Dreaming the World

Today is sunny and warm. We are deep in drought, again, with no end in sight. Most days are too warm, as are many nights. In spite of this the fall color is excellent, although the leaves fall soon after they change. While some trees remain green, it seems we are now past peak.

Nori the cat has taken to spending her afternoons sleeping in the dining room bay window, soaking in the sun. While we are concerned about the unseasonable warmth, she is clear that with no heating on in the house, she is too cold.

I have just read Jeanette Winterson’s new book, 12 Bytes, in which she imagines a coming society where humans have merged with AI, and might be less lonely as all are interconnected like the Borg. This set me to thinking about the resources needed to accomplish that feat.

Our great crisis of the moment is a crisis of carrying capacity. The gist of the concept of carrying capacity is that there are a finite amount of resources available to organisms in an ecosystem. A corollary is organisms evolve over time to fill all the available space in an ecosystem, taking advantage of all available resources. The end result is a landscape both diverse and complex.

A useful, abet oversimplified, way of speaking about the concept of carrying capacity is this: the more resources we use, the fewer there are for other organisms. When carried to extremes this resource theft results in the mass extinctions we are now witnessing. In addition, climate change, water shortage, war, new epidemics, and pollution are all attributable to human resource overuse.

Another, interlocking ecological principal worth noting here is: there is no such thing as a free lunch. Resources have to be taken from somewhere and the pollution created by their use has to go somewhere. In a viable ecosystem one organism’s waste is another’s lunch but when resources are used in an unsustainable manner, resources become increasingly sparse and waste levels become toxic.

We humans are using vastly more than our share of resources and the resulting pollution increasing bites us at every turn. Greenhouse gasses, plastics, pharmaceuticals, pesticides and herbicides, and urban runoff are all forms of pollution. Resource based wars, which are now the norm, produce mind boggling levels of pollutants.

We are routinely told by those who would be leaders that habitat and species loss, resource wars, hunger, water shortages, and grossly uneven income distributions are inevitable consequences of needed economic growth. Besides, catastrophes are good for business. We are also told that diversity, essential for long term ecosystem stability, is always a bad thing. One wonders whether the costs of business as usual, and our dreams of immortality, or worth it.