The Medea Hypothesis: Is Life on Earth Ultimately Self-Destructive?

THE MEDEA HYPOTHESIS

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The Medea Hypothesis: Is Life on Earth Ultimately Self-Destructive?,

by Peter Ward

THE MEDEA HYPOTHESIS

Is Life on Earth Ultimately Self-Destructive?

PETER WARD

Princeton University Press    Princeton and Oxford

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ward, Peter Douglas, 1949–

The medea hypothesis : is life on earth ultimately self-destructive? / Peter Ward.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-691-13075-0 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Extinction (Biology) 2. Environmental geology. 3. Historical geology. 4. Life (Biology) 5. Evolution (Biology) 6. Catastrophes (Geology) I. Title.

QE721.2.E97W375 2009

576.8′4—dc22

2008056066

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

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Printed in the United States of America

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

FOR JOE KIRSCHVINK

OUR SPECIES HAS TO TAKE CONSCIOUS ACTION ABOUT THE FUTURE OF OUR PLANET TO SURVIVE. THAT ACTION IS NOT A RETURN TO, AND RELIANCE ON, NATURAL ECOSYSTEMS, BUT RATHER SOME KIND OF TECHNOLOGICAL ENGINEERING/TERRAFORMING TO OVERCOME THE NATURAL TENDENCY OF OUR SPHERE’S LIFE TO DRIVE ALL SPECIES, INCLUDING US, INTO EXTINCTION. MOTHER EARTH IS, LIKE MEDEA, THE MURDERER OF HER OWN CHILDREN, GAIA THEORY IS A FAIRY-TALE READING OF A VERY GRIM HISTORY, AND WE RELY ON NATURE TO BAIL US OUT AT OUR PERIL.

—William Dietrich, 2006

CONTENTS

Introduction ix

1  Darwinian Life 1

2  What Is Evolutionary Success? 14

3  Two Hypotheses about the Nature of Life on Earth 24

4  Medean Feedbacks and Global Processes 55

5  Medean Events in the History of Life 72

6  Humans as Medeans 91

7  Biomass through Time as a Test 98

8  Predicted Future Trends of Biomass 114

9  Summation 126

10  Environmental Implications and Courses of Action 128

11  What Must Be Done 141

References 157

Index 173

INTRODUCTION

Let us begin with a thought experiment. Envision the vast, life-filled rain forest now occupying the Amazon Basin of modern day Brazil. The wide, brown river slowly but inexorably flows eastward, carrying within its fluvial grasp unnumbered tons of mud, silt, sand, and in some places even gravel, originating either in the foothills of the rapidly eroding Andes Mountains far to the west, or from the upper reaches and banks of the river itself. Commingled with this future sedimentary rock are vast quantities of rotting plant material, ranging in size from entire trees to microscopic fragments of peat. This produce is fed upon by armadas of herbivores, stalked in turn by carnivores, with scavengers patiently waiting for both to become a meal. Vast, jungle forests grow right to the water’s edge, made up of trees reaching upward toward an unseen sky, their highest leaves finally emerging from the multiple layers of canopied gloom to form a vast plateau looking like a green sea swaying gently in sync with the breezes under the bright equatorial sun, a variegated surface far above the twilight world of the forest floor. Amid and above this canopy flit insects, birds, and bats, an aerial nekton among the simpler airborne plankton that, combined, turn the sky darker at dawn and dusk by their numbers and fill it with sound at any hour. This Amazon Basin with its attendant rain forests is a cornucopia of multiplying and rotting cells, a place of rapid growth and rapid decomposition, a habitat inhabited at a frenetic pace by an unknowable biomass of life, an unknowable level of species diversity, and a barely understood morphospace of body plan disparity.

The Amazon Basin, this storehouse of diversity and biomass, is not unique on our planet. We have only to continue eastward from the merging of the Amazon with the sea, following the equatorial latitude as a guide across the South Atlantic Ocean until we are over land again, over African rain forest this time, once again over life exorbitant in both kind and numbers. As in South America, this jungle spans the entire width of the continent we pass over, ever eastward, until we are over water again—this time the Indian Ocean. When next we reach land, we are over the South Asian rain forests.

The species change in each of these disparate rain forests, but the sheer abundance and exuberance of life in these habitats do not. These hot rain forests are the most populated and most diverse—two different things—storehouses of life on planet Earth. More species are seemingly crammed into the trees alone—perhaps more species of beetles live in the trees alone—than there are other species in all the other habitats on Earth combined, including the coral reefs and surface regions of the sea. We are talking as many as 30 million beetles in addition to everything else! But there is so much else. If we were to weigh the total mass of living material from these forests—from microbes in the soil beneath to the tiniest of float spiders in the air above—the weight of this living material would likely be a significant (but impossible to really fathom) fraction of the Earth’s total biomass, perhaps even exceeding that of all of the rest of life combined—again including the coral reefs, the plankton on the surface of the sea, the cool boreal forests and wheat fields, and the deep microbial biosphere.

And now for our experiment. Rolling up our sleeves, godlike, we change the climate over these forests by cooling the Earth’s temperature just a few degrees. A very simple act, but one that quickly takes on a life (death, actually) of its own, for the cooling begets more cooling in a positive feedback mechanism: the cooler it gets, the more the Earth cools. As the Earth cools, the poles become more snow-covered, and more light is reflected back into space, causing the temperature to cool some more, and more ice to form. In the tropical forests there is no ice, of course, nor will there ever be, but the temperature changes have caused a decrease in and, more important, an irregularity of rainfall; areas with monsoons lose them, while other areas accustomed to constant, rather than episodic, rain experience the first dry and wet seasons. Those plants needing year-round rainfall begin to die, and those animal species confined to these particular trees in some obligate fashion die too.

To the north and south, the ice twins of oceanic ice caps and continental glaciers emerge from sleep and, like vast, stretching giants, extend their fingers toward one another until they merge into white wastes of ice, over a mile thick on land, and once thus united they swiftly move either south or north depending on their starting points in the high latitudes of both the northern and southern halves of the Earth. In both hemispheres they scrape their way toward those warmer regions of the midplanet, sucking the level of the sea down to feed their growth as greedy solid water changes phase from its more temperate liquid brother. Their continent-wide fronts are heralded by powerful and dreadfully cold adiabatic winds that blow massive piles of dust onto formerly fertile lands, and even the lands beyond the reach of the glaciers and winds are affected. No place on Earth escapes a change of its local climate in this new, reverse Oreo cookie of a world, all white top and bottom, with a dying and drying, darker middle of plants and rock, for no place keeps the exact or, in most places, even approximately the same kind of climate that existed in the preglacial world.

In the non–ice covered equatorial latitudes we watch as many tree species begin to die, bringing down the complex food webs that are dependent on the trees and their ecological cornices, webs far more complex than any spider’s weaving found stretched between the branches of the closely spaced limbs. In the rain forests and dry forests alike, trees swiftly die and fall, to be replaced by grass and weeds at best, and bare rock elsewhere, their encompassed species of animals and plants changing from living to extinct, with virtually no possibility even of a fossil record to mark their passing.

The process of deathly change does not stay restricted to land. As the land plants die, the rivers become choked with rotting vegetation that makes its way out to sea, causing a short-term bloom of life amid the newly abundant nutrients. But soon that bloom ends as oxygen is used up, and the rotting vegetation falls onto oxygen-free bottoms, creating a vast eutrophication, where so much organic material rots that it takes all of the available oxygen out of the surrounding water. The death of trees on land has more consequences: with roots gone, the soil is carried away by wind and rain, eventually falling onto the ocean bottoms. Near the continents, great submarine fans are built, covering the once stable bottom communities, choking the sea bottom. The more mobile invertebrates dig out of the less catastrophic, underwater landslide events, but the immobile fauna has no chance, and in the abundant cases of the larger undersea landslide flows, there is no chance at all. All are buried by layers of sediment rumbling off the land’s edge into the sea. The river mouths choke; rapid cover of sand and silt kills off the fragile estuarine communities as deltas and rivers radically change course in the mounting piles of sediment streaming off the land.

There is no refuge as the temperatures of the sea change, driven downward by the cooling atmosphere. Species adapted to warmth are killed directly, and as these die they doom the many more species dependent on stable food webs and predicted resources. The extinction on land thus begets its own, different kind of misery in the sea. Thus we have no need to wave our evil magic wand over the seas; simply killing off the land forests, or a good proportion of them anyway, does the trick.

The increasing ice on land is ultimately composed of seawater, and so much ice forms on land that the level of the sea in its many oceans precipitously falls. A consequence of this is that the falling sea level exposes near-shore, formerly undersea communities. Eventually the sea drops nearly 250 feet below present-day levels, killing off the richest undersea communities till that time still extant—including the coral reefs, which have to migrate seaward to avoid being stranded, but which become stranded over vast regions nevertheless. The entire Great Barrier Reef tract of Australia dries to salt marsh, and the Torres Strait now separating New Guinea from Australia dries up as well.

But there is far more to come. The Earth’s climate has long been on a knife-blade balance between times of glaciers and times without, and our push to just slightly colder temperatures has tipped that scale: the glaciers have now grown well down into the mid-latitudes of our planet, scouring to glacial flour whatever plant communities that are left, stomped under a mile of ice. Armadas of icebergs calve off the glacial fronts where they reach the sea, dropping piles of gravel far out to sea as they melt. The atmosphere is perpetually hazy with dust.

We can now return to where we started. Following our catastrophic meddling, most of the Amazon is now grassland and savannah, with only isolated pockets of the once lush rain forests. Large areas are bare rock, since the soil beneath these forests had been thin to begin with. The changing weather patterns and death of trees stripped many regions into Depression era dustbowls; life did not have the tens of thousands of years necessary to change that bare rock back into productive soil.

So far, our experiment has been on a world where there are no humans. But that is not our world. Add our civilization into the mix and make a monetary calculation of what will be lost: all coastal cites are now perched far from the sea; the dust is so thick that jet engines clog in the stratosphere, and we are reduced to propeller plane travel; the changing weather patterns and the cold have wrecked any Farmers Almanac, and most agribusiness as well; large proportions of the formerly rich wheat and corn regions of the United States, Canada, northern Europe, and the ex-Soviet Union are changed, with some showing increasing harvest, but most yielding less. And it is not just wheat that takes a hit: many of the rice-growing areas of China are either under ice or so near the glaciers with their high winds and dust that they are no longer productive. What would it cost to rebuild all coastal cities, to replant most crops in new places, to fight an inevitable famine and fight as well the border wars precipitated by the many millions of humans who are displaced by the economic ravages inflicted by the falling sea, displaced into entirely different countries? The cost would be in the trillions of dollars. And this is just an accounting of the human constructions lost. What is the monetary value of a species going extinct?

Let us try to tally up what we have done beyond the monetary aspects. We can do this in two ways: the number of species going extinct, and the relative biomass of the planet, before and after. Both are as yet difficult to put final numbers on, but our science does tell us that both will be significantly large.

As we stare out at what we have wrought, we might wonder at the penalty for such death bestowed. What should such a killer receive as penance, when a million or more species, a significant portion of the total amount of life on Earth, are killed off as a result of some action that changed a world with planet-spanning rain forests to one of desert, ice, and grassy plains, and but a thread of the once luxurious, pole-to-pole forests? In China, according to (perhaps) urban legend, the perpetrator of any crime costing the state a significant loss of money is summarily executed, with the tab for the bullet to be paid by the miscreant’s family. What punishment is just for the perpetrator of a crime vastly more immense in scale?

We can rejoice that this particular thought experiment is just that—a thought experiment. But in fact such global cooling events have been triggered in the past by deadly murderers. And cold is only one of their weapons. If the global assassins wanted to kill off an even larger percentage of life on Earth than is possible with glacial cold, the weapon of mass destruction of choice would be heat, or, more accurately, that now familiar phrase global warming. By just raising the temperature of the planet a few more degrees than it is now, we could reduce Earth-life’s diversity and biomass to extremely low levels—or even cause planetary sterility through mass extinction.

Bogeymen in the closet can make for a good scare. The shiver of a slasher movie is a cheap thrill soon ended as the fictional killer is put to its deserved end, the lights go on, the movie-goers file out, and we go on with our lives. But the reality is that there is a killer on the loose capable of planetary-scale catastrophe, a killer quite alive, an assassin that owes nothing to Hollywood or Stephen King. It has killed in the deep and near past and is poised to kill again in the near and distant future. This killer is devilishly sly, cleverer than any well-disguised and innocuous character thought up by the pulp mystery writers. It hides in plain sight. The purpose of this book is to put a face on this, life’s worst enemy.

The killer is life itself. If left unchecked, it will hasten the ultimate death of all life on Earth. Only human intelligence and engineering can delay this fate.

• • •

There is nothing conscious about life’s lethal activities. In fact, the individuals making up each species are ruled by natural selection and live in ways maximizing their survivability, and the repeated killing off of many of them is definitely not in their interest. But, perhaps paradoxically, aggregates of species interacting with the physical environment as well as with other life, in the region on Earth that we term the biosphere, appear to have effects not selected for—lethal effects, in fact.

We humans have the odd distinction of being the only ones that either know or care, and it remains to be seen if we will stave off planetary extinction or hasten its onset. Right now we are rapidly transforming a world of moderate temperature (one with ice caps and relatively low sea level) to a heated world without ice caps and with high sea level. Yet while we are the only organisms capable of extending the life of the biosphere, we are certainly not the only creatures capable of the opposite—reducing the lifespan of the Earth as a habitable world. The mass extinctions of the past were far more lethal than any war yet waged by humans, and they were not even primarily caused by complex life. Rather, microbes were at their root. But higher life forms were accessories to this murder, in that it was higher life that allowed microbes to multiply to the point that they could begin their ruthless poisoning of air and sea. What we must do is to defang the monster through direct intervention into the carbon, sulfur, nitrogen, and sulfur cycles, and by maintaining planetary temperature so that there are always ice caps in the high latitudes. Unfortunately, many