We Walk Among Them

The belief that one is an alien is usually associated with some form of insanity presumably brought on by reading too much science fiction; and, it may be imagined, with a desire to attract attention in a society where it is all too easy to feel ignored. Yet I feel like I think an alien might. I dwell less in my environment than on it. I look around the surrounding countryside, and I have no idea how to survive in it. I don’t know what plants are safe to eat or where to find them; I don’t know how to catch prey; I don’t know how to build a shelter from local materials; I don’t know how to treat illness; I don’t know how to light a fire or make tools. To be honest, I don’t particularly want to know either – it is interesting in an abstract, academic way of course, but I don’t think I would enjoy suddenly being forced to live a hunter-gatherer existence on a permanent basis. Instead, my head is filled with knowledge about computers, technology, brands, celebrities, insurance policies, TV shows and power tools.

All things that sustain me come from somewhere else that, as far as the ecosystem I inhabit is concerned, may as well be from another planet. The power that heats my house is generated elsewhere; the food I eat is grown elsewhere; the water I drink treated elsewhere; my medicines manufactured elsewhere; my waste disposed of elsewhere. My home planet is the global supply chain and the infrastructure that allows me to access it. It is a fragile planet I can just about survive in, as opposed to the natural environment on which my home is layered, which is a planet in which I stand no chance of survival (in the long if not medium term). It has nothing to do with the rock, the water and the earth where I am, which is only there to provide aesthetic and recreational amenity.

Chances are I think you are an alien too. Before you scoff, how irresponsible does it feel to go for a hike in the wilderness (or as close to wilderness as you can access) without the following: a waterproof jacket, stout footwear, warm clothes, a hat, sunglasses, suncream, GPS-enabled mobile phone? Of course, even these items are in some ways not specific enough – your clothes should be multiple layers, constructed using special breathable man-made fibres that won’t soak up your sweat and put you at risk of hypothermia. Your waterproof jacket would likely also be made of advanced materials. Even suncream now contains nanoparticles. All this technology is designed to protect you from the elements. Adventures into the wilderness even involve taking space food with us: dried food that we can reconstitute on a camping stove with carefully boiled water (the only resource we trust ourselves to collect from the environment, and interestingly, a resource that would need to be abundant on any other planet we might one day colonize). We must be the only animal to go to such lengths before venturing into the environment.

How would you recognise an alien species that had been living on a planet for several thousand years? Certainly initially you might find them living in geodomes, leaving them only carefully in space suits. But over time, given enough resources, perhaps they might have bred plant species that could survive outside the geodomes, and the aliens themselves might have evolved a little (or modified their genome) to tolerate better the differences in environmental conditions between their home planet and the colonized planet. The atmosphere might have been adjusted using industrial processes. There could be networks of tunnels, perhaps. Technology might have been developed to enable the aliens to roam more freely – for longer time periods and further distances from the geodomes. We are reaching a point where in principle we might not be able to tell the difference between an alien planet that humans had colonized for a few thousand years, and our habitation of our home planet.

This boundary becomes more blurred when the weather is extreme. When I visit hot countries (and personally, I start to feel uncomfortable when the temperature reaches 25C), I find myself moving between one air-conditioned space after another: from my air-conditioned hotel room to the air-conditioned public transport network to the air-conditioned conference venue that is usually the reason I am in the ‘hot’ country in the first place. Every minute spent in the open air is a minute longing for the next air conditioned space. Equally, in winter in Scotland, I move from my centrally heated house to my car with the hot air blowing on maximum, to my centrally heated workplace. If my car, house and workplace were air-sealed, and I moved between them in a space suit, I might as well be on the moon! If Passivhaus design takes off, buildings will soon become more air-tight. And if the predictions of climate change scientists are right, extreme weather will become more and more normal and we will need to adapt our homes and infrastructure to cope.

The alienation of humanity from its environment is reflected in the fact that we see ourselves as separate from it in the first place. The conceptualisation of the relationship between humans and their environments using terms such as ‘coupled’ (as in: ‘coupled’ human and natural systems) suggests such separation. More than this, it not only suggests that human systems can be decoupled from natural systems, but that they were so at some point in the past, and have only recently been joined! Even scientists think we are aliens!

Though we ourselves are aliens, we are (ironically) increasingly concerned with aliens in our environment. Aliens that we have introduced to our local ecosystems from other ecosystems: some harmless, others dangerous, denoted by the use of the adjective ‘invasive‘. It is not just species that are aliens in our environment, but also manufactured chemicals and biochemicals. These ‘pollutants’ defile our conceptions of the purity of the natural environment – by which we are horrified even as we decadently consume the goods that are responsible for it. It is a kind of prurient Victorian hypocrisy.

It may seem like playing into the hands of those who work to belittle concerns of environmental activists to reframe pollution as a hypocritical attitude to the myth of the pristine ecosystem. Particularly if it were then argued that pollution is an ‘opportunity’ for evolution (the linked articled doesn’t) – a shock to the ecosystem that sends it on a journey to another supposedly ‘harmonious’ equilibrium. Conservation efforts are essentially methods of preserving what we think ‘ought’ to be present in the environment – though well-intentioned perhaps, they are in some sense no less industrial than activities traditionally regarded as environmentally exploitative. Indeed, sometimes conservation efforts are just as damaging as the supposed problem they aim to solve. And conservationism doesn’t have an entirely comfortable political history. Nowadays, conservationists could be seen simply as extorting ‘penances’ from the public to assuage their guilt about environmental ‘sin’, and using them to create an environmental commodity: a nature ‘reserve’, a species ‘saved’ from extinction. Yet the species chosen are those regarded as valuable to humans – usually mammals. There are not offers to adopt a threatened slug, insect, bacterium or virus as there are for snow leopards, dolphins, tigers, elephants, gorillas, orangutans. (Though there is this blog and a joke both of which I came across whilst searching the internet for such things as ‘adopt a smallpox virus’ and ‘adopt a Yersinia pestis‘.)

Instead, perhaps we should recognise that endochrine disrupting compounds, microplastics, pharmaceuticals, heavy metals, carcinogens, dioxins, parabens and C8 are now irrevocably a part of the global ecosystem, and species that cannot cope with them are irrelevant; they are the dinosaurs of the present day. And since dinosaurs evolved into birds, perhaps we should wait and see what interesting species evolve from the new chemical soup we are creating. (Assuming we are not among the dinosaurs…) The same applies to introduced species, frankencrops, and the other ghouls and ghasts of ecoarmageddon. Conservationists need to embrace change.

And if nature is too slow to adapt, industry (a hotbed of positive thinking) can exploit the ‘opportunities’ it creates for the benefit of its customers. For example, reduced fertility arising from endochrine disruption can be handled by in-vitro fertilisation. Cancers caused by dioxins can be treated with chemotherapy drugs. Probiotics can replace the bacteria removed by antibiotics. Vitamin and mineral supplements can compensate for the decreasing nutrition in food. Pharmaceuticals are part of the human adaptive process to living in the environment we are creating, just as anxiolytics, antidepressants and virtual realities are there to help us bear it. Instead of seeing medication as a sign of ill-health, we should see it as a positive expression of our adaptation to the new environmental reality, and a further step on the path of our transition to full alien-ness: intergalactic citizens of nowhere.