Climate Musings

I just finished reading the Fall Edition of Lapham's Quarterly, called Climate.  As usual, an amazing compilation of essays, notes and observations concerning the planet and its climate.  And, also as can be expected, a compilation that reaches thousands of years into our past, and even a few which describe possible future scenarios.

I bookmarked a number of the articles towards purchasing some books for Christmas, some of which are. 

The Unexpected Universe by Loren Eisely

Man and Nature by George Perkins Marsh

When Rain Clouds Gather by Bessie Head

the Muqaddimah by Qalat ibn Salama

The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells

Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari

Down to Earth byBruno Latour

How the Little Ice Age Transformed the West and Shaped the Present by Philipp Blom

The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire byKyle Harper

Many, if not all of these books exhibit a common theme; as mankind has experienced the boom in technology, industrial capacity, robotics, and modern medicine, as we have learned that we can control our environment, manipulate bacteria, extract more and more valuable commodities from the planet, we also take one more step towards a disconnection from nature and its cycles, so that while we have certainly advanced in a remarkable fashion from our humble beginnings, we have also misinterpreted that dominion over the flora and fauna of Earth equates to controlling and conquering nature, as opposed to the more responsible definition which includes taking care of and being responsible for the continued flourishing of the beauty and sustenance that nature provides.

In Climate, we have accounts of people working with the land, using its resources responsibly, so that they remain for future generations, side by side with depictions of men denuding forests for all its lumber, then moving on the next wooded area with no concern for the devastation left behind.  In both cases, these stories teach us a lesson about valuing what we have, and working with nature to improve our lives, as opposed to improving our lives despite the consequences to the natural world, as if the two are not intertwined.

Nora and I went to the movies last weekend and saw Ad Astra.  At one point in the movie, when describing the lunacy of men fighting over the resources of the moon and other planets in our solar system, the main character describes humanity as "world eaters".  The phrase is stated with the backdrop of malls and consumerism on the moon, all to distract us from the reality that our petty wars over resources, rather than been solved before we left our big, blue marble, came with us to the other rocks orbiting around our sun.  Is the epitaph "world eater" destined to be our legacy should others visit earth after humans are gone?

It is difficult to predict what the world may be like in 20, 30, 50 years from now.  I imagine that if we were to speak in depth with people born in the early 20th century, those who have seen the massive changes in transportation (horse drawn carriages to rockets), communication (telegraph lines and limited distance phone lines to instant world-wide access in your hand), medicine (millions dying and maimed from the ravages of polio and flu to the mapping of the human genome and targeted treatments based on individual genetics), and global interconnections (from alliances based on blood lines to ones based on money and natural resources), we would come away with the feeling that most of these scenarios could not have been foreseen, and that the aged are as much lost in the times of today as they are in the hurt that results from the death of their generation.

But what is easy to predict is that if we don't come to grips with the effects of the Anthropocene Age, especially the damage we are causing to the natural cycles of our environment, our future will be as unpredictable as the present is for those who lived 100 years ago. 

Will we be like the frog who doesn't notice the warming water until it has been boiled to death, or will we be able to pry our future from the deleterious effects that result from unrestrained capitalism and its crony, uncontrolled resource extraction? 

Can we take a step back from the idea that we are judged, we will be judged by future generations with a yardstick labelled profit and loss, and replace it with the understanding that history might reflect a new morality where the degree in which the Earth's population suffers, or does not suffer, from poverty, treatable disease, or a lack of opportunity for education and economic sustainability, was addressed with environmentally friendly solutions that not only promoted humanity's survival but did so in conjunction with nature not in opposition to it?

The other interesting take away I realized from Climate, is the pretty large trove of history that connects natural disasters with cultural and even social change in humanity.  And on a fairly large scale as well.  It is just another example of how understanding history, or at least understanding the importance of valuing historical lessons, can help bridge humanity's efforts to a more peaceful future.  Perhaps some of those connections as described in Climate are the result of connecting dots after the fact towards a result one wishes to find, but it can certainly bring one to pause when we consider how horribly we are treating Mother Earth, and how she may react, in light of past social and cultural upheavals that seemed to coincide or were inspired by a large scale natural phenomena, especially those associated with humongous volcanic eruptions and the change in world wide climate that a few of them caused. 

It is no surprise that we are experiencing an increase in human migration due to climate fluctuations, if one studies the reasons for past human migrations, migrations which compelled early hominids to seek more hospitable environs.  In essence, humanity has been searching for Eden ever since we became conscious of our discomfort, sometime driven by the search for better food sources, sometimes water, sometimes shelter, but often as the result of a climate change that made "home" less hospitable.

Just as no man should be above the law, humanity is not above nature.  If we continue to treat it as just another commodity, I fear we will be vastly unprepared for the ramifications of our folly, and not able to break the paradigm that put us in this mess, which will result in mankind engaging in the same actions which brought us a climate crisis, unable to shift quickly enough once the true danger is realized.  Certainly the lessons of history, and many of the entries in Climate, would lead me to conclude so.  Let's hope history is not repeated and I am incorrect.