It's something of a surprise to find one of the foremost cheer-leaders of the globalised 'free markets' discussing the impact of human beings on the planet, and doing so in a way that actually recognizes there's a problem. So two cheers for The Economist!

To think that the workings of so vast an entity could be lastingly changed by a species that has been scampering across its surface for less than 1% of 1% of its history seems, on the face of it, absurd. But it is not.

Humans have become a force of nature reshaping the planet on a geological scale—but at a far-faster-than-geological speed.

And we have our biggest impact on those flora and fauna which are of no use to us ...

The world’s ecosystems are dominated by an increasingly homogenous and limited suite of cosmopolitan crops, livestock and creatures that get on well in environments dominated by humans.

Creatures less useful or adaptable get short shrift: the extinction rate is running far higher than during normal geological periods.

So what is to be done? The answer, it seems, is along the lines of what Media Lens called the Technofix:

The challenge of the Anthropocene is to use human ingenuity to set things up so that the planet can accomplish its 21st-century task.

Increasing the planet’s resilience will probably involve a few dramatic changes and a lot of fiddling. An example of the former could be geoengineering ... the idea that humans might help remove carbon from the skies as well as put it there is a reasonable Anthropocene expectation ...

More often the answer will be fiddling—finding ways to apply human muscle with the grain of nature, rather than against it, and help it in its inbuilt tendency to recycle things ...

The buzz word here is 'geoengineering' and what it does is allow for business as usual. And there's the problem.

'Business as usual' means a global economy dominated by corporate-sociopathy, which, not content with organizing the planet's sixth extinction event, is quite comfortable with marginalising millions of people who are also 'less useful or adaptable' to the demands of corporate profit.

In the process a utopian experiment of monstrous proportions is well under way: the creation of the autonomous individual and the destruction of altruism and empathy as valid human emotions and behaviours.

The grotesque figure of Ayn Rand, and the cohort of Austrian School economists have provided the, er, 'philosophical' foundations, along with the Hitlerian figure of Friedrich Nietzsche.

Like Nazism - which marginalised those outside the fantasy 'community' of the so-called Aryan race - and Stalinism - which marginalised any form of entrepreneurialism - the free market 'utopia' depends for its success on fitting human beings into the mould of Homo economicus.

On a purely pragmatic plain, the Economist's geoengineering amounts to little more than tinkering around the margins of the ongoing degredation of the biosphere.

Furthermore, geoengineering appears to be not much more that a 'third face of power' job, in that schemes like carbon capture surface from time-to-time as the technofix which will allow humanity to go on burning coal.

Similarly, the replacement of petrol/diesel by biofuels is highly dubious, since it impacts on food production, playing a role - along with corporate speculators - in the unfolding food crunch.

Again, the technofix is on hand. Food will become plentiful again if only we would allow Monsanto Corporation to take over the worlds agriculture in the name of corporate profit.

The 'small' matter of soil degredation can thus be ignored. [GT]

The Economist 26 May 2011