The Unnatural World

The Race to Remake Civilization in Earth's Newest Age

David Biello

• Publisher: Scribner
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781476743929
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Global Warming & Climate Change
• Index: Biological Sciences

A brilliant young environmental journalist argues that we must innovate and adapt to save planet Earth in this enlightening "trip around the world to meet people working out new ways for humanity to live as well as survive" ( The New York Times Book Review ). With the historical perspective of The Song of the Dodo and the urgency of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, The Unnatural World chronicles a disparate band of unlikely heroes: an effervescent mad scientist who would fertilize the seas; a pigeon obsessive bent on bringing back the extinct; a low-level government functionary in China doing his best to clean up his city, and more. These scientists, billionaires, and ordinary people are all working toward saving the best home humanity is ever likely to have. What is the threat? It is us. In a time when a species dies out every ten minutes, when summers are getting hotter, winters colder, and oceans higher, some people still deny mankind's effect on the Earth. But all of our impacts on the planet have ushered in what qualifies as a new geologic epoch, thanks to global warming, mass extinction, and such technologies as nuclear weapons and plastics. "A futurist ray of hope amid the usual denial and despair" ( Esquire ), The Unnatural World examines the world we have created and analyzes the glimmers of light emerging from the efforts of incredible individuals seeking to change our future. Instead of a world without us, this history of the future shows how to become good gardeners, helping people thrive along with an abundance of plants, animals, all the exuberant profusion of life on Earth—a better world with us. The current era of humans need not be the end of the world—and "Biello describes both what we have done to alter our planet and what we should do in the future to ensure its habitability" ( Scientific American ).

Part I

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Alter Earth

Chapter 1

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Iron Rules

We take things out of the ocean we’ve never seen before and put things into it we don’t want to see again.

—MARINE BIOLOGIST CALLUM ROBERTS, WINNER OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY WINTON PRIZE FOR SCIENCE BOOKS, 2013

The Southern Ocean is a forbidding place, mostly unvisited by humans. Winds of more than 120 kilometers per hour wreak havoc, and waves routinely wash up and over the bow of any ship that dares to venture so far south, drenching the decks in ice-cold sea spray that instantly freezes. Worse, rare freak waves can build to towering heights and flip a ship in place. Looming icebergs can fatally wound an unwary or unarmored vessel. Beyond this storm-tossed sea lies Antarctica, locked in deep freeze by a current that reaches 4000 meters from sea surface to ocean bottom and spans thousands of kilometers in its endless encircling moat. The Southern Ocean is where the mustachioed marine biologist Victor Smetacek, like any good scientist with a plan to change the world, hopes to change the sky with the power of the sea.

Victor’s sailor father, Fritz, fled the German-speaking Sudetenland region of the former Czechoslovakia and, as a dedicated Communist, ultimately the Nazis. He washed up in India in 1939, where he dropped the z from Smetaczek. Among the teeming masses of Calcutta, he fell in love with Shaheda Ahad, a young woman from Orissa. Fritz and Shaheda moved to a onetime British hill station hundreds of kilometers to the west, closer to New Delhi. Victor, their youngest son, and his siblings were raised on a tea plantation 2000 meters up in the Himalayan foothills, far from any sea (though the hill station does surround a large lake) and just west of Nepal. Shaheda gifted her children, especially Victor, with charm and a lust for life. Young Victor indulged his passions for bird-watching, collecting butterflies, and hunting for food, starting to stalk jungle prey with his father’s shotgun at the age of ten in the company of local farmers. He eventually graduated to stalking and shooting cow-killing leopards and even, once, an elephant.

Food remains a concern in India and, as a young man in the 1960s, the tragic famines of Victor’s homeland drove him to sea. An article from a 1954 issue of Collier’s magazine called “Bread from the Sea” inspired that flight in part, and in part perhaps to echo the journeys of his beloved father. In that article, the journalist Bill Davidson suggested that so-called phytoplankton—microscopic floating life powered by photosynthesis, often also called blue-green algae or cyanobacteria—might become a stable source of food for humanity. Smetacek used his Czech surname to land a scholarship to study marine biology at the University of Kiel in Germany in 1964. He had to learn German in a hurry from reading newspapers to do it, since his father had checked the “fluent” box on his application although, in fact, young Victor spoke fluent Hindi and little Deutsche.

At Kiel, Smetacek discovered the numerous organisms hiding behind the scientific term “plankton.” This microscopic life fills the sea from top to bottom, extending even into the sediments of the seafloor. Since the 1980s, Smetacek has ventured aboard the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research’s sturdy icebreaker Polarstern to study these plankton in their native habitat: the Southern Ocean. It is there that phytoplankton show their full diversity, locked in an endless struggle with zooplankton, the abundant grazers of the sea. One family, the diatoms, their elaborate shells made of the same element as sand—baroque twisting nets, thistles and thorns, even pod-shaped landing craft—guard the ocean-drifting cells as they busily turn carbon dioxide into food using the energy in sunlight. Like a jumble of children’s blocks of all shapes and sizes, a sample of seawater turns up countless thousands of the most abundant life-form on the planet, and the base of the global food chain. This variety of shapes and patterns shames plants on land, showing more range in size than the difference between moss and redwood trees, though it is the difference between the microscopic and merely tiny. There are more plankton cells in the sea than the current count of stars in the entire known universe. And some scientists argue that phytoplankton can start an ice age, given enough nutrients.

Plankton and their ancestors were the first geoengineers—large-scale manipulators of the entire planet and its biological, geological, and chemical processes. Some 2.4 billion years ago, photosynthetic bacteria began to bubble out oxygen. By 1.7 billion years ago, oxygen made up 10 percent of the atmosphere—a massive change in the chemical composition of the air. For the first time, fire was possible, if there had been anything to burn. Slowly at first, but steadily, the atmosphere became dominated equally by geology and biology, off-gassing from volcanoes, and emanations from life combining to wreath the planet in a particular mix of gases.

Now the burning of untold eons’ worth of this captured and fossilized sunshine—otherwise known as coal, oil, and natural gas—has changed that mix of gases again. Carbon dioxide piles up in the sky, swathing Earth in a slightly different mix of opaque gases that prevent the planet from shedding back to space some of the sun’s ceaseless heat. To throw off that greenhouse gas blanket, why not simply copy nature? Use photosynthesis to bind that excess CO₂ in carbohydrates and then bury that food beneath land or sea. Given that the plankton of the sea produce 70 percent of the oxygen in the atmosphere, these prolific tiny plants seemed a good place to start. Scientific experiments and even accidents of industry have shown that plankton blooms can be reliably induced with the addition of extra trace nutrients like nitrogen, phosphorus, and, in the case of Smetacek’s work, iron. That’s Smetacek’s grand scheme: It shows how human intention may tinker with living flows—and even harness them. This is the Anthropocene as direct action, turning the wildest wilderness into a kind of farm, or a living system that serves human needs.

Smetacek and a boatload of forty-nine Indian and German scientists steamed out of Cape Town on January 7, 2009, bearing 20 metric tons of iron sulfate borrowed from a titanium smelter in Bremerhaven, Germany. He is too European now to be fully Indian and too Indian to be German, which made him the perfect person to pull together this joint expedition fueled by the redolent smells of curry. Plans hatched at a restaurant in Bremerhaven back in 2004 to fertilize roughly 300 square kilometers of ocean and to watch the results had finally come to fruition. But unbeknownst to Smetacek and his crew, this little iron experiment also had seeded the beginnings of a storm of controversy—and that storm was headed straight for the RV Polarstern.

* * *

Water covers more than two-thirds of Earth, yet the oceans often remain an afterthought for the land mammals currently at the top of the food chain. As Smetacek wrote in his final report from that 2009 cruise: “We live on a wet planet but, being land animals, we call it Earth.” The world is really made by two great fluids—the ocean and the atmosphere—roiling against each other. Land merely impedes or redirects this ceaseless flow.

Personally, I fear the ocean, having grown up in the center of the continent known as North America and endured a perhaps too early exposure to the film Jaws. In my view, our distant fishy ancestors showed great wisdom in forsaking this dismal soup for the relative safety of land. The sea stews with danger, sharks and undiscovered viruses, all with a soupçon of human additions, like plastic ghost nets that snare the unwary. The oceans encompass the majority of the globe, so what happens to the oceans will determine the future course of the planet and the prospects for this current epoch.

Today, plastic litters the shores, not left directly by careless tourists but washed up from the sea, the last great garbage dump. Reefs that once abounded with life are coated in sediment and algae, showing glimpses of bone white and haunted by only the smallest fish, fit only to be boiled to add flavor to water. The giant snapper of yesteryear is no more. Signs of human activity have even reached into the bottom muck, where life proceeds at its slowest known pace and the future of rocks is laid down.

Mostly, the oceans reveal the depths of human ignorance. We have visited the bottom of the Marianas Trench, the deepest part of the sea, only twice—and one of those visits was by a Hollywood director. We have better maps of the moon than of the ocean floor in all its vast expanse, the first such global map delivered only in 1977—eight years after Neil Armstrong walked on the lunar surface. The life habits of eels and the origins of the Sargasso Sea remain a mystery, and the most abundant photosynthetic organism in the ocean wasn’t even identified by scientists until the 1980s because the nets used to survey the sea had holes too big to capture a microbe that boasts 1 million cells or so per liter of ocean water. Marine scientists still routinely discover new species, even ones as large as dolphins. Ships on the surface can even go missing: The 100-meter-long, 1400-metric-ton Russian cruise ship the Lyubov Orlova disappeared in the North Atlantic in 2013; it still has not been found. This alien world exists in parallel to the continental crust we comfortably inhabit, refusing to forgive or forget by absorbing much of the extra heat trapped by accumulating greenhouse gases—even the carbon dioxide itself—and unleashing that heat to fuel extreme weather. The ocean’s vastness defies human scope.

We don’t even know enough to know what we’re missing. This is the phenomenon scientists have dubbed “shifting baselines,” or the fact that whatever one encountered (or didn’t encounter) as a child is likely to be the basis by which one judges what is normal (or not) when it comes to the oceans or any other part of the nonhuman world. If, like me, you have never seen a two-meter-long grouper, then you are unlikely to think that its absence is unusual. But someone who snorkeled off Jamaica just forty years ago would note this dramatic lack. If right whales have not been seen off the coast of Europe in your lifetime, or the lifetime of even your great-great-grandmother, you are unlikely to think of them as missing—or, for that matter, think of them at all. It’s a collective social amnesia that allows for continual, gradual decline.

In large part, we live with a sea haunted by ghosts. Roughly three-quarters of all large animals in the sea—fish, mammal, or otherwise—are gone. The ghosts can be dimly perceived in change. Revenants explain collapsed ecosystems like the cod banks off Newfoundland and even the price of lobster. It’s as if we were trying to study the ecology of the Amazon rain forest based on the cattle and pasture that remain after the forest is gone. Everything is different. The bones of the Hawaiian petrel stretching back 1,000 years show a reliance on big fish as food while those from the last 100 years show a shift to smaller fish, squid, and the like—a new epoch recorded even in the hollow skeletons of seabirds.

What we know for sure is equally troubling. Overfishing has allowed jellyfish and squid to take over in many regions, devolving the oceanic food chain and returning the jellies to a dominance last enjoyed more than 550 million years ago. Meanwhile, the big predators of the sea, like the mighty bluefin tuna, keep getting smaller, no longer the 4-meter-long, 700-kilogram giants that could dwarf a moose. We kill sea turtles and other jellyfish eaters in large numbers, even if mostly by accident now with our fishing gear. The only hope for change may be that humans develop a taste for these newly dominant species like the jellies or lionfish and overfish their numbers back down, though this is not a perfect solution.

In just one year—1998—humans helped kill off one-quarter of the world’s coral. The Indian Ocean alone lost more than 70 percent of its reefs due to higher water temperatures, causing coral bleaching. Warmer waters cause corals to expel the algae that live with them and the reefs lose their color. The corals are not dead—not yet—but they are stressed and, when confronted with other challenges, such as water pollution or overfishing, can easily succumb. Nearly twenty years later, only some of these reefs have recovered and the last few years have again seen unusually warm ocean waters and more mass bleaching around the world thanks to ongoing global warming. Dead reefs in turn imperil the homes of fish and other sea life that more than 1 billion people rely on for sustenance.

More than 40,000 square kilometers of ocean floor are trawled or dredged every day, creating a map of regular track marks in heavily fished seas off Europe and North America. No one knows what impact this has on life at the bottom because it is largely unstudied and unobserved, but we do know that the North Sea was once covered in oysters and is now covered in shifting sands. The seafloor has been flattened, as if plowed, and trawling is not the only way we blindly impact the deep. A tin-based coating applied to boats to keep them cleanly slicing through the water turned out to make all mollusks grow penises and, even after a ban, continues to mess with the reproductive systems of sea cucumbers living on the seafloor. Nor do we have any sense of what life is like in the true abyss around 5000 meters below the continental shelves.

We are even creating entirely new ecosystems, such as the life clinging to the rafts of plastic pellets (called nurdles) and microbits swirling in the great gyres of the world’s oceans. This “plastisphere” supports an array of microbes, from those that feast on the hydrocarbon chains in the plastic itself to opportunistic microbes that make food from sunlight or feed on those that do. Scientists have found thousands of microbes floating on individual pieces of plastic.

Some of the prelapsarian glory we will never get back in our lifetimes, including the great pods of thousands of whales that once graced the global sea, fertilizing the phytoplankton base of the food chain as they traveled by defecating. And the sea absorbs much of the fossil carbon released by the burning of coal, oil, and natural gas, rendering the salty waters more acidic. “The last thousand years have seen our influences gather like a green wave, scarcely perceptible at first but slowly lifting and steepening over centuries to burst across the globe in the last sixty years,” writes the marine biologist Callum Roberts in The Ocean of Life.

Despite all this human-made pollution and all these human-made challenges transforming the ocean and creating the conditions for a new geologic epoch, what worries some people most is the dumping of iron in a small patch of the southernmost sea.

* * *

The storm started with an email. ETC Group (Action Group on Erosion, Technology and Concentration) sent Smetacek an inquiry about his Indian-German iron fertilization experiment. The small environmental outfit started off twenty-five or so years ago working on protecting the livelihoods of the rural poor, but over time it has branched out into the environmental and socioeconomic impacts of any new technology. To ETC and, in particular, its program director Jim Thomas, Smetacek’s experiment amounted to geoengineering—a deliberate intervention in the planetary environment. While the United Kingdom’s Royal Society, the world’s oldest scientific body, also included the phrase “large-scale” in their definition of geoengineering—and Smetacek did not plan to fertilize much of the ocean—Thomas and his peers felt that it was close enough, particularly in light of previous efforts to fertilize the ocean near the Galápagos proposed by a commercial company.

The mischievous Smetacek responded to the email on the first day out, noting that his experiment had “the explicit permission of the German and Indian governments, including the German Ministry of the Environment, which hosted the [Convention on Biological Diversity] meeting last May.” That convention, often shortened to CBD by those wonks who traffic in its arcana, asked governments to refrain from such iron fertilization experiments “until there is an adequate scientific basis on which to justify such activities.” Armed with that wording, Thomas took Smetacek’s email to the German environmental ministry, at the time headed by the former high school teacher Sigmar Gabriel.

Gabriel professed no knowledge of the experiment and sent a request to his colleague, the minister in charge of research, Annette Schavan, that Smetacek’s experiment be stopped immediately. This apparent contradiction within the German government spawned an international media frenzy and, by day three of the Polarstern’s voyage south, the ship had to stop, leaving the scientists on board in limbo.

Yet this experiment was nothing new.

Smetacek had been chief scientist on a similar iron fertilization cruise back in 2004. What had changed? Just one thing: A peripatetic citizen-scientist named Russ George had attempted to make money from the idea.

A bearded, bespectacled, pudgy little bear of a man who looks like he just stumbled out of his hippie days and is prone to nervously biting his fingernails, George describes himself as a forest ecologist. He planted trees in Canada’s forests to replace those chain-sawed to make way for roads. He even turned tree planting into a business of sorts, starting a company called KlimaFa (Climate Trees) in Hungary in an attempt to get paid to plant trees as part of efforts to draw down the CO₂ put into the atmosphere by fossil fuel burning. He planned to donate some of those forestry carbon offsets to cover the climate-changing pollution of the Vatican, that is, to make the Holy See carbon neutral. But now the bizarro entrepreneur, who also previously tried to sell cold-fusion devices (which have yet to be proven to work), had a new scheme: plankton blooms for carbon credits. In 2002, George chartered rock star Neil Young’s wooden schooner The Ragland to test out the theory behind iron fertilization off Hawaii.

Encouraged by the results and interest, by 2007 George had formed Planktos Inc. and raised funds for an expedition to the Galápagos Islands to dump iron in the water. He proposed to make that expedition a commercial venture, much like his tree-planting scheme: He would sell the rights to the CO₂ sucked in by any subsequent plankton bloom. This is the core idea of an “offset”: You reduce CO₂ by, say, fertilizing a plankton bloom and then sell the credit for that sucked-up CO₂ to someone emitting a lot of CO₂, like the owner of a coal-fired power plant. And Planktos wasn’t alone in trying to sell the idea: San Francisco–based Climos had a similar plan, as did Virginia-based GreenSea Venture. The schemes attracted investors including Elon Musk, wunderkind of electr...