Brussels, November 16 2018. This is a short story about our times and where we are at with climate change and the sixth extinction. About how it all affects our ways of thinking and working, how we try to escape our fate, and how deeply we are trapped in the very process of making happen what we strive to avoid.
Yesterday, I attended a short presentation by a young and skilled biologist. He was namely using the resources of Google Earth to improve the estimates of the global forest coverage and how it contributes to carbon storage at a planetary scale. Based on the new set of data he has collected and the known climatic scenarios, he could predict where the forest would be likely to expand or withdraw anywhere on the planet by 2050. Although rather theoretical, this knowledge would be of great value to make good decisions and take further steps on the ground of conservation, mitigation and for tackling climate change.
At the end of the presentation, a gentle breeze of questions was addressed to the speaker. All of them were of purely technical nature. The conversation ran on how difficult it is to model the complexity of forests’ ecology and account for their dynamics, stages in succession, feedbacks on soil and local climate.
I began to feel uncomfortable, as this brief discussion was going to an end. There was an unpleasant question floating around in the room and I could smell its stinky fragrance. Something like “Hmmm, it would be much more practical if all the forests in the world could behave in a manner that would make them more predictable, faster to grow and adapt, more standard in ecology and morphology, more consistent in the way they store carbon”.
The whole sequence had not last for more than ten minutes and the inviting professor was about to declare the session closed when a young woman raised her hand for a last question. I don’t remember what her question was exactly, but the focus was roughly the following. Since we know that the physical conditions will change by 2050 and consequently that a shift is likely to happen between different types of forest in some regions (let’s say for instance that a dense tropical forest is expected to shift to a scattered dry forest, or a boreal forest should turn into a temperate forest), it may be pointless, or even counterproductive, to stick to conservation actions, which may hinder the shift to a better adapted and more productive (that is carbon-rich) forest in the new expected climatic conditions.
Suddenly, I realized with a chill of horror that we were gently discussing the idea of intentionally destroy natural ecosystems for the sake of climate. Is this what it leads to when our best science elite dedicate itself to preserve nature and a liveable planet? To be honest, I was not really surprised that our western ways of measuring and controlling nature would lead to insult “nature’s nature”. After all, the same thing happened with modern agriculture, which turned our landscapes into living deserts, zombified ecosystems with few or no interactions, no more symbioses. And I could multiply the examples. But my point here is simply to underline how the way we think and make science today can turn even a brilliant scientist dedicated to the protection of the forest into an agent of capitalism turning whatever exists into an optimized piece in its profit machine.
So, in the end, the Google Earth tools may be beautifully fitted for calculating its CO2 content and potentialities, because we will have managed forests in a way that turn them into optimized and predictable ecosystems. Silent forests, as they call them already in central Africa. A global forest that is entirely defined by how it appears on a digital map. A forest without a place for the spirits to hide, a forest that the “forest people” would never call a “forest”. A “Google Forest” indeed.
symbiosphere 