Rachel's Democracy & Health News #953  [Printer-friendly version]
April 3, 2008

CHANGE WE MUST

[Rachel's introduction: A federal judge is being asked to stop a
scientific experiment that has a very small chance of going wrong and
destroying the Earth. This is an opportunity to think carefully about
how our laws -- and our habits of mind -- have remained unchanged for
a hundred years while our place in the natural order has changed
completely.]

By Peter Montague

The New York Times carried an important story in its science section
this week. Two people have sued in federal district court in Honolulu,
trying to stop a group of scientists in Europe from conducting a
particle physics experiment that, they say, might create a black hole
that could destroy the Earth and perhaps the entire universe.

The scientists have spent 14 years and $8 billion building the Large
Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland and naturally they're itching
to give it a try. They want to smash protons into each other to see
what will happen. They say it is "very unlikely" that they will create
a black hole and even if they did, it very likely wouldn't eat the
Earth, they say.

Just to be on the safe side, they set up a research team to examine
the question. The research team didn't say exactly, "No problem." They
said, "Very, very likely, no problem." Oddly, members of the research
team are not being identified so we have an anonymous group of
scientists assuring us that experiments conducted by their colleagues
and friends (proton smashers are a small community, after all) will
not destroy the Earth. On that basis, these scientist want the judge
to give them a green light to smash lots of protons together, to see
what they can learn.

These scientists need to look at it from the point of view of ordinary
humans. It was 1980 when scientists first announced that 95% of the
mass of the universe had gone missing and could not be accounted for.
The part of the universe we can see and touch and smell is only 5% of
the whole ball of wax, they said in 1980. From gravitational effects,
which they could measure, they deduced that there had to be something
huge out there making up an invisible 95% of the universe, but they
could not detect the thing itself (only its gravitational effects) and
they had no idea what "it" was. They named this missing stuff "dark
matter" and they've spent the last 28 years trying to get their hands
on some of it. So far, no luck.

So here's what it boils down to: scientists in search of the missing
95% of the universe want us to trust them to conduct an experiment
that they and their friends say has only a very slight chance of
destroying the Earth.

Really, this is not an altogether new problem -- though it is a
thoroughly modern problem. In 1775, at the beginning of the industrial
revolution, the people who invented the steam engine had almost no
idea what thermodynamic forces they had harnessed. But they could see
the effects and soon they were using these mysterious forces to move
pistons and create all manner of useful machines from water pumps to
locomotives. One thing was different -- even when these early
machines exploded (which they often did) only a few people got killed.
They weren't tinkering with the fate of all Creation, or even all of
humankind.

Now things are different. Arguably, the difference began to unfold
when the petrochemical industry got started in the 1870s. Those early
chemists were experimenting with concoctions that would eventually
escape and contaminate the entire planet, including all humans, with
small amounts of dozens or hundreds of poorly-understood but potent
chemical products and by-products. Now the whole planet is
contaminated with biologically active industrial poisons and we've
built several government bureaucracies, not to mention hundreds of
university programs, plus a massive industrial research apparatus, to
try to figure out what all these chemicals are doing to the ducks and
the jelly fish and your sister. Really, we haven't a clue and it's
likely to stay that way for centuries to come. Every time we learn
something new, we discover that these biochemistry problems are far
more complicated than we ever imagined. Each time our horizon of
knowledge expands a tad, it opens up vast new vistas of ignorance.

After industrial chemistry, then came nuclear power, and suddenly
everyone could see that humans held the future of the planet in their
little trembling hands. When the first nuclear bomb exploded in the
desert of southern New Mexico early in the morning June 16, 1945,
Robert Oppenheimer -- the project director -- famously said, "I am
become death, the destroyer of worlds." That summed it up nicely.

Now anyone who's willing to look can see that humans have grown into a
force of geologic proportion -- a relentless, expanding presence that
all the other creatures on planet Earth must fear and accommodate.
Some geologists want to declare officially that the Cenozoic Era has
ended and a new geological era has begun -- which they want to name
the Anthropocene to signal that human behavior is now the dominant
force on planet Earth.

There's a point to all this history. It tells was that things are very
different now from what they were in 1775 or even 1875. As Joe Guth
explained it for us in Rachel's #846, during those early days of
industrial pride, judges and legislators devised laws based on the
following assumption:

Economic activity was presumed to be beneficial and if some people got
hurt along the way, they would be compensated by the general
improvement in well-being. People who ripped up the Earth, and caused
ecological devastation in a thousand different ways, were creating
wealth and well-being for all of humanity and so they got the benefit
of the doubt. To bring them into court was nearly impossible and if
you got them into court the burden was on you to show that they had
been grossly negligent before they could be held liable for any
damages. Our modern legal structure still operates on this basic
assumption.

In other words, the law was -- and still is -- set up to give the
benefit of the doubt to anyone who wanted to build giant steam engines
or chemical factories or uranium processing plants or Large Hadron
Colliders. To ask a judge to stop these activities goes against 100
years of law.

But that's exactly what needs to happen, which was Joe Guth's point in
Rachel's #846. Circumstances have changed, so the law needs to change.
Today, there is good reason to doubt whether expanded economic
activity (of the traditional kind) is bringing net benefits to
humanity. More coal plants? More nuclear power (with its inevitable
camp-follower, the restless A-bomb)? There's good reason to think that
more bulldozing and more waste dumping and more "development" are now
doing more harm than good. (Of course there are many parts of the
world that desperately need power plants, roads, and ports. But to
accommodate that genuine need the overdeveloped parts of the planet
need to cut back, in some cases pretty drastically -- like cutting
carbon dioxide emissions by 80 to 90% in 30 years or so, a daunting
challenge.)

It's pretty clear that during the Anthropocene Era many of Earth's
natural limits have been surpassed -- the planet is becoming
biologically impoverished as the oceans are fished out, the forests
aren't able to grow back as fast as they're cut, fresh water is
already in short supply and dwindling, humans are crowding out the
other creatures, which are therefore going extinct, and it's getting
hot in here. You can read about new signs of genuine planet-wide
ecological distress in most any good newspaper most any day.

So the old conditions have completely changed. The planet is now
being stressed beyond endurance by human activities. Much of our
economy is now, arguably, anti-economic -- producing more bads than
goods.

As Joe Guth told us in #846, "Containing the damage to the earth is
the most important task facing humanity.... The law must be
transformed so that the earth's limited assimilative capacity will
operate as a real constraint on our economy. This transformation in
the law can begin with common law judges, who are called on now, as
they have been for centuries, to adjust the law to changing
circumstances."

So, yes, perhaps the scientists in Europe should be asked to
acknowledge that there is no amount of human knowledge worth risking
the destruction of planet Earth. We humans have been playing God for
at least 100 years now, and it's time we acknowledged that we're not
very good at it.

And perhaps the same message should go out to the prideful
technologists who want to fix global warming by rocketing mountains
of sulfur dust or acres of aluminum needles into space to shade us
from the sun, or who want to dump huge quantities of iron filings into
the oceans to stimulate the growth of plankton that will eat carbon
dioxide, or who want to bury a few trillion tons of liquefied carbon
dioxide a mile below ground, hoping it will stay there forever. What
else will those parasols in space or those extra plankton do? What if
that liquid carbon dioxide starts leaking out in a hundred years? Do
we really want to find out the hard way, by trial and error? Maybe
it's time to face the fact that, in the Anthropocene Era, the most
important characteristic that we humans can develop and foster is
humility in the face of our vast and irremediable ignorance. We can't
find 95% of the universe. So be it. A hundred years ago it didn't
matter that we didn't know what we were doing. We were arrogant but
puny.

Now we are still arrogant but we are no longer puny. If we don't
change our ways, all of Creation will eventually be destroyed. It's
not too late to change -- our habits of mind as well as our laws.
Anyone willing to face facts knows we must.