later, when they returned, “literally the smell was so bad when we actually brought the stuff out, I almost vomited.” As for the fungi, it never touched the oil-soaked hair mats. 

About a year after the spill, Lisa found a UC Berkeley graduate student named Thomas Azwell who was looking for a project as part of his dissertation research. Azwell, now the director of the Disaster X-Lab at the UC Berkeley College of Engineering, told me that, initially, he had been “worried we were going to create an even worse mess, and it’s going to turn into this kind of parachuting-cats-into-Borneo story, where it just gets worse and worse.” 

In short order, Thomas found an article that showed that fungi can’t degrade bunker fuel on their own; the molecules in the heavy fuel are too complex. He proposed something simpler: composting. Take the hair mat lasagna, blend in plant waste, aerate regularly. And it worked. The pile began to naturally decompose. After a few months, they brought in earthworms to finish the job. Lab tests showed that the most toxic chemicals had broken down. “It took 18 months and a lot of manual labor, and it was really a mess,” Lisa told me. But in the end, they had usable (“freeway grade”) compost. Matter of Trust even got a grant from Patagonia to sell the final product at Costco.

This adventure was one of the first large-scale, high-profile attempts at mycoremediation — a scientific method that enlists fungus to restore and clean the industrial waste of modern society. Mushrooms famously thrive on all that is dead, decaying and toxic. Myco-remediation evangelists believe they can tackle everything from chemical spills to household trash. 

But the Cosco Busan spill wasn’t exactly a success story. It was, at best, a “feasibility study,” as Lisa put it, or in Thomas’s words: a “poorly designed prototype.” The fungi alone did not biodegrade the bunker fuel, and on the whole, the process had been labor-intensive, bulky, messy, variable and slow. Moreover, it did not fit into existing bureaucratic and legal processes, and whatever money was earned back by selling the compost was not enough to provide a financial incentive. 

In short, mycoremediation was a hard sell in a system that values efficiency and standardization above all else. But the enthusiasm for the technique was undiminished. A movement was growing, one focused on that almost archetypal image of the mushroom fruiting from a clump of oil-soaked earth, transforming toxin into life.  

Although the idea of using fungi to break down pollutants has been around for some time, the popularization of mycoremediation as a grassroots, citizen-science initiative owes much to Stamets, arguably the founding figure of DIY mycology. Before the burst of mycophilic media in the last five years and going back some four decades, Stamets was the person who best conveyed the awe-inspiring potential of fungi. His books grounded the fungal enthusiasm of counterculture in actual scientific knowledge and skills — first with two canonical cultivation manuals, and then with “Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World.”

Equal parts scientific textbook, instructional manual and spiritual manifesto, “Mycelium Running” is focused on relatively low-tech, ecologically beneficial applications for fungi, interwoven with what can only be described as a mycological view of life and the universe. Stamets is gifted at waxing lyrical about mycelium, which he describes as “vast sentient cellular membranes” that we walk on in every “lawn, field or forest floor.” In the opening chapter, he posits that mycelium is “the living network that manifests the natural intelligence imagined by Gaia theorists.” (“Gaia’s internet,” he calls it.) Even the fabric of the universe looks like mycelium. He writes:

Stamets was and still is something of a circus barker for the fungal kingdom, standing outside the big top, inviting passersby to see the wonders within. The new Star Trek named a character after him — an “astromycologist” and expert in the fleet’s “spore drive propulsion system.” His writing and lectures (many of which are online) crystallized the mystical view of mycelium as conscious and beneficent and the idea of fungi as “allies,” all delivered with a beguiling mixture of scientific language and spiritual reverence.

“Mycelium Running,” published in 2005, inspired countless readers with its descriptions of how to use fungi for ecological restoration. In the years after the hair-mat experiment, groups of mushroom enthusiasts began forming to experiment with these methods. An American in Ecuador even founded a shoestring nonprofit, the Amazon MycoRenewal Project, to clean up oil spills left behind by Texaco there. 

In 2014, as a graduate student in anthropology, I joined one of these groups in the Bay Area — an informal organization that I’ll call the Fungal Alliance of the Bay (FAB), a pseudonym — as part of my fieldwork. Almost everyone in FAB had been inspired by Stamets and the promise of mycoremediation. As one FAB member told me, “Mycelium Running” “blew his mind,” especially “the remediative potentials.” Groups like FAB were keen to bring mycological know-how to the masses, for both personal and communal use. Their enthusiasm was infectious, and in the spirit of participant observation, I became one of them.

Over time, a cottage industry of classes on mycoremediation cropped up, taught by people like Tradd Cotter, the author of a book called “Organic Mushroom Farming and Mycoremediation,” and Peter McCoy, co-founder of a far-left collective called Radical Mycology, based in the Pacific Northwest, and author of his own book called “Radical Mycology.” The curriculum in these classes was as much about the philosophy and possibilities of DIY mycology as it was about technical instruction. This message of possibility, wonder and hope mixed with hard science felt like a distinct rhetorical form. I began to see these teachers as “myco-vangelists,” preaching the good word about mushrooms. They found sympathetic audiences in a national circuit of mycological festivals, a network of permaculture farms and centers and other like-minded hosts.

For many people in FAB and similar groups, learning how to cultivate mushrooms was just the first step toward learning how to “train” a specific fungus to consume toxins. FAB’s makeshift lab, at a local biohacker space, has been home to a few attempts to get Oyster mushrooms (Pleurotus ostreatus), famously voracious, to eat motor oil. I remember one day finding petri dishes of agar half-soaked in motor oil on the shelves — an oil spill in miniature — with a small square of fungal tissue (a clump of the interior of a stem or cap) off to the side, beginning to put out its first tendrils. The lab even had a culture of Pestalotiopsis microspora, the fungus that can break down polyurethane; someone had gotten it in the mail after contributing to a Kickstarter campaign. 

Throughout my fieldwork, mycoremediation was a puzzle to me. In spite of all the books and classes and excitement, there were few cases in which it had been documented as a measurable, consistent and (most importantly) replicable process. And yet, it continued to be celebrated as a potentially game-changing “myco-technology.” Why wasn’t it being applied at all the polluted sites around us? 

In the “hands-on” workshops that I took in that time, the targets for remediation tended to be rather pedestrian, like the motor oil that drips off car engines in parking lots or the cigarette butts collected in an ashtray. These projects felt miniscule relative to the scale of toxic waste on our planet. This is not to say that such small-scale remediation projects were not worthwhile, or not meaningful, but they did not seem to match the enthusiasm that the method aroused in people. 

Nearly a decade later, the idea of mycoremediation has echoed far and wide. It is often mentioned in books and articles about fungi, usually in a catalog of potential applications. Less often mentioned are the difficulties and limitations that have also emerged alongside it. 

In fact, just a few months into my fieldwork, I found to my surprise that some FAB members quietly doubted the technique worked at all. Glen, a retired engineer, told me that he had suspected from the beginning that “using mushrooms for remediation was likely to be a flop.” He noted dryly that even Stamets was not working on mycoremediation and had quietly moved on to other projects. Andy, a widely respected taxonomist, told me that he “used to believe in it” until John, an old-timer in the local amateur mycology scene, told him (as he recounted in a stage whisper), “‘Don’t ever tell anyone this, but it’s a bunch of bullshit!’” 

When it comes to biochemistry, the rift between something that “works” and something that’s “a bunch of bullshit” is usually stark. If not self-evident, the difference between these two categories is usually discernable on some level of material, evidence-based reality. The thing was, mycoremediation did “work” in petri dishes and garden-sized projects; it was at large scales, like oil spills or superfund sites, where it seemed to falter or couldn’t get off the ground at all. 

Over two years of ethnographic fieldwork, I spent hours peering into the sealed environment of petri dishes and mason jars while exclaiming in wonder at the snow-white threads of mycelium growing within. In its first stages, mycelium radiates outward like a slow-motion starburst, explosions of cellular growth. It has an ambiguous beauty, strikingly symmetrical, organic and otherworldly at the same time. Most enthralling was when the radial growth broke out and sprouted fleshy tendrils (primordia, otherwise known as baby mushrooms), a process called “pinning,” as they often look like tiny pins emerging from a two-dimensional surface — or, in the case of a species like Lion’s Mane, they curl in all directions like some kind of albino sea creature. 

Like all the FAB members, I too became weirdly attached to my jars, in which a fungal culture slowly colonized the substrate (usually a grain mixture), turning dense and white with mycelium. I once brought a “burrito” of corrugated cardboard inoculated with wild Oyster mushrooms that I’d harvested in the Oakland hills on a road trip with me, storing it in a plastic bin in the trunk of my car. I opened the lid to mist it with water twice a day and check its growth. I wanted to see if I could get it to fruit (produce mushrooms), but sadly, I composted it in Colorado.

FAB members and I would stand around each other’s makeshift labs, in kitchens and garages or in the converted utility closet at the local biohacker space, wondering over petri dishes and mason jars and plastic bags filled with myceliated substrate. My interviews with them (about their life stories and ideas about mushrooms, nature, science) were littered with exclamations of awe — many variations on “and then I was like, ‘whoa!!’” These jolts of wonder were embedded in a sustained enthusiasm for fungal lifeforms. The cognitive-affective pleasures of curiosity and fascination carried moral and aesthetic meanings too: Fungi epitomized interconnection, interspecies symbiosis, nonhuman intelligence and the cycles of decomposition and generation that characterize healthy ecosystems. They resonated as models of how to live sustainably on this planet. 

Much of their interest in applied mycology had to do with waste: making less of it and using fungi to break down what had already been produced, both toxic and benign. “Waste streams” was a key term in the vocabulary of DIY mycology. An ideal scenario was to use some kind of waste stream as substrate to grow mushrooms, thereby sending less trash to landfills.

Most of the DIY mycologists that I met during my fieldwork were committed to ecological lifestyles and social and economic justice. Fungi was at the intersection of their political, environmental and personal concerns: It could fortify soil and lower the use of pesticides, provide a model of connection for our increasingly fragmented and lonely society, heal psychological trauma and chronic illness, remediate the toxins of industrial society and much more. Their wonder and excitement were animated by anxieties, hopes and dreams about what was possible for human society as we moved away from fossil fuels, over-consumption and environmental pollution and toward sustainable lifestyles in balance with our surrounding ecosystems. 

Or at least, that was the vision.

Today, we can see clearly the destruction wrought by industrial modernity: the climate crisis, mass biodiversity and habitat loss, widespread pollution, economic disparities, political instability, ethno-nationalism. The whole system seems to be in crisis. The anthropologist Kim Fortun calls this stage of global capitalism, with its omnipresent disasters, “late industrialism.” 

Fortun notes that one of the defining characteristics of late industrialism is a focus on production, property and boundaries while ignoring the way manmade products “migrate and trespass” — into the air, water, soil and our bodies. The plastic bottle doesn’t remain a plastic bottle; the components of production don’t remain in the factories. Along with the products we produce — the measured, quantifiable, documented commodity — comes the remnants of everything used to create them. As the Polish philosopher Zygmunt Bauman put it, two trucks leave the factory: One carries the products going to the marketplace, the other carries the trash going to landfill. But we only count the first truck, not the second — and certainly not the smokestack, the chemical flows. The result is a form of “slow violence” (as Rob Nixon describes it), where damage, like the gradual rise in rates of cancer, is not immediately obvious, making it much easier for the perpetrator to avoid accountability.

Something that has fulfilled its intended use and is discarded doesn’t vanish into thin air. It moves out of sight — to a landfill, a garbage patch in the ocean, perhaps burned. These afterlives, distributed across ecosystems and interrelated lifecycles (including our own), are seemingly impossible for the logic of industrial capitalism to grasp. 

Fungi — with their delicate, wisp-like threads of mycelium and their hobbit-home fruit bodies — offer another perspective. They embody an ecological paradigm of objects and phenomena in relationship with their surroundings, as part of feedback loops and lifecycles, in which diversity is critical to a system’s robustness. 

This embodiment is key to understanding the affective experiences of wonder and enthusiasm that fungi generate. The fungal form illustrates the interwovenness of ecosystems and the realization that nothing, nor any process, can be disconnected from and unaffected by the whole. Fungi materialize such complex systems. We see this most clearly in the conceptual and practical relationship between fungi and waste. They stand as a countermodel to the inability of our present system to make sense of (to digest, so to speak) the entirety of its products. 

It is precisely their proximity to death and decay that affords fungi their charismatic power today. Across cultures, they are often associated with otherworldly forces — gods, stars, witches, fairies, ghosts and other nonhuman spirits. In this association, mushrooms recall the philosophical concept of the pharmakon, something that is dangerous and powerful in its indeterminacy, its latent potential to be destructive or beneficial. 

Today, this ambiguous association is slanted toward hope. As McCoy writes in “Radical Mycology”: “From the mycelium we have come, to its web shall we return to be embraced, dissolved and recomposed.” Fungus’s vast, benevolent, delicate, living web mingles with death and decay and can both destroy and revitalize; in this sense, fungi seem to possess the ultimate transformative power. 

Fungi are inherently involved in what the scholar William Ian Miller called “life soup”: the unavoidably interrelated processes of decomposition and fertility, of death and life. In their phallic form, occasional sliminess and stinkiness (like the species that spread their spores by emitting an odor of carrion to attracts flies), and their sudden appearance and rapid decomposition, mushrooms often inhabit an uncanny valley between obscene, gross and alien, between the natural and the supernatural. As the crucial, mediating link between mortality and fecundity, fungi somehow embody and transcend both. 

It is this positionality that gives fungi their power, be it auspicious or nefarious. Oscar, one of my interlocutors from FAB, described them eloquently as “the pallbearers of nature”: They carry out the dead from the world of the living. They “deal with death,” as he put it, and with those aspects of modern life that are normally shunted aside, separated out, sent away.

In short, the aura of potential surrounding fungi, so closely intertwined with the capacity for transformation, is not solely about psilocybin or biomaterials or remediation. It is a reflection of fungi’s underlying power. Some can kill you in a few days, some can cause debilitating diseases (as Emily Monosson documents in her recent book “Blight”), and some can generate life-changing experiences of divinity.

Thus the power of fungi — to transform, destroy, deconstruct and resurrect — holds an almost sacred allure as industrial modernity falls apart at the seams and we are left to face its mess.

By the end of my fieldwork, mycoremediation’s original sheen of promise had worn off but a patina of wondrousness remained. The Amazon MycoRenewal Project had changed its name and shifted away from a focus on fungi to other means of ecological restoration; similarly, teachers on the DIY mycology circuit began to introduce mycoremediation with careful caveats before diving into its myriad possibilities. 

People were realizing that fungi require other organisms (bacteria, worms, plants) to be able to biodegrade toxins, and that this was done best by professional scientists who had the time, resources and knowledge to hypothesize, calibrate, test and measure. Even then, buy-in from authorities remained difficult — but not impossible. Environmental scientists, bioengineers and remediation specialists continue to experiment with fungi in their arsenal of bioremediative agents, while new start-ups continue to search for ways to make mycoremediation a viable business model. 

Similarly, DIY mycologists have over the years implemented a seemingly endless series of prototypes and simple installations to demonstrate that fungi can, in fact, consume toxins. Undeterred by the difficulties in scale, replication and economic feasibility, many still see the method as promising — a means, as Stamets put it, to use fungi to “offset the environmental damage inflicted by humans.” And their work, despite its limitations, captures the imagination much more than thermophilic composting or those meal worms that eat Styrofoam. 

In 2015, I took Tradd’s mycoremediation workshop at the Telluride Mushroom Festival. Under the placid gaze of three giant elks’ heads hanging on wood-paneled walls in a local lodge, Cotter helped me realize that part of the method’s appeal was its innate ecological drama — it enacts a wondrous, hopeful and empowering process. In these small, clearly delineated, closed environments — so unlike complex, large-scale, real-world scenarios — the petri dish, mason jar or barrel acted like a stage, making us an audience to amazing displays. 

Tradd spent much of the workshop explaining how you can train a fungus to eat chemicals that it would not usually consume, using elaborate metaphors (often involving pizza) and self-effacing jokes to explain what causes fungi to produce enzymes that can break down carbon-rich molecules. He included many photos of mushrooms growing out of odd substrates (like an old bowling ball) that he harvested and cultured for future use, as well as photos of his own in vitro lab experiments, in which he mixed fungal cultures with pesticides, motor oil or bacteria. He said:

He showed us a slide with a petri dish with a bacterial culture on one side and an Oyster mushroom culture on the other. “Three days later, you have all the bacteria fleeing the scene. You dropped the tiger in the room.” The tiger in this case: the hyphal threads of the Oyster mushroom mycelium radiating outward. In another slide, a puddle of the pesticide Atrazine sat on one side of the agar and on the other side, the fungus. A series of time-lapse photos showed the fungus growing until it stopped in front of the liquid like a line in the sand. 

“All right,” Tradd narrated, “it’s been eating pizza. Now comes the nasty stuff. It gets a whiff of it, it stops. That’s the moment where … it’s saying, ‘If I’m going to stay alive, I need to adapt.’” 

The fungus stayed that way for two days, Tradd said, so he gave up on it. “I said, enough is enough. It’s not going to eat it.” He had plans to try a new plate with less Atrazine to see if it was an issue of ratio. “I left the [old] plate in the incubator and just by chance I came back two days later. Bam.”

There were audible gasps in the lodge. The new photo showed the mycelium expanding into the tiny chemical spill and consuming it. “That gives me goosebumps,” said Tradd. “It just needed time to figure it out.” He had made an animated gif of the fungus devouring the Atrazine in the petri dish. We watched it a few times.

The animated gif was a nice touch, although by that point, I had seen some version of this story multiple times. Each time, it was awesome: It seemed momentous and promising. And each time, it was framed as a prototype, an illustration of a possibility, a suggestion for future experimentation. 

We seemed stuck in a state of latent potential. After Tradd’s workshop, I began to wonder if this seemingly secondary aspect of mycoremediation — how cool it was to look at, how entertaining it is to watch — was not secondary at all. Rather than a realistic method for widescale remediation, it was, in practice, a kind of theater. Not in any trivial sense, but quite the contrary — as a medium of mythic truth. 

Like those terrible spectacles of the ancient world that Tradd referenced, these “gladiator matches” were both entertainment and displays of power. They staged a hyperreal enactment of justice and fate, with an audience looking on through the translucent walls of a petri dish or mason jar, a kind of Persian miniature depicting the heroic ability of fungi to slay the monsters of our time.

It’s no wonder that so much of the art made with mushrooms explores this very capacity. “Fungal Futures,” a 2016 exhibit that was perhaps the first major event to showcase fungal art and design, featured many pieces that were grown on some kind of waste or that incorporated biodegradation into the art itself. Katharina Unger’s artwork “Fungi Mutarium,” a domed incubator with tiny pods made from agar that house fungal cultures, was described as “a prototype that grows edible fungal biomass” on plastic waste. And then there was Jae Rhim Lee’s “mushroom burial suit”: a full-body garment embroidered with undulating white lines resembling mycelium and inoculated with fungi bred to decompose corpses as well as the environmental pollutants that accrue in the human body itself. 

Amateurs and artists are not beholden to the norms of objectivity that characterize science as a social institution. Their awe-inspiring rhetoric and invocations of possibility are a different kind of performance, more akin to a preacher who inspires feelings of wonder, grace and fervor in their audience. As Stamets wrote in “Mycelium Running,” “We felt we had witnessed a mycomiracle: Life was flowering upon a dead, toxic landscape.” 

This “witnessing” is essential to understanding the appeal of mycoremediation. Mycovangelists stage what the philosopher of science Andrew Pickering called, in his book on cybernetics, “ontological theater”: using science and technology to showcase the possibility of another reality, another way of being. Prototypes, then, are not simply technical, but almost incantory in nature. Although mycoremediation may have failed to achieve large-scale applications, it still works as an inspiring display of the power of fungi — its capacity for transformation, its ability to turn death into life.

Only days before Tradd’s workshop, a tailings pond at a decommissioned gold mine just 10 miles from Telluride was accidentally unplugged (by EPA workers, ironically). Three million gallons of mine waste, mostly heavy metals, poured into Cement Creek and then the Animas River, turning the water an opaque yellow for days. Travis, a local DIY mycologist who co-taught the workshop with Tradd, was visibly depressed over the spill. He told me later that he knew the river well and often spent time there with his son. In truth, it was only a matter of time before the mine waste escaped its holding container, either through accident or neglect. This is simply a result of the way the system is designed. 

In most industries today, “remediation” usually means removing industrial waste to somewhere else, pushing it to the margins or dispersing it somehow into air or water — “out of sight and mind,” as Fortun puts it. Another approach is to simply abandon the waste where it is and move on — onto the next mine, the next factory, the next oil field — as was the case with Texaco in Ecuador. Often, the communities that end up dealing with the waste don’t have the political or economic power to fight the commercial interests behind these plans. They, too, are deemed “marginal,” negligible, a rounding error on the corporate budget. 

Fortun and other scholars observe that this form of displacement is not only endemic to our system, it is essential to its functioning — a feature, not a bug. The toxicity of industrial modernity cannot be denied, only ignored. “The strategy,” writes Fortun, “is one of disavowal.” 

“Disavowal” is a term that Fortun borrowed from Freudian psychoanalysis. For Freud, disavowal is the rejection of an aspect of reality whose acknowledgment would be too traumatic or emotionally difficult to face. The disavowed is not unknown nor actively discredited; rather, it is perceived but not acknowledged. It is a willed blindness, something placed outside the frame. In a state of disavowal, “things in reality connected are kept separate. Disavowal operates through disjunction, and refusal to connect.” It is one of the distinguishing characteristics of psychosis as defined by Freudian psychoanalysis. And disavowal, writes Fortun, “is a key corporate tactic of late industrialism.” 

Everyone who takes part in industrial modernity employs some degree of disavowal when it comes to waste. One might even say it is required to navigate our late industrial lives. If we spent every minute thinking about the environmental catastrophe of our society, it would be hard to function. But, of course, it is easier for some than others. The effects of waste and pollution might be everywhere now, but their effects are still unevenly distributed. 

Disavowal, though, is not only about waste. The disavowal of dark truths is arguably a theme of modernity itself. Modern practices around death are revealing in this regard: In many traditional societies, a corpse is kept in the family space until its burial; in most modern societies, the dead body is carted off immediately. Embalming is common to halt (and hide) the process of decay. It is precisely this approach that Lee’s mushroom burial suit is critiquing.

From a fungal vantage point, this system is indeed psychotic. Mycoremediation may not be the systemic intervention that was hoped for, but as an expression of one’s personal concern for our toxified landscape, it is far from insignificant. Rather, it is a tangible way for people without much institutional power to engage in the ongoing fight against environmental damage, to try to contain the disasters seeping around us. As a domestic intervention, mycoremediation is modest but culturally meaningful — a method of repair and reconnection. 

The power of fungi comes from the proximity they have with dark truths: the abject, the mess we need to face, mortality, vitality, kinship. In other contexts, this proximity elicits wariness, but in our current crisis, it holds the possibility of a healing power — a pharmacological power. Fungi can take on the mess and the junk, break it down and transform and incorporate it rather than ignore it. 

True, fungi need a host of other lifeforms to complete their task; they are not the only actors in this drama. But they are emblematic of the process. As one DIY mycologist put it succinctly: “There is no waste in nature, you know. Everything can be reused and everything can be seen as a potential source for someone else.” 

I thought about this often when I spent time with Oscar, a permaculture gardener, and Celeste, an arborist, who were regulars at FAB meetings and events. Their Oakland home was decorated with old posters from punk shows, stencil prints (one of an Amanita phalloides, a beautiful and lethal mushroom) and found art, a Ganoderma shelf mushroom nailed to the wall, a small jungle of plants. In a corner, a series of repurposed window screens hung vertically from the ceiling over a big circular floor fan—a homemade dehydrator. Every time I visited, it was full of mushrooms, plants and flowers: remnants of their wanderings.

One Sunday morning, I showed up to join them on a foray in the local hills. They were still puttering around, thinking about breakfast. Oscar hadn’t slept much — he told me he had been up late reading online mushroom forums. We went out into their backyard where he showed me a gigantic shaggy parasol he had spotted that morning, bigger than his head, its cap so heavy that the weight of it broke the stem. I took a picture of him: goofy face, hair askew, a tattered sweater, gold tooth glinting in the morning sunlight. 

Oscar and Celeste’s backyard was home to many mycological experiments. The shaggy parasol went into a cooler full of ice water, where Oscar broke it up and stirred it in, making an impromptu slurry to reinoculate the garden. A source of awe and delight just a second ago, the mushroom disappeared into a whirl of organic fragments. It was the lifecycle that mattered, not the fruit itself, and Oscar was on to the next thing. 

Among Oscar and Celeste’s projects was a “junk mail digester”: a plastic bin filled with Oyster mushroom spawn, into which they incorporated the constant stream of useless junk mail that arrived at the house — Safeway coupons, catalogs addressed to old roommates, glossy fliers for pizza delivery. Like everyone, they hated junk mail but never knew what to do with it. Before, it would just go in the recycling. Now it sprouted mushrooms.

The post Finding Hope In The Dark Power Of Fungus appeared first on NOEMA.

So it is that Kern County — in the heart of California’s historically agricultural Central Valley — has been riding these gales for more than a century.

This past April, Lorelei Oviatt, the longtime director of Kern County’s Planning and Natural Resources Department, which permits land use and development, laid out a vision for weathering the next gale. In a Bakersfield university gymnasium, she unveiled the plan: a globally ambitious and locally controversial “Carbon Management Business Park.”

Oviatt is central to leading the county’s next transition. She has done more to reshape the landscape of Kern County and its energy systems over the last 20 years than probably any other individual. Even the session’s moderator quipped to listeners, “unless you are a kit fox living in a hole, you know who Lorelei Oviatt is.”

The vision, Oviatt said, is to build a massive solar farm that would power machines to suck carbon dioxide from the air, concentrating it for industrial uses and long-term underground storage. The plan — which would help address the climate crisis, create jobs and generate needed tax revenue — was actually motivated by declining groundwater that was rapidly starving 500,000 acres of land of the water needed to grow the crops Kern is famous for. 

As the agricultural land is forced fallow, Oviatt warned, the assessed values of those half-million acres would plunge on the county’s property tax rolls; libraries would close, county services would shut down. But an alternative path exists where Kern could become a leader in an emerging carbon management industry that’s estimated to grow to $100 billion by 2030 and $250 billion by 2050. For Kern alone “at the top end this could produce $68 million a year in county property tax revenue to the county, $25 million to surrounding cities, and 23,000 jobs,” Oviatt noted. “That is hope!”

Key for Oviatt is that the county move fast. This is of course critical to responding to climate change. The most recent report by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change argues that the world will need to rapidly decarbonize power systems, transportation, buildings, materials and agriculture, and then remove roughly 10 gigatons of carbon dioxide emissions annually by 2050.

This is needed to keep the world below the tipping point of 1.5°C warming, the point climate scientists predict will take us past natural ecosystem thresholds and potentially into irreversible climatic feedback loops. This means 10,000,000,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide removed. The largest direct air capture plant in the world today is in Iceland, and it can remove 4,000 metric tons from the atmosphere per year. 

For Kern, speed and scale have been key to its energy transitions — streamlining planning and permitting processes in order to unlock new technologies and welcome new industries.

The residents of Kern County, however, are divided on a few things. First, whether climate change is a top concern; second, who they think will benefit from solutions like carbon removal; and third, how fast they really want to change. The Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, Kern’s representative in Congress, has worked to cut funding and slow several key aspects of federal climate policy. But county officials don’t have the luxury of political point-scoring. And whether they “believe” in the science or not, they are being forced to deal with very real impacts of climate change: increasingly frequent droughts, floods, wildfires and extreme heat events.

County officials also know that the oil is drying up — due both to depleting wells and California’s commitment to become carbon neutral by 2045. The county’s job now is to manage a transition through the decline of existing industries, the rise of new threats and a potential green industrial revolution on the other side. This is the existential challenge of governance today. 

As Oviatt explained earlier this year to reporters, without new jobs and revenues from carbon removal, “Kern County will be the next Gary, Indiana.” She told me that her fear is “people will leave to Texas if the oil goes away. Then housing will go down. Then we have a Mad Max scenario.”

The environmental justice community fears a different scenario: that carbon removal will be used to keep oil and gas — a zombie industry — alive, and continuing to pollute poor, over-burdened communities long into the future. They view carbon removal as a false solution — creating both moral and health hazards. As Beverly Wright, a national environmental justice leader has argued, “In the real world, this is an experiment,” she told The Washington Post in June, “And this experiment is going to be conducted on the same communities that have suffered from the oil and gas industry.”

Almost everyone agrees that Kern faces mounting challenges, and that change is coming. But there is wide disagreement over what that path forward looks like and the speed of any transition.

It’s important to note that carbon “capture” and carbon “removal” can mean quite different things. Carbon dioxide capture primarily involves capturing emissions from the top of a power plant’s smokestack or an industrial facility. Carbon dioxide removal mainly means removing it from the atmosphere through processes like “direct air capture,” mineralization, enhanced weathering and others that can be done almost anywhere. The U.S. government is particularly interested in spurring carbon removal, and recently awarded over $17 million to three pilot projects in Kern County.

Carbon dioxide removal, like solar and wind now, has also become politicized. To many people, questions around who decides, participates and determines the trade-offs of a green transition are even more critical than simply who benefits or bears the risks. Despite the global scale of these issues, politics are still local.

Carbon Valley

Even among Californians, Kern County is not well known. The county is usually seen through glass at 75 miles per hour on a straight shot up the Interstate 5 freeway from Los Angeles to San Francisco. Bakersfield, its most well-known city, is slightly more famous now as the home to McCarthy, who plays an often remote, but critical role in whether Kern benefits or is excluded from federal funds. 

Kern County can use all the help it can get. In 2021, the county had a lower labor force participation rate than the California average (58% vs. 63%), a higher unemployment rate (10% vs. 8.3%) and higher poverty rates (18.5% vs. 12.3%). Well-paying oil and gas jobs continue to decline. Agriculture jobs are seasonal and climate change has made work in the fields more dangerous. The topography of the Central Valley, combined with its dairy farms and oil operations, makes Kern County home to some of the worst air quality in the country. 

Over the last century, Kern’s economy has been highly dependent on not just energy generation, but the daily price of oil. In 2008, 36% of its economic activity was connected to oil and gas extraction and mining. In 2014, following a collapse of crude oil prices, Kern saw extraction activity fall by half, leading to an 11% drop in GDP, almost as large an economic drop as the county experienced during the “Great Recession” of 2008.

With stubbornly high unemployment and poverty rates, Kern’s working poor need jobs and its unemployed need services. This won’t be achieved by simply protecting the remaining oil and gas jobs, which have mostly benefited a small pool of legacy oil and gas workers. Kern’s vision for the future is a more diverse economy, with quality entry-level positions, job ladders and skill-building that creates a more resilient economy that’s not dependent solely on oil or agriculture.

Energy Transitions

Over the last decade, Kern has transitioned — in fits and starts and through multiple economic crises — from the number one producer of oil and gas to also the number one producer of wind and solar energy in California. Kern County produces 71% of California’s crude oil and 78% of its natural gas. Despite recent declines, as of 2019, Kern is still the seventh highest oil-producing county in the United States. 

At the same time, Kern has moved from producing nearly no renewable energy in the aughts, to being by far the largest producer of renewable energy in California. Kern County now hosts the largest wind farm in the U.S. and the third largest solar farm. The county, Oviatt said in April, has attracted $69 billion in private investment, which has funded 18,000 MW of renewable energy.

Economic output from electricity generation has grown steadily, more than doubling its share of Kern’s GDP from 4% in 2001 to 10% in 2021. By 2021, over 50% of the electricity generated in Kern County was from renewable sources.

While its notorious oil pumpjacks have by no means gone away, Kern’s landscape has slowly transformed to include thousands of acres of wind turbines and solar panels. 

This transition has cost Kern County millions in lost revenue. California’s solar tax exemption — which incentivizes solar development by exempting solar farms from property taxes — has cost Kern nearly $20 million annually in lost taxes. Wind, on the other hand, has no such exemption and has become the number one source of county taxes, recently surpassing oil.

In many other fossil-dependent regions, renewables have been blocked or delayed. But Kern’s residents seem to generally support renewable energy, as it has helped bring economic stability during recent booms and busts of oil markets. 

But this is not just a story about the lack of opposition. Kern’s story is about intentional, government-led policy guiding aggressive private sector investment in renewables. As the costs of solar, wind and batteries have decreased, Kern County has worked to incentivize additional private sector investments to scale and further drive down the costs of renewables. 

Environmental activists have pressured the governor and state Legislature to hold strong on phasing out oil and gas, while local activists have continued to raise the costs of business-as-usual oil production.

Kern has overcome initial inertia and built momentum for their energy transition. 

State-led Markets

California has its own version of a “green industrial policy” that supplements the recent Inflation Reduction Act. The state has committed to remaking its power systems, transportation and buildings with the goal of net zero carbon by 2045. However, while the destination is clear, the path is contested.

Some of these battles are being fought in windowless conference rooms where bureaucrats review environmental impact assessments, which are crucial to the approval of development permits. These rooms are where many projects go to die in California. But Kern County has tried to create a more routine, and therefore stable, process for corporations to develop wind and solar power. The result? A comparatively predictable and relatively fast planning and permitting process. 

Although Oviatt sells this green transition within Kern by talking about jobs, taxes and the services they pay for, she knows she also must sell it externally to attract private capital. She noted at the carbon conference in the Bakersfield gymnasium, “My number one goal in doing this interactive [carbon management] website was to send a message to Wall Street and send a message to all this green money back East. If you want to come to California, come to Kern County.”

Governments establishing market signals to incentivize and “de-risk” corporate investments is now a core strategy for energy transitions around the world. Kern’s creation of a predictable market for wind and solar follows similar strategies used in Denmark, the UK and Uruguay. The city of Los Angeles plays a cameo role here, having signed an agreement to buy Kern’s wind power, which created the certainty investors needed.

Days after the April announcement of the Carbon Management Business Park, the California Resources Corporation (a spinoff of Occidental Petroleum) announced its second major carbon dioxide storage deal in the county; it was only a couple months after yet another announcement of the creation of a carbon removal consortium, which would bring together industry, tech, academia, national labs, government, labor and community members to work on carbon removal and storage solutions.

Mac McFarland, CRC’s then-CEO gushed that “Governor Newsom has set the most ambitious targets for California of any state in the nation — and in the world — to rapidly and permanently remove carbon from the atmosphere, and California DAC [Direct Air Capture] Hubs will be essential to helping achieve the governor’s goals.” More carbon removal hubs and startups are on the way to Kern. 

But of course, not all carbon capture plans are equal. Or equitable for that matter. Several people I spoke to sniped that the solar and wind power produced in Kern County should not just power the Teslas and induction stoves of Santa Monica. Transitions need to be designed to not only benefit L.A., Sacramento, or Wall Street, but also Main Street, Bakersfield and even the unpaved sidewalks of unincorporated Kern.

The Carbon Transition

The “Surf Ranch” in Leemore, California, a human-made wave pool for surfing near-perfect rights, lefts and barrels year-round, is closer to the oil wells and farmland of Kern, roughly 60 miles to the south, than the actual ocean. But surfing in the desert doesn’t seem to shock anyone any more than the idea of reversing carbon flows in Kern — flipping the county from a top carbon producer to a center for carbon removal.

Kern County seems almost ideal for carbon removal and storage. Growing acreage that’s going fallow can be used to host solar farms that power direct air capture facilities that then pump carbon dioxide underground, into a geology naturally ready for 1,000-year storage. 

George Peridas, an energy and carbon management expert from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, recently noted that California’s geology is “a gift from God that the state received.” California is estimated to have enough geologic storage for 17 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide; meanwhile, Peridas said, the state emits roughly 400 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalents annually. And as Peridas noted, Kern has the workforce and expertise for this exact job. “You have people who have been pulling out the carbon. They’re also going to be pretty good at putting the carbon back in.”

The Drillers, the mascot of Bakersfield High School, could take on new meaning in a carbon management economy. 

Oviatt’s bosses on the county Board of Supervisors are officially nonpartisan, but they lean conservative like the county. Their focus on jobs and taxes has enabled Kern to move aggressively and build an unlikely coalition to support its goals of renewable energy, carbon removal, green hydrogen and more. 

This coalition makes some community members and environmental activists nervous. While Peridas may be right that oil companies have the expertise to build pipes and pump carbon, they have also been extracting and polluting Kern for 100 years. Climate justice activists want oil companies shut down, not enhanced. They see carbon capture and sequestration, or piping and storing carbon dioxide, as just the latest risk for their communities. 

‘Carbon Dilemmas‘

Driving from the northern tip of Kern County south and then east, from Delano through Bakersfield, to Arvin, then around Tehachapi Pass to Rosamond, you get to experience the green transition in action: from acres of oil rigs; to farms bursting with carrots, potatoes, grapes, peaches and plums; to wind farms sprawling down mountainsides; to industrial-scale solar that produces the mirage of a lake glimmering across the desert.

Along the way, you also see oil pumpjacks feet away from homes, schools and farms. These are the clearest reminders of past versions of “streamlined permitting” and “environmental protections” that failed to protect low-income and communities of color. 

One of the ironic outcomes of the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, given that zero Republicans voted for it, has been the rapid growth — and billions of dollars — that have flowed to “red states” to fund renewable energy, electric vehicle batteries, green minerals and carbon removal. Red states are now seeing green.

Is this positive? Yes. Maybe. Sometimes. Some transitions are clearly being captured by incumbent actors and serving to reinforce existing power structures. Oil companies are becoming “energy companies” and making money pumping carbon emissions up and then down. Occidental Petroleum just bought a leading startup in direct air capture, a company called Carbon Engineering. Incumbent automakers are now offering up an electric Hummer — so heavy it overwhelms most carbon reductions, but an arguable transition nonetheless.

So far, most carbon capture and storage has been led by the fossil fuel industry and likely falls somewhere between a failure and outright scam, according to environmental activists. It turns out, there has been a long history of expensive carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects on fossil fuel power plants.

As Greenpeace argues: “That means that after 50 years of CCS development; after billions of dollars in subsidies; after all the hype, deceits, tax breaks and guarantees; the oil industry captures about 0.1% of annual CO2 emissions. The other 99.9% pollutes the atmosphere and heats Earth. Meanwhile, most of this captured CO2 is used to produce more oil.… Carbon capture was a scam from the beginning and remains so today.”

The Sierra Club calls carbon capture a “‘moral hazard,’ the danger that the prospect of a get-out-of-jail-free card will lessen the urgency to accomplish the most important task, which is to stop burning fossil fuels. The hazard is not theoretical.” Occidental Petroleum’s purchase of Carbon Engineering, and their statement that this will allow them to produce “net zero carbon” oil, only confirms activist suspicions. 

The environmental justice movement worries further that carbon capture and storage will be done in a way that puts low-income communities at risk. For example, they cite a case in 2021 where “a pipeline carrying compressed carbon dioxide mixed with hydrogen sulfide ruptured, engulfing the small town of Satartia, Mississippi, in a green haze, leaving many residents convulsing, confused, or unconscious.”

Earlier this summer, “citing threats to the environment and public health,” more than 80 environmental justice and conservation groups urged the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to stop carbon capture, use and storage (CCUS) project applications in California’s Central Valley.

Carbon removal through direct air capture in remote locations powered by renewable energy seeks to respond to these environmental justice and equity concerns. The U.S. Department of Energy’s investment in direct air capture pilot projects shows they believe in the need to test and learn. However, few people seem to trust the carbon removal industry.

Permitting Reform

It is becoming harder to argue that the climate crisis is not an existential threat for billions of people around the world. This should be enough to motivate urgent transformation of the systems causing climate change. First and foremost, rapidly phasing out fossil fuels. But then also, simultaneously, building a low-carbon economy based on renewable energy, long-duration energy storage, zero-carbon transportation, low-carbon materials, regenerative agriculture, etc., all with a focus on first helping the communities most impacted and vulnerable to climate disruptions. 

If we take this threat seriously, it does seem like we need something akin to a “wartime mobilization” to build a new economy. But this mobilization should not subvert democratic processes. And it should include guardrails to prevent inequitable distribution of risks in the transition. California’s ban on using captured carbon for enhanced oil recovery, which Occidental does in Texas, is critical to making sure carbon removal is not used to extend the life of fossil fuels. Requiring projects to mitigate any emissions down to zero and situate them away from communities, is also key.

This is what the National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA) and the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), both of 1970, are meant to do — identify and then mitigate the impacts of new developments. But few people believe they are working well today. California has become something akin to what political scientist Frances Fukuyama calls a “Vetocracy,” where CEQA is regularly weaponized to block even the most sustainable of projects.  

Despite Oviatt’s efforts to streamline the permitting process in Kern “without cutting corners … to accelerate these solutions,” as she explained in April, such efforts to streamline, reform and accelerate solutions are also being invoked by the fossil fuel industry, including, famously, U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin, D-West Virginia, to advance gas pipelines. The many bad versions of permitting reform and debates around how to move the green economy forward are tearing at the seams of the climate movement.

A central question in this movement revolves around how to increase meaningful local participation without paralyzing decision-making. Some national groups convened recently at a conference hosted by the Roosevelt Institute have proposed “progressive reforms” to NEPA that “strengthen, rather than cut, community engagement” and that help “build trust that could help ensure the long-term success of the renewable transition.” Their argument: better participation can actually speed and deepen transitions. 

Roosevelt Institute analysts argue community engagement takes place too late in the permitting and review process, when site selection, designs and funding are already in place. “At that point, it is very difficult for communities to influence the shape of a project within the NEPA process, and they must often resort to litigation or organizing,” they wrote. 

The analysts recommend reforms like starting community engagement much earlier in the process; making the comment system more accessible to community members; allowing the community to review potential projects, select the ones it wants and oppose harmful ones; considering the cumulative impacts of projects; and building in a feedback and learning process after a project has been launched. This final step is key for adjusting as projects play out on the ground.

Governing Transitions

The science now tells us that we will almost certainly need to build and scale carbon removal systems around the world, while also decarbonizing as fast as possible. The world needs both. Unfortunately, many of the early carbon capture systems were deeply flawed and used to protect carbon emitters. 

We now also know that there are bad versions of solar, wind and electric vehicles. A key job for governance is to parse good from bad. And to decipher more quickly which is which. This is one of our core carbon dilemmas.

We will need to sunset industries. And we will need to rapidly grow others. This will necessitate improving decisions about what to block and what to build. It also requires learning from our mistakes. In almost every case we will have to contend with powerful incumbent actors fighting to protect their interests and to delay change.

Kern County is a living case of both the theory and the difficult politics of these dilemmas. And Kern shows why equity matters so much in these transitions. Incumbent actors will work to slow and capture transitions, and some will undoubtedly use carbon capture to extend the life of oil and gas in other states. At the same time, environmental groups will work to block carbon removal (and in some cases solar and wind power) if these systems put local communities at risk.

And if it is true, as Oviatt asserts, that carbon removal can be as much about jobs and taxes as fighting global warming, then these jobs, taxes and services need to benefit local communities.

With so many ways to block a fledgling program’s success in California, transitions need support. This means new broad-based coalitions, where participants have a real say in decisions and share in the risks and benefits. Strong local governments will need to partner with community activists to nurture new technologies and then support the small number of corporations willing to invest in scaling and driving down their costs.

The nonprofit Carbon180 has argued recently that carbon removal could be both environmentally and socially beneficial if it designs in core principles around procedural justice or fair decision-making; distributive justice, or equitable allocation of project risks, benefits and impacts; and reparative justice, which involves acknowledging and addressing past harms. 

If we have any hope of achieving rapid and equitable transitions, we will need to start early, plan carefully, prioritize environmental justice principles, and test and learn quickly. We will need to move quickly, but we will also need to design in feedback loops and intentional adjustments.

Academics sometimes call this “experimental governance” or “adaptive management.” Stakeholders closest to problems come together to develop solutions, test, learn and then iterate until they get the balance right or need to adjust again.

There is unfortunately no guaranteed path to ensure Kern County benefits fully from the next carbon economy. But a commitment to collective experimentation and learning at the pace of innovation will be necessary for governing through the gale.

With thanks to Stephen Stack, a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, who worked with me on data analysis and visualization.

The post A Green Revolution In California’s ‘Carbon Valley’ appeared first on NOEMA.

Descend further still — down, down, down, past luminous sea butterflies, fangtooth fish and species of nearly blind octopi — and soon enough you’ll hit the sea floor. If you’re lucky, you might touch down next to an ancient sea sponge. Researchers estimate that the oldest sponges have been alive for perhaps 10,000 years, predating the oldest human civilizations by around five millennia.  

But the inhabitants of some parts of the gloomy ocean deep face an existential threat. The seabed contains vast deposits of precious metals, an untapped resource that mining companies and others claim could turbocharge the renewable energy transition. In July, the International Seabed Authority (ISA) — the body tasked with governing seabed mining — met to hammer out extraction regulations. After three weeks of intense debate, the meeting concluded without a clear agreement. The future of the seabed is uncertain.

Clinging to rocks and other hard surfaces that jut out from the sea floor, a sponge — no matter how ancient — might not look like much of a reason to halt a hugely lucrative endeavor, especially one that might fuel the green transition to a more sustainable world above. But probe a little deeper and this strange animal invites us to think about how we might live in harmony with each other on our planet — and what is at stake if we do not.

An Underwater Rainforest And Its Mineral Wealth

What’s caught the eye of intrepid mining companies looking at the seafloor are billions of tons of polymetallic nodules. These lumpy, potato-sized nuggets are formed through complex and agonizingly slow biochemical processes — over a million years, they expand at a rate of just 1-3 millimeters — and are packed with nickel, cobalt, manganese and other rare metals. Since 2001, the International Seabed Authority has issued 31 permits to private companies and state-owned enterprises trying to explore the ocean floor with a view to eventually exploiting these reserves. 

As the world becomes increasingly reliant on battery technology to fuel the green transition, the race to the depths of the sea is heating up. In 2021, the tiny island nation of Nauru announced its intention to dig up nodules within a 1.7 million square mile region of the Pacific known as the Clarion-Clipperton Zone. The country’s declaration triggered what’s known as the “two-year rule,” giving the ISA just 24 months to finalize an environmental rulebook for mining. 

The deadline was July 9 this year — but after weeks of heated negotiations, the ISA pushed it back to at least July 2025. The outcome disappointed companies eager to commence operations. But it wasn’t a straightforward victory for conservationists: Several countries called for a temporary pause on all deep-sea mining, but China blocked the debate from reaching the ISA floor. 

The debate has turned bitter. Both the conservationists and the mining advocates claim they are fighting to save the planet. Who should we believe?

Threats To The Ecosystem

The deep sea teems with life, up to 90% of which remains unnamed and undiscovered. Less than 0.01% of the deep-sea floor has been sampled and studied in detail. This pristine ecosystem may contain millions of species — a biodiversity comparable to that of tropical rainforests. Scientists discover new species almost every time they dive down there. 

The unusually stylistic flair of some researchers studying this realm — “bizarre,” “mysterious,” “spectacular” — is a testament to the utter strangeness of these sci-fi-esque creatures. Glass squid float elegantly, bioluminescent light organs disguising their silhouettes from would-be predators. The goblin shark, the last living member of a lineage stretching back 125 million years, sniffs out prey using a special organ on its long snout to detect the weak electrical fields produced by other animals. Barreleye fish gaze upward from eyes situated within translucent heads. Iron-armored snails cling onto searing hydrothermal vents, harvesting toxic chemicals that symbiotic microbes living on them break down for sustenance.

Our ancient sea sponge is somewhere down here, too, filtering 20,000 times its volume in water every single day.

An extraction operation could dredge up thousands of square miles of seabed. Violent strip mining would crush and tear out complex sea flora and choke filter feeders in vast plumes of sediment that stretch for hundreds of miles. Major sound pollution would also occur. Other methods of sea mining — like stripping away the mineral-rich outer layer of seamounts, many of which are underwater mountains formed by volcanic activity — would decimate millennia-old coral and sponges. 

Scientists also argue that mining could also disrupt the ocean’s role as a carbon sink. Since the onset of the industrial era, the oceans have absorbed about a quarter of all human-generated CO2 emissions. Deep-sea mining would loosen ocean-floor sediment, potentially reinjecting carbon stored there back into the ocean, potentially accelerating ocean acidification and global warming.  

Citing such threats, the International Union for Conservation of Nature has called for a moratorium on deep-sea mining. So too has the European Academies’ Science Advisory Council — the continent’s top science panel — and various national governments from France to Fiji. In an open letter, more than 700 marine science and policy experts from over 44 countries have urged the ISA to temporarily ban the practice. “The sheer importance of the ocean to our planet and people, and the risk of large-scale and permanent loss of biodiversity, ecosystems and ecosystem functions, necessitates a pause of all efforts to begin mining of the deep sea,” the letter warned.

Green Transition Miracle?

Not everyone agrees. Advocates of deep-sea mining see it as the solution to the climate crisis, not the opposite. 

Electric cars, wind turbines and solar panels rely on vital metals like cobalt, manganese, nickel and copper. Transitioning the global economy to renewables is going to require a vast amount of these precious minerals.

In 2019, the anthropologist Jason Hickel estimated what it will take to decarbonize the global economy: 34 million metric tons of copper, 40 million metric tons of lead, 50 million metric tons of zinc, 162 million metric tons of aluminum and 4.8 billion metric tons of iron. In 2030, the global demand for lithium will likely surpass two million metric tons, doubling the demand forecast for 2025. A swelling fleet of electric cars will further exacerbate the metal deficit.

Plundering the ocean floor is the least harmful route to decarbonization, would-be deep-sea miners claim — including The Metals Company, Nauru’s proposed mining partner. The alternative is to ramp up production on land, polluting soil, devastating wildlife and contributing to human rights abuses. 

Underwater mining means “no disruption to Indigenous communities, no deforestation and no child labor during the mining phase,” The Metals Company’s website declares.

So is deep-sea mining the lesser evil? Surely the green transition is more important than some sea slug. Surely Indigenous communities should take priority over the deep, dark ocean where no human lives. Who would honestly argue that a goblin shark, ancient lineage or not, deserves more protection than a child toiling in a cobalt mine in Congo?

We have to mine, the miners say. Do you want to mine the ocean deep or mine on land? Hit a switch and prevent land degradation and ecosystem devastation. If a few ancient corals get crushed, so be it. 

The Circular Economy

The comparison between land and sea mining is something aspiring ocean mining companies lean heavily on. But “you cannot compare apples and oranges,” Duncan Currie, an environmental lawyer working with the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition, told me. “We do not know the extent or nature of biodiversity loss in the deep sea, so cannot compare it.”  

Mining the deep sea also won’t necessarily lead to the closure of terrestrial mines, he said. “It is not logical to assume opening deep-sea mining in the ocean will lead to the closure of land-based mines. They would be in addition.”

There are other options, and there might also be new discoveries or advancements in materials and technologies that lessen the need for minerals. Promising battery alternatives like graphene aluminum-ion, iron-flow and solid-state technologies are being developed, as well as no-impact extraction directly from seawater. Indeed, many electric vehicle manufacturers like BMW, Volvo, Volkswagen and Renault, support the deep-sea mining moratorium.

These developments have their own problems — aluminum production, for example, can spew chemicals into groundwater — but the impacts are more quantifiable (and therefore manageable) than mining the deep. 

More crucially, we need to shift from a linear economy — in which single use is the norm — to a circular economy where recycling and re-use play a key role. The deep sea isn’t the only untapped reservoir of precious minerals. Much of the vast amount of e-waste consumers produce annually is available to be reclaimed. In a scenario developed by the International Energy Agency to achieve net zero emissions globally by 2050, demand for critical minerals will increase six-fold compared to today. But a 2022 report commissioned by the World Wildlife Foundation found that scaling up recycling can reduce cumulative demand for lithium, cobalt, nickel, manganese, rare earth elements, platinum and copper by more than half.

“The path forward includes a mix of technological innovation and changes to our current patterns of consumption and waste,” then-WWF director general Marco Lambertini wrote in the report. He added: “With human ingenuity and an enlightened sense of self-preservation, this task is well within our collective capacity to achieve.”

In 2022, researchers estimated that 5.3 billion mobile phones were thrown away. Most no longer work, sometimes by design. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Indeed, regulatory solutions already exist. 

Earlier this year, the EU proposed “right to repair” legislation requiring manufacturers to make their products easier to fix. The Paris public prosecutor recently opened an investigation into Apple for preventing consumers from mending their phones with third-party components. And around the world, “repair cafes” and “libraries of things” are springing up to collectivize ownership and fight unnecessary waste. Mandating the provision of extended warranties requires companies to replace defective products, disincentivizing inbuilt flaws. In Sweden, for example, customers have the right to make a guarantee claim up to three years after the point of purchase.

Lessons From A Sea Sponge

In the deep-sea mining debate, the real question is not whether companies should plunder on land versus sea. The question is about how humans look at the natural world: as a naked resource, nothing more than an agglomeration of resources that exist to be ruthlessly exploited? As our home, a place we must protect at all costs or face the consequences? 

At the bottom of the ocean, faceless sea sponges are silently sucking up vast quantities of water. They provide vital services to ocean floor ecosystems, filtering water, recycling waste and producing valuable nutrients for other marine organisms. 

Some specimens are 20 times older than industrial capitalism. They have survived for so long by working with their environment, not against it.

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The message of the display, it seemed, was to exult in the demise of a disliked technology by showcasing an earlier extinction. The dinosaur and nuclear power: outmoded, obsolete, good riddance. 

On another spring day, this one more than a century ago, a 15-foot-long stegosaurus lumbered down Broadway in New York. Made from paper-mâché and mounted on a cart, his name was Jingo. The year was 1916 and Jingo was conducting a tour of major American cities as a symbol of protest against U.S. military preparations to join the Great War engulfing Europe.

At intervals, Jingo’s chaperones halted him and announced his cautionary lesson to streetside crowds. “Meet Jingo!” they shouted. “This animal believed in huge armament, he is now extinct!” Placards held by the activists bristled around Jingo’s bony plates, hammering the message home: “All armor plate, no brains, now he’s dead!” 

In pamphlets, campaigners went further, slandering stegosaurs as “stumbling” and “clumsy,” a “slow-moving creature of low mentality.” Jingo’s spinescence apparently betrayed his “brutal foolery” akin to the bone-headed belligerence that seemed, during World War I, to be “destroying Europe.”

Like Greenpeace’s tyrannosaur, Jingo deserved his fate. Whether it was their superlative stupidity, lumbering lassitude or abundance of brawn that got them killed, everyone assumed dinosaurs were doomed to extinction. To many, the suggestion of beaked and spike-tailed lizards, armored like dreadnoughts, seemed absurdly unnatural, and unnatural things shouldn’t really exist. They deserved to be weeded out of existence, making room for what’s better.

Dinosaurs became the supreme symbol of deserved obsolescence around the same time the bones of most of the iconic species displayed in museums today were first unearthed, in the latter 1800s and early 1900s. Soon enough, they came to be treated with shocking spite. In 1893, reviewing a book that was among the first to present lavish illustrations of “extinct monsters,” one Victorian gentleman saw in them nothing but a “waste of good material” for trophy hunting. “What splendid sport it would have been,” he daydreamed. Fifteen years later, another writer dismissed triceratops as one of “nature’s unsuccessful experiments” before proceeding to salivate at the fun a “sportsman” would have had hunting one.

Pillorying these extinct creatures has long been to display a lesson, a precedent to avoid. Their disappearance was warranted because they’d done something wrong. But the pernicious assumption that extinction is somehow deserved is, in part, what got us into the predicament we find ourselves in today: ecological collapse, a planet-wide extinction event and the disappearance of creatures and cultures deemed unworthy of survival.

Having reflected on what “splendid sport” it would be to slay a sauropod, the Victorian reviewer quoted above absentmindedly moved from prehistoric to present-day extinctions. He remarked — with admiration, not remorse — that the “big game of modern days disappears before civilization” before pointing to Cecil Rhodes, who was then in the process of colonizing and stretching railroads across Africa. Such “progress,” the reviewer applauded, can only “help further hasten the extinction of the few great remaining beasts.” He regretted such disappearances, but only insofar as they would rob humans of fun game to hunt.

Of course, human activities have been jeopardizing other species for a long time. Roughly 10,000 years ago, mastodon, mammoths, megatherium and other large mammals abruptly disappeared, possibly due to our hunter-gatherer ancestors spreading out across landmasses.

But people only truly recognized that extinctions are possible and humans have caused them within the past 300 years or so. Over millennia, people pondered the origin of fossils — around 110 A.C.E., for example, the Chinese philosopher Zhu Xi speculated that shell-embossed rocks on high mountains were once shellfish living at the bottom of the sea. But understanding that those creatures no longer exist not just in that place but throughout all space everywhere, forevermore, is a different notion. 

For the longest time, there simply wasn’t sufficient evidence to conclusively answer the question: Why could a species, once lost, not simply appear again later? This is mostly due to the fact that there was no consensus on how species originated in the first place. For centuries, people had sincerely believed that animals such as mice or snakes were “spontaneously generated” — created from unorganized matter without parents or ancestors. They believed this was unremarkable, happening often and continuously.

Going back at least to Augustine, one prevalent version of this theory held that species “pre-exist” all their actual manifestations in the form of invisible “seeds” diffused through the atmosphere. These, it was thought, always existed and always will; they were “indestructible,” baked into reality’s cake. All you need is welcoming conditions and the “seeds” simply blossom into fully adapted creatures.

This theory bypasses all the steps we now know are necessary for a living world to forge complex organisms from unorganized matter. It’s like saying you can manifest a cake without bothering with any preparation or recipe — or that a lifeless world might produce cities and satellites. Within such an outlook, there aren’t any prior states or cumulative steps needed for intricate animals to leap from inexistence to existence, or for a lost species to later return. As one French naturalist argued in the 1720s, though it may appear some species have “vanished from Earth,” it is nonetheless true they all “certainly survive” — “their seeds still occur,” circulating latently, and they “therefore could reappear again one day.” 

Not many decades later, another influential scientist ran the thought experiment of annihilating all life on Earth. Following such a “universal death,” he confidently predicted a “replacement of living nature” would briskly and without difficulty reappear, populated by animals of the “same varieties.” No surprise that he also cheered how, as our “species multiplies and improves,” it pushes aside other lifeforms by expanding humanity’s “empire both terrible and absolute.” 

Belief in the spontaneous creation of complex things, without the need of any prior genealogies, defangs the consequences of their eradication, because there’s no stringency of states the universe must retrace to produce similarly complex things again. Easy go, easy come. Hence, perhaps, why attitudes to extinction remained feckless well into the 1800s, as writers regularly hurrahed the culling of unique animals like Australia’s “feeble” kangaroo, exulting their destruction by European colonizers. 

As late as 1819, a prominent German biologist named Lorenz Oken conjectured that humanity itself originated in just such an effortless way: generated from “sea slime,” with the first babies simply washing ashore, no ancestors necessary. He even speculated, sincerely, as to how this initial generation of children fed and fended for themselves, given there were no parents to show them the ropes.

Now we know what it took life on Earth to meander from prokaryote to primate and from monomer to marsupial: billions upon billions of years. We appreciate that such a tract of time seems to be the shortest possible period required to assemble kangaroos or humans, or any other living thing, from unliving matter. But if you believe that entire ecosystems can painlessly be forged “afresh” each time the world is wiped entirely clean — as many scientists seriously believed back then — it’s much harder to see the weight of what’s lost, should anything die.

In this world, there are two types of things: those that depend upon prior histories for their existence, and those that don’t. Some things can, at any moment, begin to exist, regardless of the universe’s prior states. Their appearance isn’t conditional upon any specific past holding true. They can spawn anywhere, anytime; they require no connection with parents or precedents, which would anchor and limit the region of space and time within which they can emerge. Accordingly, these things tend to be unremarkable. They also tend to be simpler.

But then there are historical things. In order to possibly exist, they require specific events in the past to have happened. You will never encounter them beyond the region within which this history, with all its piecemeal stages, has unfolded. The more complex and sophisticated something is, the more history — that is, the more steps required for its assembly — it tends to require in order to emerge. For this reason, things that depend upon histories tend to be remarkable, even unique. Unlike kangaroos, cities or satellites, hydrogen atoms aren’t the product of long-winding histories. This is why hydrogen is cosmically abundant, but kangaroos aren’t.

It was Charles Darwin who revealed that species are historical things by illuminating the sheer amount of time required to accumulate life’s present grandeur. He saw living species as precious because of this. They were not effortless “creations” but hardy “descendants” from the earliest forms, making them “ennobled.” When a “species” disappears from Earth, Darwin explained, the “same identical form never reappears,” for the “link of generations has been broken.” 

This finally explained why species could not be re-created even if similar conditions happened to recur. We are born of time, Darwin revealed, not slime.

Though it took later scientists to illuminate this, Darwin’s theory additionally implied that Earth’s animals are unique to Earth, just as species that originate on islands aren’t found anywhere else unless they migrate. Should any species be wiped out here and now, therefore, it is lost not just from Earth, but from the whole of the rest of the cosmos, for all its remaining moments.

Nonetheless, attitudes to extinction remained callous. In 1868, Darwin’s mentor, Charles Lyell, remarked that entire ecosystems were being obliterated as “the colonies of highly civilized nations spread themselves over” what he called “unoccupied lands.” Heartlessly, albeit presciently, he predicted the trend of accelerating anthropogenic extinction rates would intensify.

Lyell argued that humans shouldn’t recoil at the “havoc committed” in “obtaining possession of the earth by conquest,” nor regret wielding the “sword of extermination.” In eradicating other species, he explained, we “exercise no exclusive prerogative.” That is, even the “most insignificant and diminutive species” has, in the struggle for survival, “slaughtered their thousands.” Lyell positively celebrated this, seeing it as a warrant for human rapacity.

One of the reasons such hard-heartedness to the extinct persisted after Darwin was the wide acceptance of a competing theory known as “orthogenesis” that also attempted to explain how evolution worked. Orthogenesis held that species don’t die based on interactions with an extrinsic world, but upon an entirely internal principle, like the aging of an individual’s body. Like clockwork unwinding, species and entire clades were envisioned as being propelled along a set path, arcing from youth to senescent decay. Their mortality was thus assumed to be as deterministic as a missile’s trajectory in Newtonian ballistics.

At the turn of the 20th century, this popular theory’s proponents believed lineages were born with an allotted lifespan. Once their congenital “virility” runs out, they become “spent” before perishing. Many spoke of “racial senility”; some compared extinction to “predestination.”

The theory provoked scientists to search for symptoms of “ebbing vitality in a race,” just as doctors recognize dementia and cataracts as illnesses of age. Numerous signs of “palaeopathology” were offered. Gigantism and dwarfism, luxuriant antlers or baroque horns: There were many identifiers of “decadent” or “geriatric” genera. Lurid, macabre analogies abounded. For example, one paleontologist described the coiling of ammonites as the symptom of a clade “writhing” in “death agony,” contorting like arthritic joints.

“Death comes ultimately from within,” supporters of orthogenesis intoned. What this belief obscured is that species can die by accident — that is, had the lineage not succumbed, it might otherwise have gone on, surviving, thriving, diversifying.

Contrarily, Darwin’s theory of natural selection accommodated chance, insofar as individuals survive or die based on random variations in changing environments. Nonetheless, Darwin and his followers insisted that species are predominantly pushed to the grave by their more adaptive descendants or competitors. Accordingly, they thought extinction was primarily a matter of bad design, not bad luck. 

For this reason, Darwin downplayed the role of large catastrophes that could decimate indiscriminately, wiping out even the most “successful” lineages. He maintained instead that emerging evidence of mass extinctions — of conspicuous dips in biodiversity etched into the fossil record — must be distortions of our limited perspective arising from incomplete data.

He thus remained convinced that, averaged over time, “natural selection” works to inexorably “progress towards perfection.” In an 1860 letter, Darwin wrote this progress was so inevitable that “if every Vertebrate were destroyed throughout the world,” except the humble reptiles, then, after “millions of ages,” they would inevitably “become highly developed on a scale equal to mammals” — “possibly more intellectual.” 

So even for Darwin, extinction wasn’t anything to repine over — a temporary setback at worst. Lost species were likely “inferior.” Better to have been pruned sooner rather than later, making way for what’s fitter.

Such sentiment dovetailed with racism and eugenics. The wholesale genocide of Indigenous peoples was similarly cast as an inexorable fate rather than the result of political decisions or culpable agency. “No motives appear to be able to stay the progress of such movements, humanize them how we may,” one Victorian writer heinously mollified, expressing a general outlook. Some reacted with mawkish sorrow, handwringing over this supposed unavoidability and pledging to make “their passing easier.” Others went further, rebuking such “sentiment” as “unreasonable,” cruelly insisting there is “satisfaction in the replacement of the aborigines.” But both parties alike laundered atrocities overseas as inexorable outcomes of natural selection’s “cosmic process.” Phrases like “improved out of existence” became quintessential fin-de-siècle parlance, used to excuse enormous evil.

Just like the “uncouth dinosaurs,” intoned one author as late as 1930, “so also many human beings, unlovely in character, must be looked on as necessary waste.” “Necessary waste,” that is, at evolution’s altar of selection and rejection. Indeed, during the new century’s opening decades, the spiteful tenor regarding dinosaurs intensified rather than abated. Perhaps it helped Western scientists to have a prehuman exemplar of “unavoidable extinction” — a distant “fact” to point to, tactfully positioned far beyond the realm of the political — to justify barbarities they benefited from in their present.

By the time Jingo rolled down Broadway in 1916, it was common for his kind to be raised as totems of either deserving death or indivertible decrepitude. Aside from being called “superlatively stupid,” many experts believed stegosaurian investment in spinescence to be the “faultless indicator” of a species that had “spent its vital force.” Jingo’s gothic protrusions were read as the “excrescences” of “racial senescence.” Like the writhing ammonites, his very anatomy was interpreted as the “embodiment of the death agony of a race.” 

Summing up an overriding sentiment, the humorist Will Cuppy quipped in the 1940s that the “Age of the Reptiles ended because it had gone on long enough and it was all a mistake in the first place.” 

This reasoning fed into self-serving assumptions regarding humanity’s own self-appointed position as successor and supplanter. The “moronic” and “slow-moving dunces” were mercifully “improved” out of existence by those “little warm-blooded beings” whose hefty brains would later blossom into evolution’s pinnacle.

Assuming that extinction only ever weeds out the “decrepit” and “unfit” not only absolved humans from wielding the “sword of extermination” in the present. It also had the bonus effect of making “man” — that latter-day inheritor of the Earth — seem anointed as the inevitable result of natural selection’s search for the best.

Such assumptions still lingered in 1959 at the centenary celebration of “On the Origin of Species,” where experts came together for discussion. During one panel, a curious query cropped up: Why did “man” evolve from “primates” and “not, for instance, kangaroos?”

The question revealed the persisting assumption that Homo sapiens was somehow the destination and apogee — a target even marsupials or reptiles might ache to achieve, rather than just one more outcome of life’s sprawling evolutionary explorations. Indeed, scientists have since conjectured that dinosaurs, if they’d stuck around, might have eventually become something like us: bipedal and brainy. Dismissing them as “necessary waste” is one thing, but imagining them “improved out of existence” by essentially becoming us smacks of an egoism yet more profound.

By 1964, the paleontologist Glenn Jepsen referred to dinosaurs as “amiable clodpoll buffoons, not to be exactly ridiculed or censured but not to be taken very seriously, either; amusing, every ton of them.” Friendly derision, but derision nonetheless. The tone, however, had by now softened enough for the sheer suddenness of their disappearance to be acknowledged as an enigma.

Listing the range of suggestions that had been made for this, Jepsen could only conclude: “no one knows.” Revealing his exasperation with the prevailing uncertainty, he facetiously included “flying saucers” in a litany of proposals, alongside the suggestion that the dinosaurs died of “paleo-weltschmerz.” (In German, “weltschmerz” means something like semi-suicidal boredom.)

Over the next couple of decades, however, much would change. New research in the 1970s and 80s concluded that dinosaurs were not cold-blooded slowpokes, but highly active, social and even intelligent. Reflecting this, illustrators updated their depictions, rectifying the ways human preconceptions had warped even the bodies of these beasts. 

Tyrannosaurs transmogrified into well-balanced bipeds in stark opposition to the tail-draggers of prior reconstructions that seemed to amble around like cumbersome kangaroos. Additionally, it also became clear that the lineage of dinosaurs didn’t even end, as birds were identified as their direct descendants. No longer could their kind be cast as a clade that spent its “vital force” eons ago.

When the father-son team of Luis and Walter Alvarez stumbled upon strata dating to the end of the dinosaur’s reign that was laced with iridium — scant on Earth but abundant in asteroids — they took a critical step in identifying the cause of the dinosaurs’ disappearance. It suddenly seemed the dinosaurs didn’t die because of bad genes but from sheer bad luck. A streaking comet could hardly be rationalized as the handmaiden of progress, nor the invisible hand of adaptation.

During the 1980s, the giant impact hypothesis showed how adventitious luck, rather than innate superiority, shapes macroevolution’s unfolding story. Extinction is not always the pruning of “aged” or “unfit” lineages; even the most “successful” can succumb. Ultimately, this provided a sobering lesson for Homo sapiens, otherwise so often self-assured of its preeminent inevitability.

First, the new view implied that, if the asteroid had not plummeted into what is now Mexico, we cannot assume anything humanoid would have ever emerged. As the Polish writer Stanisław Lem pointed out in 1983, we are the offspring of cosmic contingency.

Second, it toppled the residual assurance that an animal as “successful” as Homo wouldn’t be succumbing to oblivion anytime soon. Suddenly, our own position seemed more precarious than before. As Stephen Jay Gould observed, research from the early 1980s onward into the fallouts of prehistoric asteroid impacts also provided an “important” impetus for the first attempts to “model the climactic consequences of nuclear holocaust.” 

Third, by demonstrating how the marks of contingency cast wide legacies through evolutionary history, the impact hypothesis also made more salient the impacts of present-day human activity upon life’s further future. Suggestions that we are altering everything to come, in ways that aren’t inevitable, gained force. Indeed, it was around the same time that prominent scientists, like the anthropologist Richard Leakey, first began asserting that we are living during “the sixth mass extinction.” 

For Leakey, it was evidently reckoning with the role of contingency, in previous mass extinctions, that led him to insist humans take responsibility today. Indeed, an important part of imputing culpability for a misdeed is acknowledging that the perpetrator could have acted otherwise and, if they had, the misdeed would not have happened. But this was precisely what prior outlooks precluded — with self-serving hastiness — by casting the destructions wrought by human industry as inevitabilities within the “cosmic process.” 

Today, human industry presides over mass extinction and climate breakdown. Because of this, it’s tempting to label ourselves as somehow inherently evil. Not only have humans wielded the “sword of extermination,” but prior generations, in their small-mindedness, slandered and libeled the “vanquished” as somehow inferior.

Nonetheless, human societies — like species — are historical things: built out of precedent but in ways open to change. Qualities may become entrenched and hard to tweak, because of all that becomes built on top of them. But making claims about what’s “innate” remains dubious, always liable to prejudice and generalization. There is thus no fate — nor congenital destiny or doom — for historical things, be they living lineages or planetary civilizations. What they are today is the product of a past that could have gone otherwise, and what they will be tomorrow depends on what happens next, which can also go differently, hinging on chance or choice. This opens us up to accident; it also carves space for agency.

So, perhaps we should take the lesson of Jingo — not to prejudge the capacities, fates and dignities of other animals as matters of fate — and apply it to our own kind. Let’s not conclude that humans are irredeemably or inherently evil, nor that human interventions must only ever vandalize this world.

We may have been the first and only animal to have pilloried others for having perished. But we are also the first and only animal to begin apprehending the wrong of doing so. History reveals that this knowledge has only just started to seep into our consciousness. This has hardly yet stopped the wholesale destruction of ecosystems. But it is cause for urgency: to produce a viable planetary civilization that, rather than parasitizing the planet that birthed it, enters into symbiosis with it. After all, we don’t any longer have even the meager excuse of our recent ancestors: that of ignorance.

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