When the doors close on a commercial airline flight, the tension begins. How soon until they open again? With the possible exception of any youngsters still enamored with the adventure of air travel, most passengers have high hopes for a quick takeoff, smooth trip and safe arrival. While some may fret over the possibility of a long wait on the tarmac or the loss of their luggage, few stop to consider the environment they will soon be entering. At 30,000 feet there is too little oxygen outside to sustain human life; the temperature on the other side of the Plexiglas window is dozens of degrees below freezing. It is a profoundly harsh and deadly environment through which the relatively small habitable tube will be traveling.
Understanding that the Earth itself is merely a larger version of that aircraft is even more eerily discomforting. If something goes wrong here, there is no other place to go, no safe harbor to seek. Coining the phrase “Spaceship Earth,” 20th-century visionary Buckminster Fuller once noted our nonchalant relationship with our safe world: “Spaceship Earth was so extraordinarily well invented and designed that to our knowledge humans have been on board it for two million years not even knowing that they were on board a ship.”
Our planet not only carries us through the void of space, but at the same time provides for all of our life-support needs without, it seems, even trying. But to be captured in the naive assumption of perpetual comfort was to Fuller a dangerous idea. “We have not been seeing our Spaceship Earth as an integrally-designed machine which to be persistently successful must be comprehended and serviced in total.”
As a designer and originator of the geodesic dome, Fuller understood the concept of the “design envelope”: the understanding that all things, even planets, must operate within certain tolerances. To stretch the envelope or push a system beyond those limits is courting disaster. The potential for eventual collapse of the entire system as a whole is possible when critical parts begin to fail under loads exceeding their capacities. This is not an unfamiliar concept to the engineer. Unfortunately, it is also a concept that is becoming all too familiar to the ecologist.
Is such a cascade of ecological failures possible on a planetary scale?
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