On Depth and Deepness

We believe that we live in the 'age of information,' that there has been an information 'explosion,' an information 'revolution.' While in a certain narrow sense that is the case, in many more important ways just the opposite is true. We also live at a moment of deep ignorance, when vital knowledge that humans have always possessed about who we are and where we live seems beyond our reach. An unenlightenment. An age of missing information.
--Bill McKibben, The Age of Missing Information

We recently read a game-changing work by paleoclimatologist Curt Stager, entitled Deep Future:  The Next 100,000 Years of Life on Earth, and its implications have somewhat staggered us.  Stager asks that mainstream thinkers move beyond the question of global warming to consider “then what”?  This is a natural concept for someone whose daily fare involves the study of geological time – not days or weeks, or even years or decades, but minimally centuries and milennia.

Why, then, if we wish to discuss one book, do we start with a quotation from a different book, nay even a totally different author?  Simple, really.  Bill McKibben’s Deep Economy forms the intellectual backdrop against which the depth of Deep Future may be plumbed.

Progressives, Liberals, Hippie Freaks, and other post-modern intellectual types append the word “deep” to practically any form of endeavor in which they wish to express the notion that even after all the measurements have been taken, and all the facts have been explained, there’s still something else going on. 

This is the ineffable je ne sais quoi of every pseudointellectual charlatan of the last two hundred years, and yet the concept lingers.  Why?

We would contend that this notion, the idea that the truth is something other than what you happen to be seeing, or hearing, or touching, or tasting at any particular moment, has such staying power because ideas which tend towards preference for empiricism and inductive reasoning have every bit as much susceptibility to the bias of invalid predicates as do the a priori prejudices of religion – which is to say, garbage in, garbage out, and the more sophisticated your input mechanism, the more sophisticated your garbage.

Basically, ecological economists like McKibben get into arguments with environmental economists, and on the basis of rational scientific evidentiary inquiry, the environmental economists (who have much better math skills) are right practically every time.  The ecological economists, though, get invited to better parties, because they have a more robust message to spread, having moved beyond simple measurement of sensory data as is expected of an impartial observer – the role science has always claimed for itself – into the more contentious role of social activist – a role the environmental economists claim is inappropriate for anyone involved in the exercise of “science”, not because activism is wrong (the environmental economists are almost universally also politically active in advocacy of a wide range of issues), but because activism is not a form of inquiry.  The activities, they say, ought by nature to be separate.

The ecological economists, though, counter that the very act of deciding what to measure is a form of activism, and that the environmental economists, even those who vote for radical political candidates and petition for radical direct-democratic causes, are actively supporting status quo economic and political structures through their adherance to status quo scientific methodology.

Fascinating stuff, really, if you’re sufficiently geeky for it.

And this is where Stager’s Deep Future comes into play.  Stager is not the first person to use the word “anthropocene” but he is the first to introduce us at Myrtle’s place to the idea.  We are living in the first geological epoch which is not merely marked by the presence of a particular species, but is defined by that species.  Everything about our world is changing, and it is changing because we have changed it. 

Most paleoclimatologists tend to mark the beginning of the anthropocene, the Age of Humans, with the invention of the steam engine in the 17th century, but there are those who argue that many thousands of years before that, when humans were still hunting and gathering, we wiped out large mammals, and chopped down forests, and began belching excess carbon-dioxide into the atmosphere in quantities larger than the ecosphere could reabsorb.  Much if not all of the holocene, they argue, should actually be subsumed by the anthropocene.

And when what you are studying is the impact of everything done by humans upon everything surrounding humans, dividing what you are studying from what you intend to do about it becomes a blurrier proposition.

 This is the point at which we become less sympathetic to those who insist upon scientific and academic integrity and more sympathetic to those who argue for redefining the very field of inquiry from economic growth to something less tangible – economic satisfaction. 

Stager, of course, ignores economics altogether, because his field is climate, and he does a remarkable job of explaining the various scenarios in which global warming will eventually peak (in as little as a few centuries, or as many as 50,000 years), and will be replaced by a time of global cooling, as all fossil fuel is already spent, and all the excess carbon is eventually subsumed in the oceans, and things “return to normal” at some far future time.  He then turns to a discussion of the various scenarios of necessary cultural adaptations to the changing climate, and the sorts of communities that are likely to thrive, and those that are likely to suffer.  The time frames?  Far longer than most contemporary climate writers have bothered to speak about.

But when Stager speaks of the conditions to be faced by future civilizations, it gives us pause to think about posterity in entirely different ways.  We are all used to the platitudes of politicians who speak of leaving a legacy for our descendants, a world in which our children and grandchildren have at least as much opportunity for success and happiness as we have enjoyed, and these platitudes have replaced much of our serious ethical thinking, because they are easier than would be a studied analysis of what we are actually passing on.

We are used to the notion that we can grow out of any crisis, that by the time one resource is depleted, technology will have found its replacement.  This notion is a prima facie lie, but we have continued to believe in it since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution because it is a comfortable fiction.

We can’t grow forever, nor should we want to.  The ecological, physical, emotional, cultural, and spiritual costs are simply too high.  The scars on our planet and on ourselves are too obvious for all but the most hardened to ignore for too much longer.  Growth has not made the masses happy even where growth has been the most impressive.  Growth has definitely not made the masses happy in those places where resource exploitation has been the greatest.

As it turns out, the legacy we ought to be passing down, if we are to reclaim any kind of life worth living in future years, addresses both the needs of “deep economy” and of “deep ecology”.  Learning to live sustainably has the potential to soothe our tattered nerves, and to level off our abuse of our planet and our neighbors.  Living, and buying, and eating, and entertaining on a local scale will do more for our personal happiness than any amount of growth could, and will do far less harm to the world around us.

These are things we all know intuitively, if only we allow ourselves to listen to that quiet voice in the back of our heads that says, “Yes, this is pleasant.”  There is a concept in Sweden that the Swedes insist has no valid translation in English – “Lagom”.  We at Myrtle’s think we know an idiom from the American South that is a fairly close approximation:  “Plenty good.”  And we say plenty good is good enough. 

Plenty good is as deep as depth ought to get.