Offset ALL THE THINGS

I like this piece from BBC Future very much. The title, "Can humanity leave nature behind ?" certainly obeys a popular law of headline questions being invariably answered in the negative, but there's more to it than that.

Faced with a looming collapse of Earth's natural systems, talk of decoupling is no longer science fiction. In some cases, it manifests as ever more profound "fixes" to preserve our pursuit of the good life. For example, scientists have begun devising ways to synthesise "ecosystem services" – such as pollination or other natural processes that benefit human society. In food production, this involves attempting to grow crops under artificial light underground, culturing microalgae, mycoprotein and mealworm in bioreactors, and introducing modified genes to increase the resilience of agricultural species to environmental change.

At other times, the proposed decoupling is framed as a form of escapism. The newly touted "metaverse", for instance, promises a form of spatial, workplace and recreational departure from the "meatspace" of the physical world: why visit a polluted forest or lake when you can access a near-perfect digital simulation of a clean one from your home? Elsewhere in Silicon Valley, technologists and billionaires talk of the need to abandon a degraded Earth altogether, and are taking the tentative first steps to develop Mars-bound spaceships.

My own take is that where "decoupling" actually helps reduce human interference in the natural world, and avoids us having to further deplete its resources, this is generally a good thing and to be encouraged. Where such an approach instead requires further intervention in nature - if we were, say, to simply replace existing agricultural land with a new, more intensive, more efficient form, rather than using that improvement to reduce the land used for farming and restore it to wilderness - that would be a bad thing. Trying to escape a dying Earth is the utmost folly - it's not dying (cynics : kindly sod off) and we can't escape it. In contrast, trying to develop a space industry to help with better stewardship is laudable. A metaverse is neither intrinsically good nor bad for the planet but depends entirely on how it's implemented.

Allow me to introduce you to a conceptual tool – a metaphor to explore this space. Imagine a gradient which represents all the material complexity in the world, with the extreme complexity of "self-organised" matter at one end and consciously "engineered" matter at the other. So, at that latter far end might be – for example – the most delicate and finely engineered human structure (AI or a supercomputer perhaps), and at the other end, the wildest and most diverse ecosystem. A midpoint might represent something alive but highly modified and controlled, like a monoculture of crops, or an ornamental garden.

Crucially neither end of this spectrum is inherently good or bad either. It's only a handful of lunatics who genuinely want to go back to living in the trees, and the perhaps larger portion of people who would rather live in a purely synthetic environment are no less idiotic. But a sterile environment, a world of glass and steel, can have as much beauty in it as a world of trees and soil, can be as dangerous as one of sharks and starvation. Technological denialism may have its heart in the right place by trying to avoid further damage to the ecosystem, but ultimately it's a mistake, just as much as it would be to seal ourselves in technological bubbles.

But what if the creator of each new "manmade" thing had an obligation towards creating its opposite on this gradient? For example, a form of biodiversity investment or rewilding instigated when something is added to the engineered side. There is a profound symmetry to the idea that whatever complexity is built or created on one side, must be equally replaced or protected on the other for the system to remain stable.

While pollution or illegal environmental damage are sometimes fined or taxed, offsetting is rarely considered for processes other than carbon production, and direct withdrawals from nature by new human creations are not "priced-in".

Another well-established category of offset is reserving land for national parks, green belts to contain cities, or nature reserves to preserve valuable ecosystems. Here, though, these schemes are often undertaken by governments, and there is often less of a direct link between the builders of engineered objects such as a new housing block or factory, and areas of regeneration or rewilding. While national efforts can have impact, it would be inspiring to see the burden of restoration fall more significantly on those who are directly unbalancing the system... There are also recent projects underpinned by so-called "nature positive" principles, which aim to build ecological resilience and reverse loss. Operation Wallacea, a biodiversity and climate research organisation, has devised biodiversity credits to trace the tangible improvements to biodiversity in any given area, and to develop an international biodiversity credit standard which could be traded in the same way as a carbon credit.

Which is indeed offsetting all the things. I like the principle very much. Rather than saying, "you just can't damage the environment at all", which will never work, you say, "every time you damage the environment you're responsible for compensating". This is not mutually exclusive with the need to minimise the damage in the first place.

I am aware that offsetting is no panacea, and it can create moral quandaries too. The writer and environmentalist George Monbiot, for example, has compared offsetting to the sale of indulgences by the Catholic church in the 16th Century, when sinners could, in effect, pay to cancel out their bad deeds. It’s true the idea runs the risk of greenwashing or giving a green-light to damaging processes, but I would argue that any, and preferably equal, act of replacement is better than none.

I strongly agree. We have a responsibility to clean up the mess we made as well as not making any more. Simply saying, "stop using energy" isn't going to work, ever. And if that responsibility extends directly and generally to the damage we inflict, not just concerned with CO2 emissions, then so much the better.

In these examples, to say there are opposites does not mean one is bad and one is good. It is more that up cannot exist without down, matter without anti-matter, and life could not exist without death. If this wisdom keeps re-occurring across folklore, mythology and in a multitude of symbols because it reflects an important truth, then we might be wise to heed its message and be concerned with the continued existence of opposites and the dynamic play between them. That is to say, even if you were someone who wouldn't enjoy spending time in nature, and even if we found a way to not rely on it for survival − for example, by creating artificial systems that would sustain us in a decoupled state – the decision to foster a balance between technology and nature aligns with long-held human values across many societies.

he truth is we may need an existence like Blade Runner 2049 in some portions of the planet, and we do need to decouple to some extent, as technology will be needed to liberate the land required for rewilding. But, watching the recent flurry of commercial space flights, I wondered about how much biodiversity had been lost to make that happen, what it cost the Earth system. If the Earth is not to be irreversibly degraded and unbalanced, we need some equal and opposite pull in the direction of replenishing natural complexity. Surely the best reward of a healthy planet is space exploration, not it being an escape from a dying planet. If the human-biosphere umbilical cord is to be cut, it should leave mother Earth in peak health, and in service to both parties.

I think this author is a good person and deserves a hug. Sometimes the solution is not in the middle but in balancing the two extremes.