SCALE AND PERSPECTIVE
Someone once asked:
If I’m not mistaken, you are arguing for humanity banding together to protect ourselves from a plethora of potential disasters. I’m confused about why you say all of our excitement and trauma around climate change is misplaced. Of all of the disasters you speak about, climate change seems to be the only one that we have any kind of power to prevent. If not in the short term, then at least to mitigate the very worst of it in the very long term. As far as I understand, all of the other catastrophes you mention are beyond our control. Are you saying that we should be much more worried about the potential of these other disasters (volcanoes, meteors, solar events, etc.) than we are about the impacts of climate change? Is it because their impact would be vaster? And if so, wouldn’t even our best efforts to adapt (“weather-proofing our food supply”) be nowhere near enough? How is being really concerned about climate change – a huge existential problem that we have some understanding of how to mitigate – “misplaced”?
Me:
Ooh ooh, thanks for the feedback!
That was a good summary. The only thing I would change is to say “life banding together to save life.” I think that distinction really transforms how most people think about this. To start, I think we have to consider all life (any life) to be effectively a miracle. And then from there we just have to notice how fragile life is, acknowledge the patterns and time-scales nature operates on, and then just appreciate that virtually everything within your grasp was impossible until right about now and that even the words you use and what you’re aware of was not known or even recognizable just a few generations back. (That's essentially what my thesis is about.) For me, appreciating all of this acts as a pretty powerful compass. We probably disagree on much of the above, or at least have different definitions and visions of all of this, so I'll spell out below what I'm thinking when I say, for instance, that life is miracle-like or fragile.
LIFE
I think life is the closest thing we have to a miracle. I believe this miracle is also one of the rarest and most fragile things in a universe full (or empty as it were) of the rare and fragile. (If there was strong evidence to the contrary one might look at this whole matter rather differently.) I also think effectively everyone everywhere has terrible intuition about this; at least, that seems to be the case for everyone I’ve ever been exposed to, myself included. I think we all get this exactly wrong. That seems to be largely because it's almost impossible to have anything but the impression we're all swimming in an unquantifiably vast sea of life, of every imaginable and unimaginable variety and at every different scale: a teeming, oozing ball of life, every bit of which appears composed of and seething with or spontaneously generating still more life. (Even under the impossible pressures and frozen ink-blackness of the deepest ocean – an un-Earthly, nearly space-like place – life is there, and not just in microscopic form.)
But with just a little context that whole picture, to me, seems closer to a delusion than reality. And it's a truly wicked delusion across many dimensions. The planet’s apparent inoculation with myriad organisms (to the power of myriad organisms) and at every possible height and depth ignores, I believe, almost everything we know. Every instance of life sits within a habitable veil as tenuous as, and of proportionate thickness to, that of a soap bubble; and nearly everything to have ever called that quivering and momentary film home has already been erased by the very systems and processes that call it into being and sustain it. Further, the plan on the books (the rule established by Mother Earth and her co-conspirator Nature) is only to engage in more biocide and as soon as is practicable.
So then, to my mind, the act of just noticing almost any of this life – starting to ask “What are all these things swimming around?” “What are they up to?” “How many are there and are there different types?” – is an even rarer and newer and more fleeting and impossible miracle than life itself. (Of course, that intuition could be far off. However, it does feel like a universe teeming with life only in microscopic single cellular form is almost as qualitatively different to a universe with no life at all as it is to one containing big complex things like lichens and sea anemones… No?) And then, in this light, noticing this misapprehension of life (as both abundant and steadfast) strikes me as far newer and rarer and even closer to impossible a thing even than the above vague recognition of the volume and variety of life’s forms.
I want to start every conversation from the above context. But, as far as I can tell, we don’t have good (any?) language to talk about any of this. I don’t even think we even have a vague metaphor for the above assessment. To me a unicorn would be the level one miracle (like the basic existence of life: a bacterium, say). But what would be the equivalent of a unicorn to a unicorn? Do you know what I mean? If mythical beasts had fantastical stories about exotic, seemingly impossible creatures then that far rarer of rare beasts would still just be a level two miracle (like life being aware of other life: what fish appear perfectly capable of.) And then I don’t even know how to think about a level three miracle. What is that? A unicorn’s unicorn’s sasquatch? I don’t know the analogy but this would be the very hard-won and fleeting spark that is some vague orientation to where we might be and what may be going on (Carl in accounting who understands that we're all cruising around on an unbelievably zoomy spiral through the cosmos aboard just one of an uncountable number of so-spinning orbs...)
There should be a single word that causes everyone to trace all of this taxonomy of near-miracles in their mind.
CAVEAT
A major provision here, and possibly something we disagree about, is that I don’t think there’s good (any?) reason to believe there is anything we (humans and the rest of life) cannot do, and do very well. I mean, we artificially generated the internal mechanics of stars here on Earth only a century after inventing the term “scientist.” This is exactly the kind of thing we’re ridiculously nonchalant about in the present. And I think we seriously understate the significance of everything humans have gotten up to until now and the fact that prior to modern times, the last 10,000 years, excruciatingly little changed on any noticeable timescale. I like to consider, for example, that it appears to have taken our hominin kin something like a million years to evolve their stone tools from being one-sided to …WAIT FOR IT… being two-sided. That single innovation of forming one sharp edge on a rock to then deciding to knap the opposite side as well, making it double-edged, appears to have taken maybe 20,000 generations to occur to anyone, for them to execute, and for it to catch on. That’s five times longer than anatomically modern humans seem to have been around. For more context, modern humans went from inventing the wheel (around the 4th century BC) to placing the international space station in orbit (1998), and all of the myriad requisite innovations in between, in around 2,000 years. If we were operating with the same social organization and bio-chemical hardware and software as our very close cousins, what we consider to be the slightest and most irrelevant innovations – just to go from the iPhone 10 to the iPhone 11, say, or HTML4 to HTML5 – would take more time than the sun or our planet has had to offer. In this way, the present feels to be nothing like a slight tangent, and thereby maybe rising to the level of legitimately novel and interesting, but instead something so radical and miraculous I lack the creativity to frame it in language. (Miracles to the power of miracles to the power of miracles. Or something.)
I think the above is true while I'm also very quick to admit that our discussions about intelligence (whatever that is) are far too limited and limiting and that there is wicked genius all around us. (I mean, have you met a cuttlefish!) That said, please notice this genius seems to operate on a timescale of uncountable eons. Innovation appears to emerge in sea sponge, date palm, flying squirrel, and narwhal communities with similar frequency found among our closest cousins Australopithecus or Homo erectus: hundreds of thousands or millions of years, requiring so many generations that biological evolution seems to generate novelty quicker.
In this light, I also think it’s right to consider the present, or even the last ten millennia, as such a wildly alien dimension that we actually find ourselves living in our very recent ancestors’ dreams. Certainly nothing less. And then considering this radicalness typical or somehow something we can turning away from then strikes me as so fantastically bizarre that its beyond understanding. We call this 'normal.' It's so for beyond the strangest, most impossible situation any of the uncountable and miraculous species squishing around on this planet has ever conjured up. And I don't think we could have even imagined the scenario just recently.
Why am I spelling this out and so labouriously? Well, because I think this is how we have to think about not just our innovations and successes but all of our worst mistakes and problems too. Climate change, ozone depletion, air pollution, deforestation and on are the unfolding of the hopes and dreams of our ancestors. They’re the ones who got us here and oriented us to our present situation, intentionally or by accident. And because what we see manifested in the world are ridiculous and unprecedented dreams, those who dreamed them up lacked critical information about all of the complexities and repercussions. (They were not primarily arrogant or stupid, as some suggest.) As a result, living generations have always had both the pleasure of living with these miracles but also the displeasure of having to correct for the egregious errors hidden in the code or cast into the iron.
For example, the forests of BC were literally immutable and unending until very recently. All the armies in all the world with all the stone axes they could muster could not have deforested this vast province in their lifetimes, or many lifetimes, even if that was their sole ambition. Then along came the hand saw. The impossible became theoretically doable. And then very quickly the chainsaw, and quicker still the feller-buncher. And then, abruptly, what was nearly impossible to accomplish by the most ambitious emperor with all the time and resources in the world was suddenly doable by a couple lazy dudes holding a beer and listening to the hockey play-by-play. And I think we love to ignore every part of this equation and do so constantly. (The broad acceptance of concepts like extinction and mass extinction can be counted in decades and yet many folks talk like these concepts have been human universals since time immemorial. No. Atmosphere, ecosystem, organism, and even earth: all brand spanking new ideas.)
In just this way, a tremendous amount of what was not difficult but instead perfectly impossible just yesterday is now possible or may even have been rendered so simple or essential that the majority of people don't wastes their time engaged with it any longer. And this is so on so many fronts. And we’ve spent the last millennia pulling more and more off the impossible shelf and into our possible trunk – and we’re doing so with more and more and all faster and faster. So, it’s not change at an exponential rate, doubling at a predictable interval, but the rate of change itself is on the move. So, if only to me, thinking that there’s something that doesn’t fall into this very same category (impossible) seems like a rejection of almost everything we’ve all experienced and so intimately know.
RECIPROCATION AND PARTNERSHIPS
All of this comes from a framework of life being fundamentally about partnerships and reciprocation. Maybe a kind of Michael Pollan married to Paul Stamets perspective, starting with the premise that we wouldn’t be here without the fungi, phytoplankton, and others; and then noticing how corn and potatoes, cats and pigs (and more all the time) have all cleverly manipulated humans into burning tonnes of our own calories and sacrificing our own reproductive success to ensure their safety, comfort, and maximal global distribution – and in a manner not seen by other species. (That’s what I meant by them “voting for us” to take up this role. Is there any sign termites or hummingbirds, squid or zooplankton have been so called out?)
From there, the main thing about climate change-specific concerns being misplaced is that this flush of atmospheric CO2 is more like a one-off accident. And, not only is it one we’re already correcting for and the very instant (on any meaningful timescale) it was noticed, but it's the most natural and easiest to overcome. (For example, everyone around in the middle of the last century will tell you they were convinced that ten thousand nuclear weapons were going to rain down across the globe at any moment – which would make the worst case scenario of climate change look more like a poopy diaper than a global catastrophe...) Further, then notice how we (humans) could very easily solve for climate change and then wake up to watch ourselves and everyone else get wiped out by a hundred other more serious, well-understood, natural and known-to-be-recurring events. And then all we have to do is notice that all of this seems true and that solving for these other issues also solves for climate change.
So, for example, if there was no modern C02-related anthropogenic climate change, would we do everything in our power to prevent or limit or merely adjust to the next ice age? It is coming after all and may even be overdue. Would “doing something about it” require moving millions (or billions) of people? And what of other species? What of entire ecosystems to which these organisms are mutually infused? What is our spiritual/ethical/biological obligation to and need for cedar, caribou, and muskrat? And will this inevitable migration be viewed in the context of all of life’s countless ancient global migrations or will we demand to impose modern political chaos on top of all of this social, cultural, biological reconfiguration? What of people’s rights to stay where they are? What of the right to not have your lands overrun by a tsunami of folks from the world’s northern and temperate regions? What of food security and health more generally? What about energy? If the worst of climate change happens (which, incidentally, we have already crossed off the list) we’d be looking at maybe a 10,000-year disruption.
But this would only be a rehearsal for the above Big Reversal (an age of ice likely not much less than 100,000 years) and what will certainly issue a much more lasting and serious set of extinctions, paired with a migration to the warm middle (the least likely spot to freeze solid, but one that still manages to do so from time to time.) And then, in this light, doesn’t it seem that every bit of those resources spent on costly infrastructure in the far north or far south in this or the coming decades is both egregiously misspent and misplaced and not just a violation of our obligations to our direct kin but maybe everything else on the planet? I think so. To me this feels something like building your whole village out of grass and on the beach in a known tsunami region when there are a set of cliffs, hills, and even a mountain range all in the immediate vicinity.
Or to think about this another way: What would it mean to be profoundly concerned and make every effort to limit C02 or prevent specific extinctions only to wait just another second (not even in geological time but on your clock) and be indifferent or ambivalent to any of the many mass extinctions or entire global sterilizations scheduled to arrive? I mean, why save and replenish the plains bison, California condor, and monarch butterfly if that only means we ensure they’re in far larger numbers when they inevitably suffer mass starvation, local extirpation, and then are pushed to extinction? How does the ethics work? Feels to me like we would only be doing any of that “good” to assuage our own guilt. That may be reason enough to save them but also feels a bit dirty, doesn’t it? Like the full accounting of that “good deed” would amount to little more than maximizing misery and suffering in the universe. No? Feels to me something like housing the homeless so that we can watch their house burn down with them in it. Seems sick. Alternatively, if it’s all futile and we are just impotent apes then why lessen our outputs of atmospheric C02 in the first place? What are we doing and why? And who do you see contending with any of this in any public manner? (I mean, we’ve not talked about or been exposed to any part of this even for a minute over two years in Enviro grad school!)
NATURE
Scale is a big part of the confusion, I think. We love to talk about needing to look past the next fiscal quarter or tax year but then we freak out when someone talks in centuries or millennia. I believe we have to think on the order of 10,000 or 100,000 years, at the very least, just for the needed perspective to make sense of the present and know where we’re at and, thus, where to aim.
The author of the article we were just reading in class brings up ice ages (a fair thing to do) but then doesn’t use this to compare, calibrate, or orient us the subject of his piece: climate change.
We’ve had a whole bunch of major ice age epochs going back billions of years… Let’s ignore almost all of that (because plants are not even a billion years old) and just look at the epoch we’re currently in. This period, known as the “quaternary glaciation,” began around 2.5 million years ago. So, this is the scale I think we should be talking about and considering when speaking about climate. That’s our ruler. And then what are the smallest increments worth plotting on that ruler?
Between three million years ago and today more than a dozen glacial periods (freezes and melts) saw sheets of ice with spots kilometres thick covering many millions of square kilometres of Canada and significant portions of the northern hemisphere. Of course, these snowy ice sheets buried, froze, and then ground everything below to dust, like a granite mortar and icy pestle. Just the last glacial period and accompanying ice cap lasted 75,000 years or so. (How much time is that? Well, at the start of this glacial period Homo sapiens, Neanderthals, Denisovans, and Homo erectus were all neighbours and appear to have had a similar toolset. And by the end of that period we were the only ones left standing.) And, as I say, this 75,000-year freeze is just the most recent global climate event, just one of many such events in recent history – and, of course, just one of a smorgasbord of global, climactic, ecosystem-wide, multi-species insults. And, importantly, each freeze had an intervening thaw (a period with stable, hospitable temperatures like the one we are in now) lasting only a fraction of the period of freeze. This tells us we’re probably due for a big freeze of unknown severity stretching out maybe 100,000 years. Therefore 10,000 years seems, if only to me, like the smallest increment worth pointing to on the timeline. So, if our three million-year-long ruler is analogized to 30cm then 10,000 years is 1mm. It's a perfect mental image (if you’re into that sort of thing.)
But then the author talks about civilization, too. And, again, most queerly, he doesn’t use that for scale. Though I disagree with his premise, as noted previously, the oldest thing I want to call a city or permanent settlement is only on the order of 10,000 years old, as best we know, and the same time-frame exists for things like agriculture (at least among humans); writing is only 5,000 years old, and English less than 2,000 – which is to say, that all of this and everything I know and nearly all I can imagine is brand new and fits into an almost invisible sliver on the above ruler, this restricted scale. And if you double that 10,000-year figure and propose that there could be resounding global impacts associated with climate change stretching out another 10,000 years, what would be the results? Likely little more than a slight delay to the 100,000-year age of ice we’re almost certainly destined, and perhaps overdue, for – one which promises to erase most of the 300 species of flora and fauna unique to Canada alone.
Just look at what we reference with regard to climate change. People talk about climate, noting that it's not weather. They say you have to think at scale, about the planet and across time. And then they talk about temperature records being broken, ones that go back “three decades!”, not five centuries or a hundred millennia. They neglect to mention that the concept of temperature and our measuring of it is brand new. So, "the hottest summer on record" sounds identical to confusing weather for climate, if only to me. And with climate change the unknowns are significant and predictions going out just a hundred years are unreliable, highly contested, and have serious variances from best-case to worst. Still, we are told the bleakest impacts can be mitigated or avoided and much can be turned around in our lifetime.
I mean, just last summer we crossed off our prior worst-case scenario. This figure was on record and steering conversation, study, and policy since 1979. Effectively no one took notice or reported on it. And this is to say nothing of all the catastrophizing with regard to human impacts (the ozone hole, acid rain, sonic booms, nuclear fallout, species extinctions…) that have already in my short life proven wildly misleading or wrongheaded. We're pretend none of this happened and never bring any of it up. But we do this all while seemingly not noticing or caring for the catastrophes which are hardwired into the system and cannot, at present, be avoided. That's curious.
And then in light of all the above, things like a seven-generation outlook (what, just 200 years?) is exposed as irrelevant to anything but a single human life. (Anthropocentric much?) Is that timeline meaningful to any civilization or species, given the pace of change and the state of our (mis)understanding? And wouldn’t seventy or seven hundred generations be far closer to the time horizon we need to consider? A few centuries is not useful to a member of a nomadic herding population in Mongolia or Norway just trying to maintain their way of life; nor is it useful for a group of architects and developers seeking investors and inhabitants to build and populate the world’s first megalopolis at the bottom of the sea. To look out only two centuries, from my (likely wrong) perspective, is to waste all one’s precious time and resources and probably that of everyone who came before you (fish, bird, great-grandfather, or mother.) And then figuring out how to do the impossible, just as we’ve done countless times (even just in the last century), is seen less as a foolish endeavour and more like the only meaningful orientation to have. We absolutely need to establish floating libraries of life here on earth, a kind of global appendix that can reboot the biosphere when it is inevitably sterilized. And we need half a billion people (and liverworts and kittens and cassowary) in orbit and eventually rusticating on the rocky moons of Jupiter. And we need to genetically engineer a vast, oozing mutualistic symbiosis to self-assemble a space-reef stretching a trillion-trillion kilometres, forming a living thread between the billion rocky islands that make up the Oort cloud. Not seeking to do all of the above strikes me as the same as indifference to mass.
Most weirdly, in my experience, such indifference typically arrives from folks who appear and claim to be most concerned about extinction. The environmental movement and so many of those adjacent talk of humans as a virus, of the need to limit human numbers, to erase modern civilization, or even exterminate the species. They do this in writing and in casual conversation all the time. I don’t know what to do with that. (Other than grabbing people by the lapels and shaking them violently.) To get there you would have to disagree with effectively all of the above, not just one piece of it. I'd love to hear what of the above is my own silly misapprehension. Please.
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RESOURCES
Quaternary glaciation - Wikipedia
How long can we expect the present Interglacial period to last? - USGS
Ours to Save: There are over 300 plants and animals that are uniquely Canadian... - Nature Conservancy of Canada
An Assessment of Earth's Climate Sensitivity Using Multiple Lines of Evidence - Sherwood et al.
The Chicxulub Asteroid Impact and Mass Extinction at the Cretaceous-Paleogene Boundary - Schulte et al.
Fossil clues paint vivid picture of dinosaurs' doomsday - CBC
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