In the opening few minutes of the science-fiction film Blade Runner 2049, a police car flies over a landscape that has been transformed by synthetic farming. Concentrically-arranged mirrors for capturing solar energy point and tilt towards central towers like Mecca, circle after circle stretching into the distance. Further on, a mosaic of plastic-covered indoor farms cover every inch of land, glinting in the dull sunlight like facets of cracked glaze. Inside one of these cells, a worker in a hazmat suit dredges a handful of squirming beetle larvae from a murky green pool. We learn these farming techniques saved humanity from famine caused by ecological collapse in the mid-2020s. The entire planet is ravaged, containing nothing but highly coveted relics of "real" organisms, and a dysfunctional climate is by dry dust. Even then, humans survive, and even prosper – there might be nothing wild left, but they can create perfectly animals to replace the real things. The metaphorical "umbilical cord" connecting human survival and the biosphere has been well and truly cut... But what if the creator of each new thing had an obligation towards creating its opposite on this gradient? For example, a form of biodiversity investment or rewilding instigated when something is added to the engineered side. There is a profound symmetry to the idea that whatever complexity is built or created on one side, must be equally replaced or protected on the other for the system to remain stable.
Offsetting is not a new idea, and I certainly wouldn't want to take any credit for it here. We are most used to encountering it in the context of air travel: you can pay for a company to plant CO2-guzzling trees. In terms of carbon offsetting, trees are a good contender for the polar opposite of air-travel pollution on the gradient outlined above, even if the practice currently has problems in terms of a time-lag in carbon sequestration and unhealthy monocultures of trees. However, while pollution or illegal environmental damage are sometimes fined or taxed, offsetting is rarely considered for processes other than carbon production, and direct withdrawals from nature by new human creations are not "priced-in".
Another well-established category of offset is reserving land for national parks, green belts to contain cities, or nature reserves to preserve valuable ecosystems. Here, though, these schemes are often undertaken by governments, and there is often less of a direct link between the builders of engineered objects such as a new housing block or factory, and areas of regeneration or rewilding. While national efforts can have impact, it would be inspiring to see the burden of restoration fall more significantly on those who are directly unbalancing the system. For example, the UK government recently introduced legislation of Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG) whereby all new developments need to deliver a 10% improvement in local biodiversity. 2020 and 2021 as the world hunkered down for the Covid-19 pandemic, I found myself reflecting on this bleak depiction, as part of my work at for the Study of Existential Risk in Cambridge, UK. I puzzled over what the future might look like once humanity had overcome Covid-19, and the climate-ecological crisis shimmered once again into view. If severe environmental degradation continues, a plausible path is one where humans will, through necessity, decouple from a biosphere that ceases to function. A quote kept going around my mind, by researcher Brad Werner at a major scientific conference in 2012. In a talk entitled "Is Earth ?", he said that global capitalism, aided by technology, "has made the depletion of resources so rapid, convenient and barrier-free that 'Earth-human systems' are becoming dangerously unstable in response".
What if, as Werner suggested, Earth really was in trouble and the planet's natural systems are fated to collapse and die off? Will we develop artificial back-ups to take their place, like in Blade Runner, and if so, what might that world look like? These questions led me to publish a paper exploring the consequences and dangers of severing the human-biosphere umbilical cord, and how this process may already have begun. Humanity is already on the path to decoupling from natural systems – so if we want to avoid the worst scenarios of this trajectory, what might we do about it?
You must be logged in to post a comment.