Oliver Morton, the chief news and features editor of the journal Nature, had an interesting op-ed a few days ago.

The photograph of that earthrise by the astronaut Bill Anders forms part of the Apollo program’s enduring legacy — eclipsing, in many memories, any discoveries about the Moon or renewed sense of national pride. It and other pictures looking back at the Earth provided a new perspective on the thing that all humanity shares. As Robert Poole documents in his history, “Earthrise: How Man First Saw the Earth,” that perspective had deep cultural effects, notably in the emotional resonance it offered the growing environmental movement. Seen from the Moon, the Earth seemed so small, so isolated, so terribly fragile.

It takes nothing from the beauty and power of the image, though, to point out that it was the photographer, far more than its subject, who was isolated, and that the fragility is an illusion. The planet Earth is a remarkably robust thing, and this strength flows from its ancient and intimate connection to the cosmos beyond. To see the photo this way does not undermine its environmental relevance — but it does recast it.

That the Earth is small is undeniable. If the inner solar system were the size of the United States, the Earth would be the size of a football field; if the distance to the center of the galaxy were a mile, the Earth would be less than an atom. But if the “Earthrise” photo could have captured our planet in the dimension of time instead of space, things would look different. In its duration, as opposed to its diameter, the Earth demands to be measured on a cosmic scale. At more than four billion years old, it stretches a third of the way across the history of the universe, a third of the way back to the Big Bang itself. Many of the stars you can see on a clear winter’s night are younger than the planet beneath your feet.

Mere persistence is not, in itself, that great a feat. The barren rocks of the Moon have persisted almost as long. But the Earth has not merely endured; it has lived. For almost 90 percent of its history the planet has been inhabited, and shaped by life. The biological mechanisms that first operated in the dawn of life animate the creatures of the Earth to this day, forming an unbroken chain at least 3.8 billion years long.

Read the article. The boy can write. In this article and other things that Oliver has written there is an unusual sort of openness and honesty that refuses to collapse complex subjects into simple minded stances suitable for political posturing. If that's what you hunger for then you will find little nourishment in Oliver's work.

It is fitting that one of the major points of his op-ed article is that the earth is an open system.

The science of thermodynamics tells us that closed systems tend toward equilibrium, toward dullness, toward entropy. If the Earth were truly as isolated as it looks, that unavoidable tendency would be the lot of life. But the Earth is as open as the sky. Energy from elsewhere floods through it, creating endless chances for complexity and improbability, washing the world’s entropy back into space. The flow of energy that unites almost every living creature on the planet is the same flow that connects our environment to the universe beyond.

I saw a semi-hilarious old episode of Mythbusters the other day in which they tested the old saying, paraphrasing, that you can't polish a turd. Oliver is a gentleman. I'm not. I'm a rude bumpkin who calls a spade a freakin' shovel. The Mythbusters episode showed that you can in fact achieve a high gloss shine by patiently smoothing dung or dirt, so perhaps one day I too will be civil.

Not today. I think that seeing the earth in the more accurate context that Oliver patiently explains busts the whole collection of new agey myths that underlie the environmental movement. Environmental awareness and concern has always been appropriate, but the environmental movement was an intellectually and ethically bankrupt political campaign that had little actual relevance to the environment. Worse in some ways, it was aesthetically bankrupt as well, substituting an impoverished cartoon of the earth for something far more majestic and mysterious.

Oliver's concluding remarks, perhaps his intended point, is that our current environmental threats are manageable. We can deal with them if we want to do so. It's a hopeful message, seasonally and situationally appropriate.

“If we can put a man on the Moon ...” quickly became shorthand for society’s failure to achieve goals that seemed far simpler. But still: we put a man on the Moon, and that does say something. Efforts on a similar scale aimed at harvesting the energy flowing about us are entirely appropriate, and could make things a great deal better. We cannot solve all problems; some climate change is inevitable. But catastrophe is not.

I don't entirely disagree - current threats are not as dire as the hysterics claim - but I'm much more invested in open systems. Our progress to date on environmental issues has been made in spite of the environmental movement, not because of it. Society’s failure to achieve goals is the invariant outcome of a political definition of society as a collective that somehow decides on goals and persues them. That's not how societies work. They can't be directed, they can only be inhibited, misdirected, impeded, crippled by the attempt to control them - the SNAFU principle.

Worse, even after the errors of the collective approach become obvious it takes collapse to allow a change of direction due to the Concorde fallacy, the sunk-cost fallacy, the inability to make decisions based on current information without regard for past investments. And worst of all, policies adopted by societies are resistant to change since they are based on a previous consensus and it is that consensus that is the true goal. Admitting that the policies are mistaken destroys the hard won consensus, destroys the legitimacy of the commanding elites.

An energy moon shot won't help. That's just a distraction, a circus to entertain the simple minded and enrich politicians and their cronies. But the system is open and solutions will be found, emerge if you will, since the true genius of humanity is a reflection, albeit pale, of the larger genius of the earth itself which has lived for billions of years by finding improbable solutions that seem obvious in hindsight. To have a useful grasp of the dynamics of the system and ourselves we need to hold the mark, retain the mental openness of the moment of insight when what seems improbable morphs into something obvious. We need to be aware of that hindsight bias and not assume that any directed effort could have done as well. It's unsettling, even frightening, to actually listen in this way since we are most comfortable ignoring the external inputs of an open system. But, we need to have some courage.