Dante’s Inferno, a seven hundred year old epic poem, describes hell as having nine rings based on various character defects.
I couldn’t help but think of this as I read NewScientist’s curiously named Ocean to Ozone: Earth’s Nine Life Support Systems. We’ve broken every single one of them, these systems that feed and protect us.
We’re approaching a point where we’re going to get honest about this stuff, because Mother Nature isn’t going to leave room for any more denial …
We’re screwing up our oceans. Between acidification, increasingly tiny plastic particles which photo degrade bit by bit, but do not actually biodegrade, and overfishing … well … disaster.
We’ve tried really hard to protect our ozone. We stopped making the worst chemicals, but now with climate change warming the lower atmosphere while cloud cover keeps the stratosphere frosty we again face ozone layer depletion.
One quarter of our rivers no longer reach the ocean. We’re going to be fighting over water in a decade or two the way we fight over oil now.
We’re in the midst of the Earth’s sixth great extinction period. We’ve wrecked all these support systems and our biodiversity is crashing. We worry over megafauna - disappearing polar bears, but silver nanoparticle based anti-bacterials are found in the soil of the Arctic now, stressing the normal microfauna of the region. We’re screwing up everywhere.
We bind 120 million tons of nitrogen a year, many multiples of what the Earth can stand. We need phosphorus in a ratio to nitrogen and our abuse of the nitrogen/phosphorus cycle is changing things in ways we can’t begin to understand.
Fully half of our tropical rain forest has been wiped out and we’re making dramatic changes to grasslands, too. Our land use is problematic at best.
The Earth has had between 180ppm and 280ppm CO2 for the last six hundred thousand years. We knocked that number so far out of bounds we have no way of knowing what climate change will bring.
Fires and volcanoes put out aerosols. We actually dimmed the sun from World War II until we cleaned up our act on diesel particulates. Right now half of the climate forcing from carbon dioxide is interdicted by sulphate aerosols; perversely, climate change will accelerate as we run out of oil and these particulates decrease.
The last ring of suffering isn’t something we’re missing, it’s an emptiness that has gone - chemical cleanliness. We have a chemical pollution problem that is as complex as any of the other mistakes we made. There’s Prozac in our reservoirs and Atrazine in our rainwater. We pour out synthetic hormones and petroleum based chemicals that work in conjunction with genetically modified plants. No one can say where this experiment, Test Tube Earth, will end.
This story doesn’t have a happy ending. It just can’t. Too many people, too many unknowns, too much momentum with the changes we already see in motion.
If you were waiting for me to suggest some hopey, changey solution … well … fuggedaboutit.