How should societies manage the profit-driven economic systems that are systematically transforming the world – destroying the resources they depend on, damaging ecosystems, and causing widespread suffering? This is one of the central social and political dilemmas of the past two centuries. And the world seems to be always in a position of falling behind and trying to play catch-up on ever-larger scales, as the Anthropocene gallops onward. Currently, we face the prospect of runaway climate change. Climate impacts are escalating, and global systems may be reaching critical tipping points¹ from which there will be no return. To address these problems on the global scale, there is a voluntary system of national carbon reductions – that is not yet working.

The tensions between capitalism and environmental stewardship, stretching across generations, was the principal theme in our class last week. Excerpts from Henry David Thoreau’s Walden², Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac³, and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring⁴ each stress aspects of this predicament from the vantages of the mid-19^th and 20^th centuries. There is a clear through-line of “brokeness” in the the modern world that has led to our current predicament.

Writing in the 1850s, Thoreau shows how various social forces, shaped largely but not exclusively by the demands of 19^th century American capitalism, manifest in the daily lives of individuals. These demands both mold and degrade the quality of personal experience, putting people on endless treadmills of work and obligation in the name of earning a wage and accumulating wealth. Nature becomes a means to this end. Thoreau asks that his readers pause and reassess these demands by distant masters, and return to a direct engagement with nature. Leopold, writing nearly a century later, identifies the similar category error of treating nature or the environment as a source of economic resources, useful for extraction. Leopold argues for a basic recognition that the environment is not merely property but has value in itself, and humans do not stand apart but are embedded in ecosystems. Writing just over a decade later, Carson documents the terrible toll of various forms of chemical polluioin on animals and ecosystems – and the huge void in environmental oversight by governments that let it happen.

Certainly, a lot of progress has been made in the past 60 years in the United States and elsewhere, both in an emerging ethic of stewardship and in building systems of government oversight. But large gaps remain – in values, in capacities, in political clout – between the engines of global capitalism and those pushing to protect the environment. As came up in our discussion, these splits manifest at local, national, regional, and global levels. Sometimes they lead to a “tragedy of the commons” in which collective resources are destroyed by competing self-interests – yet sometimes they can be overcome⁵ through creative negotiation and collective political process.

But the accelerating speed of social and environmental change today seems to be outpacing these efforts – at least as far as climate impacts go. Now, we must not only figure out proper stewardship, but contend with chaos – rapid change, species die-offs, extreme weather, climate refugees.⁶ There are also frightening emerging challenges such as pandemics – which often have origins in the complex ecology⁷ of expanding “edges” between human settlement and perturbed wild areas.

Understanding such fast-moving changes is essential to building and maintaining environmental stewardship in a chaos era. One interesting recent attempt came with the 2021 publication of a paper in PNAS titled “Stewardship of global collective behavior”.⁸ The paper, by a group of researchers from a range of disciplines including biology, ecology, earth sciences, climate, and international relations, is a kind of manifesto to the academic and policymaking communities arguing for expanding the study of collective behavior and to prioritize it as a “crisis discipline.” “The basic debate is an ancient one,” they write. “Are large-scale behavioral processes self-sustaining and self-correcting, or do they require active management and guidance to promote sustainable and equitable wellbeing?” While there’s a substantial literature in economics and ecology on these questions, they say, this isn’t enough to contend with 21^st century problems – in particular, the advent of the internet and increasingly networked societies motivates new, potentially dangerous, social dynamics (including the rapid spread of misinformation) that may cripple the capacity for collective action when it is needed most. (While, at the same time, nurturing a growing carbon footprint.⁹)

“Crisis discipline” is a term coined by the biologist Michael Soulé,¹⁰ considered the father of conservation biology (the original crisis discipline). Such approaches are aimed not just at building understanding, but addressing problems that demand immediate action, yet are poorly understood: “Crisis disciplines are distinct from other areas of urgent, evidenced-based research in their need to consider the degradation of an entire complex system—without a complete description of the system’s dynamics.”

In an interesting commentary on “Stewardship,” Robin Berjon, a computer scientist and vice president of data governance at the New York Times, notes how communications and media play an important, yet still poorly-understood role, in these urgent questions of collective behavior¹¹: “The paper's core idea is straightforward: complex systems can be highly resilient to perturbation, but that resilience is finite. Once such a system is pushed outside of its homeostatic regime, it undergoes sudden, catastrophic, and irreversible loss of functionality. The deployment of internet technology is evidently a massive perturbation of our social dynamics — but we lack the intellectual tooling to analyse its effects as they are taking place.”

The specific problem Berjon addresses is the algorithmification of news and other media, in which decisions about content once made by people (writers, directors, editors, producers, et al) is increasingly made by algorithms that operate at greater scales and are created to maximize efficiency and profit. The problem, as he sees it, is that this simplifies media and information diets, and this in turn may cripple the capacity of democracies, in particular, to process information and devise solutions – particularly to urgent problems such as climate change. In essence, he wonders if the Internet may lead to dumber politics, and with it a breakdown in policy and response capacity: “In mediating so much of humankind's discovery through the tiny funnel of a handful of systems, we are creating an unprecedented impoverishment of our intellectual toolbox.”

As a journalist, I find these arguments particularly alarming given that they lie at the intersection of ecology, political behavior, and information. Just as the seeds for climate change were being planted in Thoreau’s day, and the warming process well underway a century later when Leopold and Carson were writing, whatever insane social-political-ecological disruptions await as the product of networked societies are probably already unfolding – and now only semi-perceptible. But of course, given the dangers that breakdowns in stewardship post, these questions only become more urgent.

References

1. Lenton, T. M., Rockström, J., Gaffney, O., Rahmstorf, S., Richardson, K., Steffen, W., & Schellnhuber, H. J. (2019). Climate tipping points—Too risky to bet against. Nature, 575(7784), 592–595. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-03595-0
2. Thoreau, H. D. (2018). Walden. Global Grey.
3. Leopold, A. (1949). The Land Ethic. In A Sand County Almanac. Oxford University Press.
4. Carson, R. (1962, June 16). Silent Spring – I. The New Yorker, 6/16/1962.
5. Harvest Strategies: 21st Century Fisheries Management. (2019, November 6). Pew Trusts. https://pew.org/2pMr4K3
6. Isle de Jean Charles Resettlement. (2021). Isle de Jean Charles. https://isledejeancharles.la.gov/
7. Holmes, E. (2022, March 10). COVID-19—Lessons for zoonotic disease | Science. Science. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abn2222
8. Bak-Coleman, J. B., Alfano, M., Barfuss, W., Bergstrom, C. T., Centeno, M. A., Couzin, I. D., Donges, J. F., Galesic, M., Gersick, A. S., Jacquet, J., Kao, A. B., Moran, R. E., Romanczuk, P., Rubenstein, D. I., Tombak, K. J., Bavel, J. J. V., & Weber, E. U. (2021). Stewardship of global collective behavior. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 118(27). https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2025764118
9. Swabey. (2021, August 11). Estimates of ICT’s greenhouse gas emissions might be way off the mark. Tech Monitor. https://techmonitor.ai/leadership/sustainability/estimates-of-its-greenhouse-gas-emissions-might-be-way-off-the-mark
10. McNulty, J. (2020, June 23). Michael Soulé, father of conservation biology, dies at 84. UC Santa Cruz News. https://news.ucsc.edu/2020/06/soule-obituary.html
11. Berjon, Robin. (2021, June 26). Stewardship of Ourselves. Robin Berjon. https://berjon.com/stewardship/?s=09