Elements of a Durable Civilization

I have been thinking about what it will take to move from a global civilization to a planetary civilization — and why we need to.

First, consider how we talk about civilization. Mostly, it seems we talk about how it will end and how soon and why. Lately, everything the public frets about gets elevated to where it has to be seen as an “existential threat” to civilization. Over-population! Y2K! Artificial intelligence! Mass extinction! Climate change! Nuclear war! Under-population!

On examination, most are serious in important ways, but declaring that any will certainly end human civilization is an exaggeration that poisons public discourse and distracts us from our primary undertaking, which is managing civilization’s continuity and enhancement.

I suggest it is best thought of as part of our planet’s continuity. Over billions of years, Earth’s life has been through a lot, yet life abides, and with a steady increase over time in complexity.

Over many millennia, humanity has been through a lot, yet we abide. Regional civilizations die all the time; the record is clear on that. But the record is also clear that civilization as a human practice has carried on with no gaps, in a variety of forms, ever since the first cities, with a steady increase over time in complexity and empowerment.

Civilizations come and go. Civilization continues.

Now we have a global civilization. Is it fragile? Or robust? Many think that global civilization must be fragile, because it is so complex. I think our civilization is in fact robust, because it is so complex.

I can explain something about how the complexity works with the Pace Layers diagram. It is a cross-section of a healthy civilization, looking at elements in terms of their rate of change.

In this diagram the rapid parts of a civilization are at the top, the slowest parts at the bottom. Fashion changes weekly. Culture takes decades or centuries to budge at all.

It’s the combination of fast and slow that makes the whole system resilient. Fast learns, slow remembers. Fast proposes, slow disposes. Fast absorbs shocks, slow integrates shocks. Fast is discontinuous, slow continuous. Fast affects slow with accrued innovation and occasional revolution. Slow controls fast with constraint and constancy.

Fast gets all the attention. Slow has all the power. 

In the domain where slow has all the power, making any change takes a lot of time and diligence. At the Culture level, for instance, one big, slow, important thing going on this century is worldwide urbanization. Most of our civilization is pouring into cities. And largely because of urbanization, our population is leveling off and soon will begin decreasing.

According to Jonas Salk, that is a fundamental change, because it means civilization — for the first time — is shifting from growing to shrinking. He says those are two completely different epochs, and what was possible in Epoch A will be impossible in Epoch B, and vice versa — some things we couldn’t do in Epoch A will be required in Epoch B — such as long-term thinking.

At the Nature level, the big event is climate. Most of the time it is highly variable. But 10,000 years ago, for unknown reasons, it suddenly settled down into a highly stable climate that happened to be ideal for agriculture and civilization. And it stayed that way till now. That’s the Holocene.

Now we’re in the Anthropocene, with massive climate influence by humans. We have planetary agency — and wish we didn’t. Gaia, we realize, was doing fine until we fell in love with combustion. What we want is for the Anthropocene to be an endless Holocene. (Maybe a little colder would be nice.)

So. We have a global civilization, economically and infrastructurally. Now, because of climate-scale problems that we have caused and must solve at scale, our task in this century is to become a planetary civilization — one that can deal with climate on its own terms. It’s a different order of integration that our global civilization isn’t up to yet. We may have a thriving global economy, but there’s no such thing as a “planetary economy” — the dynamics in play aren’t measured that way.

We have to integrate our considerable complexity with the even greater complexity of Earth’s natural systems so that both can prosper over time as one thriving planetary system of Nature and people.

Here’s the sequence in Gaian terms. The early anaerobic biosphere had an atmosphere that was basically stable chemically. After the great oxidation event 2.7 billion years ago, aerobic life took off with a highly unstable atmosphere chemically — lots of reactive oxygen.

Fast-forward to the present — to what Adam Frank and David Grinspoon call the “Immature Technosphere” — with its excessive carbon dioxide and chlorofluorocarbons. Global civilization made that happen. A properly planetary civilization can undo the effect and get us to a “Mature technosphere.”

Can we really do that? Probably, yes. We’ve already taken on protecting the planet in other ways. Being smarter than dinosaurs, we have figured out how to detect and deflect potentially dangerous asteroids.

As for ice ages, our current interglacial period is already overdue for a fresh massive glaciation, but it’s not going to happen, and it may never happen again. Accidentally we’ve created an atmosphere that can no longer cool drastically unless we tell it to.

The goal is this: We want to ensure our own continuity by blending in with Earth’s continuity. How do we do that? Here’s one suggestion: Expand how we think about infrastructure.

We’ve gotten very good at building and maintaining urban and global infrastructure — such as the world’s undersea cables and satellite communication systems. That experience should make it easy for us to understand the role of natural infrastructure and make the effort to maintain and sometimes enhance it.

We already take rivers seriously that way. We understand that they are as much infrastructure that we have to take care of as the bridges over them. We are catching on that the same goes for local ecosystems and the planet’s biosphere as a whole. And climate. All are infrastructure. All need attention and work to keep them going properly.

Does anything change if we say (and somehow mean) “planetary civilization”? I think so, because then civilization takes the planet’s continuing biological life as its model, container, and responsibility. When we say “we,” we mean all life, not just the human part.

You could say that Humanity and Nature are blending into one entity, and that sounds pretty good. But it misses something. I think we have to keep our thinking about Humanity and Nature as distinct, because Humanity operates with mental models and intention and Nature doesn’t. Humanity can analyze Nature, but Nature can’t analyze Humanity.

Our analysis shows that our well-realized intention to harness the energy of fossil fuels had an unwelcome effect on climate that standard Gaian forces won’t fix. That’s okay. Now our intentions are focused on fixing that problem. It will take a century or two, but I’m pretty sure we’ll succeed.

This is the reason to not be constantly obsessed with how civilization might end. It takes our eye off the main event, which is how we manage civilization’s continuity. Continuity is made partly of exploration, but most of the work is maintenance. That’s the strongest argument for protecting Nature, because Nature is the most enormous and consequential self-maintaining thing we know. 

We are learning to maintain the wild so that it can keep main­taining us. 

Folk singer Pete Seeger, when he was 85, said this: “You should consider that the essential art of civilization is maintenance.”