Age brings an uncomfortable clarity. It provides enough distance to watch successive waves of certainty break against a steadily retreating coastline of hope. A long life teaches many things, but perhaps most of all that certainty rarely survives contact with reality.
I do not want, in these later years, to become a caricature. The market for grumpy old men appears permanently oversupplied. So I tend to avoid turning every dinner conversation into a rant about oceans absorbing more than 90% of the excess heat trapped by greenhouse gases, even as ocean heat content continues to set records.¹
Somewhere along the way I seem to have developed a grin-and-bear-it brain, though I am almost ashamed to admit that I sometimes adopt this approach when confronted by casual cruelty and astonishing stupidity.
Yet I find myself grimly amused by those celebrating the next great step for humankind: settlements on Mars and the Moon, new frontiers, colonisation, new worlds. It is as though the twenty-first century has exchanged covered wagons for rockets.
It is not the technology that fascinates me, but the narcosis through which creativity, severed from moral restraint, becomes invention; invention becomes accumulation; and accumulation becomes damage.
Near-Earth orbit increasingly resembles an industrial estate suspended above the planet. Useful things undoubtedly happen there, and without them our civilisation would now struggle to function as it does. Alongside this orbital infrastructure, on which we now depend, drifts an expanding cloud of satellites, spent rocket bodies, discarded hardware and debris, transforming what once appeared to be empty space into a frontier junkyard. I can't wait for the launch of the first orbital refuse collector: a cosmic sanitation service robotically hoovering the heavens. Inevitably, of course, corporations are already attempting such a clean-up. Useful though these early efforts may be, they underline the point. We remain remarkably adept at devising technologies to address problems we should have avoided in the first place. Foresight is not a human strength.
Why do supposedly intelligent societies repeatedly organise themselves in ways that become maladaptive? After all, there is no shortage of signals that should have alerted us to the error of our ways.
I have thought a great deal about economy and ecology, and about the impact of one upon the other. Yet at root these are abstract, technical words describing very different orders of reality. Ecology and ecosystem have been generalised so freely, especially in management, technology and corporate language, that their original scientific meaning is often flattened, blurring the distinction between natural Earth systems and human-made complexity. Ecology, in its original scientific sense, concerns the relationships between living organisms and their environment. Ernst Haeckel coined the term in 1866.² Arthur Tansley later gave us the ecosystem as a way of describing the whole system: not only organisms, but the physical conditions through which life is sustained.³
This distinction matters. Ecology and its ecosystems contain the living and physical resources from which human economic life ultimately derives. Markets, finance and production are not separate from these systems; they are embedded in them and bounded by them. But the modern economy is not itself an ecosystem in the original sense. It is a human construction: institutional, financial, political and behavioural. Its organising forces are not only energy, soil, water, climate and species interaction, but ambition, appetite, fear, status, ownership, control and accumulation.
It is here, as authorial shorthand rather than a scientific category, that economy begins to reveal itself as an egosystem, participating in what I would call the egosphere.
Ecosystems and egosystems both consist of interdependent relationships that continually adjust to one another. Almost nothing remains alone for long because almost nothing survives alone. Survival depends upon connection, feedback and adaptive continuity.
But there is a decisive difference. In natural systems, maladaptation eventually meets consequences: organisms adjust, fail, or disappear. In human systems, power can delay consequences, resist adjustments, disguise them, export them, or force others to bear the costs. This is where ego becomes dangerous: not as individual selfhood, but as appetite released from restraint.
An egosphere is composed of egosystems that usually operate in relative equilibrium. However imperfectly, it remains in everyone’s interest to preserve some form of adaptive balance. But egos are volatile. Given excessive licence, they do not merely compete; they destabilise. At the extreme lies the hyper-egosphere, where concentrated power rewards grandiosity, grievance and domination, and where the most dangerous egos ascend into narcissism and, in some cases, malignant narcissism. Drawing energy from resentment, humiliation or injured entitlement, their motivations take distorted forms of ambition, status-seeking, control and the pursuit of supreme power. Coupled with charisma, itself a morally indifferent quality, this power does not simply attract lesser egos; it ignites them.
A heating planet and the growing cloud of orbital debris circling silently
above us may appear to be separate problems. They are not. Both are symptoms of
the same underlying pattern: the relentless drive to extract, accumulate and
expand beyond sustainable limits. One part of the egosystem degrades the
habitat beneath our feet; another litters the space above our heads. Between
them stands the bewildered creature that calls itself sapiens.
Is this grumpy? Of course it is. But I find it very difficult to grin and bear when confronted by the desecration of this beautiful place we call home.
And there is still so much beauty in the living environment itself, in people on the front line of its preservation, in the renewal of natural resources, in the cultures defending our rights, and in the creative imagination of those working to heal the damage left by destructive systems.
I don't feel despair so much as troubled wonder at how those now growing up will flourish in the conditions we are leaving behind.
Age perhaps sharpens one’s awareness of this. Not because it brings wisdom, but because one’s own body becomes increasingly incapable of escaping its own feedback. Frailty is feedback. Illness is feedback. Anger is feedback. Mortality is the feedback that cannot be deferred.
One of my enduring memories is of lying in a meadow on a warm summer afternoon in 1953, staring into an impossibly blue sky and sensing, deeply, that there was nothing between me and the sun, the moon and the stars. It seemed boundless then.
Imagine learning that it is Earth itself that is now ring-fenced by dead metal, spent machines and a fine dust of synthetic residue.
So much for that.
References
¹ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate, Summary for Policymakers, 2019; Yuying Pan, Lijing Cheng, John Abraham, Kevin E. Trenberth et al., “Ocean Heat Content Sets Another Record in 2025,” Advances in Atmospheric Sciences, published 9 January 2026, https://doi.org/10.1007/s00376-026-5876-0.
² Ernst Haeckel, Generelle Morphologie der Organismen, 1866.
³ Arthur G. Tansley, “The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts and Terms,” Ecology 16, no. 3, 1935. Historical accounts attribute the suggestion of the word “ecosystem” to A. Roy Clapham in correspondence with Tansley.