Breathing underwater, in my experience, can provide a kind of hot-wired, instant-karmic version of this mystical oneness. But even this near at hand, it remained an afterthought. The reef’s demise would mean seemingly nothing to the thrumming life of the island. There might be a way to move the bulk of humanity to act for the reef’s salvation — and our own — but spiritual union with the reef, with nature itself, appeared to be too small and precise a tool.
hamilton island, queensland / 20°21’ s, 148°57’ e / marina tavern / june 2008
The juxtaposition between the reef’s majesty and the workaday tourist buzz of my port of call was even more jarring on the Great Barrier Reef. I was staying on Hamilton Island, the most heavily developed resort destination in the Whitsunday chain, featuring the most easily navigated path to the reef. And now I sat on a pub’s terrace watching another magnificent tropical sunset, this time as it descended over a marina crowded with yachts and pleasure cruisers.
At dusk, the small island adjacent to Hamilton was a purpling hump on the horizon, and I spied the silhouettes of construction cranes and bulldozers fixed along its spine like cubist remora. Until recently a fairly rustic little holiday spot, Hamilton Island was the site of a massive expansion beginning in the mid-1990s. Because the entirety of the Whitsunday island chain falls under the rubric of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, however, Hamilton had reached its permitted development limit. The resort’s new eighteen-hole golf course was thus being built on the little island across the channel from the marina.
For a moment, I was livid. I was barely an hour’s journey from the planet’s pinnacle natural achievement, its ancient wisdom and unsurpassed beauty nowhere more readily accessible than right here. What atrophied mind turned instead, in such a place, to the presumed necessity of a round of golf? The whole of the reef was in very real and proximate danger of vanishing forever. Surely before we came to such a precipice, there’d first be no more goddamn golf.
I was well into the next pint before my hubris caught up with me. Trace the outline of the extraordinarily complex apparatus that was required to bring me to my most recent holy communion with fan corals and neon-coloured fish, and try to imagine a thing more thoroughly dependent on the industrial order that was on the verge of sealing the reef’s fate. The steel pontoon dock permanently moored to Hardy Reef, outfitted for scuba and snorkelling, hosting reef tours by semi-submersible and a buffet lunch for 200. The high-speed, wave-piercing catamaran tethered to the pontoon, nearly forty metres long and digitally stabilized for my comfort. The departure dock here on Hamilton Island — just one of a dozen in the tidy, modern marina, this little semicircle backed by high-end retail, purveyors of multinational cuisine, and the tavern serving up these cold draft beers imported from the mainland. The luxury condos and beachfront high-rise hotels scattered farther afield. The airstrip out on the peninsula in the distance, with daily non-stops to Brisbane and Sydney.
I felt as if I were balanced precariously atop this whole ungainly apparatus, and I recognized in that moment that it was the apparatus itself, not the beauty it allows us to touch, that we had to work to preserve. This whole affluent, hyper-advanced world order, which has given rise to a tourist infrastructure with gears so well greased it enabled me, basically on impulse, to arrange a day trip to the Great Barrier Reef with little more effort than it takes to order a takeout pizza — or to make one from prefab groceries.
crystal waters, queensland / 26°47’ s, 152°43’ e / around back of the community kitchen / june 2008
A few days later, I went with my family to stay at Crystal Waters, a “permaculture village” on the banks of the Mary River near the Glass House Mountains of southern Queensland. Crystal Waters was one of the earliest experiments in sustainable living, founded in the late 1980s as a new kind of rural community based on the permaculture design concept developed by Australian ecologists David Holmgren and Bill Mollison. At its core, permaculture envisions human settlement as a kind of biomimicry — “the conscious design and maintenance of agriculturally productive ecosystems which have the diversity, stability, and resilience of natural ecosystems,” as the Permaculture Research Institute of Australia puts it.
Crystal Waters is a lushly vegetated and loosely populated township of eightysome homesteads that spills across a series of steep hillsides and deep valleys. It turned out we’d arrived the day before its twentieth birthday party, and a crowd of current and former residents gathered the next morning on the village green for the celebration of what remains one of the most ambitious sustainability experiments in the world. We made our way down from the guest cabin to help out with the preparations. I joined a cluster of residents at the cob oven — a wood-burning stove handmade from straw and clay — to help out with the pizza-making operation. It had been my understanding that Crystal Waters was striving for self-sufficiency, so I was a little surprised to see a stack of prefab, plastic-wrapped pizza shells on a table next to the oven, along with a range of store-bought toppings. The nearest full-service grocery store was in a town almost thirty kilometres up the highway. Yet another Anthropocene irony: even the most ambitious sustainability pioneers are thoroughly entrenched in the order they’re trying to supplant.
We fell into casual conversation in that easy way men do when there’s a fire to be tended, and talk turned to my recent communion with the Great Barrier Reef. One of the locals, a maker of elegant slide didgeridoos of his own design, said something about how the future didn’t look very bright for the reef.
“Not unless we really make some changes, no,” I replied, shooting for a note of pragmatic optimism.
“Nah,” chimed in a ponytailed dude named Angus who was assembling pizzas. “It’s gone, mate. Might as well start getting used to the idea.”
I didn’t know what to say to that, so I busied myself with the cheese grater. His tone had sent me reeling, for reasons I couldn’t place until much later. It wasn’t grave or accusatory, not glib nor gleefully nihilistic. It was a win-some-lose-some tone, a shooting-the-breeze-around-the-bonfire tone. The tone of someone who’d already reached some sort of difficult reconciliation a good while back with the notion that there was nothing so sacred or durable that it exists beyond the reach of this tumult. It was the tone, I guess, of someone who’d dedicated his life to the step that came after the lament. I came in time to think of it as of a piece with future-tense voices like Bruce Sterling’s — the emerging voice of Anthropocene reason.
There is a double edge, however, to this kind of realism. I’ve come to embrace it because it places the focus where it must stay — on the task at hand and the road ahead — but it also veers perilously close to a kind of bleak fatalism that invites self-serving rationalizations of inaction. It could even seem to encourage much darker survival strategies.
When I spoke, for example, to Rod Salm, the director of coral reef conservation at the Nature Conservancy of Hawai’i, whose office convened the workshop that led to the Honolulu Declaration, he told me about an urgent call he’d recently received from someone on the board of trustees of a charitable foundation that provides significant funding for the conservancy. The board members had recently seen a study suggesting little hope remained for the world’s reefs, and they wondered why, if the reefs were inevitably headed to hell in a handcart, they should invest more money. “We have to leave people with the encouragement that there are actions we can take, and if we do take actions, there is hope,” Salm told me. “If we kick back and say there’s nothing we can do about it, definitely we are going to lose things.”
The Anthropocene epoch — the term itself is predicated on the idea of a permanent and categorical shift in the earth’s equilibrium. Some of the most strident opposition to its use that I’ve heard, in fact, has come from the most passionate of green activists and sustainability advocates, who fear that it does nothing but yank the lid right off the most dangerous Pandora’s box in the industrial closet — the one labelled “geoengineering.”
Geoengineering — large-scale intentional tinkering with the planet’s climate — is, to be sure, a uniquely hubristic school of applied doomsday science. And it is predicated on the twisted logic that a reasonable response to evidence that human industry has irrevocably altered the biosphere would be to undertake to alter it in much more intentional and grandiose ways. I’d argue, though, that while the fear of geoengineering is well grounded — the Strangeloves of the world are indeed lustily roused by the notion of irreversible climate change — the lid is wide open already.
Consider, for example, an article from the March/April 2009 issue of the journal Foreign Affairs. The title is “The Geoengineering Option: A Last Resort Against Global Warming?” A perfectly reasonable question mark, floating just above the names of five esteemed academics at A-list institutions (Stanford University’s Law School, Carnegie Mellon’s Department of Engineering and Public Policy, the Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland). Below that, a dispassionate analysis. All this in the same pages where the free world’s Cold War containment strategy was first articulated.
“The time has come,” the authors argue, to give serious attention to geoengineering — both because it might provide “a useful defense” against the worst shocks of a rapidly changing climate, and because some rogue state’s “unilateral geoengineering project” could be launched before the repercussions are fully understood. There are any number of potential projects, they note, from seeding the lower atmosphere with sea water to create a reflective layer of dense cloud to launching clusters of giant reflective discs into orbit.
The most feasible and cost-effective geoengineering strategy, the authors explain, would be “launching reflective materials into the upper stratosphere,” in conscious imitation of the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo, which created a plume of sulfur dioxide particles large and thick enough to reduce the entire planet’s mean temperature by half a degree Celsius for a time. Should humanity find itself in need of such a cloud to stave off global warming long enough to develop a more effective long-term solution, what would the costs and benefits be? As the authors note, it’s really pretty straightforward, from a technical standpoint, to use “high-flying aircraft, naval guns, or giant balloons” to build a planetary-scale sunblock, whether made of sulfur dioxide or — let’s get serious about this — “self-levitating and self-orienting designer particles engineered to migrate to the Polar Regions and remain in place for long periods.” The real question is whether or not that would be a useful thing for us to do.
It warrants special mention that “The Geoengineering Option” is the first Foreign Affairs article ever to employ the term ocean acidification. And the authors duly note that no geoengineering scheme yet extant would do a thing to slow the acidification process, since blocking the sun does nothing to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide available in the atmosphere for absorption by the sea. “Fiddling with the climate to fix the climate strikes most people as a shockingly bad idea,” they finally concede. But it’s only prudent, they argue, to study geoengineering as “a true option of last resort.”
Jules Verne would probably recognize this terrain, and his fellow sci-fi founding father H. G. Wells — who dreamed up Martian apocalypse and that mad scientist Moreau — surely would. Perhaps there are no broad new vistas of human ambition entirely free of dark clouds, and in any case geoengineering is one that will necessarily shade the blue-sky thinking of the Anthropocene. I’m convinced it’s worth that risk, though. As the sustainability guru Paul Hawken recently told the graduating class of the University of Portland, “Civilization needs a new operating system, you are the programmers, and we need it within a few decades.” Yet I can’t see how we motivate ourselves toward an engineering project of that scale without stepping right to the precipice of total system failure and staring directly into that abyss — and then looking up at the clear sky above and understanding, in the same way we understand that it is a collection of gases that gives us life, that it is an Anthropocene sky that feeds us now.
“If you look at the science about what is happening on earth and aren’t pessimistic” — Hawken again — “you don’t understand the data. But if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth and the lives of the poor, and you aren’t optimistic, you haven’t got a pulse.”
ballarat, victoria / 37°37’ s, 143°53’ e / caro convention centre auditorium,university of ballarat / june 2008
I first heard tell of “resilience” — not as a simple descriptive term but as the cornerstone of an entire ecological philosophy — just a couple of days before I met Charlie Veron on the pages of Melbourne’s most respected newspaper. I was onstage for the opening session of the Alfred Deakin Innovation Lectures in an auditorium at the University of Ballarat at the time. The evening had begun with a literal lament — a grieving folk song performed by an aboriginal musician. I’d then presented a slide show of what I considered to be the rough contours of an Anthropocene map of hope, after which a gentleman I’d just met, a research fellow at Australia’s prestigious Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation named Brian Walker, placed my work in the broader context of resilience theory.
