Planet Keeper? Why on earth?

The last book by the late sci-fi writer Michael Crichton of Jurassic Park and The Andromeda Strain fame was titled State of Fear. Throughout the book he points up the promotion of fear and paranoia in the global public by Governments and corporate interests in order to induce docility and obedience to state authority and complaisance in the face of corporate depredations.

The main instrument used to spread this fear is the global media, now fully corporatised and controlled by replacing competent and conscientious journalists with untrained, poorly educated - and generally pretty dumb - 'wannabes'. These can be relied on to read out the press releases as written, and without comment, and to not rock the boat. He even has one of his characters date when this started - 9 November 1989, when the Berlin Wall come down. This symbolised the end of the Cold War and was seen as the end of the threat of global nuclear war and MAD - mutually assured destruction. European Communism has disappeared as a threat; China and the other Red nations were too far behind to be threatening. The prospect of European war was disappearing as a threat as the EU grew. Global peace looked like being assured. People were being freed from fears that had traumatised them for half a century - but there were interests that flourished on public fears.

So news rooms had to develop different scare stories, and the various environment protection bodies found themselves a serendipity. Every quirk of nature was given a beat-up into 'man bites dog' shock-horror news stories and sold hard to newsrooms. This was not idly done, but was one of the most powerful fundraising strategies these organisations had. A pod of whales beach themselves, the TV crews capture this for global consumption, and Save the Whales' revenue scores a healthy surge. A volcano erupts and we are told that millions of tons of carbon dioxide is spewing out; so we don't make too much noise when the government announces a multi-million spend to reduce CO₂ emissions.

So much for the disinterestedness of the so-called 'not-for profit' environment movement - what Crichton calls 'a great fund-raising and media machine — a multi-billion-dollar industry in its own right — with its own private agenda that’s not necessarily in the public interest.'

Throughout State of Fear, Crichton demonstrates two unarguable truths; first, that environmental change is natural and continuous, and that we are perhaps being ridiculous trying to maintain a status quo. Second, that 'the science' does not support the claims and the vision of global climate change that the 'environment protection' industry is projecting so profitably for its members.

Crichton presents his argument very convincingly, so I will let one of his characters tell you in his own words. I do recommend that you read this book - it's well worth the cover price!

Let’s remember where we live, Kenner was saying. We live on the third planet from a medium-size sun. Our planet is five billion years old, and it has been changing constantly all during that time. The Earth is now on its third atmosphere.
The first atmosphere was helium and hydrogen. It dissipated early on, because the planet was so hot. Then, as the planet cooled, volcanic eruptions produced a second atmosphere of steam and carbon dioxide. Later the water vapour condensed, forming the oceans that cover most of the planet. Then, around three billion years ago, some bacteria evolved to consume carbon dioxide and excrete a highly toxic gas, oxygen. Other bacteria released nitrogen. The atmospheric concentration of these gases slowly increased. Organisms that could not adapt died out.
Meanwhile, the planet’s land masses, floating on huge tectonic plates, eventually came together in a configuration that interfered with the circulation of ocean currents. It began to get cold for the first time. The first ice appeared two billion years ago.
And for the last seven hundred thousand years, our planet has been in a geological ice age, characterized by advancing and retreating glacial ice. No one is entirely sure why, but ice now covers the planet every hundred thousand years, with smaller advances every twenty thousand or so. The last advance was twenty thousand years ago, so we’re due for the next one.
And even today, after five billion years, our planet remains amazingly active. We have five hundred volcanoes, and an eruption every two weeks. Earthquakes are continuous: a million and a half a year, a moderate Richter 5 quake every six hours, a big earthquake every ten days. Tsunamis race across the Pacific Ocean every three months.
Our atmosphere is as violent as the land beneath it. At any moment there are one thousand five hundred electrical storms across the planet. Eleven lightning bolts strike the ground each second. A tornado tears across the surface every six hours. And every four days, a giant cyclonic storm, hundreds of miles in diameter, spins over the ocean and wreaks havoc on the land.
The nasty little apes that call themselves human beings can do nothing except run and hide. For these same apes to imagine they can stabilize this atmosphere is arrogant beyond belief. They can’t control the climate.
The reality is, they run from the storms.

Kenner is a brilliant, extremely well informed scientist, rational, radical and articulate; he wants to replace all of the outdated EP organisations - which he believes have no further role to play in today's world, as all of their initially radical objectives have become mainstream - with more appropriate instruments to study how and to make tools to 'manage' the environment. He presents his wish list thus:

	I don’t want one of these pretentious names with the words world and resource and defence and wildlife and fund and preservation and wilderness in them. You can string those words together in any combination. World Wildlife Preservation Fund. Wilderness Resource Defence Fund. Fund for the Defence of World Resources. Anyway, those fake names are all taken. I need something plain and new. Something honest. I was thinking of ‘Study the Problem And Fix It.’ Except the acronym doesn’t work. But maybe that’s a plus. We will have scientists and field researchers and economists and engineers—and one lawyer.
What would this organization do?	There is so much to do! For example: Nobody knows how to manage wilderness. We would set aside a wide variety of wilderness tracts and run them under different management strategies. Then we’d ask outside teams to assess how we are doing, and modify the strategies. And then do it again. A true iterative process, externally assessed. Nobody’s ever done that. And in the end we’ll have a body of knowledge about how to manage different terrains. Not preserve them. You can’t preserve them. They’re going to change all the time, no matter what. But you could manage them—if you knew how to do it. Which nobody does. That’s one big area. Management of complex environmental systems.
	Then we’d do developing-world problems. The biggest cause of environmental destruction is poverty. Starving people can’t worry about pollution. They worry about food. Half a billion people are starving in the world right now. More than half a billion without clean water. We need to design delivery systems that really work, test them, have them verified by outsiders, and once we know they work, replicate them.
It sounds difficult.	It’s difficult if you are a government agency or an ideologue. But if you just want to study the problem and fix it, you can. And this would be entirely private. Private funding, private land. No bureaucrats. Administration is five percent of staff and resources. Everybody is out working. We’d run environmental research as a business. And cut the crap.
Why hasn’t somebody done it?	Are you kidding? Because it’s radical. Face the facts, all these environmental organizations are thirty, forty, fifty years old. They have big buildings, big obligations, big staffs. They may trade on their youthful dreams, but the truth is, they’re now part of the establishment. And the establishment works to preserve the status quo. It just does.
Okay. What else?	Technology assessment. Third world countries can leapfrog. They skip telephone lines and go right to cellular. But nobody is doing decent technology assessment in terms of what works and how to balance the inevitable drawbacks. Wind power’s great, unless you’re a bird. Those things are giant bird guillotines. Maybe we should build them anyway. But people don’t know how to think about this stuff. They just posture and pontificate. Nobody tests. Nobody does field research. Nobody dares to solve the problems—because the solution might contradict your philosophy, and for most people clinging to beliefs is more important than succeeding in the world.
Really?	Trust me. When you’re my age, you’ll know it is true. Next, how about recreational land use—multipurpose land use. It’s a rat’s nest. Nobody has figured out how to do it, and it’s so hot, so fierce that good people just give up and quit, or vanish in a blizzard of lawsuits. But that doesn’t help. The answer probably lies in a range of solutions. It may be necessary to designate certain areas for one or another use. But everybody lives on the same planet. Some people like opera, some people like Vegas. And there’s a lot of people that like Vegas.
Anything else?	Yes. We need a new mechanism to fund research. Right now, scientists are in exactly the same position as Renaissance painters, commissioned to make the portrait the patron wants done. And if they are smart, they’ll make sure their work subtly flatters the patron. Not overtly. Subtly. This is not a good system for research into those areas of science that affect policy. Even worse, the system works against problem solving. Because if you solve a problem, your funding ends. All that’s got to change.
How?	I have some ideas. Make scientists blind to their funding. Make assessment of research blind. We can have major policy-oriented research carried out by multiple teams doing the same work. Why not, if it’s really important? We’ll push to change how journals report research. Publish the article and the peer reviews in the same issue. That’ll clean up everybody’s act real fast. Get the journals out of politics. Their editors openly take sides on certain issues. Bad dogs.
Anything else?	New labels. If you read some authors who say, ‘We find that anthropogenic greenhouse gases and sulphates have had a detectable influence on sea-level pressure’ it sounds like they went into the world and measured something. Actually, they just ran a simulation. They talk as if simulations were real-world data. They’re not. That’s a problem that has to be fixed. I favour a stamp: WARNING: COMPUTER SIMULATION—MAY BE ERRONEOUS and UNVERIFIABLE. Like on cigarettes. Put the same stamp on newspaper articles, and in the corner of newscasts. WARNING: SPECULATION—MAY BE FACT-FREE. Can you see that peppered all over the front pages?
Anything else?	There are a few more things, but those are the major points. It’s going to be very difficult. It’s going to be uphill all the way. We’ll be opposed, sabotaged, denigrated. We’ll be called terrible names. The establishment will not like it. Newspapers will sneer. But, eventually, money will start to flow to us because we’ll show results. And then everybody will shut up. And then we will get lionized, which is the most dangerous time of all.

Finally, Crichton sums up his state of knowledge on the entire picture here.

In brief, dear reader, that is where Planet Keeper comes from, and where it is going.

Please join us in our quest.