Pagans and plankton
Pagans and plankton
Plus Sky2K, death of books, and pirate radio
Let’s meet for coffee this Friday, September 6, at 6:30 am at Loyal North.
(1) Into the religious void
Over the summer, I was struck by Russ Roberts’ account of his recent trip to Prague, in which he mourns the decline of Judaism and Christianity in the cultural life of Europe. “It’s a bit ironic for a Jew to sit in a church in Prague and reflect on what has been lost with the demise of Christianity in Europe,” Roberts writes. “You look at the statuary and the frescoes and you see an attempt to inspire human beings to rise above themselves and aspire to greatness. You see a vision of what humanity can be and of a better world…. Christianity was a revolution in how we human beings see ourselves.” But now, he notes, “the soaring music and soaring cathedrals are, like the synagogues of Prague, ancient history, a remnant of what once was.”
Paul Kingsnorth picks up the same theme in an essay last month titled “Into the Void.” The West isn’t “repaganizing,” he argues. It’s worse than that. We no longer believe in anything.
Say what you like about modern paganism, but however you quite define the word, it implies religious belief…. If we were really ‘re-paganising’, then, we would be returning to the worship of the old gods. And yet, despite all the Satanic witchery of popular culture, we are not actually doing so. What we are seeing [instead] is an aesthetic. Nobody would die for it. Nobody would fight for it. It is LARPing and play-acting. Rather than signifying a sinister new development or threatening new faith, it is a flimsy veil drawn over a gaping void.
“Exhibit A” for Kingsnorth is the drag-queen parody of the Last Supper from the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics. The creators of this grotesque display aren’t pagans, he argues, because when criticized, they backtracked and crawfished:
They did that because they did not, in fact, believe in or respect the ‘gods’ that they were portraying. They were just playing with images that meant nothing to them, … blaspheming against the God of a long-dead culture, but not believing in the ones they pretended to put in its place….
In the West today, that means that we have to live in a culture without faith. Without faith in the Christian God, obviously, but without faith in anything else either. We are not pagans because pagans, like Christians, believe in something. We believe in nothing….
[N]o, this is not an atheist age either. It is not, I would say, any kind of ‘age’ at all. It has no shape. It has no centre. Nobody sits on its throne. It is, taken in the round, simply a vacuum. There is nothing here at all.
It is a void.
(2) Plankton, “atoms of the ocean”
Moving from the big ideas that form and deform civilization, we zero in on the tiny, unseen building blocks of ocean life: plankton. Ferris Jabr writes in The Guardian that “[p]lankton are so tiny and ubiquitous, they sometimes seem less like creatures within the ocean than atoms of the ocean itself. Without plankton, the modern ocean ecosystem – the very idea of the ocean as we understand it – would collapse.”
Plankton are also literal building blocks:
In fact, the vast majority of chalk and limestone formations on Earth, including large sections of the Alps, are the remains of plankton, corals, shellfish and other calcareous sea creatures. Every imposing edifice that humans have constructed with limestone, including the Great Pyramid of Giza, the Colosseum and the Empire State Building, is a secret monument to ancient ocean life.
And they play a key role in our planetary thermostat:
Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere continuously dissolves into the ocean’s surface, where sun-loving phytoplankton incorporate it into their cells during photosynthesis…. When they die, they bump into each other, form little clumps and begin to sink, along with the fecal pellets of zooplankton, carrying carbon to deep, cold, dense water, where it may remain for thousands of years…, accumulating in layers of muck that eventually petrify and trap carbon for millions of years.
In parallel, carbon dioxide spewed by volcanoes combines with water vapour in the atmosphere, forming carbonic acid that falls to land in rain. Due to its slight natural acidity, rainwater reacts with and dissolves the planet’s crust. The chemical reactions involved in this weathering produce various minerals, salts and other molecules, which flow to the ocean via rivers, nourishing marine life. Certain types of cyanobacteria, plankton, corals and molluscs use calcium and bicarbonate ions produced by weathering to construct shells, sheaths, skeletons, reefs and stacked microbial mats called stromatolites. When such creatures die, their carbon-rich remains gradually accumulate in layers of compacted limestone sediment on the seafloor. Over great spans of time, tectonic activity subsumes and transforms the sediments, returning the carbon they contain to the planet’s surface in the form of new mountains or erupting volcanoes, thereby completing the cycle.
If Earth enters a torrential hothouse state, intense and frequent rainfall weathers rock more quickly than usual, flooding the ocean with minerals, nourishing life in the sea and removing carbon from the atmosphere faster than volcanoes can replenish it. Over hundreds of thousands to millions of years, this feedback loop cools the Earth.
Conversely, if ice smothers most of the sea and land, the water cycle effectively stalls, the productivity of plankton and other ocean life drops, and carbon dioxide builds up in the atmosphere, eventually warming the planet. This entire process is therefore largely controlled by life and ultimately allows life to exist on Earth….
Another treat of perusing this piece: the magnified images of microscopic plankton, and a sideways journey into Ernst Haeckel’s mesmerizing 1904 book Art Forms in Nature, which you can browse in full here.
Other Things
Magazines are dying, and so are book publishers as authors become more independent.
Radio Caroline, the pirate radio station broadcasting from sea, turned 60 years old this year.
Christian virtue class starts next Thursday night, September 12. Sign up here.