Someone recently asked me what, if anything, gave me reason for optimism in these ever-darkening times. This was my reply.
For the last twelve years or so, working with world-class collaborators, my Planet colleagues and I have been building new tools to deepen our understanding of our changing world, and to foster greater planetary health and inclusive guardianship.
The work has been bracing and full of promise. Harnessing new breakthroughs in earth observation, artificial intelligence and the best available science, these efforts have included initiatives to comprehensively map the world’s shallow-water coral reefs; inform assessments of global climate emissions; monitor deforestation across the world’s tropical forests; track the world’s progress on renewable energy; improve our care for biodiversity hotspots; identify emerging threats to food security; respond to crises and disasters and map the world’s most climate vulnerable human populations in unprecedented detail. Even now, we’re spinning up new efforts to monitor and protect cultural and natural heritage sites around the world, and support the real-time monitoring of key Planetary Boundaries systems that make it possible for life to flourish on the Earth.
This work is not happening through our efforts alone – but through an archipelago of sometimes-overlapping, sometimes-independent parallel collaborations, all over the world. There is a deep tribe at work.
Each of the tools and datasets that these collaborations produce illuminates a single dimension of our ever-changing planet. In doing so, each generates substantial impact in its own domain, from new scientific insights to lasting conservation outcomes.
Taken together, however, these tools point at the emergence of something new and deeper being born – something not just scientific, or operational, but relational. These tools are giving the planet a voice, and AI is helping us interpret it. As we learn to hear and understand it, a quiet revolution, as de/recentering as the Copernican one, is slowly reframing our individual and collective relationship with our terrestrial home.
The Earth is vast and complex beyond our conceptualization. It is grand and banal, merciful and merciless, dying and regenerating, attendant and indifferent to us, all at once. It is more familiar than our kin and stranger than our ken.
For centuries, we have scarred the Earth in our ignorance, avarice, and ambition. We devastated it for our comforts, and built accounting systems that willfully excluded the consequences from the balance sheet.
When we illuminate even a single dimension of our changing world using these new tools (as we are now doing over and over again) we learn astounding new things about our extraordinary, dynamic planet.
But not only this. For in seeing our changing world, we ourselves are changed.
That’s because every tool of scientific discovery, from the microscope to the gene sequencer, inevitably becomes a tool of moral discovery. We learn about the world, and in so doing we are re-situated within it. New truths bring forth new relationships, especially between the parts and the whole. Simplistic understandings give way to more sophisticated ones, and, slowly, slowly, we reform our systems of governance, of development, of commerce accordingly. When we invented contemporary capitalism, we thought of nature as self-replenishing, hyperabundant and free – too cheap to meter, and we ground down the forests as a result. Now, in our civilizational adolescence, we are learning that every economy is a part of — indeed reliant on — the natural world. (A truth long-known by some of our older indigenous cousins.) Consequently, we are now slowly, slowly reformulating our understanding of what an economy means.
This process will not be without its reversals, even terrible ones, but it is inexorable. No matter how many malign and misinformed edicts issue forth from those who would wish it otherwise, we cannot go epistemologically backward. We cannot unknow. And the deep, civilizational work to bring this new relationship forward will continue, even in dark times.
We are now in a dialectical race between the reinforcement of a prior, smaller worldview, with its self-confident reductionism and short-term conveniences, and the establishment of an emergent, new relationship with our planet, and with each other. The former can only be sustained by a few incumbents’ will to dominate; in this dependency, it is inherently fragile. The latter is far more durable – enabled by the authentic desires of the vast majority of humanity, supported by the most powerful information technologies ever devised, focused on the most pressing planetary challenges we have ever faced, with benefits for everyone – both those alive now and those yet to come.
Which of these would you bet on happening, over the long term?
Image: Coastal Zone of Kimberly, Australia (C) Planet Labs PBC