Atlantis Dispatch 010:
A choose-your-own-adventure piece in which ATLANTIS contemplates tempests…
Image credit Steve Mcghee.
October 4th, 2021
…begin transmission…
Well, it’s hurricane season on Earth, reader. And if there ever were a time to talk about the weather, it seems to be now. While we were on our way back to the ship after the Medici exhibit at the Met last week, we found ourselves sloshing around in the NYC subway, thinking, my, my are we in an illustration from Kim Stanley Robinson’s cli-fi novel, New York 2140? So soon? Well, yes, reader, it appears that the weather is scaling up its storms to make itself very, very clear. “Let there be no doubt,” the storms seem to be saying, “we will drown you if you do not take the heat off of the planet.” Never has Atlantis been so relieved to be a boat!
In light of our realization that New York could really become more like the old city of Atlantis within our waking lives, we redoubled our efforts and began to contemplate our entanglement. Now, in our current climate recovery efforts, Atlantis has noticed a few patterns. The first thing that strikes us is how enmeshed we are: as Atlantis readers may recall, the global infrastructure that keeps us moving is so deeply entrenched in all of our lives that our ocean fauna have started to metabolize plastic. When we think about the scale of the problem, our little individual efforts at, say, recycling bottles, start to feel absurd. It makes Atlantis wish that Prospero would turn up after one of these “hurricanoes” and tell us that it is all an illusion, no cause for alarm.
And yet we also know that it is a question of actually doing something about the weather, not just proposing magic or sea walls to obscure the swell. So, what can Atlantis do? Well, we can certainly help with a shift in thinking.
Atlantis is of the mind that we need to think in more systemic ways — especially in terms of ecology, coupled systems, and informational organization. As SFI Science Board and External Faculty member Simon A. Levin argues in a recent article in The Bridge, for example, a shift toward ecological thinking means that we observe the ways that our systems of life are like Darwin’s tangled bank: the creation of tinkering species, more so than master craftsmen. Rather than getting overwhelmed by the smallness of our individual selves against the vastness of the problem, we can think of ourselves as networks of species working to form a more robust habitat. Reversing climate change, you say? It takes an ecosystem.
We would also do well to be aware that in these habitats — these systems of life — our subsystems are coupled with each other. As Atlantis crewmates know, our economic system is deeply entangled, interwoven, interdependent, and snarled with our energy sources — add to this our biological systems and our respiratory systems besides. COVID-19, anyone? Yet by seeing these systems as both separate and entangled, we can start to think a bit better about how to decouple and transform them. As SFI President David Krakauer, and SFI Distinguished Professor Geoffrey West argue in a recent article at Nautilus, transforming coupled systems typically involves a series of trade-offs. But by seeing them clearly, we can prevent collapse along the way.
Now, perhaps, like you, when our ship starts spinning, so do our minds, and we sometimes find ourselves getting a little philosophical, reaching beyond our planet, out into space. After we reflected a while on the complex swirling energy systems of our current moment, we started to wonder if life has always been this way, like from the beginning, when it first emerged.
But Lo! Ahoy! Suddenly, we see a conceptual storm brewing dead ahead. A tempest of our own making has us divided, and frankly we’re torn as to how to proceed. Perhaps you’d be willing to take the Galver and steer us to safety.
Shall we head straight into the eye of the storm
or
bear away from the winds to some off-course, unexpected destination?
Atlantis simply cannot decide.
. . .