PLANET AQUA

Jeremy Rifkin is the author of more than 20 best-selling books translated into 35 languages, as well as being a senior economic adviser to the EU and China on transitioning to what he calls a third industrial revolution to address the underlying causes of climate change. This is a groundbreaking contribution, rethinking our central metaphor in terms of water rather than earth, entailing a fundamental shift of ways of thinking and hence of operating systems. Such an aquatic view of our planet is evident from space photos, as the cover illustrates. It is our planetary hydrosphere that animates all life on Earth, and which is now severely out of balance. As Chinese Taoist philosophy has always maintained, waters are a life source rather than a resource to be exploited for short-term profit.

The book begins with a series of observations and statistics relating to extreme water stress, floods, droughts, heat waves and forest fires – with more in prospect, while all this is a natural consequence our extractive, utilitarian and exploitative capitalist system driven by growth and leading inexorably to resource depletion. As I noted in my review of Joseph Campbell above, there is a huge difference between mythologies that seek to work in harmony with nature, and those considering humans as separate and superior. Rifkin takes this up as a core proposition (p. 235), noting the reaction of Schopenhauer to Kant's rationalism ‘using cold, detached, objective reason to subdue, capture, sequester, and tame nature's excesses, in order to meet the utilitarian needs of our human family.' (p. 7) Schopenhauer's was the only entry to a prize competition on the foundations of morality arranged by the Royal Danish Society in 1837 to celebrate Immanuel Kant.

Against the conventional wisdom of the time (p. 254), Schopenhauer proposed that compassion, not pure reason, was the basis of morality ‘and that emotions and feelings animated the compassionate instinct.' He regarded Kant's view as ‘entirely abstract, wholly insubstantial, and likewise floating about entirely in the air.' In other words, it is not grounded in lived human experience, and the heart is entirely absent. Rifkin rightly identifies Schopenhauer as the first person in history to define the empathic process in a succinct fashion and notes that empathic moments eliminate the other (his italics). The development of AI has been largely driven by the same detached reason, data computation, algorithmic agency, and robotic feedback. We are at a critical point of choice where I believe we have to renounce our effort to bend nature to our rational will, and rather embrace nature's calling and rejoin the community of life on Planet Aqua. This entails a Goethean mindful and empathic biophilic reattachment to all that is alive so that life might be replenished (p. 260) Can we both live in part in virtual worlds, while re-embedding ourselves back into the planetary spheres, biomes, and ecosystems? This is where indigenous world views can provide priceless guidance.

The book is structured in four parts: the imminent collapse of hydraulic civilisation, the Mediterranean eco-region as the canary in the mine, the implications of living on Planet Aqua, and a new ontology for life on earth. The water-energy-food nexus is a key focus in discussing the rise and fall of civilisations, with deforestation and agriculture leading to salinisation, drought, and hence to food shortages and the need for migration (our ancestors were nomadic and adaptable, a trait now in evidence with climate refugees, a trend initially identified by Sir Crispin Tickell as far back as the 1980s. The Romans were the first to manipulate water supply on a large scale, thereby providing drinking water (and baths) for cities – the Pont du Gard feeding Arles is an awe-inspiring example. There are some fascinating figures on the growth of watermills in Europe, reaching 500,000 by the 1790s, and also of the implication of dams – there are currently over 36,000 spread across major river basins, and causing downstream ecosystem change. Then there is the use of water for irrigation, especially of cash crops, and the increasing need for desalinisation plants to provide drinking water for burgeoning populations. Rifkin recommends a radical shift from capitalism to hydroism (detail and implications on p. 96), also implying a corresponding shift from militarised geopolitics to biosphere politics based on bioregions.

Our economic operating system has to be transformed to reflect that of Nature - as Viktor Schauberger was already proposing in the 1930s (biomimicry) – in terms of complex adaptive systems. Rifkin explains how the modification of time was mediated by the mechanical clock, leading to the promotion of efficiency and productivity where time is money; (p. 165) also, how perspective in art led to the detached and objective observer. Efficiency then entails ‘the extracting, sequestering, commodifying, and consuming of ever greater volumes of the Earth's guiding spheres…' in an inherently unsustainable fashion. Another influence is Newton's description of (dead) matter and motion devoid of time, criticised by Whitehead and Collingwood with their process philosophy. Rifkin argues that an aqua-centred rather than earth-centred approach sees waters as processes, patterns, and flows. These workings ‘need to be embedded into the heart of our educational systems, our cultural lore, are ways of governance, our approach to the economy, our sense of selfhood, and the way we experience life itself. (p. 247) In some countries, this now involves the extension of legal rights to waters.

There is far more rich content that could be discussed, but there are in my view a few missing elements. Forests are not in the index, and their role in relation to water cycles is crucial (see Luigi Morelli's article above). Nor is there any consideration of weather manipulation, geoengineering and the (subversive) use of directed energy weapons with respect to wildfires, for which there is some suggestive evidence in relation to the anomalies in Lahaina and Los Angeles; for more information, see https://geoengineerinwatch.org. Weather warfare run by the CIA may have played a role in the geopolitics of the Middle East, particularly in Syria, as another means of destabilising the Assad regime, leading to droughts, food shortages, and large scale migration. On the US mainland, Dane Wigington has provided significant evidence of ongoing weather manipulation (see also his recent interview with Tucker Carlson), which he argues is responsible for many weather extremes attributed to carbon emissions, for instance through ice nucleation or even steering of hurricanes (readers need to assess these claims for themselves). At the very least, these kind of subversive interventions are confounding factors that I believe need to be taken into consideration and which – like artificial clouds spreading out in the sky - are officially dismissed as conspiracy theories. These reservations aside, the book represents a real paradigm shift in how we view the Earth.