Today’s post is a brief philosophical piece on the featured topic for this week, geoengineering, inspired by my current state of mind as I complete the last minute pre-production for a sci-fi short film voice recording session called White.

Being the director is quite the challenge and a whole lot of creative fun! It’s also an exercise in restraint since I would love to tell you all about the mysterious world of the White but all you get right now is the title. Muahahaha!

Now back to geoengineering.

I do admit that my thoughts on its long term viability are somewhat jaded. The engineer in me believes in the power of ingenuity but the Steward in me remains humbled before the immense cosmic power of our Gaea.

It seems to me that humanity is always once step behind.

We see it in the medical field where antibiotic resistant bacteria, the super-bugs wearing spandex and a cape, conspire against increasingly potent pharmaceuticals while the human body suffers more and more damage from the side-effects.

We see it in agriculture, as round-up resistant bugs and organisms attack the corn we engineered to be the hero in the battle against low yields.

We even see it inside our own bodies as we adapt to higher levels of caffeine until that point where we accidentally brush our teeth with hair gel in the morning.

So what is our solution? We engineer our way out of it…temporarily.

The Energy Drink!  WOO-HOO! Life is exciting. The brain is on overdrive. Boy are we productive!

Do you ever wonder what a squirrel would look like in a business suit? Take a walk down Wall Street. We rodents of unusual size are indeed what we eat. Nuts!

Eventually, the natural world outwits humanity’s innovation and a new solution is implemented, until it too becomes insufficient, and yet another new idea is born, and so on and so on. This is what feeds our intellectual, societal, and economic evolution. This not what controls our physical evolution.

What we have created for ourselves in our mind is a circle evolution independent of the circle of life (or at the very most intersecting it at the outer edge) which believes it encloses life when in fact it is the other way around.

As we expand our circle through technology and more detailed knowledge of the natural world, the outer circle we are completely enclosed by and whose limit is the universe expands as well. We remain bound inside a physical world we do not fully comprehend.

Humans have such an incredible capacity to create, mold, and shape the outside world that we falsely assume that we can control it. That is the trap I believe geoengineering has fallen into.

Perhaps a double take at ourselves in a Mirror Mirror would give us a different perspective?

What is your view on the merits or ills of geoengineering?  Can we innovate our way back into alignment with the natural world?