The Roman Philosopher Lucius Anneaus Seneca (4 BCE-65 CE) was perhaps the first to note the universal trend that growth is slow but ruin is rapid. I call this tendency the "Seneca Effect."

Sunday, April 24, 2022

Earth's Past and Future: a Long-Term View

 

For the Orthodox Easter day of 2022, I thought to abandon the daily noise of the news and take a long-term view. So, here is a post, republished from "The Proud Holobionts," that presents the history of our planet during the past 400 million years and some hypotheses on what could happen in the next billion years or so. Easter is a time of rebirth and of hope, so let's hope for a future of peace for these poor savanna monkeys, so noisy and so unruly. 


Gaia and the Savanna Monkeys. 

The Great Cycle of Earth's Forests




 Forests appeared on Earth some 400 million years ago, and they have been thriving over that long period. But, during the past 150 million years, they started to show signs of distress, reacting to the decline in atmospheric CO2 concentrations and to the competition with grasslands. As Earth changes, will forests be able to cope and survive? It is an extremely slow trend, but we cannot rule out that forests will conclude their cycle and disappear in a geologically short time. This text is an attempt to reconstruct the story of forests, and not just of foreste, and to imagine what their future could be in deep time. (image courtesy of Chuck Pezeshky


A forest is a magnificent, structured, and functional entity where the individual elements -- trees -- work together to ensure the survival of the ensemble. Each tree pumps water and nutrients all the way to the crown by the mechanism called evapotranspiration. The condensation of the evaporated water triggers the phenomenon called the "biotic pump" that benefits all the trees by pumping water from the sea. Each tree cycles down the carbohydrates it manufactures using photosynthesis to its mycorrhizal space, the underground system of roots and fungi that extracts mineral nutrients for the tree. The whole "rhizosphere" -- the root space -- forms a giant brain-like network that connects the trees to each other, sometimes termed "the Wood Wide Web." It is an optimized environment where almost everything is recycled. We can see it as similar to the concept of "just in time manufacturing" in the human economy. 

Forests are wonderful biological machines, but they are also easily destroyed by fires and attacks by parasites. And forests have a competitor: grass, a plant that tends to replace them whenever it has a chance to. Areas called savannas are mainly grass, although they host some trees. But they don't have a closed canopy, they don't evapotranspirate so much as forests, and they tend to exist in much drier climate conditions. Forests and grasslands are engaged in a struggle that may have started about 150 million years ago when grass appeared for the first time. During the past few million years, grasses seem to have gained an edge in the competition, in large part exploiting their higher efficiency in photosynthesis (the "C4" pathway) in a system where plants are starved for CO2.

Another competitor of forests is a primate that left its ancestral forest home just a couple of million years ago to become a savanna dweller -- we may call it the "savanna monkey," although it is also known as "Homo," or "Homo sapiens." These monkeys are clever creatures that seem to be engaged mainly in razing forests to the ground. Yet, in the long run, they may be doing forests a favor by returning the atmospheric CO2 concentration to values more congenial to the old "C3" photosynthetic mechanism still used by trees. 

Seen along the eons, we have an extremely complex and fascinating story. If forests have dominated Earth's landscape for hundreds of millions of years, one day they may disappear as Gaia gets old. In this post, I am describing this story from a "systemic" viewpoint -- that is, emphasizing the interactions of the elements of the system in a long-term view (it is called also "deep time"). The post is written in a light mood, as I hope to be able to convey the fascination of the story also to people who are not scientists. I tried to do my best to interpret the current knowledge, I apologize in advance for the unavoidable omissions and mistakes in such a complex matter, and I hope you'll enjoy this post. 


The Origin of Forests: 400 million years ago

Life on Earth may be almost 4 billion years old but, since we are multicellular animals, we pay special attention to multicellular life. So, we tend to focus on the Cambrian period (542-488 million years ago), when multicellular creatures became common. But that spectacular explosion of life was all about marine animals. Vascular plants started colonizing the land only during the period that followed the Cambrian, the Ordovician, (485 - 443 million years ago)

To be sure, the Ordovician flora on land was far from impressive. As far as we know, it was formed mainly by moss and lichens, although lichens may be much older and precede the Cambrian. Algae may have eked a precarious life on rocks even much earlier. Mosses, just like lichens, are humble plants: they are not vascularized, they don't grow tall, and they surely can't compare with trees. Nevertheless, they could change the planetary albedo and perhaps contribute to the fertilization of the marine biota -- something that may be related to the spectacular ice ages of the Ordovician. It is a characteristic of the Earth system that the temperature of the atmosphere is related to the abundance of life. More life draws down atmospheric CO2, and that cools the planet. The Ordovician saw one of these periodic episodes of cooling with the start of the colonization of the land. (image from Wikipedia)

There followed another long period called the "Silurian" (444 – 419 My ago) when plants kept evolving but still remained of the size of small shrubs at most. Then, during the Devonian (419 -359 million years ago) we have evidence of the existence of wood. And not only that, the fossil record shows the kind of channels called "Xylem" that connect the roots to the leaves in a tree. These plants were already tall and had a crown, a trunk, and roots. By the following geological period, the Carboniferous (359 - 299 My ago), forests seem to have been widespread.  

A major feature of these ancient trees was the development of an association with fungi. Their roots formed what we call a "mycorrhizal" symbiotic system. The fungi receive carbohydrates that the tree manufactures using photosynthesis, while the tree receives from the fungi essential minerals, including nitrogen and phosphorous. We don't know the details of how this symbiotic relationship evolved over hundreds of millions of years but, below, you can see a hypothesis of how it could have happened. (Source) (in the figure, "AM" stands for "arbuscular mycorrhiza" - the oldest form of symbiotic fungi).




Another major evolutionary innovation that may have been already operating in the Paleozoic forests is the "biotic pump." As an effect of the pressure drop created by the condensation of evapotranspirated water, forests can create pump water vapor from the ocean and create the "atmospheric rivers" that bring water inland. That, in turn, creates the land rivers that bring that water back to the sea. As forests create their own climate, they can expand nearly everywhere. The image shows clouds created by condensation over the modern Amazon rainforest (source).  

If we could walk in one of those ancient forests, we would find the place familiar, but also a little dreary. No birds and not even flying insects, they evolved only tens of million years later. No tree-climbing animals: no monkeys, no squirrels, nothing like that. Even in terms of herbivores, we have no evidence of the kind of creatures we are used to, nowadays. Grass didn't exist, so herbivores may have subsisted on decaying plant matter, or perhaps on ferns. Lots of greenery but no flowers, they had not evolved yet. You see in the image (source) an impression of what an ancient forest of Cladoxylopsida could have looked like during the Paleozoic era.

The Paleozoic forests already had one of the characteristics of modern forests: fires. There had never been fires on Earth before for at least two good reasons: one was that there was not enough oxygen, and the other was that there was nothing flammable. But now, with the oxygen concentration increasing and plants colonizing the land, fires appeared, lighting up the night. They would remain a characteristic of the land biosphere for hundreds of millions of years.

Image Source. The "fire window" is the region of concentrations in atmospheric oxygen in which fires can occur. Note how during the Paleozoic, the concentration could be considerably larger than it is now. Fireworks aplenty, probably. Note also how there exist traces of fires even before the development of full-fledge trees, in the Devonian. Wood didn't exist at that time, but the concentration of oxygen may have been high enough to set dry organic matter on fire. 

Wildfires are a classic case of a self-regulating system. The oxygen stock in the atmosphere is replenished by plant photosynthesis but is removed by burning wood. So, fires tend to reduce the oxygen concentration and that makes fires more difficult. But the story is more complicated than that. Fires also tend to create "recalcitrant" carbon compounds, charcoal for instance, that are not recycled by the biosphere and tend to remain buried for long times -- almost forever. So, over very long periods, fires tend to increase the oxygen concentration in the atmosphere by removing CO2 from it. The conclusion is that fires both decrease and increase the oxygen concentration. How about that for a taste of how complicated the biosphere processes are? 


 The Mesozoic: Forests and Dinosaurs

At the end of the Paleozoic, some 252 million years ago, there came the great destruction. A gigantic volcanic eruption of the kind we call "large igneous province" (sometimes affectionately "LIP") took place in the region we call Siberia today. It was huge beyond imagination: think of an area as large as modern Europe becoming a lake of molten lava. (image source)

It spewed enormous amounts of carbon into the atmosphere in the form of greenhouse gases. That warmed the planet, so much that it almost sterilized the biosphere. It was not the first, but it was the largest mass extinction of the Phanerozoic age. Gaia is normally busy keeping Earth's climate stable, but sometimes she seems to be sleeping at the wheel -- or maybe she gets drunk or stoned. The result is one of these disasters.  

Yet, the ecosystem survived the great extinction and rebounded. It was now the turn of the Mesozoic era, with forests re-colonizing the land. Over time, the angiosperms ("flowering plants") become dominant over the earlier conifers. With flowers, forests may have been much noisier than before, with bees and all kinds of insects. Avian dinosaurs also appeared. They seem to have been living mostly on trees, just like modern birds. 

For a long period during the Mesozoic, the landscape must have been mainly forested. No evidence of grass being common, although smaller plants, ferns, for instance, were abundant. Nevertheless, the great evolution machine kept moving. During the Jurassic, a new kind of mycorrhiza system evolved, the "Ectomycorrhizae" which allowed better control of the mineral nutrients in the rhizosphere, avoiding losses when the plants were not active. This mechanism was typical of conifers that could colonize cold regions of the supercontinent of the time, the "Pangea."  

During the Mesozoic, the dinosaurs appeared and diffused all over the planet. You surely noted how the Jurassic dinosaurs were often bipedal (See the illustration showing an early form of Iguanodon). They are also called "ornithopods," it is a body plan that allows herbivorous creatures to eat leaves on the high branches of trees. A bipedal stance makes the creature able to stand up, balancing on its tail. Some dinosaurs chose a different strategy, developing very long necks for the same purpose: the brontosaurus is iconic in this sense even though, traditionally, it was shown half-submerged in swamps (the illustration is from the New York Tribune of 1919). That's a bit silly, if you think about that. Why should a semiaquatic creature need a long neck? Think of a hippo with the neck of a giraffe: it wouldn't work so well. 

A much better representation of long-necked dinosaurs came with the first episode of the "Jurassic Park" (1993) movie series, when a gigantic diplodocus eats leaves. At some moment, the beast rises on its hind legs, using the tail as further support. 

If you are a dinosaur lover (and you probably are if you are reading this post) seeing this scene must have been a special moment in your life. And, after having seen it maybe a hundred times, it still moves me. But note how the diplodocus is shown in a grassy environment with sparse trees: that's not realistic because grass didn't exist yet when the creature went extinct at the end of the Jurassic period, about 145 million years ago. 

To see grass and animals specialized in eating it, we need to wait for the Cretaceous (145-66 million years ago). Evidence that some dinosaurs had started eating grass comes from the poop of long-necked dinosaurs. That's a little strange because, if you are a grazer, the last thing you need is a long neck. But new body plants rapidly evolved during the Cretaceous.  The Ceratopsia were the first true grazers, also called "mega-herbivores". Heavy, four-legged beasts that lived their life keeping their head close to the ground. The Triceratopses gained a space in human fantasy as prototypical dinosaurs, and they are often shown in movies while fighting tyrannosauruses. You see that in Walt Disney's movie "Fantasia" (1940). It may have happened for real.


Note the heavy bone shield over the head. With so much weight on board, Trixie couldn't possibly rise on its hind legs to munch on leaves on tree branches. Note also the beak, it looks perfectly adapted for collecting grass. It means that the Cretaceous landscape was probably similar to our world. We don't know if there existed the kind of biome we call today "savanna" -- a mix of grass and trees, but surely the land was shared by forests and grass, each biome with its typical fauna. 



The Great Cooling and the Rise of C4 Grass

At the end of the Cretaceous period, 66 million years ago, a new large igneous province appeared in the Deccan region, in India. It generated another climate disaster with the associated mass extinction. Most dinosaurs were wiped out, except those we call "birds" today. A large meteorite also hit Earth at that time. It caused only minor damage but, millions of years later, it gave human filmmakers a subject to explore in many dramatic movies. 

In time, the Deccan LIP faded away, and the era that followed is called the "Cenozoic." The ecosystem recovered, forests re-colonized the land, and mammals and birds (the only survivors of the Dinosauria clade) fought to occupy the ecological niches left free by their old masters. The early Cenozoic was a warm period of lush forests that offered refuge to a variety of animals: birds made their nests in branches, while squirrels and other small mammals jumped from branch to branch, or lived at the bottom. It is during this period that primates evolved: the huge forests of those times offered refuge for a variety of species that had probably already developed sophisticated social behaviors.  

Grass also survived the end-Cretaceous catastrophe. As a result, some mammals evolved into new "megaherbivores" or "megafauna" that occupied the same ecological niche that the triceratopsides had colonized long before.  Here is a brontotherium, a large herbivorous mammal that lived some 37-35 million years ago, during the late Eocene period (image from BBC).

The megabeasts of the Cenozoic do not have the same fascination of the giant dinosaurs, but this creature has a nice-sounding name, and it looks like Shrek, the ogre of Spielberg's movie. Note how the beast is correctly shown walking on a grassy plain. The Eocene is supposed to have been mostly forested, but grass existed, too. The brontotherium was an opportunistic herbivore, apparently able to subsist on various kinds of food, not just grass. 

During the warm phase of the Cenozoic, Earth reached a maximum temperature around 55 million years ago, some 8-12 deg C higher than today. The concentration of CO2, too, was large. That is called the "early Eocene climatic optimum". It doesn't mean that this period was better than other periods in terms of climate, but it seems that Earth was mainly covered with lush forests and that the biosphere thrived.  

Then, the atmosphere started cooling. It was a descent that culminated at the Eocene-Oligocene boundary, about 34 million years ago, with a new mass extinction. It was a relatively small event in comparison to other, more famous, mass extinctions, but still noticeable enough that the Swiss paleontologist Hans Georg Stehlin gave it the name of the "Grande Coupure" (the big break) in 1910. One of the victims was the brontotherium -- too bad!

Unlike other cases, the extinction at the Grande Coupure was not correlated to the warming created by a LIP, but to rapid cooling. You see the "step" in temperature decline in the figure. 



Why the big cooling? The answer is not completely known. Surely, the cooling was correlated to a decline in the CO2 content in the atmosphere and that, in turn, may have been generated by the collision of the Indian plate with Eurasia. It was a gigantic geological event that generated the Himalayan mountain belt. It exposed huge amounts of fresh rock to the atmosphere, and the result was the removal of CO2 because of silicate erosion and weathering. The Himalaya hypothesis is one of those explanations that seem to make a lot of sense, but it has big problems

Another possible explanation is that Earth just outgassed less CO2 than before. The CO2 that plants need for their photosynthesis is generated mainly at the mid-oceanic ridges where the hot mantle (the molten rock layer below Earth's crust) outgasses it, as it has been doing for billions of years. It may well be that the mantle is getting a little colder over the eons, so it outgasses less CO2 than before. It may be true, but it seems to be a weak effect -- not enough to explain the CO2 decline of the Cenozoic.

In my opinion, the most likely hypothesis is that the CO2 concentration declined because of higher biological productivity not just on land, but also in the sea (as it seems to be implied in a recent study)
In other words, the early Cenozoic may have been so booming with life of all kinds that it absorbed more CO2 from the atmosphere than the mantle could replace by outgassing. The result was the cooling phase. The abrupt step at "Grande Coupure" may be related to the evolution of a specific life form: baleen whales, which changed the equilibria of the whole marine ecosystem, drawing down even more CO2 from the atmosphere.

This interpretation agrees with the fact that ice ages are often observed after LIPs. It may be one of the many cycles of the ecosphere. So, when a major LIP appears, the rise of CO2 is disastrous at the beginning but, in the long run, it gives the biosphere a chance to rebound and expand in a CO2 rich system.  Then, the rebound generates its own doom: the abundant biological productivity draws down CO2 from the atmosphere, cools the planet, and the system finds itself CO2-starved again. In this interpretation, the Eocene cooling and the Grande Coupure were long-term consequences of the Deccan LIP that had destroyed the dinosaurs, millions of years before. I hasten to note that this is just one of the several possible interpretations but, in my opinion, it makes a lot of sense.    

The Eocene cooling had profound effects on forests. First, the CO2 decline gave an advantage to those plants which utilized a more efficient photosynthesis mechanism called the "C4" pathway. Earlier on, the standard photosynthesis mechanism (called "C3") had evolved in an atmosphere rich in CO2. The C3 mechanism is efficient in processing carbon dioxide, but it is hampered by the opposite process called "photorespiration," which becomes important when the CO2 concentration is low. Using the C4 mechanism, plants can concentrate CO2 in the cells where photosynthesis occurs and avoid the losses by photorespiration. 

C4 plants appeared shortly after the Grande Coupure and diffused mainly in grasses, Trees, instead, didn't adopt the new mechanism. The explanation is subtle: photosynthesis needs water, and the process that goes on in leaves is strongly connected to the evapotranspiration mechanism. The C4 mechanism needs less water than the C3 one, so evapotranspiration is hampered. The result is that C4 trees could not be as tall as the ordinary C3 ones, and so they are not favored by natural selection in forests. In an atmosphere of very low CO2, forests are disadvantaged because of the higher photosynthesis efficiency of grasses. 

During the period that followed the Grande Coupure, temperatures and CO2 concentrations remained stable, but at relatively low levels. The result was that many forests disappeared, replaced by grasslands and savannas. Herbivorous species evolved teeth more specialized for grazing and became "mega-herbivorous" species. The landscape must have become similar to the modern one, with patches of forests alternating with savannas. 


A typical savanna ecosystem: the Tarangire national park in Tanzania. (Image From Wikipedia). Compare with the forest image at the beginning of this post. 


Despite the expansion of savannas, rainforests continued to exist in the tropical regions. Conifer forests kept a foothold in the Northern regions, helped by their Ectomycorrhiza system that avoided the runoff of nutrients in winter. The boreal forest is also called "Taiga." 

Then, a new cooling phase started, apparently a continuation of the previous trend: cooling begets more cooling. It was the beginning of the "Pleistocene," a period of unstable climate with ice ages and interglacials following each other, triggered by small oscillations in solar irradiation caused by the characteristics of Earth's orbit. These oscillations are called "Milankovich Cycles" -- they are not the cause of the ice ages, just triggers. (Image Source).




The oscillations are caused by ice having a built-in albedo feedback so that the more ice expands, the more sunlight is directly reflected into space. That causes the temperature to decline and ice to expand even more. Taken to its extreme consequences, this mechanism may lead to the "Snowball Earth" condition, with ice covering the whole planet's surface. It may have happened for real during the "Cryogenian" period, some 600 million years ago. Fortunately, there were mechanisms able to re-heat Earth and return it to the conditions we consider "normal." 

During the Pleistocene, the CO2 concentration in Earth's atmosphere plunged to very low levels, especially during the glacial periods, when it reached levels as low as around 150 parts per million (ppm). Earth may have inched close to a new snowball Earth but, fortunately, that didn't happen. In part, it may be because the sun, today, is about 5% hotter than it was during the Cryogenian. But we will never know how close Gaia got to freezing to death. 

During the Pleistocene, the advancing ice sheets swept away all plants, but even in non-glaciated areas, forests suffered badly.  Tropical rainforests didn't disappear, but they were much reduced in extension. In the North, most of the Eurasian boreal forests were replaced by the "mammoth steppe," a huge area that went from Spain to Kamchatka. where mammoths and other mega-herbivores roamed. 



It is not impossible that an ice age colder than the Pleistocene average could have led to the eventual extinction of the forests, completely replaced by grasses. But that didn't happen, and things were going to change again. 


The Rise of the Savanna Monkeys  

Primates are arboreal creatures that evolved in the warm environment of the Eocene forests. They used tree branches as a refuge, and they could adapt to various kinds of food. From the viewpoint of these ancient primates, the shrinking of the area occupied by tropical forests was a disaster. They were not equipped to live in savannas: slow on the ground, they would be just an easy lunch for the powerful predators of the time. Primates also never colonized the northern taiga. It was probably not because they couldn't live in cold environments (some modern monkeys can do that), but because they couldn't cross the "mammoth steppe" that separated Tropical forests from the Northern forests. So, "boreal monkeys" do not exist (actually, there is one, but it is not exactly a monkey!).  

Yet, during the Pleistocene, the shrinking of the tropical forests forced some monkeys to move into the savanna, leaving their comfortable living on tree branches. The Australopythecines, (image source) appeared about 4 million years ago. We may call them the first "savanna monkeys." The first creatures that we classify as belonging to the genus Homo, the homo habilis, appeared some 2.8 million years ago. They were also savanna dwellers. 

The savanna monkeys won the game of survival by means of a series of evolutionary innovations. They increased their body size for better defense, they developed an erect stance to have a longer field of view, they super-charged their metabolism by getting rid of their body hair and using profuse sweating for cooling, they developed complex languages to create social groups for collective defense, and they learned how to make stone tools adaptable to different situations. Finally, they developed a tool that no animal on Earth had mastered before: fire. Over a few hundred thousand years, they spread all over the world from their initial base in a small area of Central Africa. The savanna monkeys, now called "Homo sapiens," were a stunning evolutionary success. The consequences on the ecosystem were enormous.

First, the savanna monkeys exterminated most of the megafauna. The only large mammals that survived the onslaught were those living in Africa, where they had the time to adapt to the new predator as it evolved. For instance, the large ears of the African elephant are a cooling system destined to make elephants able to cope with the incredible stamina of human hunters. But in Eurasia, North America, and Australia, the arrival of the newcomers was so fast and so unexpected that most of the large animals were wiped out. 

By eliminating the megaherbivores, the monkeys had, theoretically, given a hand to the competitors of grass, forests, which now had an easier time encroaching on grassland without seeing their saplings trampled. But the savanna monkeys had also taken the role of megaherbivores. They used fires with great efficiency to clear forests to make space for the game they hunted. In the book "1491" Charles Mann reports (. p 286) how "rather than domesticating animals for meat, Indians retooled ecosystems to encourage elk, deer, and bear. Constant burning of undergrowth increased the number of herbivores, the predators that fed on them, and the people who ate them both."  Later, as they developed metallurgy, the monkeys were able to cut down entire forests to make space for the cultivation of the grass species that they had domesticated meanwhile: wheat, rice, maize, oath, and many others. 

But the savanna monkeys were not necessarily enemies of the forests. In parallel to agriculture, they also managed entire forests as food sources. The story of the chestnut forests of North America is nearly forgotten today but, about one century ago, the forests of the region were largely formed of chestnut trees planted by Native Americans as a source of food (image source). By the start of the 20th century, the forest was devastated by the "chestnut blight," a fungal disease that came from China. It is said that some 3-4 billion chestnut trees were destroyed and, now, the chestnut forest doesn't exist anymore. The American chestnut forest is not the only example of a forest managed, or even created, by humans. Even the Amazon rainforest, sometimes considered an example of a "natural" forest, shows evidence of having been managed by the Amazonian Natives in the past as a source of food and other products. 

The action of the savanna monkeys was always massive and, in most cases, it ended in disaster. Even the oceans were not safe from the monkeys: they nearly managed to exterminate the baleen whales, turning large areas of the oceans into deserts. On land, entire forests were razed to the ground. Desertification ensued, brought upon by "megadroughts" when the rain cycle was no more controlled by the forests. Even when the monkeys spared a forest, they often turned it into a monoculture, subjected to be destroyed by pests, as the case of the American chestnuts shows. Yet, in a certain sense, the monkeys were making a favor to forests. Despite the huge losses to saws and hatchets, they never succeeded in completely exterminating a tree species, although some are critically endangered nowadays. 

The most important action of the monkeys was their habit of burning sedimented carbon species that had been removed from the ecosphere long before. The monkeys call these carbon species "fossil fuels" and they have been going on an incredible burning bonanza using the energy stored in this ancient carbon without the need of going through the need of the slow and laborious photosynthesis process. In so doing, they raised the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere to levels that had not been seen for tens of millions of years before. That was welcome food for the trees, which are now rebounding from their former distress during the Pleistocene and reconquering the lands they had lost to grass. In the North of Eurasia, the Taiga is expanding and gradually eliminating the old mammoth steppe. Areas that today are deserts are likely to become green. We are already seeing the trend in the Sahara desert. 

What the savanna monkeys could do was probably a surprise for Gaia herself, who must be now scratching her head and wondering what has happened to her beloved Earth. And what's going to happen now?  


The New Large Igneous Province made by Monkeys

The giant volcanic eruptions called LIPs tend to appear with periodicities of the order of tens or hundreds of million years. But nobody can predict a LIP and, instead, the savanna monkeys engaged in the remarkable feat of creating a LIP-equivalent by burning huge amounts of organic ("fossil") carbon that had sedimented underground over tens or hundreds of millions of years of biological activity. 

It is remarkable how rapid the monkey LIP (MLIP) has been. Geological LIPS typically span millions of years. The MLIP went through its cycle in a few hundreds of years. It will be over when the concentration of fossil carbon stored in the crust will become too low to self-sustain the combustion with atmospheric oxygen. Just like all fires, the great fire of fossil carbon will end when it runs out of fuel, probably in less than a century from now. Even in such a short time, the concentration of CO2 is likely to reach, and perhaps exceed, levels never seen after the Eocene, some 50 million years ago.  

There is always the possibility that such a high carbon concentration in the atmosphere will push Earth over the edge of stability and kill Gaia by overheating the planet. But that's not a very interesting scenario, so let's examine the possibility that the biosphere will survive the carbon pulse. What's going to happen to the ecosphere?

The savanna monkeys are likely to be the first victims of the CO2 pulse that they themselves generated. Without the fossil fuels they had come to rely on, their numbers are going to decline very rapidly. From the incredible number of 8 billion individuals, they may return to levels typical of their early savanna ancestors: maybe just a few tens of thousands. Quite possibly, they'll go extinct. In any case, they will hardly be able to keep their habit of razing down entire forests. Without monkeys engaged in the cutting business and with high concentrations of CO2, forests are advantaged over savannas, and they are likely to recolonize the land. We are going to see again a lush, forested planet where arboreal monkeys will probably survive and thrive. Nevertheless, savannas will not disappear. They are part of the ecosystem, and new megaherbivores will evolve in a few hundreds of thousands of years. 

Over deep time, the great cycle of warming and cooling may restart after the monkey LIP, just as it does for geological LIPs. In a few million years, Earth may be seeing a new cooling cycle that will lead again to a Pleistocene-like series of ice ages. At that point, new savanna monkeys may evolve. They may restart their habit of exterminating the megafauna, burning forests, and building things in stone. But they won't have the same abundance of fossil fuel that the monkeys called "Homo sapiens" found when they emerged into the savannas. So, their impact on the ecosystem will be smaller, and they won't be able to create a new monkey-LIP. 

And then what? In deep time, the destiny of Earth is determined by the slowly increasing solar irradiation that is going, eventually, to eliminate the oxygen from the atmosphere and sterilize the biosphere, maybe in less than a billion years from now. So, we may be seeing more cycles of warming and cooling before Earth's ecosystem collapses. At that point, there will be no more forests, no more animals, and only single-celled life may persist. It has to be. Gaia, poor lady, is doing what she can to keep the biosphere alive, but she is not all-powerful. And not immortal, either. 

Nevertheless, the future is always full of surprises, and you should never underestimate how clever and resourceful Gaia is. Think of how she reacted to the CO2 starvation of the past few tens of millions of years. She came up with not just one, but two brand-new photosynthesis mechanisms designed to operate at low CO2 concentrations: the C4 mechanism typical of grasses, and another one called crassulacean acid metabolism (CAM). To say nothing about how the fungal-plant symbiosis in the rhizosphere has been evolving with new tricks and new mechanisms. You can't imagine what the old lady may concoct in her garage together with her Elf scientists (those who also work part-time for Santa Claus). 

Now, what if Gaia invents something even more radical in terms of photosynthesis? One possibility would be for trees to adopt the C4 mechanism and create new forests that would be more resilient against low CO2 concentrations. But we may think of even more radical innovations. How about a light fixation pathway that doesn't just work with less CO2, but that doesn't even need CO2? That would be nearly miraculous but, remarkably, that pathway exists. And it has been developed exactly by those savanna monkeys who have been tinkering -- and mainly ruining -- the ecosphere. 

The new photosynthetic pathway doesn't even use carbon molecules but does the trick with solid silicon (the monkeys call it "photovoltaics"). It stores solar energy as excited electrons that can be kept for a long time in the form of reduced metals or other chemical species. The creatures using this mechanism don't need carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, don't need water, they may get along even without oxygen. What the new creatures can do is hard to imagine for us (although we may try). In any case, Gaia is a tough lady, and she may survive much longer than we may imagine, even to a sun hot enough to torch the biosphere to cinders. Forests, too, are Gaia's creatures, and she is benevolent and merciful (not always, though), so she may keep them with her for a long, long time. (and, who knows, she may even spare the Savanna Monkeys from her wrath!). 


We may be savanna monkeys, but we remain awed by the majesty of forests. The image of a fantasy forest from Hayao Miyazaki's movie, "Mononoke no Hime" resonates a lot with us. But can you see the mistake in this image? What makes this forest not a real forest? 


__________________________



Note: You always write what you would like to read, and that's why I wrote this post. But, of course, this is a work in progress. I am tackling a subject so vast that I can't possibly hope to be sufficiently expert in all its facets to avoid errors, omissions, and wrong interpretations. Corrections from readers who are more expert than me are welcome! I would also like to thank Anastassia Makarieva for all she taught me about the biotic pump and about forests in general, and Mihail Voytehov for his comments about the rhizosphere. Of course, all mistakes in this text here are mine, not theirs.



Sunday, April 17, 2022

Veritatem Dies Aperit: Time Reveals the Truth

 


The Resurrection of Christ -- by Piero della Francesca (ca. 1465 AD).


The Roman Philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca lived in difficult times, not unlike ours. Then, as now, a Great Empire was starting to follow a road that would eventually lead to its final collapse. That was clear for those who could see beyond the veil of lies that pervaded everything, then as now. 

Seneca could never really face the ultimate consequences of what he was seeing, but sometimes he peered into the future, and he saw a better world that was to come. In his "De Ira" (about rage), Seneca wrote "Dandum semper est tempus: veritatem dies aperit." (There is always time, and the days disclose the truth). 

Seneca was also a contemporary of Jesus Christ. It is likely that neither knew of each other, but they shared one thing: the need for truth. Christ went beyond Seneca when he said, "I am the way, the truth, and the life." Seneca was still a man of the past, Christ was the future. 

There will be a moment when the mass of lies that surround us will collapse and fade away. On the day of resurrection, the day of Easter in Christianity, truth is revealed, and we might discover that it was always in front of us. 

Happy Easter, everyone! 


Monday, April 11, 2022

Descending to Hell: What's Happening to Humankind?

 

Shanghai residents locked inside their apartments, venting their rage by screaming in the night.  


This is truly beyond the pale. The wave of madness that descended upon us during the past two years was already unbelievable as it was. But it is getting worse. Much worse. The Shanghai lockdown has no justification whatsoever: 90% of the people who tested positive show no symptoms, and worldometer reports zero mortality. Maybe it is not exactly zero, but compared to one billion and a half Chinese people, you can surely take that number as a good approximation. 

What we are seeing has nothing to do with containing an epidemic. We don't know what the people are screaming, it may be rage, they may be cheering at each other. Impossible to say, but the scene looks like the starting scene of a horror movie, with the zombies locked inside their cages, rattling at the bars while trying to escape. I read that sometimes it happens in jail that the inmates start screaming together, rhythmically. It is like that, just on a much larger scale, the entire city of Shanghai. Has the whole world became a jail? It looks like a scientific experiment with rats. Have we become rats? Have we descended to Hell? What is left of human dignity? Human rights? Human life? 

We seem to have overcome some kind of unknown threshold. There had never been 8 billion people on Earth. And 8 billion people had never been connected in a single planetary communication network. Nobody can know what may happen when something that had never happened before happens. 

The impression is that the whole system is going unstable. If you see humankind as a complex system, then you know that moves as the result of a tangle of internal feedback effects. And we know that when a system is sufficiently large, feedbacks can perversely gang up together to collaborate in bringing the system down. It is the essence of the Seneca Effect (growth is sluggish, but ruin is rapid). 

In this case, the system may simply have become too big to be under anyone or anything's control. The feedbacks are untangling themselves, by themselves, like in a giant Jenga tower starting to fall. The immense creature quivers, moves, oscillates, bumps up and down as it mashes information flows that push it in one direction or another. It is a planetary-sized zombie. It doesn't know where it is going, it just moves on, crushing everything it steps on. 

And now what? We don't know. Nobody knows. But the same Seneca who said that "ruin is rapid" also said that "veritatem dies aperit," or "time discloses the truth." There will be better times in the future. There always are.  


Monday, April 4, 2022

God is dead, and Gaia is not that well either. Who Remains to Defend Humankind?




Meeting the Goddess Gaia in a Supermarket, Italy. Frankly, as a mystical experience, it left much to be desired.



On September 13, 258, Cyprian, bishop of Carthage, was imprisoned on the orders of the new proconsul, Galerius Maximus. The public examination of Cyprian has been preserved.


Galerius Maximus: "Are you Thascius Cyprianus?" 
Cyprian: "I am." 
Galerius: "The most sacred Emperors have commanded you to conform to the Roman rites." 
Cyprian: "I refuse." 
Galerius: "Take heed for yourself." 
Cyprian: "Do as you are bid; in so clear a case I may not take heed." 
Galerius, after briefly conferring with his judicial council, with much reluctance pronounced the following sentence: "You have long lived an irreligious life, and have drawn together a number of men bound by an unlawful association, and professed yourself an open enemy to the gods and the religion of Rome; and the pious, most sacred and august Emperors ... have endeavoured in vain to bring you back to conformity with their religious observances; whereas therefore you have been apprehended as principal and ringleader in these infamous crimes, you shall be made an example to those whom you have wickedly associated with you; the authority of law shall be ratified in your blood." He then read the sentence of the court from a written tablet: "It is the sentence of this court that Thascius Cyprianus be executed with the sword." 
Cyprian: "Thanks be to God.”

There are plenty of documents about martyrs from early Christianity that look to us naive and exaggerated. But this one, no. This is so stark, so dramatic, so evident. You can see in your mind these two men, the Imperial procurer Galerius Maximus and the Bishop of Carthage, Thascius Cyprian, facing each other in anger, a clash that reminds to us the story of the aircraft carrier that tried to order a lighthouse to move away. It was an unstoppable force, the carrier, meeting an unmovable object, the lighthouse. It is the kind of clash that leads to human lives blown away like fallen leaves in the wind. 

Galerius plays the role of the carrier, bristling with weapons, power, and movement. He is not evil. He does what he has to do. For him, just as for most Romans of the time, performing the "sacred rituals" was a simple way to show that one was part of society, willing to do one's duty. It implied little more than small offerings to the Roman deities. Doing that was the basis of the virtue carried "pietas," that later Christians would call "Caritas" and that in our terminology we might call "empathy." Why would anyone refuse to do such a simple thing? He had to be truly evil, wicked, and a criminal. 

But Galerius must also have seen that he had a force in front of him that he could not possibly overcome. The lighthouse doesn't move. It cannot be moved. A man like Cyprianus, alone, was worth more than a Roman Legion. It was worth more than all the Roman Legions. A few decades later, the Empire would be ruled by a Christian Emperor, Constantine. More decades in the future, the Empire would collapse and be replaced by Christianity to start the flowering of that delicate and sophisticated civilization we call the "Middle Ages" in Europe.

In the end, the essence of the conflict that put Galerius and Cyprianus in front of each other was about the role of a totalitarian state. By the 3rd century AD, when this story took place, the Roman Empire had been a totalitarian state for at least three centuries. "Totalitarian" means that there is nothing, strictly nothing, that can stop the state from doing what the state wants to do and that the state itself defines as "the law". In the Roman laws, there was no such thing as "human rights," and nothing like a "Constitution." The law was the law, and it had to be obeyed. But who created the law? On what principles? For what purposes? It was a difficult point that needed to be clarified.

It was only much later that the Roman Emperors started understanding that the laws that they cherished so much had been turned into a tool of oppression and mistreatment of the poor and the weak. It was Empress Galla Placidia the first to say that "That the Emperor profess to be bound by the laws is a sentiment worthy of the ruler's majesty, so much is our power dependent on the power of law and indeed that the imperial office be subject to the laws is more important than the imperial power itself."  It was the way to go, but too late. Galla Placidia was not only the last Western Empress, she was the last person who actually ruled the Western Empire. When she was gone, the Empire collapsed like a house of cards. 

If Christianity won the struggle for the souls and minds of the Europeans of the 1st millennium of our era, the state was eventually to return with the age that today we call the "enlightenment" -- a curious mockery of a religious concept for an entity, the state, which recognizes none. Nowadays, we tend to see religion as a set of various superstitions, something that gives people some delusionary belief about the after-death world, maybe some philosophic reasoning on how to live a virtuous life; and don't do that or you'll go blind! But if you think about the clash between Galerius and Cyprianus, you see that it was a completely different story. Religion was a tool to defend people from the arbitrary laws of the totalitarian state. Christianity established the basic dignity of every human being and gave people an alternative social and cultural structure. The holy books were the "Constitution" of the Christian state. 

Over the years, this concept of what it means to be a Christian in a secular state was gradually lost. The last time when Christianity and the State clashed against each other in a serious struggle was with the "Controversy of Valladolid," when the Christian Church tried to prevent the European States from enslaving and exterminating the Native Americans. It was a hollow victory for the Church, and it led, eventually, to its disappearance as an independent force in the Europe we call "modern." Under the onslaught of the state propaganda, the roles in the struggle were completely inverted, and the fault for the extermination of the population of two entire continents fell straight on the Church, exactly the entity that had tried to defend the natives. We thought that the evils of the return of totalitarian states could be kept at bay using tools operating within the state itself: opposition parties, constitutional laws, statements about human rights, and the like. 

It didn't work, Today, we find ourselves in exactly the same situation as when Emperor Decius imposed on every Roman Citizen to demonstrate his/her pietas by performing sacrifices to the sacred deity that, in our case, is called "science." But, unlike the times of Decius, we have nothing to oppose to the totalitarian machine of the state that is marching on to crush all of us. Right now, there is no Cyprian to stand for the people and accept martyrdom in the name of human rights.  

I have been thinking a lot about the Gaian religion, fashionable among Western intellectuals. Would Gaianism play the same role in our age that Christianity played nearly two millennia ago? Would anyone follow the example of Cyprianus and offer his or her life in the name of Gaia? Right now, obviously not. Gaians had a good occasion with the Covid story to take an independent position about an issue that ordinary Christians were not equipped to face. Over history, facing an epidemic, Christianity could only say that it was the result of the wrath of God because someone had sinned heavily. Gaianism, instead, has much more powerful intellectual tools that could have been used. Gaians could have told people that they were damaging their health just while trying to save themselves. That their immune system is a gift from Gaia herself that they must keep strong by keeping it in contact with the external environment. Exactly the opposite of trying to isolate themselves by wearing masks, disinfecting everything, and keeping social distance. 

Unfortunately, that didn't happen, and Gaianism remained little more than a vaporous set of "green" feelings and feel-good recommendations. But it is shallow, lightweight, and easily blown away by the first serious blast of propaganda created by the state machine. And yet we desperately need something that will save us from being crushed by these monstrous machines. Will Gaia ever gain the strength of Christianity? Right now, I am doubtful, but also not without some hope. Things always change, sometimes very fast. 

Here is a reflection on Gaianism that I published two years ago on my "Chimeras" blog when the situation was not yet as dramatic as it is today. 

Gaia, the Return of the Earth Goddess





House founded by An, praised by Enlil, given an oracle by mother Nintud! A house, at its upper end a mountain, at its lower end a spring! A house, at its upper end threefold indeed. Whose well-founded storehouse is established as a household, whose terrace is supported by Lahama deities; whose princely great wall, the shrine of Urim! (the Kesh temple hymn, ca. 2600 BCE)

Not long ago, I found myself involved in a debate on Gaian religion convened by Erik Assadourian. For me, it was a little strange. For the people of my generation, religion is supposed to be a relic of the past, the opium of the people, a mishmash of superstitions, something for old women mumbling ejaculatory prayers, things like that. But, here, a group of people who weren't religious in the traditional sense of the word, and who included at least two professional researchers in physics, were seriously discussing how to best worship the Goddess of Earth, the mighty, the powerful, the divine, the (sometimes) benevolent Gaia, She who keeps the Earth alive.

It was not just unsettling, it was a deep rethinking of many things I had been thinking. I had been building models of how Gaia could function in terms of the physics and the biology we know. But here, no, it was not Gaia the holobiont, not Gaia the superorganism, not Gaia the homeostatic system. It was Gaia the Goddess.

And here I am, trying to explain to myself why I found this matter worth discussing. And trying to explain it to you, readers. After all, this is being written in a blog titled "Chimeras" -- and the ancient Chimera was a myth about a creature that, once, must have been a sky goddess. And I have been keeping this blog for several years, see? There is something in religion that remains interesting even for us, moderns. But, then, what is it, exactly?

I mulled over the question for a while and I came to the conclusion that, yes, Erik Assadourian and the others are onto something: it may be time for religion to return in some form. And if religion returns, it may well be in the form of some kind of cult of the Goddess Gaia. But let me try to explain

What is this thing called "religion," anyway?

Just as many other things in history that go in cycles, religion does that too. It is because religion serves a purpose, otherwise it wouldn't have existed and been so common in the past. So what is religion? It is a long story but let me start from the beginning -- the very beginning, when, as the Sumerians used to say "Bread was baked for the first time in the ovens".

A constant of all ancient religions is that they tell us that whatever humans learned to do -- from fishing to having kings -- it was taught to them by some God who took the trouble to land down from heaven (or from wherever Gods come from) just for that purpose. Think of when the Sumerian Sea-God called Aun (also Oannes in later times) emerged out of the Abzu (that today we call the abyss) to teach people all the arts of civilization. It was in those ancient times that the Gods taught humans the arts and the skills that the ancient Sumerians called "me," a series of concepts that went from "music" to "rejoicing of the heart." Or, in more recent lore, how Prometheus defied the gods by stealing fire and giving it to humankind. This story has a twist of trickery, but it is the same concept: human civilization is a gift from the gods. Now, surely our ancestors were not so naive that they believed in these silly legends, right? Did people really need a Fish-God to emerge out of the Persian Gulf to teach them how to make fish hooks and fishnets? But, as usual, what looks absurd hides the meaning of complex questions.

The people who described how the me came from the Gods were not naive, not at all. They had understood the essence of civilization, which is sharing. Nothing can be done without sharing something with others, not even rejoicing in your heart. Think of "music," one of the Sumerian me: can you play music by yourself and alone? Makes no sense, of course. Music is a skill that needs to be learned. You need teachers, you need people who can make instruments, you need a public to listen to you and appreciate your music. And the same is for fishing, one of the skills that Aun taught to humans. Of course, you could fish by yourself and for your family only. Sure, and, in this way, you ensure that you all will die of starvation as soon as you hit a bad period of low catches. Fishing provides abundant food in good times, but fish spoils easily and those who live by fishing can survive only if they share their catch with those who live by cultivating grains. You can't live on fish alone, it is something that I and my colleague Ilaria Perissi describe in our book, "The Empty Sea." Those who tried, such as the Vikings of Greenland during the Middle Ages, were mercilessly wiped out of history.

Sharing is the essence of civilization, but it is not trivial: who shares what with whom? How do you ensure that everyone gets a fair share? How do you take care of tricksters, thieves, and parasites? It is a fascinating story that goes back to the very beginning of civilization, those times that the Sumerians were fond to tell with the beautiful image of "when bread was baked for the first time in the ovens," This is where religion came in, with temples, priest, Gods, and all the related stuff.

Let's make a practical example: suppose you are on an errand, it is a hot day, and you want a mug of beer. Today, you go to a pub, pay a few dollars for your pint, you drink it, and that's it. Now, move yourself to Sumerian times. The Sumerians had plenty of beer, even a specific goddess related to it, called Ninkasi (which means, as you may guess, "the lady of the beer"). But there were no pubs selling beer for the simple reason that you couldn't pay for it. Money hadn't been invented, yet. Could you barter for it? With what? What could you carry around that would be worth just one beer? No, there was a much better solution: the temple of the local God or Goddess.

We have beautiful descriptions of the Sumerian temples in the works of the priestess Enheduanna, among other things, the first named author in history. From her and from other sources, we can understand how in Sumerian times, and for millennia afterward, temples were large storehouses of goods. They were markets, schools, libraries, manufacturing centers, and offered all sorts of services, including that of the hierodules (karkid in Sumerian), girls who were not especially holy, but who would engage in a very ancient profession that didn't always have the bad reputation it has today. If you were so inclined, you could also meet male prostitutes in the temple, probably called "kurgarra" in Sumerian. That's one task in which temples have been engaging for a long time, even though that looks a little weird to us. Incidentally, the Church of England still managed prostitution in Medieval times.

So, you go to the temple and you make an offer to the local God or Goddess. We may assume that this offer would be proportional to both your needs and your means. It could be a goat that we know was roughly proportional to the services of a high-rank hierodule. But, if all you wanted was a beer, then you could have limited your offer to something less valuable: depending on your job you could have offered fish, wheat, wool, metal, or whatever. Then, the God would be pleased and, as a reward, the alewives of the temple would give you all the beer you could drink. Seen as a restaurant, the temple worked on the basis of what we call today an "all you can eat" menu (or "the bottomless cup of coffee," as many refills as you want).

Note how the process of offering something to God was called sacrifice. The term comes from "sacred" which means "separated." The sacrifice is about separation. You separate from something that you perceived as yours which then becomes an offer to the local God or to the community -- most often the same thing. The offerings to the temple could be something very simple: as you see in the images we have from Sumerian times, it didn't always involve the formal procedure of killing a live animal. People were just bringing the goods they had to the temple. When animals were sacrificed to God(s) in the sense that they were ritually killed, they were normally eaten afterward. Only in rare cases (probably not in Sumeria) the sacrificed entity was burnt to ashes. It was the "burnt sacrifice" called Korban Olah in the Jewish tradition. In that case, the sacrifice was shared with God alone -- but it was more of an exception than the rule.

In any case, God was the supreme arbiter who insured that your sacrifice was appreciated -- actually, not all sacrifices were appreciated. Some people might try to trick by offering low-quality goods, but God is not easy to fool. In some cases, he didn't appreciate someone's sacrifices at all: do you remember the story of Cain and Abel? God rejected Cain's sacrifice, although we are not told exactly why. In any case, the sacrifice was a way to attribute a certain "price" to the sacrificed goods.

This method of commerce is not very different than the one we use today, it is just not so exactly quantified as when we use money to attach a value to everything. The ancient method works more closely to the principle that the Marxists had unsuccessfully tried to implement "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs." But don't think that the ancient Sumerians were communists, it is just that the lack of a method of quantification of the commercial transaction generated a certain leeway that could allow the needy access to the surplus available, when it was available. This idea is still embedded in modern religions, think of how the Holy Quran commands the believers to share the water of their wells with the needy, once they have satisfied their needs and those of their animals. Or the importance that the Christian tradition gives to gleaning as a redistribution of the products of the fields. Do you remember the story of Ruth the Moabite in the Bible? That important, indeed.

But there is more. In the case of burnt sacrifices, the value attributed to the goods was "infinite" -- the goods consumed by the flames just couldn't be used again by human beings. It is the concept of Taboo used in Pacific cultures for something that cannot be touched, eaten, or used. We have no equivalent thing in the "market," where we instead suppose that everything has a price.

And then, there came money (the triumph of evil)

The world of the temples of the first 2-3 millennia of human civilizations in the Near East was in some ways alien to ours, and in others perfectly equivalent. But things keep changing and the temples were soon to face competition in a new method of attributing value to goods: money. Coinage is a relatively modern invention, it goes back to mid 1st millennium BCE. But in very ancient times, people did exchange metals by weight -- mainly gold and silver. And these exchanges were normally carried out in temples -- the local God(s) ensured honest weighing. In more than one sense, in ancient times temples were banks and it is no coincidence that our modern banks look like temples. They are temples to a God called "money." By the way, you surely read in the Gospels how Jesus chased the money changers -- the trapezitai -- out of the temple of Jerusalem. Everyone knows that story, but what were the money changers doing in the temple? They were in the traditional place where they were expected to be, where they had been from when bread was baked in ovens for the first time.

So, religion and money evolved in parallel -- sometimes complementing each other, sometimes in competition with each other. But, in the long run, the temples seem to have been the losers in the competition. As currency became more and more commonplace, people started thinking that they didn't really need the cumbersome apparatus of religion, with its temples, priests, and hierodules (the last ones were still appreciated, but now were paid in cash). A coin is a coin is a coin, it is guaranteed by the gold it is made of -- gold is gold is gold. And if you want a good beer, you don't need to make an offer to some weird God or Goddess. Just pay a few coppers for it, and that's done.

The Roman state was among the first in history to be based nearly 100% on money. With the Romans, temples and priests had mainly a decorative role, let's say that they had to find a new market for their services. Temples couldn't be commercial centers any longer, so they reinvented themselves as lofty places for the celebration of the greatness of the Roman Empire. There remained also a diffuse kind of religion in the countryside that had to do with fertility rites, curing sickness, and occasional cursing on one's enemies. That was the "pagan" religion, with the name "pagan" meaning, basically, "peasant."

Paganism would acquire a bad fame in Christian times, but already in Roman times, peasant rites were seen with suspicion. The Romans had one deity: money. An evil deity, perhaps, but it surely brought mighty power to the Romans, but their doom as well, as it is traditional for evil deities. Roman money was in the form of precious metals and when they ran out of gold and silver from their mines, the state just couldn't exist anymore: it vanished. No gold, no empire. It was as simple as that.

The disappearance of the Roman state saw a return of religion, this time in the form of Christianity. The Middle Ages in Europe saw the rise of monasteries to play a role similar to that of temples in Sumerian times. Monasteries were storehouses, manufacturing centers, schools, libraries, and more -- they even had something to do with hierodules. During certain periods, Christian nuns did seem to have played that role, although this is a controversial point. Commercial exchanging and sharing of goods again took a religious aspect, with the Catholic Church in Western Europe playing the role of a bank by guaranteeing that, for instance, ancient relics were authentic. In part, relics played the role that money had played during the Roman Empire, although they couldn't be exchanged for other kinds of goods. The miracle of the Middle Ages in Europe was that this arrangement worked, and worked very well. That is, until someone started excavating silver from mines in Eastern Europe and another imperial cycle started. It is not over to this date, although it is clearly declining.

So, where do we stand now? Religion has clearly abandoned the role it had during medieval times and has re-invented itself as a support for the national state, just as the pagan temples had done in Roman times. One of the most tragic events of Western history is when in 1914, for some mysterious reasons, young Europeans found themselves killing each other by the millions while staying in humid trenches. On both sides of the trenches, Christian priests were blessing the soldiers of "their" side, exhorting them to kill those of the other side. How Christianity could reduce itself to such a low level is one of the mysteries of the Universe, but there are more things in heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy. And it is here that we stand. Money rules the world and that's it.

The Problem With Money

Our society is perhaps the most monetized in history -- money pervades every aspect of life for everyone. The US is perhaps the most monetized society ever: for Europeans, it is a shock to discover that many American families pay their children for doing household chores. For a European, it is like if your spouse were asking you to pay for his/her sexual services. But different epochs have different uses and surely it would be shocking for a Sumerian to see that we can get a beer at the pub by just giving the alewives a curious flat object, a "card," that they then give back to us. Surely that card is a powerful amulet from a high-ranking God.

So, everything may be well in the best of worlds, notoriously represented by the Western version of liberal democracy. Powerful market forces, operated by the God (or perhaps Goddess) called Money or, sometimes, "the almighty dollar," ensure that exchanges are efficient, that scarce resources are optimally allocated, and that everyone has a chance in the search for maximizing his/her utility function.

Maybe. But it may also be that something is rotten in the Great Columned Temple of Washington D.C. What's rotten, exactly? Why can't this wonderful deity we call "money" work the way we would it like to, now that we even managed to decouple it from the precious metals it was made of in ancient times?

Well, there is a problem. A big problem. A gigantic problem. It is simply that money is evil. This is another complex story, but let's just say that the problem with evil and good is that evil knows no limits, while good does. In other words, evil is equivalent to chaos, good to order. It has something to do with the definition of "obscenity." There is nothing wrong in human sex, but an excess of sex in some forms becomes obscene. Money can become obscene for exactly this reason: too much of it overwhelms everything else. Nothing is so expensive that it cannot be bought; that's the result of the simple fact that you can attribute a price to everything.

Instead, God is good because She has limits: She is benevolent and merciful. You could see that as a limitation and theologians might discuss why a being that's all-powerful and all-encompassing cannot be also wicked and cruel. But there cannot be any good without an order of things. And order implies limits of some kind. God can do everything but He cannot do evil. That's a no-no. God cannot be evil. Period.

And here is why money is evil: it has no limits, it keeps accumulating. You know that accumulated money is called "capital," and it seems that many people realize that there is something wrong with that idea because "capitalism" is supposed to be something bad. Which may be but, really, capital is one of those polymorphic words that can describe many things, not all of them necessarily bad. In itself, capital is simply the accumulation of resources for future use -- and that has limits, of course. You can't accumulate more things than the things you have. But once you give a monetary value to this accumulated capital, things change. If money has no limits, capital doesn't, either.

Call it capital or call it money, it is shapeless, limitless, a blob that keeps growing and never shrinks. Especially nowadays that money has been decoupled from material goods (at least in part, you might argue that money is linked to crude oil). You could say that money is a disease: it affects everything. Everything can be associated with a number, and that makes that thing part of the entity we call the "market". If destroying that thing can raise that number, somewhere, that thing will be destroyed. Think of a tree: for a modern economist, it has no monetary value until it is felled and the wood sold on the market. And that accumulates more money, somewhere. Monetary capital actually destroys natural capital. You may have heard of "Natural Capitalism" that's supposed to solve the problem by giving a price to trees even before they are felled. It could be a good idea, but it is still based on money, so it may be the wrong tool to use even though for a good purpose.

The accumulation of money in the form of monetary capital has created something enormously different than something that was once supposed to help you get a good beer at a pub. Money is not evil just in a metaphysical sense. Money is destroying everything. It is destroying the very thing that makes humankind survive: the Earth's ecosystem. We call it "overexploitation," but it means simply killing and destroying everything as long as that can bring a monetary profit to someone.


Re-Sacralizing The Ecosystem (why some goods must have infinite prices)

There have been several proposals on how to reform the monetary system, from "local money" to "expiring money," and some have proposed simply getting rid of it. None of these schemes has worked, so far, and getting rid of money seems to be simply impossible in a society that's as complex as ours: how do you pay the hierodules if money does not exist? But from what I have been discussing so far, we could avoid the disaster that the evil deity called money is bring to us simply by putting a limit to it. It is, after all, what the Almighty did with the devil: She didn't kill him, but confined him in a specific area that we call "Hell." Maybe there is a need for hell to exist, we don't know. For sure, we don't want hell to grow and expand everywhere (although it may well be exactly what we are seeing in the world, nowadays).

What does it mean limits to money? It means that some things must be placed outside the monetary realm -- outside the market. If you want to use a metaphor-based definition, some goods must be declared to have an "infinite" monetary price -- nobody can buy them, not billionaires, not even trillionaires, or any even more obscene levels of monetary accumulation. If you prefer, you may use the old Hawai'ian word: Taboo. Or, simply, you decide that some things are sacred, holy, they are beloved by the Goddess, and even thinking of touching them is evil.

Once something is sacred, it cannot be destroyed in the name of profit. That could mean setting aside some areas of the planet, declaring them not open for human exploitation. Or setting limits to the exploitation, not with the idea of maximizing the output of the system for human use, but with the idea to optimize the biodiversity of the area. These ideas are not farfetched. As an example, some areas of the sea have been declared "whale sanctuaries" -- places where whales cannot be hunted. That's not necessarily an all/zero choice. Some sanctuaries might allow human presence and moderate exploitation of the resources of the system. The point is that as long as we monetize the exploitation, then we are back to monetary capitalism and the resource will be destroyed.

Do we need a religion to do that? Maybe there are other ways but, surely, we know that it is a task that religion is especially suitable for. Religion is a form of communication that uses rituals as speech. Rituals are all about sacralization: they define what's sacred by means of sacrifice. These concepts form the backbone of all religions, everything is neatly arranged under to concept of "sacredness" -- what's sacred is nobody's property. We know that it works. It has worked in the past. It still works today. You may be a trillionaire, but you are not allowed to do everything you want just because you can pay for it. You can't buy the right of killing people, for instance. Nor to destroy humankind's heritage. (So far, at least).

Then, do we need a new religion for that purpose? A Gaian religion?

Possibly yes, taking into account that Gaia is not "God" in the theological sense. Gaia is not all-powerful, she didn't create the world, she is mortal. She is akin to the Demiurgoi, the Daimonoi, the Djinn, and similar figures that play a role in the Christian, Islamic and Indian mythologies. The point is that you don't necessarily need the intervention of the Almighty to sacralize something. Even just a lowly priest can do that, and surely it is possible for one of Her Daimonoi, and Gaia is one.

Supposing we could do something like that, then we would have the intellectual and cultural tools needed to re-sacralize the Earth. Then, whatever is declared sacred or taboo is spared by the destruction wrecked by the money-based process: forests, lands, seas, creatures large and small. We could see this as a new alliance between humans and Gaia: All the Earth is sacred to Gaia, and some parts of it are especially sacred and cannot be touched by money. And not just the Earth, the poor, the weak, and the dispossessed among humans, they are just as sacred and must be respected.

All that is not just a question of "saving the Earth" -- it is a homage to the power of the Holy Creation that belongs to the Almighty, and to the power of maintenance of the Holy Creation that belongs to the Almighty's faithful servant, the holy Gaia, mistress of the ecosystem. And humans, as the ancient Sumerians had already understood, are left with the task of respecting, admiring and appreciating what God has created. We do not worship Gaia, that would silly, besides being blasphemous. But through her, we worship the higher power of God.

Is it possible? If history tells us something is that money tends to beat religion when conflict arises. Gaia is powerful, sure, but can she slay the money dragon in single combat? Difficult, yes, but we should remember that some 2000 years ago in Europe, a group of madmen fought and won against an evil empire in the name of an idea that most thought not just subversive at that time, but even beyond the thinkable. And they believed so much in that idea that they accepted to die for it

In the end, there is more to religion than just fixing a broken economic system. There is a fundamental reason why people do what they do: sometimes we use the anodyne name of "communication," sometimes we use the more sophisticated term "empathy," but when we really understand what we are talking about we may not afraid to use the word "love" which, according to our Medieval ancestors, was the ultimate force that moves the universe. And when we deal with Gaia the Goddess, we may have this feeling of communication, empathy, and love. She may be defined as a planetary homeostatic system, but she is way more than that: it is a power of love that has no equals on this planet. But there are things that mere words cannot express. 

The tao that can be told
is not the eternal Tao
The name that can be named
is not the eternal Name.

The unnamable is the eternally real.
Naming is the origin
of all particular things. Free from desire, you realize the mystery.
Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations.

Yet mystery and manifestations
arise from the same source.
This source is called darkness.

Darkness within darkness.
The gateway to all understanding.




Friday, April 1, 2022

Destroyed by its own Propaganda: How Italy Lost World War II

 


Someday, someone will write a history of the covert psyops of the 20th and 21st centuries. It will surely be a difficult story to unravel, because they are, indeed "covert operations." Yet, it is not impossible to detect certain patterns that repeat all over history's flow. It is an exercise that can help us wade through the tsunami of propaganda we are immersed in, right now. So, rather than delving into the current situation, let me tell you a story of a historical case that we can use as an example. It is a fascinating story, little known outside Italy, but it does tell us how easy it is for a country to self destroy by the wrong use of propaganda, especially with some help from foreign enemy powers. 


Let me tell you the story of how Italy wanted to become a world empire and how it utterly failed at the task, with just a little help from Britain, the Perfidious Albion. We start with the unification of Italy, in 1861, when the Kingdom of Piedmont defeated and annexed the Kingdom of Naples. If that happened, it was because Britain wanted it to happen. 

It was a strategic issue. At that time, Britain controlled the Mediterranean Sea by controlling the two connections with the outside oceans, Gibraltar and the Suez Canal, while maintaining a military base on the island of Malta. By the 1830s, Britain had started having problems with France, which was showing ambitions of expanding into the Mediterranean Region. The British had already been shocked by Napoleon's dash into Egypt, which had threatened their whole domination system. They absolutely wanted to avoid that it could happen again. 

Their solution was shrewd and efficient: creating Italy as a unified country. That strip of land right in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea would function as a barrier to stop French expansion in North Africa. And the beauty of the maneuver was that those perfidious Albionics even managed to convince the French ruler, Emperor Louis Napoleon, to help them in the task. How the French could be conned so easily remains a historical mystery that probably nobody ever will solve. But it may have involved the most beautiful woman of that age, Countess of Castiglione.

No matter how, by 1861, Italy was a reality created by the concerted effort of the major Mediterranean Powers of the time. By 1911, the Italian government claimed its rightful chunk of the North African coast, the region we call today "Libya," and that blocked forever all French attempts to expand to create what could have become a French Lake. The Italians were grateful to Britain and spoke of their "Fratellanza" ("brotherhood") with the British.

Everything was going well in the best of worlds when, in the 1920s, something in the strategic engine started clanking ominously. The British suddenly discovered that Italy was not a tender lover, but rather a courtesan who would obey orders only if paid. And in this case, the payment was to be made in hard coal. 

England had been fueling the Italian industrial revolution for about one century by exporting coal to Italy, but now it found that it could not increase production anymore. In the 1920s, nobody had any idea of what was the role of depletion on mineral production, but it was clear that England couldn't produce enough coal to satisfy the appetite of the growing Italian economy. 

Behaving exactly like a courtesan, Italy then started dallying with another lover, Germany, whose coal production was showing no signs of decline. By 1922, Benito Mussolini had taken power in Italy. By 1926, he was the absolute dictator. In terms of international politics, his knowledge was no more than rudimentary, but it didn't take an especially bright mind to understand that the decline of British coal production gave Italy a unique historical chance. By pivoting on German coal, Italy could push Britain out of the Mediterranean Sea and turn it into an Italian Lake. (if the plan had succeeded, maybe you would be reading these notes in Italian!). 

Seen in this light, what happened in 1939 and onward makes perfect sense. We don't know if Mussolini had a specific plan -- from what we know from the notes of his son-in-law, he seemed to be mainly interested in boasting his overinflated ego, making flamboyant gestures, and throwing his weight around. But, on the whole, the behavior of the Italian government during the first two years of the war made sense if the strategic objective was to dominate the Mediterranean region. 

So, Italy attacked Greece in 1940, with the idea of denying the Greek seaports to Britain. At the same time, the army moved Eastward along the North African Coast to attack Egypt. If the Italians had taken Alexandria, it would have meant for the British to lose the Suez Canal and, with it, perhaps the whole war. 

It is bewildering how these two operations, both strategically sound in themselves, became historical disasters. In Greece, the Italians were bogged down for months in the snowy mountains of Epirus and suffered terrible losses. Eventually, the intervention of Germany forced Greece to surrender. But it was an unbelievable slap in the face for Mussolini who had boasted that "we will break Greece's back!

But it was the North African campaign that sealed the fate of Italy. In a few months, the ill-conceived Italian attack on Egypt turned into a rout. Italy lost more than 100.000 soldiers, most of them taken prisoner. It was a kind of loss that a minor power, such as Italy, could not possibly afford. And, as they say, "the rest is history." 

Now, let's pause for a moment to reflect. How was it that Italy found itself so badly unprepared for a task that its ruler, the Duce, had been, theoretically, preparing for years? Italy was not a great power, but it was an industrialized country with plenty of competence in many fields. Italian technology was renowned, especially in aeronautics. Just read the story of the "Schneider Trophy," a speed competition among seaplanes, to see how Italian engineers could compete with their British and American colleagues. And yet, the Italian Air Force found itself tasked with subduing Britain by using obsolete canvas biplanes. How could that be?

Let me propose an interpretation. It involves a certain degree of fantasy and nobody will ever be able to prove that it is true. But, who knows? After all, Albion IS perfidious, as we all know!

So, let's put ourselves in the shoes of British admiralty in the 1920s. We have this problem. This British-created creature, Italy, that was supposed to be just a counterweight against France, now has started to behave like a golem and to disobey its creators. It needs to be controlled before it is too late. Yes, but how? 

As we enter this line of thought, we find an interesting event. In 1925, there was an "exchange of notes" between Britain and Italy regarding Ethiopia. Known as the "Anglo-Italian Agreement" it essentially said that Ethiopia was part of the Italian sphere of influence. This agreement had a deep strategic significance. Essentially, the British were telling Italians, "go ahead, you can do whatever you want in Ethiopia. We won't stop you" Perfidious Albion? I think so. VERY perfidious

There followed a few years of covert planning for an invasion of Ethiopia. It was not an impossible task in itself, but Italy didn't have the kind of "projecting power" that would have allowed its military to invade and control a remote country that was reachable only by sea. It could be done only with the benevolent blessing of Britain -- which is evidently what the Duce was counting on. But never-ever trust those perfidious British, as all continental Europeans know! How Mussolini could be conned in this way is another of the mysteries of history. We already said that at, the time of the unification of Italy, the French ruler, Louis Napoleon, was controlled by using a beautiful woman. But Mussolini had plenty of women and he was more the power-monger type. Controlling him may have involved playing on his inflated manhood, leading him to see himself as the glorious avenger of a previous defeat of the Italian Army in Ethiopia, at Adwa, in 1896. 

No matter how, by 1934 a major propaganda campaign started in Italy with the idea of convincing the public that it was a good idea to conquer Ethiopia. It involved slander campaigns against Ethiopia, scientific studies showing the inferiority of the black races in comparison to the white ones, and how modern Italians were the true heirs of the noble Roman warriors who had created and defended the greatest empire in history. That kind of thing. The slander campaign implied painting Ethiopians as insects to be exterminated with insecticides (it was done for real, using chemical weapons).


After three years of campaign, the Italian public was completely bamboozled into believing that, yes, their destiny was in the "place in the sun," the way Ethiopia started to be described (as if Italy didn't have enough sun). You have to read the documents of the time to understand how well it worked. People were completely hypnotized. Just imagine yourself in 1934 asking the question, "you know, folks, before we attack Ethiopia, wouldn't it be a good idea to carry out a cost-benefit analysis?And you would discover that propaganda reduces the level of the discussion to that of the most stupid person involved in it. 

Propaganda is like a radio set that you can turn on, but cannot turn off. Once it is on, it keeps blaring its music into your ears at full volume, until you can't hear  -- nor even understand -- any other music. Ethiopia was invaded and conquered in 1935, with the appropriate slaughters, exterminations, destructions, and all that. And the new Italian Empire was. The King of Italy proudly (maybe) wore the crown of the Negus Negesti (king of kings) of Ethiopia. How the King could be conned into doing this is another of the mysteries of the universe, but, evidently, even kings are sensitive to propaganda. It was one of the reasons that led him to lose his throne after that World War 2 was over. 

Back to the Perfidious Albion, you see that Britain was shrewd and practical as usual. In 1935, they could have reneged on the Anglo-Italian agreement of 1925. It would have been easy to stop the Italians: didn't Britannia rule above the waves? Just close the Suez Canal to the Italian supply ships, and block the West African ports. The Italian forces in Ethiopia would have had to surrender in a few months, at best. Or do you think that the Italian Navy would have circumnavigated Africa and steamed all the way to the Indian Ocean to challenge the British Navy? Sure, what could go wrong? What do these roast beefs from Britain know about naval warfare?  

That's the beauty of being truly perfidious. You can manhandle your enemy much more by keeping your word than by reneging it. The bemused British looked at the Italian performance in Ethiopia. Then, when the outnumbered and outgunned Ethiopians surrendered, Albion struck: Embargo of coal and of all mineral commodities against Italy. 

It was another step forward in perfidy. The embargo gave the Fascist propaganda another handle to start with a new vicious campaign. The Italians were in a certain sense correct in being enraged -- actually livid. The British themselves had told them that Ethiopia was part of the Italian sphere of influence, and now they were embargoing Italy for having done exactly what they had said Italy could do. For having done something that other European powers, including Britain, had been doing all the time: conquering and annexing African countries. 

Again, "the rest is history." After the enormous costs of a campaign that involved sending and keeping 400,000 troops in a remote region of the world, Italy almost bled to death in the attempt of keeping its possessions in Ethiopia, weakened by the need of keeping more than 100,000 fully equipped troops there, burdened by the costs of the colonial administration, stuck into an impossible strategic situation in which it was supposed to defend a territory that couldn't be resupplied. The beauty of perfidy is how the results are incomparably bigger than the efforts. 

All this, was because someone, in Italy, decided to start a major propaganda effort in 1934, convincing people that conquering Ethiopia was a good idea. Am I a conspiracy theorist if I say that this idea was "planted" in Italy by a perfidious foreign power? Maybe......

______________________________________________________

This story of an ancient propaganda disaster makes no direct reference to the current world situation. But I guess that my readers are smart enough to understand what I wanted to say. I think we are in a desperate situation. Either we manage to get rid of propaganda, one way or another, or that thing we call the "Western Civilization" is destined to go down the Seneca Cliff, just like the Italian Empire did in 1943. But, whatever happens, it will happen because it had to.

Also, note that my use of the term "Perfidious Albion" does not imply disparaging Britain or anything British. You may have noted that I use the term with a certain degree of admiration, which I think is fully deserved in this case. Bertolt Brecht said once that "it is tiring being evil." Being perfidious is at least elegant! 

Finally, I would mention my uncle, Giovanni Piccinni, who fought in North Africa at the battle of El Alamein as a member of the division Folgore. He was a good man, brave and upright. His only problem was that he had been exposed to the Fascist propaganda so much that he came to believe it completely, and so he never complained having been sent to fight in a hopeless situation from where he managed to come back unscathed, almost miraculously. But so is life -- our minds are fragile things.