Meditation 71: The Earth is a Human Petri Dish

The earth is a human Petri dish filled with the stored energy of the sun. For ages, the sun has been worshipped as a god. Plato compared it to the Form of the Good. For the Greeks and for many other ancient peoples, the divinity of the sun was plain from the fact that without the sun, life, as we know it, would be impossible. The sun provides energy to power life on earth. By photosynthesis plants grow. Vegetation turns sunlight directly into life and stored energy. Animals use the heat and light of the sun to find their food, survive and multiply. Plant eaters use and store the energy of plants.  Predators use the energy stored in the bodies of their prey for their own survival. One way or another, life on earth depends directly or indirectly on the power of the sun. Our small earth, itself, is the sun’s castaway, and its molten core a remnant of the sun’s great heat.

What happens when a life form hits the mother-lode of energy? I propose to examine this question by exploring an analogy between life in a Petri dish and life on earth. In the humble Petri dish we find a bowl of finite size containing a most nutritious gelatin for micro-organisms to eat. We put a small number of them into the middle of the Petri dish and see what happens. Suppose that they love the nutrients, and start eating. Soon the energy in food leads to population growth. The faster they eat the more of them there are. The more they are, the faster they use up the food. Within the finite Petri dish, they eat like there is no tomorrow. Starting at the center, a desert begins to form as the nutrients are exhausted. Unthinking, they eat their way to the edge of the dish, using up all available resources at ever increasing rates. Finally, with nothing to eat, the micro-organisms die out.

Now look at the experience of the fire using hominids who evolved into what is ironically called ‘homo sapiens.’ For millennia, there were many trees, and few humans. Throughout pre-history and most of history, too, humans burned wood to provide heat and light. Mainly by burning wood, but also cow dung, loose coal, or peat, humans found a power that was useful in many contexts for many purposes. There are, however, substantial limits to what can be done with a simple wood fire, though the discovery of charcoal and the bellows did allow developments in pottery and metallurgy after the last ice age.

It is amazing what humans built and manufactured by burning wood or charcoal, but they hit the mother-load of energy with coal and oil. Coal powered the steam engine. Oil powered the internal combustion engine. Humans had discovered a completely portable energy, found in abundance in many places and useful in a thousand different ways. The food in our Petri dish is oil, and humans are behaving just as the micro-organisms do. We are gobbling up the earth’s resources at ever faster rates.

The analogy is not a perfect fit. Though our Petri dish, the earth, is as finite as the glass container, there is more room to maneuver. The earth’s systems are dynamic and contain many possibilities, many possible futures. The micro-organisms in the Petri dish have no way of replenishing their food stores, while humans do. Also, the individual micro-organism does not speculate about the effects down the line of eating and multiplying, or about whether its environment is finite or infinite. Humans do have reason and forethought.  They can ‘arm themselves against a sea of troubles’ or they can watch and wait for the wreck, as sailors of old, when their storm damaged vessels ploughed inexorably towards a rocky coast.

The heart breaking thought is that it may be too late to prevent the mass extinction of species, including homo-sapiens, now living on a Petri dish earth with finite resources and a growing human population. We do not know for sure whether it is too late to save ourselves and other threatened species, but in any event, we have to do what we can. Unfortunately, human desires and appetites come into play when considering what policy to pursue in contested areas of action and desire. There are many competing interests, perspectives, and values at work in the world; and, while human beings are fighting each other, and are unable to come up with a consensus about the most rational thing to do in the circumstances, the changes we are collectively bringing to the earth’s previous ecological balances are piling up like a wave about to crash. If we want to continue living on this planet in anything like the style to which most people would like to become accustomed, there has to be a collective realization that we have been living in a fool’s Petri dish, that fossil fuel is our gelatin, and that we have to get a grip on our desire for the short term gratification of our appetites, or we are not going to survive in anything like our present form, if we survive at all.