I’ve always loved the Ban Ki Moon quote “There is no Plan B because there is no Planet B.” With no hysteria or panic, it succinctly captures the torture we’re putting the earth through, and the absolute necessity of taking steps to save that same earth. The former Secretary General believes our Plan A is nations working together to reduce carbon emissions—implementing renewable energy technologies and smarter environmental policies.
But this isn’t everybody’s Plan A.
Mainstream environmentalism—using existing political frameworks, improving renewable energy technologies– tends to get the most publicity, and I’ll discuss its evolution in the next article. Some however, do not believe that emissions reduction is the best way forward, and this piece will focus on these more unconventional thinkers. Some, like prominent writer Paul Kingsnorth, do not believe there is a way to save the world at all, while others believe that the only way forward is through geoengineering technology.
Paul Kingsnorth is a former member of the mainstream environmental movement, and a current writer both of journalistic pieces (for varied publications including The Guardian) and of fiction and poetry. In his simultaneously beautiful and infuriating essay collection Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist, Kingsnorth takes the position that the earth is doomed, and that there is nothing for humanity to do but to withdraw from the environmental debate and try to improve its own relationship with the natural world.
To some extent Kingsnorth’s ideas reflect the historical idea of environmental preservation, an idea prominently championed by John Muir. This idea states that the earth should be protected without regard to human interests—that the intrinsic value of the earth is sufficient reason for its protection. Kingsnorth’s conflict with the mainstream environmental movement similarly mirrors Muir’s philosophical conflict with Gifford Pinchot, who believed in conservation, or protecting the earth so that it might provide the greatest good to the greatest number of people. Kingsnorth believes that mainstream environmentalists seek to help the earth simply so that they can continue to use it for as long as possible, when really we shouldn’t be using it at all.
Some of the best illustrators of the preservation mindset were the Romantics—those artists who expressed the earth as a thing of infinite beauty and danger, as William Wordsworth often did. Kingsnorth alludes to Wordsworth multiple times and preserves his same balance between deference to the earth and raw love for it, notably when looking over a bay:
“I had the strangest feeling, then. I felt as if I was part of something very much bigger than myself. I felt this place, this edgeland, this world of wing and water—I felt how it was working. I felt the clockwork of it, the movement, felt the blood of it flowing in the salt sea and in the movement of the gulls and in the sand and the riverflow…I wasn’t wanted here, or unwanted. I was jetsam, passing by on the tide” (Kingsnorth 189-190).
Parts of Kingsnorth’s philosophy are very valuable – appreciating the beauties, little and great, to be found in all aspects of nature, advocating for human humility, and asserting that there is value to be found in the actions of individual people.
Accompanying these lyrically phrased, logical points, however, are unproductive, not entirely founded defeatism and hypocrisy. Kingsnorth hates human advancement – even entertaining the possibility that the development of language or the discovery of fire was the beginning of the end or “point of no return” for the earth. Such lines of thinking suggest that he would prefer humans never to have existed at all. This “ideal” society of his, or one in which we live in a way that has zero impact on the earth, is literally impossible. Even if we were to knock down every structure built by humans and start living like hunter-gatherers, the evidence of our existence and our impact would still exist. Kingsnorth writes as though every other approach is worthless. Working within the parameters of humanity, knowing that we need to get energy from somewhere, the logical choice is to obtain that energy in a way that has a lesser impact on the earth. Even conceding Kingsnorth’s point that both renewable and non-renewable sources of energy disrupt the natural world, shouldn’t we, by a lesser of two evils argument, try to disrupt it less?
Kingsnorth also makes his doomsday predictions with a level of certainty that seems more attributable to his anger than to his consideration of facts. Kingsnorth cannot be certain that it is impossible for us to mitigate climate change, in part because climate models are themselves imperfect, though they nearly all predict drastic global warming. Much depends on the actual sensitivity of the earth’s atmosphere to warming, not to mention the uncertain impacts of technological and political advancements.
The philosophy most opposed to Kingsnorth’s is that which champions geoengineering. This philosophy arises in part from a belief that cooperative attempts to mitigate emissions (such as those supported by the UN and the Paris Accords) will be unsuccessful, so we should instead turn our attention to technological solutions to address the impacts of climate change. There are many different proposed methods of geoengineering. One supported by some prior evidence of success is deliberately introducing aerosols into the atmosphere to produce a negative radiative forcing effect. We know that aerosols would have a cooling effect in part because of investigations conducted upon the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in 1991. Aerosols were naturally introduced into the atmosphere and did indeed temporarily cool the climate. Proposed mechanisms for aerosol introduction include effectively launching balloons into the atmosphere and attaching a pipe to them (tethered to earth) which would receive and release consistent quantities of aerosols like sulfur dioxide. The same effect could be accomplished by employing a fleet of specialized planes (which, because of necessary specifications would be very costly to develop) to spray aerosols into the atmosphere. Other proposed geoengineering solutions involve alternate ways of capturing carbon from the atmosphere—e.g., dumping iron into oceans to facilitate the growth of phytoplankton, or carbon sequestration. While increased phytoplankton would extract more CO2 from the atmosphere for photosynthesis, the process would also risk creating oceanic dead zones where nothing by algae could grow. Carbon capture is already employed by power plants to purify natural gas, but sequestration, or the storing of this carbon beneath impermeable layers of rock, is not yet employed on a large scale.
The pro-geoengineering philosophy appears commendable in part because it is solution-based and proactive. Provided that the technologies proposed are effective in the ways they purport to be, geoengineering stands to mitigate many dramatic effects of climate change, which is practical and obviously valuable.
Despite these possible benefits, some have expressed serious concerns about the philosophy. Alan Robock, a current Rutgers University professor and climatologist, is one of the principal critics of geoengineering. In his piece “20 Reasons Why Geoengineering May be a Bad Idea,” he details many of these fears. Some refer to issues that geoengineering would fail to address; for example, while geoengineering could mitigate atmospheric warming, in their current form methods would not address ocean acidification. Other fears focus on collateral effects–the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo, though it did have a favorable cooling effect, disrupted local hydrological systems. Many of Professor Robock’s fears focus on the uncertainties of geoengineering, as, by their nature, geoengineering solutions are difficult to test in a meaningful way before implementing them on a large scale. He also worries that we may begin to treat geoengineering as a failsafe, feeling its prospect gives us license to continue emitting at our current rate, or even to increase emissions.
Both of these philosophies—Kingsnorth’s ardent love of earth coupled with his radical rejection of all modern solutions, geoengineering proponents’ intense faith in the most modern of solutions—are born of a desperation commensurate with the gravity of the climate crisis in which we now find ourselves. However, the hole in both these approaches is their lack of practicality. Geoengineering is not yet advanced enough to give real hope, and Kingsnorth’s ideal society of hunter-gatherers is never going to reappear. The following article will investigate whether we currently have any such thing as a practical approach. From there we may see whether any of us are right, or wrong, or whether we are all just doing the best we can.
Kingsnorth, Paul. Confessions of A Recovering Environmentalist and Other Essays. London. Faber and Faber Limited. 2017. Print.