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Ireland's political and cultural magazine
72 July 2021
O
N FEBRUARY 14, 1990, the Voyager 1 space-
craft, then some 6.4 billion kilometres from
Earth, turned its cameras backwards and
captured a picture of our home planet. It
was the tiniest of images, covering barely
one tenth of a pixel on the digital frame, a faint speck
suspended in the inky black infinity of space.
The idea for the photo came from famed scientist and
science communicator, Carl Sagan. The following pas-
sage, from his 1994 book ‘Pale Blue Dot’ is perhaps
one of the most poignant in all of modern literature:
“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home.
That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know,
everyone you ever heard of, every human being who
ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy
and suering, thousands of confident religions, ideolo-
gies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and
forager, every hero and coward, every creator and
destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every
young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful
child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals,
every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar’, every
‘supreme leader’, every saint and sinner in the history
of our species lived there – on a mote of dust sus-
pended in a sunbeam”.
Amid the awe and beauty, his writings contained a
dire warning. That mote of dust, our only home, “is a
lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our
obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help
will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves”.
Despite the delusional dreams of interplanetary
adventures and Mars colonies peddled by billionaires
like Elon Musk and Je Bezos, who believe their
By John Gibbons
Our climate-system trajectory is still in the zone
of uncertainty. The areas that have already
smashed into the red zone of extreme danger
are the global biodiversity crisis and nitrogen and
phosphorus flows to the biosphere and oceans.
ENVIRONMENT
staggering monopoly on wealth and resources will
allow them to shake o the very shackles of this planet,
in reality, humanity will survive or it will perish right
here on Earth.
Earlier this year, Musk’s SpaceX company unveiled
his latest gadget, named with characteristic modesty
‘Starship’. This craft is capable of transporting up to
100 people the 350 million kilometres to Mars.
To put this voyage in context, the Red Planet is
almost 1,000 times further from Earth than our moon.
Its destination, Mars, is a barren rock, utterly bereft of
the ingredients for life, infinitely more hostile to
humans than the remotest point in Antarctica or the
peak of Mount Everest.
The ethos behind the race for space is a creeping
realisation among the hyper-rich that life on Earth is
critically endangered. “History is going to bifurcate
along two directions. One path is we stay on Earth for-
ever, and then there will be some eventual extinction
event”, Musk said in 2016. “The alternative is to
become a spacefaring civilisation and a multi-planet
species, which I hope you would agree is the right way
to go”.
The “eventual extinction event” may well be much
closer at hand. Our billionaire elite can clearly sense it,
but rather than deploy their vast resources and access
to the levers of political, economic and media power to
eect the revolutionary scale of changes necessary for
our collective survival and well-being on Earth, they
instead engage in fantastical projects as monuments
to their colossal egos and unbounded hubris.
The great twentieth-century economist, John Ken-
neth Galbraith, clearly understood the corrosive
influence of auence. His book ‘A Short History of
Financial Euphoria’ oered some sharp insights. “Indi-
viduals and institutions are captured by the wondrous
satisfaction from accruing wealth. The associated illu
-
sion of insight is protected by the public impression
that intelligence marches in close step with the posses-
sion of money”.
This is the best explanation I have encountered for
the staggering myopia of extremely wealthy people
who have unlimited access to expert advice and are in
a position to quickly make the changes that could truly
matter.
Pale Blue Dot, heating
Humans need the perspective of distance to
see how much damage they are doing to the
only planet on which they can ever thrive
July 2021 73
One of the enduring challenges of addressing the
multiple ecological crises that confront us has been to
find a way of seeing them as part of an integrated
system, a ‘spaceship Earth’ floating in the void, with
its crew entirely dependent on the on-board life sup-
port systems and the integrity of the hull, which on a
planetary scale, means the thin atmospheric envelope
that surrounds us.
In 2009, a group of Earth system scientists, led by
Professors Johan Rockström andWill Steen set about
the interdisciplinary task of mapping out a “safe oper-
ating space for humanity”, to help advise governments
and international organisations on how to identify and
remain within this safe zone.
This led to the identification of the nine key ‘plane
-
tary boundaries’, within which Earth systems must
operate, and beyond which lie thresholds or tipping
points with dangerous or even catastrophic conse-
quences when breached.
The boundaries are: climate change, novel entities,
stratospheric ozone depletion, atmospheric aerosol
loading, ocean acidification, biochemical flows of
phosphorus and nitrogen, freshwater use, land-system
change and biodiversity integrity, including functional
and genetic diversity.
The famous pie-shaped visualisation (see graphic,
bottom right) developed by the Stockholm Resilience
Centre is colour-coded green, orange and red, to
demarcate the safe, uncertain and high risk zones. All
nine of these should lie well within the green ‘safe’
zone, the region where Earth systems have remained
throughout the unusually stable 11,700 year recent
epoch known as the Holocene.
“There is increasing evidence that human activities
are aecting Earth system functioning to a degree that
threatens the resilience of the Earth system, its ability
to persist in a Holocene-like state in the face of increas-
ing human pressures and shocks”, according to a 2015
paper authored by Will Steen which aimed to update
and extend the original ‘planetary boundaries’ study
from six years earlier.
While all nine boundaries are vital, two (climate
change and biosphere integrity) are identified as
“core”. If planet Earth were indeed a spaceship, right
now its red warning lamps would be flashing and its
alarm bells buzzing, warning that a hull breach was
imminent unless drastic remedial action were taken.
Given the global focus on the climate crisis, you
might expect its indicators to be the most alarming. At
the moment, our climate-system trajectory is clearly
unstable, but it is rated as still being in the zone of
uncertainty, meaning increasing risk.
The areas that have already smashed into the red
zone of extreme danger are the global biodiversity
crisis and nitrogen and phosphorus flows to the bio-
sphere and oceans. Ecosystem damage resulting from
human activities over the last half century in particular
are “the most rapid in human history, and increase the
risks of abrupt and irreversible changes”. So severe
has the loss of biological diversity and accompanying
pulse of species extinctions been that it has been char-
acterised as the Sixth Mass Extinction event in Earth
history.
To truly grasp the devastation that has already
occurred, consider that 96 per cent – by weight - of
mammals on Earth today consist of humans and their
livestock, with the totality of the world’s remaining wild
mammals a mere 4 per cent. At the start of the Holo-
cene, humans and their livestock would have accounted
for less than one per cent of Earth’s then-teeming popu-
lation of mammals.
Humanity’s race to increase food production has
thrown global cycles of both nitrogen and phosphorus
into chaos. Humans now create more artificial nitrogen
(as a chemical fertiliser) than all Earth’s terrestrial pro-
cesses combined. This is leading to serious and
escalating pollution crises, both globally and as wit-
nessed in Ireland in recent years as nitrogen-dependent
industrial dairying expanded rapidly.
Thanks to decisive intergovernmental action in the
1980s, the ozone crisis has been largely averted, but
other planetary boundaries are under growing pres-
sure. These include ocean acidification (now occurring
at its most rapid rate in 300 million years) and fresh-
water over-extraction and pollution plus atmospheric
aerosols and thousands of novel chemical entities that
have been suddenly introduced into the biosphere.
There remain large areas of uncertainty, but our cur
-
rent trajectory of ever-increasing resource extraction,
consumption, pollution, land use change and spiralling
emissions push us ever further beyond our planetary
safe zone. With wry understatement, Steen warned:
“A continuing trajectory away from the Holocene could
lead, with an uncomfortably high probability, to a very
dierent state of the Earth system, one that is likely to
be much less hospitable to the development of human
societies”.
As Carl Sagan concluded: “There is perhaps no
better demonstration of the folly of human conceits
than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it
underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with
one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue
dot, the only home we’ve ever known”.
John Gibbons is an environmental writer and
commentator.
96 per cent –
by weight - of
mammals on
Earth today
consist of
humans and their
livestock, with
the totality of the
world’s remaining
wild mammals a
mere 4 per cent.
