The age of climate hacking is upon us. Or has it always been with us?
Humans have always been GeoEngineers. Just as we have always been cyborgs. As one InformationEcology prophet understood: Technology is the most human thing about us. Or to put it another way, all technologies extend mankind’s abilities to manipulate their home: Spaceship Earth. The changes that humans make to the flows and networks that compose the operating systems of the planet can have positive or detrimental effects for humans and non-humans. Those tradeoffs are not well understood, except in a most rudimentary way.
Humans have always been GeoEngineers, we have just not been doing it very deliberately.
AGRICULTURE GEOHACKING
Some nomads make a new technology and become farmers.
Farmers pray to rain gods.
If farmers do not make sacrifices to the rain gods they may get mad and withhold the rain.
When human cultures transition from a nomadic to an agricultural economy there is an impact on climate due to a change in species mix, saying nothing of the increase in the number of humans that can be sustained overall. Clearcutting the eastern seaboard of the United States changes the ecological flows within those interconnected bioregions. The green revolution was a huge feat of GeoEngineering. The abundance and distribution of biomass on the surface of the planet was profoundly reshaped as a result of that set of agricultural technologies.
I find all the fear mongering over geoengineering sad, not because it is overblown because it is way too late. Someone should have been yelling at those first agrticulturalists to use the precautrionary principal and stop their geoengineering. They were certainly hacking the planet.
Now we need to get beyond the fear of geohacking, and utilize or build new public institutions that allow us to create a planet that is healthy, safe and sustainable for humans and non-humans alike. That may involve creating huge plankton farms as carbon sinks, or everyone giving up all forms transportation not powered by human energy, or moving to Mars, or voluntarily dying off until humans reach a population that is in line with the carrying capacity of the planet.
Complexity&Paralysis
What to do in the face complexity of which human minds can not begin to model or understand but doing nothing is not an option? We certainly shouldn’t kid ourselves into believing that previous humans were not geoengineering. They just weren’t deliberate about it. Now that we know that humans are by their very nature climatehackers how do we become ethical climate designers. “Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.” And hacking a pre-existing system provides better results than trying to initiate complexity starting from scratch.
