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Good morning.

A paper published in Nature on Wednesday declares that the world has reached a symbolic tipping point. The authors ask the question how the total mass of the products of human making compares to the planet’s total biomass – that is, bricks, plastic, metal and concrete on one side of the balance, against animals, trees, plants and grass on the other. After some complicated sums they conclude that in 2020 we are just about at the crossover point, when for the first time in human history, man-made stuff weighs more than natural biomass. In 1900, on their estimates, the mass of human products was equal to only 3% of biomass – but as roads and cities and human consumption have grown, and forests have declined, we have reached parity, and the balance is about to tip.

One response to these figures could just be ‘Wow – we humans are really good at making stuff.’ And our productivity is truly phenomenal. But the fact that the paper mentions bricks in the list of the main components of human output, immediately put me in mind of the story of Babel in the Book of Genesis, and suggests a different response.

That tale begins, you may recall, when the earth’s inhabitants say to one another, as the King James version has it, ‘Go to, let us make brick’ – and then, as soon as they have bricks, ‘Go to’ – come on – ‘let us build a city and a tower whose top may reach unto heaven, and let us make a name for ourselves.’ The point of building a city is clear enough – villages, towns and cities provide humans with safety, sustenance and comfort. But the point of the tower, always pictured in paintings of the scene as needing an awful lot of bricks, is not so apparent, and it looks like the original vanity project. And the story pokes fun at it – the builders set out to build a tower ‘whose top [would] reach up unto heaven’, but God, when he surveys their handiwork, has to ‘come down’ to see what they have done.

We humans are great makers – and there seems to me nothing wrong in being impressed by the scope and scale of human productivity, especially when our manufacturing provides for the safety, sustenance and comfort of our fellows. But let’s face it, we have built an awful lot of towers – things that looked down on from a God’s eye view, have no compelling rationale. Take one of the details in the study in Nature, that the mass of plastic in the world is now twice as great as the mass of all animals on the land and in the sea put together. The tipping point at which we find ourselves is, as the authors point out, symbolic, not consequential – but we surely have to hope that the eloquence of this symbol of our extraordinary impact on our world is enough to pull us up in our tracks before the tower comes crashing down.

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