Theme Park Earth đ
Theme Park Earth đ
Earth as home, resource, and tourist attraction.
Welcome to New World Same Humans, a weekly newsletter on trends, technology, and society by David Mattin.
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This week two related, and telling, stories caught my eye. Take them as two signs of the times.
A few days ago Jeff Bezos spoke at an event called Our Future in Space. In conversation with the Washington Post journalist David Ignatius, Bezos said that in centuries to come millions of humans will live in vast, floating cities among the stars.
People will be born in space, said Bezos, and know it as their first home. Theyâll visit Earth, âthe way you would visit Yellowstone National Parkâ. You can see the whole conversation here.
Meanwhile, the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow ended yesterday.
Working late into Saturday night, delegates managed to agree a final text. But the emissions pledges made in that text wonât limit warming to 1.5C; the agreement states only that nations will gather in Egypt next year to look again at emissions. And a promise to âphase outâ coal was diluted at the last minute, so that itâs now a promise to âphase downâ coal. Just as it sounds, the language phase down was chosen because no one really knows what it means.
One week; two stories. Taken together they would be funny, if the situation we find ourselves in wasnât so serious.
On the one hand a collective failure â at the highest level â even to articulate a plan that will see us avoid catastrophic degradation of our planet. On the other, a billionaireâs dream of a future in which a new breed of space people visit that planet as tourists visit Yellowstone, to wonder at nature.
I donât want my criticism of Bezos to appear harsher than it really is. For a start, thereâs a chance heâs right. Perhaps in centuries to come people really will visit Earth in the way that tourists today visit Yellowstone or the Grand Canyon. And he did also say of Earth, âthis place is special; you canât ruin itâ.
But thereâs such a deep, and deeply ironical, relationship between Bezosâs vision of a humankind untethered from Earth and the environmental crisis that weâre living through. Both depend on a phenomenon that underlies much of what we call modernity. That is, the instrumentalization of nature such that it becomes only another resource, or even a form of entertainment, a kind of ersatz connection to something real. Nature as tool; nature as theme park.
The upshot? Future space-dwellers may well leave their floating cities to embark on two-week, package deal trips to Earth. But if we here in the 21st-century canât remake our relationship with nature, theyâll arrive to find their holiday destination in a state of collapse. A testament to what existed once, but is now gone forever.
The more I write NWSH, the more I think about the predicament we share in the third decade of the 21st-century. And the more I think about that predicament, the more I come to believe that the question of what to do, of how to live at this moment, underlies everything Iâm trying to address with this newsletter.
Iâm at work on the next evolution of our community. That question â how should I live now? â will be at its heart.
More on that coming soon. But in the meantime thanks for reading. And until Wednesday, be well,
David.
It is almost a perverse idea to refer to a future Earth as a kind of Yellowstone. Where Yellowstone is what it is through careful preservation, the foundation of that future society will be built upon the exploitation and potential destruction of Earth. It's a confusing place to be in, as humans. Biological optimism is colliding with the dystopia that intelligence predicts as inevitable.