Dear President Putin,
I write to you from the far antipodes in sorrow and grief at the war in Ukraine. We are told that you consider that the state of Ukraine is historically part of Russia and that your aim in launching the war was to return this lost territory to the motherland. You anticipated that this would be achieved by a quick and relatively bloodless overthrow of Ukrainian forces. The government of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy would then be deposed, you thought, in favour of a regime that would agree to the political accession of Ukraine to Russia. Such return of this breakaway territory to the motherland was, we are again told, to be your crowning achievement, your glorious legacy, your own authentic title to greatness in the lineage of Russia’s great emperors. Having finally accomplished your life’s goal, you might even have felt prepared to pass the baton of leadership on to a new president.
It is surely right and proper for the leader of a country — and particularly for the president of a major power with a proud imperial past — to aspire to greatness, and to give careful thought to the question of his legacy. It is surely fitting, and nothing less than what the people would expect, that such a leader should endeavour to restore to the country itself any greatness it is perceived as having lost. In seeking to identify this lost greatness, it may seem natural to look to history, to try to recreate what was considered great in the past by the same means that were deployed by former monarchs and leaders.
The history of Russia, of course, abounds with Greats and Grands, Grand Dukes or Princes and Great Emperors — most notably Peter the Great and Catherine the Great. Both the latter were renowned, along with a number of other Emperors, for expanding Russia’s borders by annexing and absorbing neighbouring territories, breakaway or otherwise. The whole tenor of this tradition of greatness is indeed militaristic and territorial: the greatness of Russia consisted principally in its power to absorb external territories into its empire by means of military force.
But is history really an appropriate guide to the meaning of greatness today? What constituted greatness in the nineteenth century and earlier may no longer strike us as greatness in a world in which global conditions are so dramatically altered. Let us consider some of these altered conditions.
The new conditions of greatness
First, in the wake of the two cataclysmic World Wars of the twentieth century, the old lustre of valour and romance that had still clung to military prowess until then was gone: war was now seen as barbaric and abhorrent, and, in the new nuclear context, potentially anthropocidal. A centralised political instrument, the United Nations, was set up to pre-empt it, where possible, by diplomatic means, and to condemn and penalise it in the event that it did break out. Military aggression on the part of one state against another well-established sovereign state with a language and ethnic profile of its own, could, whatever the ins and outs of imperial history, no longer be internationally condoned, let alone regarded as a marker of greatness. It would rather be morally deplored.
Second, nations today are vastly more economically interconnected than in previous eras. If one nation offends the international moral order by launching an unprovoked military attack on a sovereign territory beyond its borders, it will likely become economically isolated, subject to sanctions imposed by other nations. Economic isolation, amid the highly complex and specialised production and distribution schedules of global markets today, rapidly leads to economic stress and impoverishment. This is, by any measure, hardly a pathway to national greatness.
Third, the economic interconnectedness that characterises the international order today is accompanied, and largely facilitated, by unprecedented interconnectedness at the level of communications. In this new era of global communications, it is impossible for a nation which has brought on itself the opprobrium of other nations to hide this fact from its citizens. Its government may try to insulate the public from world opinion but — short of making itself a hermit kingdom that, like North Korea, signals its existence only by way of nuclear fireworks — it cannot wholly succeed. The literate classes will find ways around communication roadblocks to ensure that they remain informed.
Once these citizens become aware that their nation is morally abhorred by the rest of the world, they will lose the kind of creative energy and confidence that is essential to the flourishing of an authentic culture. They will either depart the country or retreat into outward conformity but inner defection. Either way, the culture of the nation in question will start to wither. Without an authentic culture, a nation cannot lay claim to greatness or endow its citizens with a robust (as opposed to loud but hollow) sense of national identity. With its own populace demoralised and disposed to emigrate, such a nation will have little appeal for potential immigrants. Demographic decline — of the kind that Russia is already experiencing — is likely to ensue.
Fourth, the old anthropocentric yardstick of meaning and value that has been the axis of civilisation in previous centuries has now, in the twenty-first century, demonstrably come into question. Where societies perennially pitted themselves against one another in their bids to prove their superiority and thereby increase their own prestige, a whole new horizon of meaning and value is presently coming into view. From having been taken for granted as nothing but the backdrop to human affairs, the planet itself is now stepping forward as the primary protagonist.
All our political, economic, and social institutions, from the time of the agrarian turn in the Neolithic, have been premised, it now turns out, on the stable climatic and biosphere conditions that characterised the Holocene. All the basic categories of our discourse, in post-agrarian societies, have likewise been shaped by these conditions — by assumptions of seasonality; of meteorological limits; of the assurance of renewal; of possibilities of permanence and hence of settlement; of providence and hence of religion; of inductive continuity and hence of science. As the fixed climate parameters of what has until now been understood as civilisation slip away, we shall have to re-imagine the past and future, ancestry and posterity, human identity and the meaning and purpose of human existence.
Under these radically new conditions, “greatness” will be measured in entirely new ways. It will no longer have anything to do with societies trying to prove superiority and supremacy by subjecting other societies to their rule. No longer the “masters and possessors of nature”, as Descartes proclaimed at the time of the Scientific Revolution in the seventeenth century, humans are now about to find themselves thrown unceremoniously together, down on all fours again with one another and with nature. The Fortress Human in which we have hitherto physically and psychologically encased ourselves and our contests is already crashing down around our ears.
In Russia’s own backyard, the Arctic is burning and the vast permafrost is rapidly thawing. We have made of our once hospitable planet an Antagonist, one many orders of magnitude more powerful than ourselves. Heroic measures, the resort of the old warrior traditions, will in no way avail. The task of humanity now is to discover new, humbler ways of living that honour and support the planet as our principal Protagonist.
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A new path to ecological Détente
In this new context, nineteenth-century notions of greatness, rooted in petty tribal rivalries and disputes blind to their earth-environment, appear old-fashioned, as outdated as nineteenth-century costumes, the crinolines and girdles of yesteryear. With Earth no longer a taken-for-granted backdrop but a mighty disrupter, demanding that its laws, its own logic of self-realisation, be known and respected, on pain of obliteration, greatness will adhere to those nations, and the rulers of those nations, that can lead humanity towards a new, epochal — ecological — form of Détente.
As yet, no nation has taken this lead. Leaders of nations have instead been locked in bickering over the details of specious deals, never looking up to see the ominous planetary spectre overarching the table. Yet all around the world, people — especially young people — do plainly see that spectre. They are waiting for the leader, of any nation, who will also see it, and shine light on a pathway towards ecological Détente. To this leader they will respond with loyalty and gratitude. On him or her, the world will readily confer greatness.
As it happens, Russia is already potentially in the vanguard of the movement towards such Détente. With a greater area of wildlands, undisturbed by industrialisation, within its borders than other countries, Russia is mindful of its conservation responsibilities. A network of protected areas has long since been established, though these account for only a fraction of the total wildland area. But the seed of a new approach to Détente with Earth has, as it happens, already been planted in these Siberian wildlands. Still small in scale, this seed holds the potential for far-reaching, indeed planetary-scale, consequences. I am talking about a visionary experiment called Pleistocene Park in far north-eastern Siberia. In recent years this experiment has captured the attention of scientists and conservationists worldwide.
Pleistocene Park is the brain-child of renowned earth scientist and arctic ecologist, Sergey Zimov. In 1996 Zimov set up a research station and reserve in the Kolyma River region of Siberia to re-introduce large herbivores into the ecologically impoverished tundra systems of the north. His aim was to study the effects of such herbivores on the ecology of the reserve. Arctic ecosystems were once steppes or grasslands teeming with megafauna. This was during the Pleistocene epoch, which lasted from approximately 2,500,000 to 12,000 years ago. When megafauna species disappeared from these landscapes at the end of the Pleistocene — possibly as a result of overkill by early humans, who arrived on the Arctic scene at around this time — these grassland ecosystems became degraded.
Steppes, as is evident in those still extant today in places like Mongolia and Africa, are maintained and managed by large herbivores: the activity of grazing, the destruction by trampling of young shrubs and trees together with high nutrient turnover and seed dispersal through the animals’ digestive cycles provide the conditions on which grasslands depend. It is now known, moreover, that grassland ecosystems rather than forests, woodlands or shrublands predominated in terrestrial environments during the last glacial period (which lasted from approximately 115,000 to 12,000 years ago). The largest of these grasslands, stretching from the Arctic to China and southern Europe, was the so-called Mammoth Steppe, which was home to vast populations of mammoth, musk-ox, bison, reindeer and horse with their associated predators, such as wolves and tigers.
Zimov’s hunch was that if large grazing herbivores functionally equivalent to the Pleistocene megafauna were re-introduced into the tundra scrublands of those northern latitudes today, grasslands might reappear. If the exercise were scaled up, the Mammoth Steppe might, in a functional sense, begin to recreate itself. Such an ecological transition would be desirable for many reasons, but principally, Zimov suspected, because a steppe-like ecology could arrest the permafrost melt that is already alarmingly evident at Pleistocene Park.
Permafrost, the deep, subsurface layer of permanently frozen soils that account for a quarter of the land mass of the Northern Hemisphere, contains thousands of years of frozen organic matter. When these soils thaw, this organic matter decomposes, releasing carbon dioxide and methane; methane trapped underground in hydrates (pockets of gas encased in ice) is also released. Since the amount of carbon held in permafrost is double the amount of carbon already in the atmosphere, permafrost melt, if not arrested, is likely to push global warming to as yet uncalculated levels.
One reason why functionally recreating the Mammoth Steppe on a continental scale would likely slow down if not arrest permafrost melt, according to Zimov, is that re-introduced megafauna, at population densities comparable to those of the Pleistocene, would systematically trample down the snow-cover that insulates soils throughout the long arctic winters. So long as global warming had not already raised atmospheric winter temperatures above zero degrees at those latitudes, this thinning of the snow cover would ensure that the ground would remain at sub-zero temperatures. A further reason why recreating the steppe would help to arrest permafrost melt is that during the summer months, grasses sequester carbon more effectively than do tundra or taiga systems and, with their deep root-mats, bind and stabilize grassland soils. Having a much higher albedo, or capacity to reflect sunlight, than either the tundra or the taiga, grasslands also absorb less heat than the terrestrial ecosystems that currently prevail in the Arctic. During the Pleistocene, the Mammoth Steppe functioned as a climate regulator on a planetary scale.
The experiment at Pleistocene Park continues today, still under the direction of Sergey Zimov, together now with his son, Nikita. Their findings have so far confirmed Sergey’s initial hunches. At Pleistocene Park, the effect of re-introducing large herbivores into tundra ecosystems has indeed been to bring back grasses. During the winter months the difference between ground temperatures measured inside and outside the reserve has been shown to be 25°C. Scientists around the world are now excitedly following the Zimov studies.
Here then is a potential path to ecological Détente — one which does indeed treat the Earth as a protagonist with whom humanity can engage collaboratively, rather than seeing it as an antagonist against whom we are inevitably pitted. For the Russian government to support and significantly upscale the Pleistocene Park initiative would be for it to show the kind of visionary leadership that is so needed in our anxious times, yet so lacking, particularly in the West. Indeed, for Russia to take the lead in this way would put the West, with its long pretensions to moral and intellectual superiority, to shame. It would nevertheless be welcomed with enthusiasm by millions of people around the world, winning the hearts particularly of younger generations, who would readily offer their allegiance. For Russians themselves, it would surely be a source of moral pride, helping to restore a lost sense of relevance.
Attempts to industrialise and modernise Siberia over the last century have consistently failed. The country has remained one of the most sparsely populated regions on Earth, with even this sparse population currently shrinking. Why not then turn this relative uninhabitability to national advantage by making the region instead an engine-room of climate recovery, a planetary laboratory for exploring new strategies that work with rather than against Earth’s own logic of self-realisation? Not only would biosphere benefits ensue, but Russia could legitimately use its historical heft to demand due compensation for such environmental services rendered to the international community.
To this end, Russia could instigate a much-needed system of just remuneration for countries that preserve and restore earth systems vital to biosphere stability. In this respect too, then, Russia could exercise moral leadership. Indeed, on this new path to ecological Détente, there would be no end to the increments in prestige that could accrue.
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On the Russian vastness
If there is such a thing as “the Russian temperament”, and if I, as an outsider, may be permitted to remark on it, then I would venture to suggest that treating the wildlands of Siberia as an engine room of planetary process rather than as peripheral and in need of “development”, might actually accord with it. For surely this temperament (if such a thing does exist) owes much to the vastness and elemental nature of Russian territory — three quarters of which lies within the provinces of Siberia.
If there is a certain “virility” to the Russian outlook, a certain toughness, independence, and spaciousness, not easily contained within domestic confines — or the parallel confines of international and diplomatic protocols — may this not be because Russians have always had access to such harsh, unpeopled vastnesses? And may it not also be because, at an even deeper level, they have internalised these vastnesses as the terrain of their own inner being?
If the wildlands of Siberia were transmuted back into a Mammoth Steppe, key and core to a new vision of a distinctively Russian civilisation, would this not constitute a validation of Russian-ness that would empower Russia’s people and align them emotionally with the trajectory of this new civilisation?
The potential for greatness
So, President Putin, I applaud your efforts to restore greatness to Russia. But, as a philosopher of civilisation, I venture to suggest that notions of greatness are sensitive to context. The greatness to which a leader aspires must answer to contemporary needs and circumstances. In the unprecedentedly precarious circumstances of the twenty-first century, launching wars of aggression on neighbouring states serves no one, least of all the people of the aggressor-nation, and will consequently fail in the long term — the term in which greatness is measured — to earn prestige.
But, as a nation uniquely placed to unleash the powers of Earth to re-regulate Earth’s own systems and thereby assure the future of human civilisation, Russia could, if it took this route, earn the gratitude and acclaim of all. The people of such a nation could hold their heads high, and from all over the world, other people would be drawn to it, as ardent Russophiles, emulators, tourists, immigrants. The potential for greatness — Russia’s greatness, your own greatness — is right there in plain sight. I do hope you will grasp it.
Sincerely,
Freya Mathews
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Freya Mathews is Emeritus Professor of Environmental Philosophy at La Trobe University, Australia.
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