INTRODUCTION
The viruses keep coming. The climate keeps warming. And the earth is rewilding in real time. We long thought that we could force the natural world to adapt to our species. We now face the ignominious fate of being forced to adapt to an unpredictable natural world. Our species has no playbook for the mayhem that is unfolding around us.
We are, by all accounts, the youngest mammalian species on Earth, with only a two-hundred-thousand-year-long history. For most of that time—95 percent or more—we lived pretty much like our fellow primates and mammals as foragers and hunters living off the land and adapting to the seasons, leaving just a skim of our imprint on the body of the earth.1 What changed? How did we become the despoilers who brought nature almost to its knees but which now has come roaring back to cast us out?
Let’s step back for a moment and look at the now worn narrative regarding our species’ special destiny. During the dark days of the French Revolution in 1794, the philosopher Nicolas de Condorcet laid out a grand vision of the future while waiting to be taken to the guillotine for high treason. He wrote:
“No bounds have been fixed to the improvement of the human faculties … the perfectibility of man is absolutely indefinite … [the] progress of this perfectibility, henceforth above the control of every power that would impede it, has no other limit than the duration of the globe upon which nature has placed us.”2
Condorcet’s promissory note provided the ontological foundation for what would subsequently be called the Age of Progress. Today, Condorcet’s vision of humanity’s future appears naïve, even laughable. Still, progress is just the most recent incarnation of the ancient belief that our species was cut from a different cloth from that of other creatures with whom we share the earth. While grudgingly admitting that Homo sapiens evolved from an ancestral pool dating back to the first glimmer of microbial life, we like to think that we are different.
During the modern era we tossed much of the theological world aside, but managed to keep hold of the Lord’s promise to Adam and Eve that they and their heirs would have “dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.”3 That promise, still taken seriously, but without the religious overtones, has led to the collapse of our planetary ecosystems.
If there is a change to be reckoned with, it’s that we are beginning to realize that we never did have dominion and that the agencies of nature are far more powerful than we thought. Our species now seems much smaller and less consequential in the bigger picture of life on Earth.
People everywhere are scared. We are waking up to the hard reality that our species is to blame for the horrific carnage spreading across the earth—the floods, droughts, wildfires, and hurricanes that are wreaking havoc and undermining economies and ecosystems around the world. We sense that planetary forces bigger than us and not easily subdued by the means we have relied on in the past are here to stay, with ominous repercussions. We are beginning to realize that our species and our fellow creatures are edging ever closer to an environmental abyss from which there is no return.
And now, the warnings that human-induced climate change is taking us into the sixth mass extinction of life on Earth have moved from the fringes to the mainstream. The alarm bells are ringing everywhere. Government leaders, the business and financial community, academia, and the public at large are beginning to question, whole cloth, the shibboleths by which we have lived our lives, interpreted the meaning of our existence, and understood the simple realities of staying alive and secure.
Although the Age of Progress is, for all intents and purposes, over and only awaiting a proper postmortem, what’s new and being heard from every quarter and getting louder and more determined is that we—the human race—need to rethink everything: our worldview, our understanding of the economy, our forms of governance, our concepts of time and space, our most basic human drives, and our relationship to the planet.
But the talk thus far is at best inchoate and at worst undefined. What does it really mean to rethink every aspect of our lives? We have a clue. The question being asked in so many different ways is how do we “adapt” to the havoc that is coming? We hear it around the kitchen table and in our local neighborhoods where we work and play and live out our lives.
“Resilience,” in turn, has become the new defining refrain heard in countless venues. It is how we are coming to define ourselves in a perilous future that is now at the front gates. The Age of Progress has given way to the Age of Resilience. Rethinking the essence of our species and its place on Earth marks the beginning of a new journey where nature is now the classroom.
The great transformation from the Age of Progress to the Age of Resilience is already triggering a vast philosophical and psychological readjustment in the way our species perceives the world around us. At the root of the transition is a wholesale shift of our temporal and spatial orientation.
The underlying temporal orientation that directed the entirety of the Age of Progress is “efficiency”—the quest to optimize the expropriation, consumption, and discarding of natural resources and, by so doing, increase the material opulence of society at ever-greater speeds and in ever-shrinking time frames, but at the expense of the depletion of nature itself. Our personal temporal orientation and the temporal beat of our society folds around the efficiency imperative. It’s what has taken us to the commanding heights as the dominant species on Earth and now to the ruin of the natural world.
Of late, voices are being raised for the very first time from the academic community and even corporate boardrooms and government, challenging this once-sacred value of efficiency, suggesting that its ironclad hold over society’s temporal bandwidth is literally killing us. How, then, do we rethink our future?
If the Age of Progress marched in lockstep with efficiency, the temporal choreography of the Age of Resilience strides with adaptivity. The temporal crossover from efficiency to adaptivity is the reentry card that takes our species from separation and exploitation of the natural world to repatriation with the multitude of environmental forces that animate the earth—marking a repositioning of human agency on an increasingly unpredictable planet.
This realignment is already affecting other deep-rooted assumptions about how our economic and social life ought to be conducted, measured, and assessed. The handover from efficiency to adaptivity comes with sweeping changes in the economy and society including the shift from productivity to regenerativity, growth to flourishing, ownership to access, seller-buyer markets to provider-user networks, linear processes to cybernetic processes, vertically integrated economies of scale to laterally integrated economies of scale, centralized value chains to distributed value chains, corporate conglomerates to agile, high-tech small- and medium-sized cooperatives blockchained in fluid commons, intellectual property rights to open-source sharing of knowledge, zero-sum games to network effects, globalization to glocalization, consumerism to eco-stewardship, gross domestic product (GDP) to quality-of-life indicators (QLI), negative externalities to circularity, and geopolitics to biosphere politics.
The emerging third iteration of the industrial revolution that is taking the world from analog bureaucracies to digital platforms enveloping the whole of the earth is re-embedding our species back into the planet’s indigenous infrastructures—the hydrosphere, the lithosphere, the atmosphere, and the biosphere. This new infrastructure takes our collective humanity beyond the industrial era. In the emerging economic paradigm, it’s likely that “finance capital,” the heart of the Industrial Age, will be surpassed by a new economic order primed by “ecological capital” as we move further into the Age of Resilience in the second half of the 21st century and beyond.
Not surprisingly, the new temporality rides alongside a fundamental spatial reorientation. In the Age of Progress, space became synonymous with passive natural resources and governance with managing nature as property. In the Age of Resilience, space is made up of the planetary spheres that interact to establish the processes, patterns, and flows of an evolving Earth.
We are also just beginning to understand that our own lives, and those of our fellow creatures, exist as processes, patterns, and flows. The idea that we are autonomous beings acting on one another and the natural world is being rethought by a new generation of physicists, chemists, and biologists on the cutting edge of scientific inquiry. They are beginning to unearth a different story about the nature of human nature and, in the process, challenging the belief in our autonomous selfhood.
All living creatures are extensions of the earth’s spheres. The elements, minerals, and nutrients of the lithosphere, the water of the hydrosphere, and the oxygen of the atmosphere are continually coursing through us in the form of atoms and molecules, taking up residence in our cells, tissues, and organs as prescribed by our DNA, only to be continuously replaced at various intervals during our life. Although it may come as a surprise, most of the tissues and organs that make up our bodies continuously turn over in our lifetime. For example, one’s near entire skeleton is replaced every ten years or so. A human liver turns over approximately every three hundred to five hundred days; the cells that line the stomach turn over in five days; and intestinal Paneth cells are replaced every twenty days.4 A mature adult, from a strictly physical point of view, may be ten years old or younger.5
And even then, our body does not belong to us alone but is shared by many other forms of life—bacteria, viruses, protists, archaea, and fungi. Indeed, more than half the cells in the human body and the majority of DNA that make us up are not human but belong to the rest of the creatures that reside in every nook and cranny of our being. The point is, the earth’s species and ecosystems do not stop at the edge of our bodies but, rather, continuously flow in and out of our bodies. Each of us is a semipermeable membrane. We are of the planet literally and figuratively—which ought to shatter the cherished notion that our species is somehow separate from nature.
Our inseparability from nature’s flows is even more nuanced and intimate. Like every other species, we are made up of a multitude of biological clocks that continually adapt our internal bodily rhythms to the circadian day and the lunar, seasonal, and circannual rhythms that mark the daily rotation of the earth and its annual passage around the sun. Of late, we are also learning that endogenous and exogenous electromagnetic fields that crisscross every cell, tissue, and organ and permeate the planet also play a critical role in establishing the patterns by which our genes and cells line up and take form and assist in maintaining bodily functions.
We are of the earth, to the very sinew of our being. Like the rethinking of our temporality, our emerging understanding of our extended spatiality as a species is also forcing a reevaluation of our relationship to our fellow creatures, and our place on the earth.
Copyright © 2022 by Jeremy Rifkin
