A New Paradigm for the Earth's Ecosystem: Anastassia Makarieva Speaks about the Biotic Pump in Florence

https://www.bioticregulation.ru/

 
Everything began with the idea of Charles Darwin of "evolution by natural selection." It was a dangerous idea according to Daniel Dennett, but there was nothing dangerous in it unless you misunderstood it. And we know how it was misunderstood by the various suprematists, racists, white-supremacists, white-man-burdenists, and the like. But Darwin's idea was simple: the biosphere is not static but adapts to changes in the ecosystem. That's all. There is no species in the biosphere that is superior to other species, there is no collective movement towards some kind of "progress" - nothing of the kind. Everything changes to keep the biosphere alive.

Among other things, Darwin's idea (dangerous or not) was the first attempt to understand the functioning of complex systems - among which one of the most complex is the planetary ecosystem. Curiously, the human brain, itself a complex system, often finds it difficult to understand complex systems, there must be some profound reason for this, but let's skip the subject. Rather, the concepts proposed by Darwin have also evolved - or adapted - in time. We are beginning to understand that it is not enough to say that the biosphere adapts to changes, is too simple. This is not how complex systems work. They work through the mechanisms we call feedback where each element of the system influences others.

The step forward came from James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis with their concept of Gaia, a name that describes the fact that the biosphere adapts to changes in the ecosystem and at the same time generates changes in the ecosystem. The adaptation is mutual and two-way. Feedback, in essence.

The concept of Gaia is even more dangerous than that of Darwinian evolution: you can use it as an easy excuse to say that it doesn't matter what we do to the ecosystem, Mother Gaia will take care of everything. Yeah, sure...  But the main problem seems to be that in the current debate opinion leaders are unable to understand the concept of self-regulation of the ecosystem. The debate is broken up into inconsistent and partially (or totally) incompatible ideas. A good example is what is being done in Tuscany, in Italy, where the regional government is declaring the climate emergency while at the same time promoting the construction of a new international airport in Florence. We just can't make it.

But these ideas of ecosystemic regulation are very powerful. If we ever succeed in making them part of the current culture, they offer us the possibility of maneuvering human action within the biosphere and the ecosphere at least limiting the damage, if possible in mutual harmony. At the moment it seems totally impossible, but everything changes and those who don't adapt disappear - as Darwin taught us.

We come now to the work of Gorshkov, Makarieva, and others, who over a couple of decades have developed the concept they call "biotic regulation."  It is a concept similar to that proposed earlier on by Lovelock and Margulis, although Makarieva and Gorshkov are keen to point out that it is not the same thing. Sometimes (but erroneously) Gaia is understood as a "superorganism," a form of biological life. Gaia is not that, but let's skip this topic.

The concept of biotic regulation is a profound synthesis of how the ecosphere works: it emphasizes its regulating power that keeps the ecosystem from straying away from the conditions that make it possible for biological life to exist. From this work comes the idea that the ecosystemic imbalance we call "climate change" is caused only in part by CO2 emissions. Another important factor is the ongoing deforestation.

This is, of course, a controversial position - not to say heretical. Just last week, I read a comment from an Italian climatologist who explicitly said: "The climate crisis is NOT caused by the lack of trees." This would seem to be the prevailing opinion among climatologists in the West, although studies exist (see for example this article in Science of 2016) that show exactly the opposite. The forests cool the Earth not only by sequestering carbon in the form of biomass but because of a biophysical effect related to evapotranspiration. That is, the water evaporates at low altitude from the leaves, causing cooling. It returns the heat when it condenses in the form of clouds, but the heat emissions at high altitudes are more easily dispersed towards space because the main greenhouse gas, the water, exists in very small concentrations. 

Included in the concept of biotic regulation we find the concept of "biotic pump," developed by Gorshkov and Makarieva in 2012, stating that the forests act as "planetary pumping systems" carrying water from the atmosphere above the oceans up to thousands of kilometers inland. The biotic pump mechanism is controversial but, evidently, there must be something that brings water so far into the continents.

Now, everything depends on quantitative factors that are still little known. But, if it is true that the climate is linked in an important way to the forests, and consequently to the biotic pump, then by doing what we are doing to the forests (think of the Amazons), we are destroying one of the fundamental mechanisms of self-regulation of the terrestrial ecosystem. In other words, to fight climate change it is not enough to cut CO2 emissions from fossil fuels, but it is also necessary to reconstitute the forests in an intact form.

The situation is seen as worrisome by a group of Russian researchers who recently produced a document in which they recommend the care of natural ecosystems and stopping deforestation as the main way to combat climate change. In the document, they refer to fossil fuels with a statement that seems to echo the recent piece by Franzen in the New Yorker, "what if we stopped pretending?" That is, they say, "there are objective technological reasons prohibiting the scenario when our civilization would give up using fossil fuels." Then, they go on, saying,

In such a situation, a complex approach to climate problems is necessary - the one not confined to attempts of curbing the anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions like a transition to renewable energy sources, removal of the already accumulated carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by technological means etc. The complex approach must include restoration and protection of natural systems as a major measure, since their degradation can lead to a climatic collapse irrespective of whether fossil fuel burning continues or not. Any considerable strategic solutions will demand huge resources from the humanity. So such solutions should be mutually consistent otherwise the climate situation will just aggravate (for example, increasing the biofuel production can lead to an intensification of deforestation).

Of course, right now, anything coming from Russia is considered propaganda, if not directly contaminated with Novichok. So, the first knee-jerk reaction to this document is likely to be ideological: of course, we have been told that Russia is little more than a service station disguised as a state, so this document can't be anything but a trick to maintain the profits of the Russian oil oligarchs and their great leader, the arch-villain Vladimir Putin.

But are we sure? That is, can we deny that climate change is not just a problem of CO2 but also of other factors related to the mistreatments we are inflicting on the ecosystem? Can we keep the fiction that all we need to do to stop global warming is a carbon tax or some similar trick? Don't we need to rethink our strategies and admit that, if our approach hasn't worked so far, it will never work? Can we learn something important from Russia? And, if this is the case, does restoring the forests give us a way to at least contain the major damage we are creating by using fossil fuels?

Whatever the case, there is a clear perception gap in the way the situation is seen in the West and in Russia. And we have to understand each other if we are to do something to try to stop the upcoming disaster. We talk about this subject with Anastassia Makarieva in Florence on September 17th. 

Can you imagine being a whale? A tale of empathy and communication

From left to right in the photo, Ishmael, Captain Ahab, and Captain Peleg. Actually, the top-hatted, harpoon-bearing person in the center is me (Ugo Bardi) giving a talk on sustainability in Bagnaia, Italy, on July 17, 2019. Near me, Albert Bates (right in the photo) and Simone (left in the photo -- sorry that I don't know his last name).

Some people see whales as nothing more than an economic resource. But, for many of us, whales are an endless source of fascination. Herman Melville, in particular, may have been the first person in history who tried to see the world from the viewpoint of a whale, as he does in his "Moby Dick" novel. It is not an easy task, surely, what can whales see with their small eyes, located the sides of their gigantic heads? But, once you start to follow this line of thought, you discover a whole new world where whales see the world not with their eyes but with their sophisticated sonar system. 

Whales and men are truly alien to each other, even though they had a common ancestor, a furry creature living at the time of the dinosaurs, more than 60 million years ago. From then on, the ancestors of the two species lived in completely different environments, unaware of each other, until the hominin known as "homo sapiens" took to the waters and started a true war on whales. It started perhaps as early as in Neolithic times, but its pace and violence enormously increased in recent times. And the whales are losing it. 

Why this war? Why did we need to erase entire populations of whales, such as the "Right Whale" of which just a few are left alive in the Earth's oceans? The question is deeper than it seems and it can't be solved simply in terms of optimizing the exploitation of an economic resource that just happens to be in the form of a giant sea mammal. Who gave us the right to think of these creatures as resources?

The story is long and it is one of the subjects of the book I am writing with my colleague, Ilaria Perissi, that should be titled "The Empty Sea" (sorry that it will be in Italian). Let me just say that I am working on it on the basis of the concept of "biotic regulation" developed by Victor Gorshkov and Anastassia Makarieva. It can be seen as a "strong" version of the concept of Gaia proposed by James Lovelock. The idea is that all the elements of an ecosystem are tightly coupled with each other and it is that the reason for the ability of the ecosystem to maintain itself in relatively stable conditions. 

Something that Makarieva and Gorshkov don't emphasize is that, in order for the system to work as a control system, the elements composing it must communicate with each other. There follows that if we need to maintain the Earth system reasonably stable, we don't just need to optimize whaling for human needs -- we need to communicate with whales. It means, within some limits, becoming a whale, or at least trying to understand what a whale is. It is, in the end, a question of empathy, not of economics.

I don't claim that all this is completely clear to me, as I said, I am still working on it. Anyway, giving talks on things you don't completely understand -- yet -- is a way to improve. This is what I did last week in Bagnaia where, among other things, I had a chance to meet Albert Bates in person. Albert wrote a comment on my talk that I am reproducing below. As he notes, not everything in this story is completely clear. Indeed, learning is always a journey, not a destination

(h/t Cristina)

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It was a dried gourd that brought whales to the edge of extinction in the 19th Century. 

by Albert Bates - Resilience 

For some time now I have been writing in this space that our Achilles Heel as a species may have come at a fork along our evolutionary biology pathway many millions of years ago. Relatively few others of our fellow creatures decided to follow our lead, and for good reason. We decided to sweat.

Having sweat glands conferred an immediate advantage, the type of advantage our kind also seems to select for, rather than thinking through the more distant implications. Only primates — such as humans, monkeys, and apes — and horses have skin covered by sweat glands to regulate their body temperature through evaporation of water. Maximum sweat rates of an adult human can be 2-4 liters per hour or 10-14 liters per day. Dogs and cats, which have just a few such glands, accomplish temperature regulation by panting, which evaporates water from the moist lining of their oral cavity. Elephants manage it with capillaries in their giant, flapping ears (Woolly Mammoths, unfortunately, lacked those and were hunted to extinction).

As bipedal athletes, our ancestors could not dash as fast as deer, boar, or zebras but had the advantage of sweat. We could keep up a fast pace longer than our prey could. As the prey overheated, they were forced to slow down. As we overheated, we only needed to refill our water reserve— hence the gourd. It became as important as the spear. Fear, anxiety, stress, and pain can also cause us to sweat because our biological instincts kick in and prepare us to run.

Ugo Bardi teaches physical chemistry at the University of Florence, in Italy. I have been following his writing on biophysical economics, system dynamics modeling, and metahistory for more than 20 years. His blog in English is Cassandra’s legacy. His most recent book in English is Extracted: How the Quest for Global Mining Wealth is Plundering the Planet (Chelsea Green 2014). He was also the author of The Limits to Growth Revisited (Springer 2011).

In essays just this month so far, he seems to have debunked the notion that the Roman Empire fell from climate change, but raised the possibility that its fall caused a climate change; described how Earth’s ecosystem controls climate by the biotic pump; how the mountain Ebih “melted into a vat of sheepfat” in the 3rd Millennium BCE; and how in times of crisis the panicked elite do not react with reasoned debate, but with the usual combination of lies, damned lies, and propaganda.

I was delighted to have the chance to experience Ugo in person when he gave a lovely workshop entitled, La Grande Transizione — Da Dove e Per Dove (The Great Transition — From Where and To Where) at the annual convergence of GEN-Europe in Comune di Bagnaia, Italy, this week. What was surprising was not what he said, because he left many of the questions he raised unanswered, but how he lectures.

Describing how Herman Melville developed his empathy for the whale, Bardi donned Ahab’s top hat and fastened his sister-in-law inside a raincoat so that her arms were replaced by empty sleeves for fins, then set out with a spear to chase her around the tent.

How did these small humans in their rowed boats kill these leviathans, he asks. Why didn’t these mammals, who were much faster and stronger, merely swim away? He holds up the gourd.

In whaling, the gourd takes the form of an empty oak cask, attached to a line. If the harpooner can toss a barbed dart into the thick skin of the whale as it passes his boat, the whale is doomed. The barb may cause some superficial bleeding but is not fatal by itself. Attach a cask to its line, however, and now the whale is unable to dive to safety. As it swims, pursued by the rowboat, the drag of the line wears it out. Eventually, the boat overtakes the whale and delivers the coup de grâce, usually by a lance driven through the creature’s heart.

In a 2004 post to the Oil Drum, Bardi wrote:

In his 1878 book, Alexander Starbuck cited several factors for the decline of production of the whale fisheries in times that for him were recent. He seems to have believed that it was not the extermination of the whales that caused the decline but, rather, the increase of the human population which led to “an increase in consumption beyond the power of the fishery to supply.” But it was also clear to him that the cost and the length of voyages had increased beyond reasonable limits. He did cite “the scarcity and shyness of whales” as a problem, but he stops short of saying that the whale stock was depleted beyond recovery. Most likely, the concept of “extinction” was alien to him, as it was to most of his contemporaries.

Our perception problem with crude oil is equivalent to that of Starbuck, and indeed it is perhaps more severe. The concept of the terminal depletion of a mineral resource is alien to us, since there have been no worldwide precedents. In addition, we are apparently just near the midpoint on the production curve, so we still have to experience the peak, the associated price rise, and the decline. What the future has in store is uncertain: perhaps an energy equivalent of the “rock oil” of Starbuck’s times will materialize in the near future. But if it does not materialize we will have to live with depletion and before long begin to see lamps going out.

So what is our lesson here? Bardi never really got to that, but my takeaway was that we humans have immense technological hubris but little empathy. Bardi said we have developed empathy for honeybees, pandas, and whales but are unlikely to do that for mosquitoes and cockroaches. Unless we can imagine ourselves within the web of life, instead of seeing ourselves as its masters, we are doomed.

I think we risk destruction by many separate routes. We can fill our gourds to slake our thirst, but these days the water is likely contaminated with microplastics. The plastic spear Bardi used to illustrate his whale story is killing more whales now when it is discarded than Ahab could have with forged iron at the tip of a wooden pole.

One real problem we will face stems from that evolutionary decision about sweat glands that our ancestors made.

Orcas, thanks to subcutaneous fat stores, can withstand water temperatures ranging from 0° to 30–35°C (32–95°F). Certain species of tardigrade, including Mi. tardigradum, can withstand and survive temperatures ranging from –273 °C (near absolute zero) to 150 °C in their anhydrobiotic state. Humans have no such tolerance.

Certain sharks, tuna, billfishes, birds and mammals, including ourselves, are endothermic, or “warm-blooded” in common parlance. We have a larger number of mitochondria per cell than ectotherms, enabling us to generate heat by increasing the rate at which we metabolize fats and sugars. If we get too hot, we sweat. If we get too cold, we shiver, sit in strong sunlight, bundle in furs, or burn fat faster.

To sustain higher metabolism, we need several times the food intake of ectothermic animals. Endothermism has its advantages, such as a constant core temperature for optimum enzyme activity. We are not only ourselves under the skin but an entire community. Our human microbiome is optimally advantaged at 37°C (98.6°F).

But endothermism also has disadvantages. If we get too hot we try to slow our metabolic burn. That is what happens during sleep when our core temperature drops typically 1°C. It’s also why the greatest threat to life during heat waves may be during the night when bodies cannot stay cool enough to survive.

When relative humidity is 100%, sweating does nothing to cool us. Hotter air can store more water than colder air. When the human body is exposed to constant temperatures of approximately 55°C (131°F) longer than a few hours, death is almost inevitable. In the early stages, we may try to slow heat generation by ceasing activity. If the heat persists, the effects of our diminished metabolism damage our central nervous system first, especially the brain and those parts concerning consciousness; then heart rate and respiration decrease; judgment becomes impaired as drowsiness supervenes, becoming steadily deeper until we lose consciousness. Mammalian muscle becomes rigid with heat rigor at about 50°C (122°F), with that sudden rigidity of the whole body rendering life impossible.

Humans may catch lethal hyperthermia when a wet-bulb temperature (heat index) is sustained above 35°C (95°F) for six hours. In these conditions, if the temperature of the surroundings is greater than that of the skin, the body actually gains heat by radiation and conduction. Peter Sinclair writes: “Stepped outside yet today? Today in the midwest is what a normal summer day will be like in a few decades.” National Geographic: “In less than 20 years, millions of people in the United States could be exposed to dangerous “off-the-charts” heat conditions of 127 degrees Fahrenheit or more….”

Sadly, hyperthermia occurs in birds, insects, fishes, land animals, and plants of course, too. The sacred lotus (Nelumbo nucifera) can sustain 20 degrees C (36 degrees F) above air temperature while flowering by breaking down starch in their roots, consuming oxygen at a rate of a flying hummingbird, but lacks a similar ability to cool itself. Many plants do not flower, do not fruit, and do not reproduce themselves when it is too warm.

We will need better tools than gourds if we are going to survive this time. We need to discover empathy. And then plant a whole lot of trees.