A Safe Operating Space, part 1

In 2009, scientist Johan Rockstrom and his colleagues formulated the concept “safe operating space for humanity” to provide a benchmark for measuring feasible adaptations to the rude shocks of increasingly erratic environmental changes. A safe operating space would mean preserving Holocene stability, or at least enough of it to not radically destabilize human life. A somewhat safe operating space would mean breaching no more of the planetary boundaries that support the ecosystems on which we and so many other species depend. It is now 2022. Five and maybe six have been breached: climate, land system change, freshwater, biochemical flows (phosphorus and nitrogen), biodiversity, chemical pollution. Ocean acidification is close. Adaptation becomes increasingly challenging ~ yet we can be a tremendously creative species.

It’s hard to wrap our heads around the indifferent time and space of planetary processes–a time measured in eons, a space measured in light years. Planetary time has intruded into human time, e.g., floods, droughts, and heat waves ~ some beyond what the human body can withstand. Surviving as a species means caring for how our existence is conditioned—profoundly—by this massive indifference to our small lives. The Holocene was a period of relative stability, a time when the various temporalities that impinge on our existence more or less meshed. We can’t directly influence the planetary in our brief time on earth, but we can nudge it in the direction of habitability for future generations. Our route must be indirect and responsive in myriad ways to the rivers, the trees, the birds, the oceans, the animals, the ecosystems, our friends and relatives, and people and species we have never met and will never meet. It means building institutions that uphold people while learning to live on the Earth’s interest rather than what’s left of its Holocene capital.

Caring for the planetary is being awestruck by the magic of life and the collective and individual vulnerability of every species while taking measure of our nothingness in relation to what reaches far beyond us. Our power has been fueled by the ignorance to which our species is prone: in our unbridled quest for a certain kind of progress, we have unwittingly influenced the planetary. And it has revealed itself to us as never before. Even though our time is measured in nanoseconds next to the vast eons of planetary systems, we are still the only creature with the potential to preserve the possibility of its own existence—by preserving the species habitats on which ours depends. There is irony in our stupidity, our refusal to live in the higher registers of which we are capable. We focus overmuch on what separates us and will be swept away in a nanosecond—rather than the common needs which can unite us.