Holocene trajectory

I shook hands with Al Gore last night, briefly, in passing. He was arriving at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival's awards ceremony of the Richard Attenborough Award for environmental filmmaking. He exited a short (non-ostentatious) limo, greeted a few major players in SBIFF, then generously headed for the common folks behind the railing. After a few pictures, I thrust my hand out and he shook it, thanking me. I thanked him, sir.

He made himself available to the media, taking time to answer all their questions before moving to the next. The media were swarming; you can't blame them: he had just been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize the day before. He spent time with each of the major videojournalists, then spied more common folks behind him, and shared time shaking more hands before heading to the official, ritual red carpet, pausing to give time to photgraphers accompanied by director of "An Inconvenient Truth", Davis Guggenheim, actress Elizabeth Shue, "Titanic" director and bathymetrist James Cameron. They all generously spent more time answering questions, seemingly unhurried, before heading into the Arlington Theatre for the awards ceremony.

Now, I'm not much of a celebrity chaser, although I count among my lucky fortune to have also been in the photojournalist hoarde covering Bill Clinton and later, Hillary Clinton when they came to Santa Barbara in years past. What makes this encounter of particular import in the pantheon of my lifetime events is that I am similarly inclined toward considering the human condition in great sweeps of time, particularly late Pleistocene times, as we are now in. The Holocene is the last ten-thousand years, since the steep incline in global warming following the Wurm IV glaciation, or more popularly known as the last Ice Age.

Yup, we've been here before. Since the glacial maximum last seen at 18 KYBP (thousand years before present), we've been on a warming climb globally, which accelerated around ten thousand BP. That put us into a moderate temperate regime, which was interrupted from about seven to four (roughly) thousands of years ago, when we experienced what is called the Altithermal. It was over three thousand years of hot, dry times, requiring massive modifications in the way humans made their livings on the planet. Some places on Earth experienced more dramatic conditions than others. The American West was one of the more severely impacted.

One way we know this is that archaeologically, the hunter gatherer populations of the West who had been tracking and eating large game such as wapiti (a big, elk-like beastie) which provided good eating for a family of five for about, say, two weeks, gradually found themselves having to hunt smaller and smaller game as various large species died out. They died out not so much from over-hunting as the decline of traditional nutrient foliage which was declining in extent and abundance.

In mid-Altithermal times, target game had been reduced to deer, antelope and rabbit. Waterways, particularly swampy areas in the western flyways had also been subjected to dessication and retreat, but still provided waterfowl as edible resources. Hunting ducks became high art during the dehydrated Altithermal period. This was a dismal shadow of the glory days of megafaunal captures, such as mastodon, bison antiquus, giant sloth, camel, horses and megalo-type antlered dinner-on-the-hoof. The catalog of omnivoration had shifted to the meagre side of the curve. There was not much from which to make a meal, anymore. Populations declined as resources became scarce.

It was during those days that the diet of aboriginal peoples shifted towards processing more and more grains, and tending the natural locales of edible vegetable matter. Think you need more fiber in your diet? What if it became compulsory? Other sources of protein extraction became exploitable; who was the first guy to eat freshwater snails, because he had to? What does lizard taste like, or grubs?

Eventually, of course, the Altithermal reverted to being the Medithermal, and gave us the moderate temperate times we know as normal, once again. If something happens often enough, for a long enough time, we come to accept it as normal. But normal is changing. Normal is on the way out. The inconvenient truth is that we are descending rapidly into an era of global warming, with all the accoutrements of such an altithermal shift. Most people figure we have time to adjust, but then, most people don't understand the magnitude of the problem. 'So what if the temperature rises a few degrees, I'll just turn on the air-conditioner some more.' Most people don't understand the problem.

The interconnectedness of the components that contribute to climate (not to be confused with 'weather') is something that even the best among us, the academics, the military, NOAA, palaeoclimatologists, oceanographers and atmospheric historians, still don't understand very well yet. You can bet your red pumps that those who try to understand such processes will see a swelling of the ranks in the near future. Not that it will do much good.

According to geochronologist George Gamow and others, like Milutin Milanković, the Earth is headed into a warming trend for the next twenty-thousand years, irrespective of any conribution humans make to modifying the carbon-dioxide components of the atmosphere. In other words, it's getting hotter anyway, leave alone global warming because humans are polluting their own nest. The Milankovitch cycles derrive from astronomical cycles beyond our manipulation.

There are essentially three major factors which determine what our destiny is regarding mean temperature of the planet, whether ice-age or an uncomfortable dessication. These range in periodicities from 23 thousand years, to 40 thousand, to 100 thousand years. That is just what we can consider the background variability to which we must pay obescience involuntarily, in any event. ON TOP OF THAT, we humans, as a species lately on the scene of evolution, have fouled the nest for all species, forcing all of us, irrespective of cultural level, or religion, or political allegience, or distance from centers of intrigue, into suffering the fate of those who screwed up the environment for all of us.

I am reminded of the parable of the Boston Commons, which in colonial days served as a free, public resource for the temporary caching of cloven beasts for savoring the sweet grass growing there. Anyone could herd their flocks and chatel there for lingering in the meadow, enjoying the fresh greens. But some greedy types took advantage of the offering by excessively exploiting the forage, and ruined the regenerative properties of the vegetation. They ruined it for everyone by being greedy. So too, it is with the atmosphere and exploitable resources on the planet.

Too much toxic waste spewing into the collective breathing pool, too many trees burned for too long a time in the Amazon and Borneo, too much jetsom sewage poured into the waterways and oceans, too many killings of already precious species either extinguishing the species altogether or sinking the numbers below the threshhold of recovery, and too much boinking going on leading to overpopulation. (Have you ever stopped to consider what happens now that the growth curve of human poplulation has reached vertical?)

It is not simply a question of which nation leads the world in percentage of fuel consumption; it is not simply a matter of which nation exceeds its percapita carbon footprint; it is not simply a matter of which nation can outstrip the others in exploiting resources before the whole collapes. It is beyond that now. It's too late.

Now we are in an era that needs to look beyond the nation-state. The nation-state as a concept, as a workable entity, looking out for its own self-interests, is an antiquated concept. The most remarkable image that unifies the peoples of the native rock we all call home is the first photo taken from Apollo 8 looking back at the Earth on the way to the Moon. It was the first time in human history that we could all now see that the Earth was just a blue ball in space, devoid of boundaries, whole, finite and lonely. Intellectually we could understand that there were ants down there, driving around in their wheeled vehicles, scurrying to and fro, busy with their own agendas. But for just a moment, one had to catch one's breath and consider, however briefly, that all the ants shared one thing in common, a commonweal, a unified home, and each was responsible for caring for it, in their own way.

I don't know; maybe it was just celebrity thrill or something petty and transitory. Or maybe it was an electric moment, transcending time, sharing a dream, sharing an alarm, sharing a concern for one's home planet, knowing the plight of humans and others through the ages, from darkest glaciation through dessicated interpluvials. Somehow Al Gore's handshake was also shaking the hand of the Cro Magnon who placed his pawprint on the wall of caves in the Magdalenian during a time of rapid glacial fluctuation. It was probably that very same rapid climatic fluctuation that pushed hominid neurophysiology beyond its native capacities in the Late Paleolithic.

It was probably during that Late Paleolithic that humans first learned how to use The Invisible Tool, time. The first artifactual expression of temporal consciousness makes its appearance as an antler carved with phases of the moon. Why should that be? Why should humans, for the first time in time, suddenly begin demonstrating that they are aware that things are taking place in the context of this invisible stream they perceive as flowing? Why are things not all happening at once? Why do things change, after all? Why are there seasons, with ripening resources here, but not there, or not all the time? If we PLAN carefully, we can exploit things here, now, and there, later.

PLANNING, or anticipating changes coming in the future, becomes all the rage. Humans now have a new tool, an invisible tool, in the quest for survival. Being able to predict when herds of reindeer will travel through our valley, when root crops will be ripe, when fruits will flourish at certain, remembered, locales quickly became a huge component of thought. We were not just 'being here, now', but being then, and later. We could anticipate, make plans, schedule maximum exploitation of the environment. Scheduling became an imperative, a raison d'etre.

We were now Homo temporalis, timely man, embracing woman. We belonged to the Universe, which was happening in time, not all at once. The heavens were moving, changing. In fact, everything was changing. The world was mutable, including ourselves. Our salvation was to see this change, to understand that all was happening in time, and that we were not trapped in the moment. There was hope for improvement. We could make things better, in time. We had time on our side. We had the invisible tool of time, and the power it gave us to work things out for ourselves, our survival.

We find ourselves now in a similar predicament. We have to figure out how to make it through the "punctuated equilibrium" stage of transition embroiling us, collectively. We need to be smart, and diligent. We need to take measures, collectively, as a planet, as a species responsible for the mess.

But the good news is that we have the tribal memory of acting in time, or being able to anticipate and respond to problems within the context of time. But the time is now. It is time to anticipate, and plan and work out the steps to a better world.

Become the change you want to see.