The Good Earth is Dying, updated
Extending thinking by Isaac Asimov on planetary survival
In 1971 Isaac Asimov wrote an essay called The Good Earth is Dying, which begins with the question, “How many people is the earth able to sustain?”
Asimov lays out the following logic: Since the mass of plant life on the earth cannot increase without a corresponding increase in solar radiation (or in the efficiency of photosynthesis), and plant life is the ultimate food of all animal life, the earth can only support a limited mass of living tissue.
Assuming the total amount of living tissue currently on the earth is equal to that limit, every additional unit mass of people comes at the expense of other animals. So, if human beings set out make as many human beings as possible, we would eventually be the only form of animal life on the planet. What would that look like? Asimov describes it this way (p. 70):
Can we imagine, then, a huge, world-girdling complex of high-rise apartments (over both land and sea) for housing, for offices, for industry? The roof of this complex will be given over entirely to plant growth; either algae, which are completely edible, or higher plants that must be treated appropriately to make all parts edible. At frequent intervals, there will be conduits down which water and plant products will pour. The plant products will be filtered out, dried, treated, and prepared for food, while the water is returned to the tanks above. Other conduits, leading upward, will bring up the raw materials needed for plant growth, consisting of (what else) human wastes and chopped-up human corpses. And at this point, of course, no further increase in human numbers is possible; so rigid population planning would then be necessary if it had not been before.
This kind of future would be the end of human dignity, and reduce life’s most precious qualities to inconveniences. How many people is the earth able to sustain? Not, as it were, as many as people can possibly produce.
But, you might be wondering, suppose we had other ways to grow food. Suppose owe no longer required the sun. Suppose, through technology, we became wholly independent of plants and solar radiation? Suppose we made our own energy? Then the earth could sustain more life.
Of course, we would then also have a different problem. A problem we currently have. Because every day the earth receives an amount of energy from the sun, and every night that same amount must be radiated into space to maintain average global temperature. When human beings generate additional energy to what the sun provides, that too must be radiated into space, and so the earth must get slightly warmer. Even without the compounding effect of a thickening layer of greenhouse gas.
Eventually, these changes in temperature would become unacceptable.
And it doesn’t end there. The wealthiest nations on earth already consume a disproportionate amount of energy. Putting aside the aim of making more people, even the modest goal of raising the whole of our current population to the standard of living of our wealthiest nations may be beyond the earth’s potential for sustainability.
This means, as Asimov proposes, either we must limit our use of energy, or else depend entirely on technology to bring us to safe levels of energy use for all. Many people, understandably, find the latter option hopeful. They are willing to let the future depend on convincing arguments that support technological optimism.
Still, it could be that the problem is more fundamental. It could be that we are in this precarious position of having to troubleshoot the planet’s continued capacity to sustain life not because our progress machine has yet to reach its sustainable frontier, but instead because our machine is pointed in the wrong direction. Put another way — we may suffer from an unsustainable attitude.
This is Asimov’s perspective too. And he proposes altering our attitude in a number of ways. He suggests we change the way we think about having children, become more supportive of non-reproductive sex, slow our growth, and shift away from all forms of localism towards global government.
In most of these he is prescient. But he misses the mark on the last. Because since the time of his writing, global government has only proved itself incapable of providing a planetary rudder. And localism, for all its faults and propensity to generate conflict (Asimov argues it doesn’t even have the virtue of being useful in times of peace), is also the source of our greatest strengths— diversity.
We are in this predicament together, but as Rosi Braidotti (2019) writes, we are not one-and-the-same. The terms ‘our’ and ‘we’ are not homogeneous categories. There is an element in our thinking that is incongruent with planetary survival, yes, but it is not necessarily in all of us equally. In fact, the collective ‘we’ includes ways of thinking that are by contrast profoundly sustainable. For example, among indigenous people, who conceptualise the world as a systematic interplay of ideas, manifest in timeless narratives.
The ‘we’ to whom the problem of an unsustainable attitude is immanent, have a lot to learn from indigenous epistemologies. We cannot adopt them wholesale, for the simple reason that they are so intimately local, but we can at least let them, for the blunted use of universalism is surely antithetical to our project.
Gregory Bateson identifies one such blunted use in his 1987 essay, Form, Substance and Difference. This the error in evolutionary thinking whereby the unit of survival under natural selection is identified as the breeding individual. It is an error for the simple reason that “if an organism or aggregate of organisms sets to work with a focus on its own survival and thinks that this is the way to select its adaptive moves, its “progress” ends up with a destroyed environment. If the organism ends up destroying its environment, it has in fact destroyed itself.” (Bateson, 1987, p. 319).
Thus, Bateson concludes, the evolutionary unit of survival has to be something that includes both the organism and its environment, which in turn includes various interrelationships. Contemporary anthropologist Anna Tsing (2015) calls these relationships, “liveable collaborations” (p. 29), which she describes as contrary to the fallacy of “self containment” (p. 29). Its in these liveable collaborations that the important stuff of life occurs, “not in the decision trees of self-contained individuals” (ibid).
Such a shift in thinking, towards an organism-in-its-environment theory of survival, has a number of implications. Detailing each is beyond the scope of this article. But one worth thinking about is what it means for the way we conceptualise the boundaries of living things. If the organism-in-its-environment is the unit under natural selection, the life of the organism does not end at its skin. Where, then, does it end? And of what forms of ecological intelligence might it be part?
Meditating on these questions has the effect of peeling back the tendency of our intellect to perceive the world as made of discrete objects. It reveals something more like indigenous ways of thinking, or what is commonly called systems thinking. And “quite seriously,” Bateson writes, “I suggest to you that we should trust no policy decisions which emanate from persons who do not yet have that habit” (1987, p. 327).
The good earth is dying. We are in this together, and we are also responsible to the problem. The ‘we’ who recognise it must be willing to be moved in our thinking, transformed through the encounter (Tsing, 2015), into new ways of thinking that sustain life ecologically.
How many people is the earth able to sustain? It depends, as it were, on the people.
References
Asimov, I. (1971). The Good Earth is Dying, in The Roving Mind (1983). Prometheus Books.
Bateson, G. (1987). Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology. Jason Aronson Inc.
Braidotti, R. (2019). Posthuman Knowledge. Polity Press.
Tsing, A. L. (2015). The mushroom at the end of the world: On the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. Princeton University Press.
