Category Archives: biodiversity

biodiversity, conservation, environment

Notes from an Increasingly Lonely Planet* 1: Bioslaves and the Human Convertitron

Masters of the Biosphere

We humans are incredibly fortunate here on earth because each of us has about 19,290 bioslaves in human-equivalent terms, to take care of us.

One might ask what a bioslave in human equivalents is – it sounds cool, though maybe creepy.  In the modern world, to be a slave master is an ugly, horrible thing.  But maybe being a master of bioslaves is different?

So let’s start by taking a closer look at bioslaves.

Bioslaves

One of the most important, fun, and possibly incredibly deeply disturbing ways of understanding humanity is to understand the unavoidable fact that we are Masters of the Biosphere.

Protest all you want, and champion the bacteria or lions or something else you think are the true Masters of the Biosphere, but there is simply no getting around the fact that, for better or worse, we totally dominate the Biosphere.  Sorry, but we 7.2 billion people rule – we command most of Earth’s freshwater, have converted almost all of the most productive lands to agricultural systems, have move more earth than Earth itself, and have radically altered Earth’s atmosphere, biosphere, lithosphere and hydrosphere – a lot of spheres, and no other species can make such a claim.

If we are masters, than all other species are slaves – bioslaves, to be precise.

You could think of non-human species as our friends, family, or fellow citizens of the Biosphere rather than our slaves, but that’s not popular thinking.  Most people think of plants, non-human animals, and microorganisms as soulless creatures here to serve us.  Indeed, the most popular environmental trend right now is to think that all non-human life is here to do one thing and one thing only – to serve us.  Modern environmentalism is mostly about ecosystem services – saving nature because it serves us.  But let’s not get caught up in that debate.

The dominant theme in modern environmentalism is the idea of ecosystem services - nature's value is in its service to us and not much else matters.

The dominant theme in modern environmentalism is the idea of ecosystem services – nature’s value is in its service to us and not much else matters.

What is lost by this view is that we don’t get through life on our own – our air is manufactured by plants, animals and microorganisms that also purify our water, produce our fruits, nuts, mushrooms, lumber, fiber, feed for our domestic animals, and medicines.  They regulate our climate, curtail the spread of disease, pollinate where pollination is necessary, and do a million, million things we totally love having done for us.

Picture yourself in brilliant white linen clothes, recumbent on a splendid chaise lounge, sipping bourbon (with an ice ball) on the veranda of an enormous mansion, many times bigger than you could possibly need, and you’re surrounded by creatures that do everything for you.  Then, consider the extraordinary thing that you don’t pay them anything for it.   And if you don’t like them, you can burn, poison, incarcerate, sell, or kill them.  Really, you are the master and they the slaves.  Thinking like the slaveholders and traders of yore, we just have to claim that plants, animals and microorganisms have no souls and according to convenient interpretations of otherwise inscrutable biblical texts, they are here to serve us by God’s will.

I know, I know, that’s a horrible way to think of the living world, but just for the moment, imagine it’s the God’s truth.  We can buy, trade, torture, murder, or drive to extinction any species and do whatever we want so that we can have rich and fulfilling lives.  OK – maybe so only 1% can have rich and fulfilling lives, but that’s another subject.

Now that we have a sense of what a bioslave is, we have to convert them into human slaves to get a better grip on what all this means.

Bioslaves and the Human Convertitron

The question that immediately comes to mind is – how many slaves do we each have in terms we can understand?

Scientists do this weird thing called back-of-the-envelope-calculations (BOTEC)) to quickly gain insights into things that are very difficult to fathom.  Here’s my BOTEC:

  1. We currently are 7.2 billion people each weighing, on average, 40 kilograms (remember that a kilo is about 2 pounds). Some are babies and weigh only a little while some are very, very heavy, so, I’m saying your average human weighs about 40 kilos.
  2. Take an average human – spleen, blood, liver, skin, bones, brain, fat, and put it all in a blender – whrrrrrrrrrrr!
  3. Extract the carbon – the key element to organic life. Humans are about 18% carbon.  So, the yield would be 7.2 kilograms of carbon per average human.
  4. So now, in our BOTEC, we have to imagine this machine called the Human Convertitron. It’s like the Matter Replicator in the Star Trek science fiction TV shows where as a member of the Federation we can type g-l-a-s-s-o-f-w-i-n-e-a-n-d-p-l-a-t-e-o-f-c-h-e-e-s-e into the console of a Matter Replicator and, after a very brief time, wine and cheese, complete with glass and plate, appear.  Presumably it took other matter and converted it into what we wanted.  The Human Convertitron is even simpler – it converts all matter into humans.  It’s basically the technological equivalent of a pronatalist  agenda – but that too, is another subject.
  5. Now take all the bustards, hawks, hummingbirds, pigeons, sea gulls, sparrows, otters, clouded leopards, elephants, mushrooms, bacteria in all the soils, sediments, and microbiomes of all creatures on earth, and all the redwoods, orchids, oaks, grasses, legumes, daisies, lianas, ferns, palms, lichens, dung beetles, dragonflies, aphids, butterflies, tuna, shark, crabs, lobsters, shrimp, snails, limpets, clams, oysters, mussels, chaetognaths, priapulids, corals, worms, and so on, and put it all in a blender – whirrrrrrrrrrrr!
  6. Feed this biosphere blend into the Human Convertitron and out pops, if I did my math right, 140 trillion humans! (My logic:  there are a trillion metric tons of carbon in the biosphere which, if you divide by 7.2 kilos per person, gets you 140 trillion humans).
  7. One more bit of simple math – take the 140 trillion human slaves and divide them by 7.2 billion and that means we each have about 19,290 slaves each.
The Matter Replicator in Star Trek science fiction converts matter into whatever you want. The Human Convertitron is the same hypothetical machine, only it converts matter into humans.

The Matter Replicator in Star Trek science fiction converts matter into whatever you want. The Human Convertitron is the same hypothetical machine, only it converts matter into humans.

It might be mildly disquieting to consider that we each have 19,290 slaves working for us.  Imagine waking in the middle of the night and discovering 19,290 slaves standing in the dark, packed into your room, spilling out into the streets, all waiting to serve you.

On the other hand, it’s a stunning thing to consider the extraordinary magnitude to which we are served by nature when we convert biodiversity to humans.

What nature does for us is equivalent to having 19,290 human slaves working for us 24/7 without any compensation, rights, or protection of their well-being.

It’s a good thing we don’t have a Human Convertitron because if we did and if we converted all life to humans, Earth would collapse almost instantly unless the 140 trillion humans knew how to make our environment habitable so that we and the other 7.2 billion (or that portion of legal age) can sip bourbon (with ice balls).

On the other hand, maybe if we saw ourselves as part of the community of life on Earth, rather than Masters of the Biosphere, things might play out differently.  Slavery is one of the darkest sides of human nature and while we may not see its ugliness in the concept of bioslaves, when we recast our biota into the equivalent of human slaves, an exercise meant to see nature differently, we discover how deeply disturbing it is to consider life on Earth our slave.  Perhaps if we had considered ourselves working in league with species, rather being masters of the Biosphere, we would view life on Earth in a way that would promote environmental sustainability and human wellbeing.

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*Over the years, in foolish anticipation of one day writing a book entitled, Notes from an Increasingly Lonely Planet, I started collecting thoughts about the demise of our world that might convey ecology and evolution in unconventional, perhaps more interesting and even entertaining ways.  I worried that the bulk of environmental literature, especially books, prophesized doom, were alarmist, chastised their readers or humanity in general, or were otherwise off-putting.  I understand where environmental writers are coming from, but I wanted to take a different approach, even if the message might have unavoidably somber overtones.  These notes, however, just don’t come together well as a book, so I hope they might work as blogs.

This is my first installment of Notes in my year of practice blogging.

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biodiversity, environment

Home is where you hang your children’s children’s ….hat: Life at the bottom of the sea and elsewhere.

In 2006, a few years after we arrived in Manhattan and were still reeling from big city rents, The New York Times reported that a certain Mr. Freeman, mostly out of curiosity, posted an ad for renting a hole in a wall in his apartment – $35.00 a month.  He had a dozen inquiries by day’s end.  Home is, after all, where you hang your hat.

In the case of life on earth, home is where eventually at least one of your children can hang her hat, which means, by extension, it is where at least one of your children’s children can hang their hat, and so on.  It hardly matters if it’s a hole in the wall or a luxury condo, though we’d all prefer the latter, no doubt.

When it comes to hole-in-the-wall homes, the ocean’s hadal zone probably tops the charts as the worst place to live.  The hadal zone is anyplace between 4 to 7 miles below the ocean’s surface.  That’s roughly 6 to 11 kilometers down – deeper, as marine biologists love to point out, than Mt. Everest is high.

Deep though the hadal zone may be, it’s a tiny place; only a couple percent of the entire ocean floor that totals over 100 million square miles (multiply by 3 for kilometers).  It’s a tiny area because most of the zone is made up of deep cavernous drops or oceanic trenches and while there are plenty of oceanic trenches, they don’t cover much area.

If your home is in a hole at the very bottom of the sea, you’re living in the hadal zone.

Freeman’s hole in the wall is a luxury condo compared to hadal holes at the bottom of the sea.  The hadal zone doesn’t look so bad when we are treated to pictures and videos of the place, but these images are taken with custom-made cameras mounted on ruggedly engineered diving robots or by people in deep-sea submersibles that have lots of lamps for taking those images.

Deep sea submersibles - letting us see a word that is largely pitch black.

Deep sea submersibles – letting us see a word that is largely pitch black.  From the HADES web site – note the hadal zone at the very bottom.

In reality, sunlight only penetrates down, at best, to maybe 660 feet (200 meters).   Thus, the hadal zone is even darker than the underworld for which it is named because there is absolutely no light down there, except for the occasional flicker of bioluminescence.

It’s not just a pitch black world, it’s a creepy world – a place under a perennial drizzle of detritus, dead microbes, and particulate poop from the creatures above.  Occasionally, a corpse might make it to the bottom if scavengers above missed it as it sank slowly through miles of ocean and into a trench, but that won’t happen often.  It’s also near freezing and the pressure down there is a thousand times what it is up on the Earth’s surface.

The hadal zone hardly seems a neighborhood where anything would want to live.  And yet, scientists from the Hadal Ecosystem Studies program, or HADES, recently broke the record for the deepest fish ever found.  So, in spite of what must be the most extreme conditions on Earth, there are creatures that call it home.

But when you think about it, though the hadal zone is pretty extreme, the truth is, much of the world is inhospitable – too hot or cold, too dry or wet, and/or too little food or energy to go around.  Of the 330 million cubic miles (about 1,200 million cubic kilometers) of ocean water, only 14 cubic miles (or just 60 cubic kilometers) is in the sunlit or euphotic zone.  The euphotic zone is what we think of when we think of the ocean – kelp beds, coral reefs, eel-grass beds, or the surface waters where we see jellyfish, sun sharks, and sea turtles, but the vast majority of the ocean is a dark, cold place.  The same is true for terrestrial Earth – we tend to think of majestic forests filled with trees, flowering plants, buzzing insects, and a host of birds and mammals, or we might think of grasslands with elk and bison and wildflowers everywhere.  But vast regions of terrestrial Earth are dry (16%) or just rock and ice where little can live (25%).  It’s hard to say what percent of land is perfect for life, but if we were to consider that to be tropical habitats – that’s only about 24% of the terrestrial world.

Yet, no matter how inhospitable a place on Earth is, whether the dark hadal zone or the icy arctic, you will almost always find species that call it home.  They and their children and their children’s children, and so on, live there generation after generation.

When I think of our Biosphere, I think of New York City – home to millions.  It’s not the few who live in mansions, townhouses, luxury condos, or spacious, well-furnished, well-lit abodes that make NYC the vibrant city it is, though the wealthy often serve some important roles.  It’s the writers, musicians, artists, short-order cooks, police, firefighters, medics, teachers, scientists, architects, engineers, students, bus drivers, train conductors, garbage collectors, and the millions of people who live and work together that make the city work.  Their homes are modest places, though holes in the wall are probably rare.

The Biosphere is the same as vibrant mega-cities – all its inhabitants live and work in every space imaginable. The hadal zone is no luxury abode, but it’s home to hundreds of species, two thirds of them living nowhere else, and if we could figure out how to estimate how many archaeal and bacterial species live down there, the number would be much bigger.  It’s not just weird fish (including eels) down there, but amphipods, crabs, isopods, sea cucumbers, mollusks, lots of microorganisms, and probably many species waiting to be found.  The hadal zone may be ecological holes in the wall, but then most of Earth is a challenging place for life.  Yet, 8.7 million species call it home, and make for a rich and vibrant world.

Life values every place on Earth as home.  Strange that not all of us value Earth in the same way given that we too make our homes here.

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