From Films from the Future: The Technology and Morality of Sci-Fi Movies by Andrew Maynard
“We were wrong.”
—Vice President Becker
In July 2017, a massive chunk of ice broke off the Larson C ice shelf
in Antarctica. The resulting tabular iceberg covered around 2,200
square miles—about the area of Delaware, and a tad smaller than
the British county of Norfolk—and was one of the largest icebergs
in recorded history to break off the continent. The event grabbed
the attention of the media around the world, and was framed as yet
another indication of the mounting impacts of human-activity-driven
climate change.
Thirteen years earlier, the climate disaster movie The Day After
Tomorrow opened with a block of ice splitting off another of the
Antarctic ice shelves, in this case the Larson B shelf. At the time,
the sheer size of this make-believe tabular berg was mind-boggling
enough to astound and shock moviegoers. But the movie-berg
ended up being rather smaller than the 2017 one, coming in at a
mere 1,212 square miles.
Looking back, it’s sobering to realize that what was considered
shockingly unimaginable in 2004 had become a pale reflection of
reality in 2017.
Human-caused climate change is perhaps the biggest challenge of
our generation. As a species, we’ve reached the point where our
collective actions have a profound and lasting effect on our planet,
At this point I should be up front and admit that The Day After
Tomorrow barely touches on any of these technologies. This is a
movie that uses Hollywood hyperbole to try to shock its audience
into thinking more seriously about the impacts of catastrophic
climate change, but it does this through human stories and an
improbable (but nevertheless dramatic) climactic tipping point.
Nevertheless, it is a movie that reveals intriguing insights into the
relationship between technology, society, and climate.
Here, I need to add a personal note before we get further into this
chapter. Climate change is a contentious and polarizing issue. When
it comes to human-driven global warming, most people have an
opinion on what is and is not happening, what is and is not relevant
and important, and what people should and should not be doing
about it. Not to beat about the bush, it’s a minefield of a topic to
write about, and one for which, no matter what I wrote, I’d end up
rubbing someone up the wrong way. And yet, this is not an excuse
not to write about climate change.
Given this challenge, this chapter focuses on a relatively narrow
aspect of our relationship with the planet we live on and how
technology plays into this. As a result, it does not contain a
comprehensive survey of climate science. It doesn’t analyze and
summarize climate-change mitigation options. It doesn’t even
unpack the growing field of sustainable technologies. These are all
tremendously important areas, and if you’re interested in them, there
are volumes upon volumes written about each of them that you can
explore further. Rather, using The Day After Tomorrow as a starting
yet we are struggling to even acknowledge the magnitude of the
issues we face as a result, never mind agree on effective ways
forward. This is a deeply social and political issue, and one that
we’ll only make progress toward addressing through socially and
politically-oriented action. Yet, underlying our changing climate, and
how we handle it, is technology. It’s the technological innovations
of the Industrial Revolution and what came after that helped get
us here in the first place. It’s technological and scientific advances
in climate modeling, and data collection and processing, that
have revealed just how big the challenge is that we’re facing. It’s
our continued addiction to our technology-enhanced and energyintensive lifestyles that continues to drive climate change. And it’s
breakthroughs in areas like renewable energy, carbon capture and
storage, and solar radiation management that are helping open up
ways toward curbing the worst impacts of climate change.
point, the chapter explores what it means to live on a dynamic
planet where there is a deep and complex relationship between
living systems and the world they inhabit, and what this means, not
only for technologies that unintentionally impact our climate, but
also those that are intentionally designed to do so.
The Day After Tomorrow opens in Antarctica, with the movie’s hero,
Jack Hall (played by Dennis Quaid), and his colleagues drilling
out ice cores on the Larson B ice shelf, just as a Rhode-Islandsized chunk of ice breaks away from it. This somewhat convenient
coincidence leads to hearings that are presided over by the US
Vice President, and this is where we learn that Jack is something
of a maverick scientist, and the Vice President a cynical climatechange denier.
It quickly transpires that the ice-shelf collapse is a prelude to a
much more dramatic series of events. Water from the melting berg
disrupts critical ocean currents, and this in turn triggers a rapid
and catastrophic shift in global climate. A series of devastating
megastorms rings the changes between the world as we know it and
a radically altered world of the future. In this emerging new world,
the global North—including many of the world’s most affluent
countries—is plunged into a new ice age. It’s these catastrophic
megastorms that create the disaster backdrop for the movie,
including a dramatic but make-believe type of storm that’s capable
of pulling down super-cooled air from the upper atmosphere and,
quite literally, freezing people solid who are caught in the downdraft.
As a paleoclimatologist, Jack studies changes in the Earth’s climate
throughout its history. His research has unearthed disturbing
evidence of rapid climate shifts in the Earth’s past that are linked
to disrupted ocean currents. And because he’s a brash Hollywood
scientist, he doesn’t hesitate to make a pain of himself by telling
people that they need to act now, before the same sort of
catastrophic events happen all over again.
This turns out to be a bit of a tough sell, though, as Jack reckons
that it could be a hundred years or so before the really bad stuff
starts to happen. But because of the water pouring into the ocean
from the disintegrating Larson B ice shelf, Jack’s predictions begin to
play out faster than anticipated—much faster.
The only problem is, Jack’s son Sam ( Jake Gyllenhaal) is currently
stuck in New York, which is a long way above this “no-hope” line.
Predictably, because this is a Hollywood disaster movie, Jack decides
to travel to New York City and rescue his son, despite knowing that
he’ll be facing some incredibly tough conditions. And in true joinedat-the-hip buddy-movie style, his two research partners join him. On
the way, Jack and his team, together with his son Sam (who’s holed
up in the New York Public Library with his girlfriend and a handful
of others, burning books to stay alive) face deadly flesh-freezing
downdrafts from one of the megastorms. Thankfully, though, they
evade the killer air, and are eventually reunited.
Meanwhile, there’s a flood of US refugees (including the remnants
of the US Government) crossing the border to Mexico. Yet, before
he can be evacuated from DC, the US President is killed in the
ever-worsening storms. As the climate-change-denying vice
president takes his place (now ensconced in Mexico), he faces an
unprecedented human and environmental disaster. And as he comes
to terms with the consequences of human disregard for our fragile
environment, he emerges a humbler but wiser leader.
As the storms clear, we see a remade Earth, with snow and ice
covering much of the northern and southern hemispheres, and
a thin band of warmer land sandwiched in between. What were
previously thought of as developing economies are now the ones
calling the shots. And what is left of humanity faces the challenge
of building a new future, and hopefully, a more thoughtful and
responsible one.
As the movie draws to a close, we begin to see groups of survivors
emerging from the ice-encased buildings of New York City,
including Jake and Sam. Humanity has suffered a blow, but it’s far
from beaten.
As the planet’s climate becomes increasingly unstable, it turns out
that Jack’s computer model is the only one around that’s capable of
predicting what’s going on. As he plugs the numbers in and cranks
the handle, it becomes increasingly clear that the world is on the
brink of a catastrophic change in climate that’s only days away. Even
worse, his model predicts that the only way to protect as many US
citizens as possible is to move people in the lower-latitude states as
far south as possible, and leave everyone above a “no-hope” latitude
to the mercy of the elements.
The Day After Tomorrow leaves viewers with a clear warning that, if
we continue to be disdainful of how we treat the environment, there
could be potentially catastrophic consequences. But the overarching
message of the film is one of the indomitable spirit of humanity
overcoming even the most extreme of catastrophes. Watching the
remnants of society start to work together, we just know that,
whatever happens, we will survive as a species.
This narrative admittedly makes the climate change messaging of
the movie somewhat ambivalent. The film certainly tries to warn
viewers about the consequences of actions that lead to global
warming. But it also conveys a message of hope that, even if we
make a mess of things, we can use our grit and ingenuity to find a
way out. In other words, climate change is a problem, but it’s not
the end of the world. To confuse things further, this is a movie about
global warming that ends up with a frozen planet. At first blush, it’s
probably not the message you’d go for if you were out to convince
someone that greenhouse gas emissions are leading to catastrophic
planetary heating. Yet it does give the movie a twist that I must
confess I rather like. It suggests that the consequences of humandriven climate change are not necessarily predictable or intuitive.
Yes, the Earth’s climate as a whole is warming. But because it’s also
complex and fickle, this warming won’t necessarily lead to the types
of issues that some might imagine.
In this way, the movie leaves us with a picture of a climate that is
sensitive and unpredictable, with the greatest point of certainty
being that, if we take it for granted and continue to use it as a
dumping ground for our industrial and personal effluent, something
will give. This is part of the concern that drives scientists, activists,
and others in the push for rapid and drastic action to curb the
impacts of human-caused climate change. But even though this
is vitally important, it’s hard to make sense of the complex nexus
between people, technology, and climate without first recognizing
how fragile our relationship with the dynamic planet we live on has
always been.
On December 26, 2004, a magnitude 9.0 earthquake struck off
the coast of Sumatra. It was one of the largest earthquakes ever
recorded, and the shock waves reverberated around the world,
The 2005 Indian Ocean tsunami is a sobering reminder of just how
precarious a place Planet Earth is, even before we begin thinking
about the impacts of technology and human-driven climate change.
We live on a dynamic and unpredictable planet, and throughout
human history, natural events have devastated communities. This
is not to diminish the almost-unthinkable consequences of global
warming if we don’t put the brakes on our unfettered use and abuse
of natural resources. But it is an important reminder that long-term
environmental stability and security are often illusions that are born
from our ability to convince ourselves that, because yesterday was a
good day, tomorrow and the next will be just the same.
This is a blind spot that we all have to the dangers of sudden,
catastrophic risks, whether we’re looking at climate change or the
impacts of emerging technologies. Just how deeply rooted this is in
our collective behavior was brought home to me several years ago
on a family vacation to the Pacific Northwest. Traveling with my
wife, my parents, and our (then) young kids, we started at Mount
Hood in Oregon, and worked our way north to Seattle and Mount
Rainier via Mount St. Helens. These and other volcanoes in the
Cascade Range are all relatively inactive at the moment. But in 1980,
the world was reminded of just how much power lurks under the
range, as Mount St. Helens erupted, throwing more than half a cubic
mile of material into the atmosphere, and leaving a crater over a
mile wide.
The May 18, 1980, eruption was the most violent in the Cascade
Range since the region was populated by settlers migrating from
the east. Apart from low-level volcanic activity around some of
the peaks, there hasn’t been anything quite like it for over 1,000
years. Yet despite this relative calm, the Cascade volcanoes are far
from safe.
Fifty miles outside the city of Seattle stands Mount Rainier, perhaps
one of the most iconic of the Cascades. Mount Rainier is a magnet
for hikers, skiers, and day-trippers. Something like twenty million
people a year visit the mountain, and its striking profile is as much
triggering other, smaller quakes as they went. But the most
devastating result was a series of tsunami unleashed in the Indian
ocean. These swamped coastal areas in Indonesia, Sri Lanka,
Thailand, India, and many other countries. As the sea swept through
towns, villages, and cities, over 250,000 people lost their lives. It was
one of the worst natural disasters in recent memory.
a part of Seattle as the Space Needle and Pike Place Market. Rainier
stands guard over a metropolitan area accounting for some 3.7
million people. And yet it’s classified by the US Geological Survey
as one of the most dangerous volcanoes in the country—and one
where a major eruption could be devastating.
Seattle was founded in 1851, well after Mount Rainier’s last period
of major volcanic activity, which occurred around five hundred
years ago. Because of this lag between the cycle of volcanic activity
and large-scale urban expansion, there is little if any cultural or
historic memory among most of Seattle’s current inhabitants of how
unpredictable the environment they live in is. I suspect that most
people living around the city think of it as a safe place to be, simply
because it’s been safe for as long as anyone can remember.
My daughter now lives in Seattle, and just in case I was missing
something, I asked her what it’s like living next to a volcano that
could wipe out the city if it got particularly belligerent. She’s been
living and working there for over four years now, and her response
is best summarized as “meh”—supporting my suspicions that, to
many people living in the area, a risk not experienced is a risk
not worth worrying about. However, she did add, “So, how do you
feel about your only daughter living in the shadow of one of the
country’s most dangerous volcanoes?” which made me realize that
she’s not the only one with a rather complacent perspective here.
How easily we convince ourselves that this dynamic, dangerous
planet we live on is going to stay the same from day to day.
Despite our relatively optimistic short-term view of the Earth’s
enduring stability, Mount Rainier has had a habit of awakening
from its slumber every five hundred years or so. And given the
timing of the last eruption, we’re overdue for some action here.
Maybe nothing as dramatic as the 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption,
but probably nothing that people used to enjoying this seemingly
passive slumbering giant will take kindly to.
Mount Rainier and the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami are just two
reminders of how complacent we become when the environment
we live in appears to be stable, and how quickly we sink into denial
about how precarious life is on this outer skin of our dynamic
planet. Yet the reality is that we live in an environment that can turn
dangerous on a dime.
What these figures bring home—and they are only the tip of
the iceberg of environment-related deaths—is that we live in a
dangerous world. Many people live perilously close to potential
circumstances that could rob them of their livelihoods, their
communities, and their lives. Collectively, we live in a fragile state
of being, despite everything we do to convince ourselves that we’re
okay. Yet this very fragility is integral to life on Earth. It’s the very
changeability of the world we live in that has led, through evolution
and natural selection, to an incredible diversity of species, including
humans. A changing environment forces adaptation. It weeds out
the poorly adapted and creates new opportunities for evolving
organisms to take hold and thrive in new niches. Change is a force
of nature that has led to where we are now. Yet it’s one that we mess
with at our peril.
Over time, the complex relationship between the Earth’s changing
climate and the forces of evolution has led to a deep symbiosis
between how living organisms impact the Earth, and how this in
turn impacts them. Amazingly, over geological timescales, life has
crafted the Earth we live on as much as Earth has molded the life
it harbors. This symbiosis formed the basis of the Gaia hypothesis
developed by scientists James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis in the
1970s. And while a lot of pseudoscientific mythology has since
grown up around the idea of Planet Earth being a living organism,
there are deep evidence-based reasons to approach the Earth as a
In 2008, CBC News published a list of some of the most devastating
natural disasters that have occurred since 1900.[^168] It’s an admittedly
subjective list, as the line between natural and human-created
disaster gets increasingly blurred when it comes to floods and
famines. This aside, though, the list makes for sobering reading.
Tallying the numbers, something like eight million deaths have
been associated with earthquakes, tsunamis, eruptions, hurricanes,
cyclones, and floods over the past hundred years or so. Adding in
pandemics and famines, the number rises to well over two hundred
million people who have lost their lives as a direct result of the
environment they live in. What makes these numbers even more
devastating is that, apart from malaria (which is estimated to kill a
million people a year), most of these deaths are caused by intense
events that punctuate periods of relative calm.
complex system of organic and inorganic matter that, together, are
responsible for a shifting and evolving environment.
If we were an alien race observing the Earth from some distant
solar system, we’d see a planet where the atmosphere, the oceans,
the land, and the organisms that are part of them are constantly
changing and shifting. We’d see a rolling history of different
species rising to dominance, then fading as others arose that were
better fitted for a changing world. We’d see humans as the latest
manifestation of this deep relationship between the planet and
the life in and on it. And we’d probably assume that this species
would also be superseded at some point, not necessarily by a
more intelligent one, but by one that was simply better adapted for
thriving in a post-human world. With the clarity that comes from
time and distance, we’d recognize that humans are just one small
cog in a much larger planetary-scale machine, albeit a cog that has
an outsized opinion of itself.
In recent years, a quite compelling analogy for this deep
interconnection between the environment and the organisms that
are part of it has come out of the field of microbiology. For decades
now, scientists have realized that our bodies contain trillions of
microbes. In fact, a popular myth has arisen that our microbes
outnumber our human cells ten to one, meaning that despite any
beliefs to the contrary, each of us is more non-human than we
are human.
This number doesn’t hold up to scientific scrutiny, as how much of
each of us is made up of microbes varies quite considerably. But
that’s not the interesting bit of this story. What is, and the piece
that’s shaking up our understanding of our biology, is that we are
each deeply interdependent on the microbes that live on and in us,
so much so that there’s emerging evidence that our gut microbes can
actually influence how we think and feel.[^169]
This is where a useful analogy can begin to be drawn between the
human microbiome and planet Earth. Not so long ago, we thought
of ourselves as complete and independent entities, with minds and
wills of our own. But we’re now learning that what we think of as
“me” is a complex collection of non-human microbes and human
cells that, together, make up a living, thinking organism. We are,
in fact, a product of our microbes, and they of us. In the same
way, we’re beginning to understand just how symbiotic the earth’s
This perspective radically changes how we think of ourselves and
our actions in relation to the planet. Through it, we can no longer
assume that the environment is something to be utilized, or even
something to be looked after, as both assume we are somehow
separate from it. Rather, it’s increasingly clear that we are both a
product of our environment, and deeply enmeshed in its future. In
other words, what we do has a profound impact on how the world
changes, and how this in turn will change us.
This interdependence between us and the environment we live in
has accelerated substantially over the past two centuries. A few
thousand years and more ago, humans were something of a bit
player as far as planetary dynamics went. We were insignificant
enough that we could live our lives without bringing about too
much change (although with hindsight, it’s possible to see how early
environmental abuse set us on the pathway toward local flooding,
famines, and the formation of deserts). Yet, over the past two
hundred years, there’s been a dramatic change. Global population
has risen to the point where the environment can no longer absorb
our presence and our effluent without being substantially altered by
it.
Human profligacy is now a major factor in determining how we
impact the environment, as we saw in chapter eleven and Inferno.
But there’s another, equally important trend that is radically
changing our relationship with planet Earth, and that is the
increasing impacts of technological innovation.
Around two hundred years ago, we saw the beginnings of massive
and widespread automation, an acceleration in fossil fuel use, and
transformations in how we use agricultural land. The resulting
Industrial Revolution changed everything about our relationship
with the planet. Almost overnight, we went from a relatively minor
species (in geological terms) to having a profound impact on the
world we live on. This trend continues to this day, and we’re now
entering a phase of technological innovation where how we live
and what we do is more deeply coupled than ever to the evolution
organisms are to the planet. Just as our microbiome is an integral
part of who we are, we are discovering that we cannot separate the
physical Earth, its rocks, soils, oceans, rivers, even its atmosphere,
from the flora and fauna that inhabit it, including humans.
of Planet Earth. But there’s a problem here. Going back to the
microbiome analogy, we, along with all other forms of life, are part
of a deep and complex cycle of planetary change. Yet, because of
our growing technological abilities and our evolutionary drive to
succeed, we are now forcing the world to change faster, and in
different ways, than ever before, and we have no idea what the
consequences of this are going to be.
What we do know is that there will be consequences. We know
that the Earth changes and adapts in response to the organisms
that live on and in it. We understand that Planet Earth is a deeply
complex system, where the results of seemingly small changes can
be unpredictable and profound (going back to chapter two and
chaos theory). We recognize that, in such systems, the harder you
hit them, the more unpredictably they respond. And we realize that
complex systems like the Earth are prone to undergoing radical and
disruptive transitions when pushed too hard.
This is all part of living in the “Anthropocene,” a term that’s
increasingly being used to describe this period in the Earth’s history
where, largely though our technological innovations, humans
have the power to dramatically influence the course of planetary
evolution. The trouble is, while we have this growing ability to
impact a whole planet, it’s by no means certain that we know what
we’re doing, or that we understand how to chart a path forward
through the ways in which our planetary influence will in turn
impact us.
Here, The Day After Tomorrow stands as something of a warning
against human hubris and the fragility of our relationship with
the natural world. Over-the-top as it is, the film reminds us that
we are messing with things we don’t understand, and that if
we’re not careful, there will be a reckoning for our environmental
irresponsibility. Perhaps not surprisingly, in true Hollywood style,
it’s all a little clumsy. But it’s hard to avoid the message that we
live on a dangerous planet that has the power to seriously disrupt
our twenty-first-century lifestyles, and that we prod and poke it at
our peril.
But the movie also has a message of hope, albeit one that’s very
human-centric. It suggests that, ultimately, humans are resilient;
that even when we suffer catastrophic losses, we have the ability
to collectively pick ourselves up and come back stronger and wiser
than before.
On September 6, 2017, Hurricane Irma devastated the Caribbean
island of Barbuda. For the first time in three hundred years, the
island was left uninhabited, apart from the dogs and other animals
left behind by a fleeing population.
Irma was just one of a string of powerful hurricanes sweeping
through the Caribbean and across the Southern states of the US in
2017, in one of the most destructive hurricane seasons on record.
And, as one storm after the next battered communities, it challenged
them to think about what it means to be resilient in the face of
such devastation.
Resiliency, I have to admit, is a bit of a buzz-word these days. In the
environmental context, it’s often used to describe how readily an
ecosystem is able to resist harm, or recover from damage caused by
some event. But resiliency goes far beyond resistance to change. In
its broadest sense, it gets to the heart of how we think about what’s
important to us, and how we make provisions to protect and grow
this, in spite of events that threaten to cause harm.
Long before I became involved with environmental sustainability, I
was used to the idea of resilience that’s commonly used in materials
science. Here, resilience is a measure of how much energy a material
can absorb, and still have the ability to return to its previous state
when that energy is released. Imagine, for instance, a rubber band.
If it’s stretched, and as long as it doesn’t break and is not is old
Here, The Day After Tomorrow is surprisingly optimistic about the
future. But this optimism does depend on us working together to
develop the resiliency that’s necessary to survive and thrive on a
dynamic planet. Emerging technologies have a vital role to play
here, together with social, economic and political innovation. This
is where renewable energy technologies are finally beginning to
compete with fossil fuels; where distributed energy-networks and
battery technologies are transforming how we generate, distribute
and use electricity; where water treatment and agricultural
technologies are enabling us to achieve more with less; and where
we’re learning to not only ensure products are recyclable, but to
develop a “circular economy” where everything is reused. And this is
just the tip of the sustainable technologies iceberg. Yet if these and
other technologies are to be used to build a resilient future, we first
need to understand what we mean by “resiliency” in the first place.
and weathered, it will return to its original shape once released. In
this way, it’s resilient to change. But push it too far and it will snap;
there’s a limit to how resilient it is.
This idea of resiliency as an ability to return to “normality” in the
face of stress is how it’s often used to describe ecosystems. Resilient
ecosystems are frequently seen as those that resist permanent
damage, and that recover fast if they are harmed. But in a world
where change is the driving force behind pretty much everything,
this turns out to be a rather limited concept. Despite change
and adaptation being the bedrock of our planet’s biological and
geological evolution, ideas of environmental resiliency seem too
easily to slip into a mode of thinking that suggests change is bad,
and should be resisted.
This is understandable if we believe that we should be preserving
how things are, or some ideal of how they should be. But it’s
important to ask what are we trying to preserve here. Is it the global
environment as it now stands? Is it how we as humans are currently
living? Is it the continuation of life in some form? Or is it the
continuation of some future vision of humanity?
In reality, how we think about resiliency depends entirely on what
we are trying to protect or preserve. And this, it turns out, is deeply
dependent on context, to the extent that ideas that look like resilient
approaches from one perspective may look highly precarious
from another.
In effect, our understanding of resilience depends on what’s
important to us, and in this context, resilience is not necessarily
about maintaining the status quo, but about protecting and
preserving what is considered to be “of value.” This may be the
environment, or our health and well-being. But it may just as equally
be someone’s ability to make a living, or their deeply held beliefs,
or even their sense of self-identity and worth. From this perspective,
we can begin to think of resiliency as something we use to protect
many different types of value within society, or to ensure that this
value can be regained if it’s temporarily damaged.
Thinking about resiliency in this way ends up with it being less
about maintaining what we currently have, and more about
ensuring future outcomes that we value. It also helps illuminate
the complex landscape around issues like climate change where
different, and sometimes hidden, values may be threatened. And
with this reframing, we have a concept that is, in itself, adaptable to
This begins to get close to a perspective on resilience proposed by
Tom Seager and colleagues in 2013.[^170] Thinking specifically about
engineered systems, they explored the idea of resilience as being
about what a system does, rather than what it is. In the language of
“value,” this translates to resilience being about developing systems
that preserve what we consider to be valuable, rather than simply
describing the system itself. It’s all about getting to where we want
to be, rather than simply trying to stay in the same place.
This broader understanding of resilience is described rather well
by David Woods in a 2015 paper,[^171] and expanded on later by
Seager and others.[^172] Woods describes four types of resilience. First,
there’s rebound, or the ability for a system to return to its “healthy”
state after being damaged. This is pretty close to the standard
understanding of ecological resilience. Then there’s robustness, or
the ability to withstand knocks and shocks without failing. Things
get interesting though with the third type of resilience: graceful
extensibility.
Woods’ notion of graceful extensibility recognizes that, no matter
how prepared you are, there will always be surprises, and it’s always
good to be able to adapt to them. It’s a bit like the blade of grass
bending but not being swept away by the hurricane, while stronger
but less resilient trees are uprooted.
Woods’ final type of resiliency is sustained adaptability, or a
willingness to change and sacrifice some aspects of what already
exists in order to maintain others. Again, this begins to frame the
idea of resiliency as less about maintaining the status quo, and more
about adapting to change while preserving what’s important.
These four types of resiliency still have the feel of trying to maintain
things as they are, but they do acknowledge that some willingness
to change and adapt, and have some degree of flexibility, is
a changing world. It’s a way of thinking about resiliency that moves
our focus from maintaining our environment as we think it should
be to considering where we want to be, even as the environment
around us changes.
necessary. I’d go further, though, and argue that, because we live
in a world where change is the life-blood of everything, we need
to understand how to live with change. This includes the surprises,
failures, and changes that make life tough. But it also includes
changes that make life easier, if we can just see how to take
advantage of them. What’s important here is not trying to maintain
what we have (or what we believe we should have), simply because
we have it, but protecting what we think is truly important.
Not surprisingly, the list of what we collectively think is important is
a long and often conflicting one. But building resiliency to protect
and preserve what we can agree should be protected and preserved
in a changing world makes a lot of sense. And this brings us back to
The Day After Tomorrow.
On one level, The Day After Tomorrow can be viewed as a movie
about the dangers of not building resilient systems. In the movie,
political decision-making lacks the resiliency to prevent humandriven climate change, and infrastructure systems lack the resiliency
to withstand the impacts of the extreme storms. What we see is a
brittle world, collapsing under the consequences of ill-considered
decisions.
And yet, for all the dramatic and catastrophic change in the movie,
people, relationships, and nations survive. Not only do they survive,
they grow and adapt. And ultimately, they show deep resiliency in
the face of potential catastrophe.
This, though, is a matter of framing. Certainly, the developed
world and its institutions and infrastructures are shattered by the
catastrophic shift in global climate. But in the movie’s narrative,
what is important to the central characters, including love,
commitment, friendship, and selflessness, are resilient in the
face of the onslaught. And because of this, despite the on-screen
destruction, this is a movie about hope for the future—a hope that’s
based on the resiliency of the human spirit.
That said, this is very much a privileged Western perspective.
Despite the shock we feel at seeing whole communities decimated
in the movie, this is sadly not an unusual state of affairs as you look
around the world. Beyond the confines of a Western middle-class
existence, suffering and catastrophe are commonplace, whether
through war, famine, disease, poverty, climate, or a whole host
of other factors. And this is perhaps one of the more sobering
takeaways from the movie; that while we might talk about the need
For many of these communities, resiliency is not about holding on
to what they have, but about not letting go of who they are. Yet,
in many cases, this is a necessity rather than a virtue, and one that
should probably not be praised where it shouldn’t be needed. And
this brings us to a final way of thinking about resiliency. Resiliency
should not be about survival, or about holding onto life with our
fingernails. Rather, it should be about having the ability to thrive
in a changing world. Yet to achieve this, we need to be proactive.
We need to have foresight, and to act with intention, if we want
to create the future we desire, in spite of what the dynamic and
dangerous world we live on throws at us.
This means taking responsibility for changes that we can control,
such as reducing the chances of catastrophic climate change that’s
driven by our own irresponsible actions. But it could just as easily
mean using technology to intentionally modify the Earth’s climate.
And this brings us to an idea that isn’t explicitly addressed in The
Day After Tomorrow, but is deeply embedded in how we think
about resiliency, climate, and the future: geoengineering.
In 2006, University of Arizona astronomer Roger Angel suggested a
rather radical solution to global warming. His idea was to launch a
trillion-dollar light diffuser into space, to deflect some of the sun’s
rays from the Earth.[^173] The proposal was published in the prestigious
journal the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and
at the time it caught the imagination of a number of us who were
intrigued by such an audacious approach to planetary engineering.
Angel proposed to send billions of small, transparent “flyers” into
space to create a cloud at the Lagrange point between the Sun and
the Earth—the point where the gravitational pull of each body just
balances out—allowing the flyers to seemingly hover effortlessly
between the two. These would deflect just enough sunlight from
hitting the Earth that the cloud would act as a massive solar shade,
countering the effects of greenhouse-gas-driven global warming.
for resiliency in the face of climate change, communities around the
world are exhibiting resiliency now, every day, as they struggle to
survive and find meaning in a fickle world.
Angel’s idea was part of a growing interest in using planetaryscale engineering to manage the effects of human-caused climate
change. Commonly called “geoengineering,” it’s an approach to
controlling the earth’s climate that, to some at least, has become
increasingly relevant as efforts to curb carbon dioxide emissions
have run into rough water. Yet, despite the urgency with which
we need to get a grip on our collective environmental impacts,
geoengineering represents technologies and ideologies that are
fraught with challenges.
I first started writing about geoengineering back in in 2009.[^174] At the
time, I was fascinated by the audacity of the ideas being discussed
(most of which were more mundane than throwing billions of
sunshades into space). But I was also intrigued by the ethical and
social issues they raised. I’d been following the technology before
this, but what sparked my interest in 2009 was the controversy
around a particular experiment planned to take place in the
Southern Ocean.
The experiment was given the admittedly not-so-catchy name
LOHAFEX,[^175] and was designed to see if algal blooms could be
used to remove carbon dioxide from the air.[^176] The plan was to
release six tons of dissolved iron over three hundred square miles
of ocean in an attempt to feed and stimulate an algal bloom, which
would remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere before sinking
to the bottom of the ocean. But even before the research started,
it drew criticism from environmental groups. As one of the largest
geoengineering trials to date at the time, they were concerned that it
represented unnecessary and even unethical direct experimentation
on the only environment we have.
Despite the low chances of LOHAFEX having any lasting impacts,
these concerns put the study on hold until the funders were certain
that the risks were minimal. As it turned out, the experiment,
when it eventually took place, showed that ocean fertilization with
iron had a small and unpredictable impact on atmospheric carbon
dioxide. This was a useful finding, as it indicated the limitations
of this one potential approach to carbon dioxide removal. But it
also demonstrated what a contentious issue geoengineering was at
the time.
If you believe that the root problem with the world today is human
behavior, then one of your primary solutions to global warming is
likely to be trying to change how people behave. This may involve
reducing dependency on fossil fuels, or encouraging people to lead
more energy-efficient (or less energy-greedy) lifestyles. Or it may
mean helping individuals and organizations develop environmentally
healthy practices. In contrast, anything that gives what you think are
humanity’s bad habits a free pass is, by default, not good news—the
reckless extraction and use of fossil fuels for instance, or profligate
energy use. Geoengineering does not fit comfortably within this
ideology. It smacks too much of developing technological fixes to
reverse the consequences of “bad behavior,” rather than fixing the
behavior that led to the problem in the first place.
Unfortunately, to many people—and I would count myself here—
we don’t have the luxury of sacrificing people’s lives and the
environment we live in on the altar of ideology. Without question,
we are caught up in a cycle of collective and individual behavior
where we readily and wrongly pollute the “commons” of the
atmosphere for short-term gain. It would be lovely, of course, to
think that people could learn to be more responsible than this. But
individuals are complex, and society as a whole is more complex
still. We all have our own values, and things that are important to
us that we are striving for. And in some cases, for good or bad,
these don’t align with the common good of maintaining the earth’s
environment in its current (or past) state. Factors like putting food
on the table and a roof over our family’s head come into play,
or getting out of poverty, reducing inequities, closing economic
disparities, and striving for the same living conditions as others.
Individuals and nations are constantly juggling a plethora of issues
that are important, and while the environment is one of them, it isn’t
always the most important.
Even today, the ethics and responsibility of geoengineering are hotly
contested. On one hand, this isn’t surprising. We only have one
environment to experiment with, and so we can’t afford too many
“oops!” moments; there’s no convenient drawing-board to go back
to when Global Experiment A goes wrong. But in addition to the
(albeit low in most cases) risks, there’s another concern that dogs
geoengineering, and that’s the underlying ideology.
Yet despite this complex mess of conflicting priorities, aims, and
desires, the cold hard truth is that our actions are already forcing the
global climate to change. And as they do, we have a choice to make:
live with the consequences, or do something about it. To some in
the geoengineering community, the only way to “do something
about it” is to stop waiting for people to do the right thing, and to
start to engineer the heck out of the problem. And this, as it turns
out, isn’t as hard as you might imagine.
Here, geoengineers have two basic options: reduce the amount
of sunlight hitting and being absorbed by the earth’s atmosphere,
or actively reduce the concentration of greenhouse gases in the
atmosphere (carbon dioxide in particular). In technical terms,
these are often lumped into one of two categories: solar radiation
management, or SRM, and carbon dioxide removal, or CDR, although
it must be said that, to the enterprising geoengineer, there are ways
of engineering the earth’s environment that don’t necessarily fit
conveniently into either of these buckets.
Roger Angel’s solar shade spaceships aside, many of these
techniques aren’t exactly rocket science. For instance, planting
lots of trees is a form of CDR, as they suck up and store carbon
dioxide in their wood (although it’s not the most effective form of
CDR). LOHAFEX was another form of CDR, as are technologies
that actively remove carbon dioxide from power-plant emissions, or
artificial trees and other technologies that convert carbon dioxide
either into plastics and fuels that can be reused, or into materials
that can be buried in the ground.
Many of the approaches being considered for SRM are equally
straightforward: painting roofs white, for instance, to reflect sunlight,
or spraying sunlight-reflecting particles into the stratosphere. This
last technique borrows a trick from volcanoes, which can actually
cool the earth’s atmosphere when they spew millions of tons of
sulfate particles into the stratosphere. And it’s not that expensive.
A country like India, for instance, could probably finance a global
stratospheric aerosol SRM program designed to improve local crop
yields. The problem is, of course, that such unilateral action would
most likely make a lot of other countries rather angry.
All this is rather hypothetical, though, as to date there’s not been
sufficient research to get a good sense of what might work and
what might not with geoengineering technologies, and what the
unintended consequences might be and how to avoid them. As
And yet, something has to give here. To use an analogy from health,
it’s like a physician being faced with a patient needing heart bypass
surgery because they’ve overindulged and under-exercised, but
refusing treatment because it may encourage others to similarly
adopt unhealthy lifestyles. In the medical case, the solution is a
“yes and” one: treat the patient and simultaneously work to change
behavior. And it’s the same with the environment. Yes, we’ve made a
mess of things, and yes, we need to change our behavior. But also,
yes, we need to use every tool we have to make sure the resulting
impacts are as benign as we can make them.
And this brings us back to resiliency, and the challenges of living
on a dynamic planet. Unless drastic action is taken to forcibly
reduce the human footprint on planet Earth, we need to be able
to protect and nurture what is important to humanity. And that
means developing the ability to protect lives and livelihoods; to
protect dignity and freedom; to protect what people care about
the most. This will take social and political change, together with
global cooperation. But it will also take using our technical and
engineering prowess to the best of our ability. And, importantly, it
will depend on combining research and experimentation with social
awareness, to develop ways of engineering the climate that are
socially responsible as well as socially and politically sanctioned.
This probably won’t end up including high-concept ideas like
Roger Angel’s solar diffusers. And to be fair, Angel saw his thought
experiment as an extreme solution to an emerging extreme problem.
Emphasizing this, his paper concluded, “It would make no sense
to plan on building and replenishing ever larger space sunshades
to counter continuing and increasing use of fossil fuel. The same
massive level of technology innovation and financial investment
needed for the sunshade could, if also applied to renewable
energy, surely yield better and permanent solutions.” Rather, we
need feasible and tested engineering approaches that can be used
a result, the “geoengineering elite” of the world are caught in a
seemingly never-ending argument around should-they-shouldn’tthey. And what limited research on possible approaches has been
proposed has run into barriers, much as the LOHAFEX project did.
People who are professionally concerned about these things are
reticent to sanction experiments designed to help develop effective
geoengineering approaches, either because they are worried
about the consequences, or because they see this as an ideological
slippery slope.
carefully and responsibly, and with the agreement of everyone
potentially impacted by them. And they need to be part of a range
of options that are pursued to managing both our impacts on the
world we live on, and the challenges of living on what is, at the end
of the day, a capricious planet.
How we respond to this challenge—and to the ongoing challenge of
climate change more broadly—depends to a large extent on how we
think about the world we live in and the future we’re building. And
this raises an issue that threads through this chapter: Irrespective
of how deep our science is, or how powerful and complex our
technologies are, we cannot hope to build a better, more resilient
future through science and technology if we don’t understand our
relationship with them in the first place. And this leads us to our
final movie: Carl Sagan’s Contact.
[^168]: “The world’s worst natural disasters. Calamities of the 20th and 21st centuries” Published by CBC, May 8, 2008. http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/the-world-s-worst-natural-disasters-1.743208
[^169]: See, for instance, Ed Yong’s 2016 book “I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life,” published by Ecco.
[^170]: Park, J., et al. (2012). “Integrating Risk and Resilience Approaches to Catastrophe Management in Engineering Systems.” Risk Analysis 33(3): 356-367. http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1539-6924.2012.01885.x
[^171]: Woods, D. D. (2015). “Four concepts for resilience and the implications for the future of resilience engineering.” Reliability Engineering & System Safety 141: 5-9. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.ress.2015.03.018
[^172]: Seager, T. P., et al. (2017). “Redesigning Resilient Infrastructure Research.” Published in “Resilience and Risk. Methods and Application in Environment, Cyber and Social Domains.” Editors: I. Linkov and J. M. Palma-Oliveira Springer. Pages 81-119.
[^173]: Angel, R. (2006). “Feasibility of cooling the Earth with a cloud of small spacecraft near the inner Lagrange point (L1).” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 103(46): 17184. http://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0608163103
[^174]: See “Geoengineering: Does it need a dose of geoethics?” 2020 Science, January 28, 2009. https://2020science.org/2009/01/28/geoengineering-does-it-need-a-dose-of-geoethics/
[^175]: The name LOHAFEX comes from “LOHA,” the Hindi word for iron, and “FEX,” an acronym derived from Fertilization Experiment. The lead scientists were nothing if not obscurely creative!
[^176]: “LOHAFEX: An Indo-German iron fertilization experiment.” Eurekalert, January 13, 2009. https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/805437