makeshift

“I don't know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing — a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process” R Buckminster Fuller

This is a creation story which should begin with a disclaimer. The worldview it sets out does not (and I hope never will) represent anyone's actual beliefs – that's to say, it is neither fact nor opinion. It is more of a wilfully heretical lens through which to view things for a moment, if only because it will provoke us to think harder about what we see when we look away again.  It has no particular agenda, other than perhaps to challenge the lazy thinking which has shaped, on one hand, our received consensus on 'nature' and environmentalism, and on the other the narrow-minded philosophies-of-convenience that are created to protect particular short-term financial interests. Imagine James Lovelock's 'Gaia theory' , hijacked and put on speed; or our own logic reflected back at us, unfiltered by ideology, humanity or hope. This is the story of industry, design and progress as it might be told by an absurdly rational (and mildly sociopathic) alien, patiently watching earth through a telescope.

THE SUPER-PROCESS

Of all the many mechanisms into which star dust has formed, planet Earth is one of the most interesting and complex: a self-regulating super system, itself consisting of billions of other sub-systems and sub-sub-systems: climates, ecologies, organisms, metabolisms. The planet is, as 'Gaia' theorists have argued, like a single, complex, self-regulating organism. It is not 'intelligent' in the conventional sense  (having, for example, a personality), but nonetheless it is a processor – like a vast computer, constantly writing new processes to regulate its own internal conditions.  The number of possible mechanical functions these systems can evolve to perform seems to be almost unlimited. They range from basic chemical processes to construction, reproduction, environmental sensing, optical effects, self-awareness, logic... In short, Earth is a process worth watching.

THE NATURAL DISASTER

Some time around 3,000,000,000 years ago a species emerged on earth which began to radically alter the composition of the planet's atmosphere. It began to pollute the environment with a gas which was poisonous to many of the native species. The species (or more correctly, phylum) was cyanobacteria, and the poisonous gas: oxygen. Photosynthesis was an ecological disaster which quickly got out of control. From the perspective of a homeostatic atmospheric system (one which is self-regulated by feedback loops) the problem was that photosynthesising species had too few counter-mechanisms. Even if their explosive colonisation of the biosphere could be slowed by natural disasters such as volcanic eruptions, meteorite strikes or ice ages, the plentiful supply of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere made this exponential growth almost unstoppable. Eventually,  counter mechanisms did evolve: sea-creatures and wandering herbivores, which breathed oxygen,  exhaled carbon dioxide, and ate photosynthesising plants. They thrived in the oxygen-polluted environment, but there were too few of them to correct the imbalance. 

To make things worse, the plants, having sequestered carbon from the atmosphere,  would then die, and their carbon  remains would slowly be buried and compressed into the ground, locked deeper and deeper away in the planet's crust. It was a process with no counter-process – no homeostatic feedback loop to rebalance its environmental effects. Continuous fossil fuel formation made atmospheric carbon dioxide into a non-renewable resource: one that was slowly running out. To somehow replace this missing carbon dioxide would require massive, seismic events of the sort no mechanism on earth was capable of producing. 

It took 'Gaia' millions of years to evolve a solution to this dilemma. The cleverness of nature's solution was that it was not a vast, powerful seismic process, but a tiny, elegant malfunction in the brain of one of the oxygen-breathing species.

The species, of course, was homo sapiens. The malfunction: status. 

The beauty of status is, firstly, that it is a psychological phenomenon. To the individual experiencing it, it is deeply real and compelling, but it still does not technically 'exist'. Secondly, status is a phenomenon which is entirely infra-species. Although a number of related species (chimpanzees, for example), have evolved a similar malfunction,  social status within one species does not  translate into another. However, within a species almost everything individuals do (besides basic functions, such as eating, moving, sleeping and reproducing) is in some way orientated around gaining, exhibiting or responding to social status, be it individual, familial or tribal.  In fact, even those basic functions become opportunities to compete for, and display status. 

The desire to maintain and increase status drove homo sapiens to extraordinary acts far beyond what was in their own evolutionary self-interest: murder, war, slavery, industry, fashion, ... sometimes they would erect vast, apparently functionless structures, purely to celebrate the status of the dead, even as living populations starved in order to make such constructions possible.

For many millennia, status was fleeting –  its only longevity came through hereditary social institutions – tribal chiefdoms , monarchies and the promise of recorded history. Then, some time around 3000BC,  a mechanism emerged which took this intangible, illusory urge and turned it into (what became) the driving organisational force of human society: money. Money was, in many ways the perfect articulation of status, an abstract measure by which to store, exchange and accumulate it; meaningless beyond the species, but inescapable within it. 

STATUS STORAGE

Money has two extraordinary characteristics. Firstly, it is impossible to argue with. It turns spurious irrationalities into apparently pragmatic choices, and in so doing disguises them as rational, normal and justifiable. Money is an exclusive paradigm – the longer humans spend thinking about it, the less they can remember how to measure value by any other means.  Within just a few thousand years, money had subsumed almost all social and political discourse – governments professed their loyalty to it, and dedicated their public service to its creation.  

The second characteristic of money is that, unlike specific forms of tangible value, it is an abstract, imaginary thing, and therefore theoretically infinite in quantity. The invention of money created an endless scale upon which homo sapiens could compete for status. More and more, humans began to apply their creative and productive capacity to it. Commodities were mined and manufactured not to accommodate the finite appetites of need, but the infinite appetites of status. Where demand for a product was finite, organisations could increase their profits by prodding  the tiny status malfunction in their customers' brains. Huge posters were erected to belittle passers-by. Messages read: “You do not have enough status.” “This product will give you more status.” “Obey your thirst.” The desire to consume escalated – this tiny species of brilliant, irrational, naked apes, its population expanding, began to devise more and more ingenious, powerful mechanisms to consume in greater quantities: food, raw materials, space, energy. 

It had taken over 2 million years for the evolutionary process to respond, but homo sapiens, itself over 250,000 thousand years old, ultimately fulfilled its evolutionary purpose in not much more than 200 years. Vast tracts of the landscape were successfully cleared of the photosynthesising species  which had been poisoning the atmosphere. Competing to make themselves richer, humans went to extraordinary effort to invent diggers and drills to dig down into the earth's crust, recover the lost carbon, and burn it, often for no purpose other than to light up their vast mausoleums. 

If we can think of Gaia as having some form of 'intelligence', then we'd be forced to admit it had achieved a feat of undeniable genius: it had contrived of a species willing to go out of its way to drill deep into the planet's crust, recover the Lost Carbon, and release it back into the atmosphere.

HOMEOSTASIS ANXIETY

The most elegant characteristic of this carbon-dioxide replacement process was that it was, like all of Gaia's processes,  self-regulating. Humans had evolved to survive in the oxygen-poisoned, cooled atmosphere - thus in completing their task with such disproportionate speed, they were conveniently auto-destructive. The ultimate result was homeostasis...  not through human knowledge (as some had imagined it might be), but rather through the opposite: a perfectly tuned combination of human ingenuity and human ignorance. Despite a short burst of resistance from scientists and environmentalists, Homo sapiens' natural addiction to status proved to be hard-wired and utterly intractable. Humans continued with their important work, even as they became aware of their role in the process. They had long assumed their own behaviour to be against nature – an aberration – thus they overlooked the more logical interpretation; that they themselves were a natural process. 

Within another 200 years, their population had once again shrunk to a size which could produce carbon dioxide only as rapidly as the photosynthesising species could sequester it. Homo sapiens was a lasting homeostatic device. As the human species had been decimated by drought, disease, man-made-poverty, war, famine and scarcity, some had escaped northwards in search of more fossil fuels to drill and burn. Centuries later, colonies of humans still survive there, largely unthreatened but for the occasional  storms and, to the amusement of the alien observer who is equipped with a sense of irony, the ever-present risk of being attacked by polar bears.