Shunya's Notes

This is the last article in a 12-part series about the Earth-system, how our planet has shaped us as human beings, and how we, in turn, have shaped it The article appeared here first, in Unraveling Climate Change, a series for The Wire.

In this series of articles, I aimed to provide some context around our environmental predicament, including climate change. I discussed its multilayered complexities, how we got here, and where hope for the future of humankind may be found. In this final article, I’ll consider the next hardest question I’m frequently asked: What can I do about climate change?

It’s a pressing question. The role of the individual within larger systemic changes is difficult to map, but clearly most vital. For though we are in so many ways enmeshed and often powerless, still the totality of our enmeshed, individual actions is what makes our world. Nor can our answers today, arrived at within our current social and material frameworks, be complete; they can only be steps, taking us into a future of inevitable discontinuities: unexpected, abrupt, and snowballing social and material changes stretching through our lifetimes and for generations beyond. We already live in a climatically different world than the one that shaped human evolution and all of human history—the world to which we are best adapted—and more extreme changes are inevitable. For both the Earth-system and its subordinate human system have a momentum that carries us along and is difficult to turn.

This is the seventh article in a 12-part series about the Earth-system, how our planet has shaped us as human beings, and how we, in turn, have shaped it The article appeared here first, in Unraveling Climate Change, a series for The Wire.

It takes energy to get food—whether you’re chasing it in a hunt, climbing for it in the trees, digging it out of the ground, or farming it and trucking it across the country. Most animals, of course, lack trucks or other vehicles, so whatever food they eat they must gather on foot (or fin or wing). But for an animal in balance with its healthy home environment, it will be enough. Our human ancestors also acquired enough energy and materials from gathering and hunting to reliably reproduce at a slow and steady rate, make their tools and artworks, dance and sing and play and participate in other essentials of community life.

But sometimes the landscape provides an unexpected stockpile of food, so that one need expend hardly any additional energy to gain lots more of it. When human societies—or any other living systems—gain access to such a source, they may experience this as a sudden expansion in the carrying capacity of their environment; that is, suddenly the same amount of effort returns enough energy and materials to make and support a lot more of them. We might call this a ‘cheap’ supply of energy and materials that stimulates growth.

This is the sixth article in a 12-part series about the Earth-system, how our planet has shaped us as human beings, and how we, in turn, have shaped it The article appeared here first, in Unraveling Climate Change, a series for The Wire.

Anatomically modern humans—people like us—have been living on this planet for some 300 thousand years. Most of that time—over 98% of our time on Earth—all societies were nomadic, subsisting entirely on foraged, wild foods. There were no permanent buildings or roads. Every person lived in a wild landscape. That is, they didn’t live in a world primarily shaped and controlled by human desires, but rather one where humans were only one among many forces—some equal to or more powerful than themselves—all co-creating their environment.

Popular narratives that imagine those early lifeways tend to presume that our ancestors lived such materially simple lives because they were primitive brutes, simply incapable of building anything more ‘advanced’ or ‘civilized.’ Prehistoric, non-state peoples—often derided as ‘cave men’—are cast as mentally dim, miserable and hungry, impulsive and cruel in their treatment of each other. Or as Thomas Hobbes imagined it, their lives were ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.’ We expect they understood little and did nothing worthwhile. Since their time, we tell ourselves, humans have followed a preordained path of progress from lower to higher states of understanding and living. We’re led to presume our modern lives are so much richer and full of leisure or pleasure than theirs could possibly have been. And this leads us to presume that those beyond the reach of modernity even today are in want of our ‘civilization’ and programs for their ‘development.’

This is the fifth article in a 12-part series about the Earth-system, how our planet has shaped us as human beings, and how we, in turn, have shaped it The article appeared here first, in Unraveling Climate Change, a series for The Wire.

Basic ecology teaches us that there is no life without the flow of energy. Most of life’s energy is sourced from the sun: Sunshine falls upon the land and water, at a finite daily rate, where it’s absorbed either kinetically—as heat, driving winds and ocean currents and evaporation—or chemically, by plants whose photosynthetic powers can trap it within the chemical bonds of carbohydrates, a form of fuel that can later be burned as needed by most living cells, for growth, health, and reproduction.

Almost every living thing on the planet takes its energy from this sun-fed system, either tapping into it closer to the source, like the plants who first capture it, then the deer who eat the plants, or further from the source, like the big cats who eat the deer, or the fungi and microbes who eat all of these after they’ve lived and died. Humans eat all of these things too. After we die, we’re also eaten by the fungi and microbes; the materials that make up our bodies are returned into the soil and the air, and eventually reabsorbed by the plants. Energy and materials flow through this circle of life—really, multiple interconnected circles, or a web of life—with each species occupying its place, or niche, within the flow.