The Stable Earther
Years ago, we became aware of a group of people who still believe the Earth is flat. The Flat Earther has a new intellectual descendant.
Do you remember when you first became aware of people who still believe the Earth is flat? You probably had a sudden-onset of comedic disbelief, or an emotion that can only be described as a guttural sound resulting from collisions of emotions and thoughts combined with something of a laugh and a “huh?”
That reaction was well-founded given the incredible amount of information that lends to the flat earth model being so outdated and incorrect that it's preposterous to believe such a thing. Have these people been living under a rock? Or in a backwater cabin somewhere in Kentucky without access to the outside world? Maybe they’re being ironic or seeking attention?
The sense of awe breeds a list of questions about how it’s even possible to believe something so preposterous. And it is ridiculous. We have satellites, photographs, timelapses of the Earth rotating in space, we can fly a plane around the planet. Satellites orbit the planet (as in, they go around it.) We have over a millennia of scientists that have theorized, studied, verified, and repeated the steps to confirm it - and we have astronauts who have seen it firsthand. Yet we still have a group of people known as “flat earthers.”
It's clearly an uninformed belief to the educated and sane person, and a symptom of either isolation, lack of access to education, or some theatrical pseudo-identity to get more followers on social media platforms on count of some kind of morbid intellectual curiosity.
But what if this branch of the human intellectual tree happened to quietly diverge, resulting in a new sibling or descendant? I think that descendant is here and goes largely unrecognized, in part because the group is not yet named.
The West tells a story of an unstable Earth
Growing up in the West, one thing we learn from our environment is that the Earth is in a constant state of change. For those deeply rooted here, we learn about geology, geography, and biology as our first indoctrination into the world of information1. Unless born in Denver, Los Angeles, Phoenix, or another big city in the West, you're probably closer to the physical environment than those in any entirely human-domesticated city where the native environment has been scraped and replaced with the human-designed and -controlled environment.
In that indoctrination, we learn that the Earth has been hotter, colder, drier, wetter, entirely uninhabitable, then highly habitable, and that the Earth has plates that move -- lending to an understanding that the entire 'face' of the planet moves and rearranges itself over eons. The environment acculturates us to concepts of deep time and geologic history – the rocks are old, and they tell a very intricate story.
The environment in the West teaches us that the Earth has never been stable.
Most of the rock layers in the place I was born and raised are exposed and tell a story of a wondrous place that has been on the bottom of the ocean, uplifted many thousands of feet, and frozen and heated repeatedly. The geologic layers within walking distance of all of my homes have fossilized dinosaurs, ocean-dwelling whales, bivalves, and diatoms; Fossilized plants from a time when not many animals had yet made it onto land, despite being 1,400 miles to the nearest ocean. And the canyons and mountains that I used to be able to see from my house before urban development blocked it all out were carved by glaciers, rivers, and periods of stability interrupted by periods of earth-shaping catastrophe.
The minds of deeply rooted Westerners were formed in a place that exposed us to the idea of a complex, long, and highly varied environment, whether we’re directly aware of it or not.
The West is one of the sites of immense environmental change by both gradual methods and catastrophic ones. The Rocky Mountain Range started melting out of the last ice age, and revealed new and deeply carved U-shaped valleys. Rivers continued the cutting and deepened them with more of a V-shape in some places. The position in the middle of a very large continent with a tall mountain range to form its spine caused weather extremes that most people just don't understand. We had periods of heavy volcanic activity. We had faults that are now solidified and long-since dormant that caused entire mountain ranges and canyons to form. The environment here is one very exposed story of an unstable Earth.
The West is a place where environmental extremes today are immense, with temperature swings in the range of 70 degrees (F) in a single 24 hour period being a relatively regular occurrence. When we get too much rain in the mountains, it floods on the plains. Sometimes, it’s 70 degrees, then it snows 24 inches hours later. Sometimes, it stops raining or snowing for weeks or months. The West is one of the only places where you can use the words, winter, wildfire, and hurricane-force winds in a single sentence and have it be in the range of normal.
Any sense of normalcy or environmental stability becomes especially preposterous when you look at the American West and its environment. Those acculturated to a place that is shaped by the volatile environment, their perspectives are inherently different from those from places where the environment has been stable for a very long time, or where the environment has been entirely scraped and replaced with the American domestic space.
Disagreement between those acculturated to an urban-uniformitarianism belief will inherently occur with those raised in closer proximity to places formed via catastrophism and with more of the place’s story still intact. One views the Earth as stable, the other views the Earth as constantly changing.
Because of all of the history and the environmental reality of the West, the rise of the Stable Earther is particularly interesting.
The Rise of the Stable Earther
The Stable Earther is a person who takes a political and moral position on environmental change from a standpoint that the Earth's environment is and should be stable.
At the center of the current discourse, we have people taking moral and political positions on concepts like global warming and climate change who are acculturated to beliefs about what is normal, what is not, and who or what is responsible.
Please note that I am not taking a position for or against climate change. The purpose of this post is to explore dissonance in the current discourse that needs to be explored in order to improve the quality of the conversation and reduce unnecessary conflict.
In a stable earth mindset, one might believe that the Earth getting hotter is bad, or that we humans should work to stop the climate from changing. Someone thinking in a stable earth mindset might be aware that the planet got really hot or cold in the past, but believe that any hotter than now would be a global killer. They might also believe that scientists are all also aligned against climate change as activists to try to stop it and aren't simply observers and analysts of phenomena.
Stable earthers are everywhere. They're in the media. Science research institutions. Government. The private sector. Academic and education institutions. They're your neighbors, friends, family, and heck - may even be you. They might even work at the local power company, or oil and gas companies. The label isn't insulting unless you intend it to be.
The great oddity of the Stable Earth movement is in how it arose from an almost opposite intellectual class than the Flat Earth community. Flat earthers are clearly missing something -- whether that's a lifetime of education, any education in critical thought, or they may have a deeper psychological disorder that results in mistrust of well curated information.
Those who believe in a stable earth model seem to be almost the opposite the Flat Earther, but with the same underlying flaw with their philosophy. They're often educated, seem to self-identify as subscribing to critical thought, and at least often seem to have an interest in science. So, the Stable Earther is somewhat of a paradox.
Most interestingly, in order to subscribe to a stable earth model, one would need to either be ignorant of, or have misunderstood the environmental history of Earth as science understands it today. Historically speaking, and according to climate.gov2, we are still in one of the more odd and coolest periods in history on a scale of the last 500 million years3. And, yes, while we appear to be increasing in average temperature more suddenly, and with that change over a smaller period of time than some past instances, we are still vastly cooler than most of the last 150 million years.
The science is one conversation. The political discourse is the other.
Leaning on the science, it appears the discourse on the subject of Earth's health and the climate may be highly dissonant. We have one group screaming that the Earth is dying. We have another screaming, no it's not. And we have another group that has been silenced over all the irrational shouting that we should look at the bigger picture – that Earth has never been stable, it never will be, and that everyone needs to calm down and talk this through respectfully and rationally4.
During the Cretaceous Period, about 90 million years before human-caused greenhouse gas emissions from the burning of fossil fuels, the Earth's average global temperature was somewhere in the zone of 85 degrees (F). Today, it's in the zone of about 55 degrees (F). We have a very long way to go before peat bogs at the equator go entirely anaerobic and Antarctica turns tropical. During the Hadean Eon around 4 billion years ago, the Earth was a molten volcanic planet. We know that shit can get really crazy on this crazy little planet, but we also know that shit has been much, much crazier than it is today, and has changed much faster.
It seems that the divide between the Stable Earther and the rest of us stems from how we interpret the prediction of future conditions on Earth and what that means to us -- the individual and the whole Earth community. Some might say it's education, intelligence, or whether they "believe in science," but I've spent a lot of time thinking about where the divide really stems from, and those variables never seem to work when trying to understand the rise of the Stable Earther.
The 'education' and ‘intelligence’ critiques don’t work; While very few involved in the current discourse are significantly educated in environmental sciences, they appear otherwise highly educated -- and those who fit into the Stable Earther mold seem to at least self-identify as “believing in science.” In that, they have faith in science and scientists, but may not have studied earth sciences intensively. They also appear to widely misunderstand the ethics of porting the results of science research into activist messaging and actions. It's something else that’s going awry than a lack of education and intelligence.
I have come to suspect that the source of the conflict centers entirely on how we interpret the predictive forecasts coming out of science research and what that means for humanity and the systems that make our lives possible.
The moral focus and outcry of the Stable Earth community appears to be constructed through a lens that ignores or is unaware of Earth's climate history. The Stable Earther would disagree, because they appear to envision themselves as being on the right side of science when advocating for solutions to stopping the climate from changing. When you really analyze their narrative, it becomes very clear that some big piece of information is missing from their understanding of where this all fits in the grander puzzle of Earth's past, present, and future.
Climate change alarmism and the sciences that inform climate change appear to be severely misaligned.
Cognitive dissonance and the stable earth mindset
That's where the Stable Earther is revealed as being disconnected from the science, despite the self-declarations of being ‘followers of the science.’ The science clearly says that Earth's climate is changing, is changing quite quickly, and the science also says that the past climate of Earth has changed, changed quite quickly, and that the recent millions of years have been an oddity of a cold period. Those who subscribe to a stable earth model would say that this change is different, for different reasons, and may be responding with fear, dismay, or fervor to take action.
We arrive at the second major paradox of the Stable Earther when we realize that there is also an implied sense of control of nature in the inherent belief that we can stop the climate from changing. The Stable Earther is an advocate for human intervention to prevent the climate from changing. The underlying motivation for that is an inherent belief that humans are outside of nature — different from it — and that our actions harm nature. By my observations, the beating heart of the paradox is that Stable Earthers appear to mostly also position themselves as aligned with "Nature" (the brand, the place, the entity...), and also appear to position humans as behaving unnaturally. It’s a web of dissonant thoughts, which also appears to be at the root of the political conflict.
The Stable Earther is worthy of a much larger exploration than this blog-format, but I hope this first and informal exposé on the concept at least put a dot on the map for the existence of this new intellectual species. Growing up in the West, surrounded by exposed geology that has not yet been paved with asphalt, Kentucky bluegrass, stripmalls, and houses, a very different mindset about the Earth and its past is cultivated. It reveals that the political disagreement about climate change stems from differing worldviews of individuals participating in the debate about what it is, who is at fault, what we do about it, and what we can do about it.
If you’re born into a place where uniformitarianism is the prevalent belief and the whole environmental history of your surroundings have been paved over, you’re not likely to believe that a changing climate is normal. If your mind formed in a place where you started learning about rock formations, fossils, and geomorphology from around the time of your first words, you’re likely to perceive the climate change argument quite differently – and you’re likely a catastrophist. If you studied Environmental Studies at an east coast liberal arts school, you’re very likely to understand the outcomes of science extremely differently than if you learned about geology at some science program in the West where your lab courses walked you out to the exposed layers that tell a many-hundred-million-year story of dramatic environmental change that long predate humans.
Stable Earthers are everywhere
Stable Earthers have been living among us for some time now, though largely unidentifiable due to the lack of words to describe them. They’re people whose environmental worldview stems from an assumption that the Earth has the potential to be stable, and that stability is more normal than rapid change. A Stable Earther would say that they’re concerned about rapid and catastrophic change as a result of human activity, which is clearly fair — if the threat truly is existential, then changing the behavior causing the threat makes complete sense.
But that position is only plausible if not for the past history of Earth and paleoclimate studies that reveal that the last 500 million years have been anything but stable. More glaringly, we’re coming out of one of the coldest periods in the last 200 million years, as a direct result of a dramatically changed climate that swung from the Cretaceous Hot Greenhouse period to an ice age, where we are now running toward some mid-point where we will have no ice caps, but we still have rain-forests at the equator. The climate changes, which is indisputable.
And now that we know that the Stable Earther exists, we can derive some understanding of their worldviews and their mindsets. Their mindset implies three things about their position; They believe that the Earth is stable and there is a moral position to be taken from that, and they believe that humans have some ability to control the globe’s climate – and that we should. Just like someone who believes in a flat earth, those who believe in a stable earth are simply missing something in their whole construction of their understanding of how the whole system works. In closing, I suppose this post reveals yet another group out there … the Unstable Earthers … those who believe the Earth has never been stable in climate, geology, or biodiversity.
The Fleeting West is written by a rooted Westerner who grew up learning about Earth’s history as a matter of growing up among the exposed layers that tell the long and complex story.
Footnotes and Citations
In a prior post, I wrote about the impact of where someone is born on how they understand and interact with the environment around them - more about that here:
Where your mind formed...
Does the place you’re born and raised shape the way you perceive and interact with the world? Is there more to “place” than the people, what some call “the culture,” and other human cultural objects, such as food, clothing and religion? If so, that missing piece is probably the environment – which is where things get complicated.
climate.gov - Check out what the U.S. Government says about climate change.
https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/whats-hottest-earths-ever-been - Here’s what Climate.gov and the Smithsonian Institution say about the history of climate on Earth.
Speaking of thinking and talking through the impacts of climate change rationally, a previous post talks about misinformation about water shortage in the West:
The Colorado River is running dry and so are the stories about the cause
It’s the year, 2022, and the Colorado River hasn’t touched the Pacific Ocean for something like two decades. Demand for the river’s water feeds ecosystems, towns, and cities from the middle of Colorado to the northern tip of Mexico. The American news media is on it. But the cited cause is ignorant at best, corrupted at worst, and the more direct causes …
Thanks for this perspective. I firmly fall in the unstable earther group.