Shunya's Notes

Zoomorphising Humanity

[This essay appeared in "What Have Animals Ever Done for Us?", an anthology put together by the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) in celebration of their bicentennial year. All essays, including ones by Jane Goodall and Frans de Waal, also appear on the RSPCA website.]

India is known for its cows wandering the streets, but no less common are its feral dogs. On a December night in Goa, as I walked towards my hotel, one such mutt dozed next to the footpath. Lean, yellow, frizzy-haired. She glanced warily at me, while I stopped to empty my 'doggie bag' from dinner onto the pavement near her. After I stepped away, she ate every bite. The following night, she was there again, this time seated in the middle of the path, alert, between two of her friends. I was tickled when she approached me, dancing with merriment, glad I'd arrived as expected. Her friends, meanwhile, kept their distance, their heads low, their tails wagging as they circled round us. They weren't begging for food; they were checking me out.

Even though I'd only given a paltry gift the previous night, this happy dog had bragged about it to her friends. This wasn't the first time I'd befriended a feral dog who then brought her friends to meet me. It wasn't the last time I've felt a stray was trying to tell me about his social world or had communicated something about me to his fellows. Even in my casual observations of street dogs in my Delhi neighbourhood, I've noticed that those who claim human friends are sometimes granted a degree of special regard within their cohort, as if their pals think they're cool. Sometimes this also provokes jealousies.

I can prove none of this, of course; I can't really know what the dogs are thinking. Yet I expect that people who are familiar with dogs won't find my version of events entirely implausible. Dog lovers often grant anthropomorphic interpretations to dog behaviours. But what about the behaviours of other animals? These days the internet is awash with viral videos depicting similarly complex behaviours among our favourite wild animals. We see elephants and primates mourning their dead. We see all manner of species studiously confronting themselves in mirrors, planning with intent for the future, cooperating with their fellows to complete simple tasks. We see astonishing intelligence from birds and octopuses, solving puzzles. We even see what appears to be empathetic encounters between species: whales and crows asking humans for help to untangle them from twine; a goat rescuing a chicken from a hawk; an owl and a cat palling around like besties.

What We Talk About When We Talk About the Future

[The 19th (and final) part in a series of essays, On Climate Truth and Fiction, in which I raise questions about environmental distress, the human experience, and storytelling. It first appeared on 3 Quarks Daily. The previous part is here.]

No, it’s not your imagination, this feeling that we are entering a time of escalating crises brought by Nature: more frequent and severe storms, floods, and forest fires; more debilitating heat-waves; mounting crop losses and failures; rising water stress, hunger, and related conflicts; unrelenting pest and disease threats for us, our “livestock,” and our crops. Our planet is moving beyond the stability of the Holocene—the narrow climatic range that enabled our modern civilization—to enter a much harsher climate regime, and its effects are starting to engulf us. Today, these effects are being felt much more by some than others, with weather related disasters primarily responsible for having forcibly displaced more than one percent of humanity from their homes by the middle of 2021—already an unprecedented human calamity. Ten times that number—eight-hundred and eighty million people—now lack sufficient food to eat, an increase of over a hundred-million hungry souls compared to two years ago. 

And if you worry that it might get worse, the answer is a hard yes: under the best-case scenarios, it will get much worse—and at a faster rate. This is according to the most comprehensive assessment of climate-change impacts compiled to date, part two of the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report by Working Group II, released in March 2022. The report projects, for instance, that in Africa alone half the population—seven-hundred million people—may be displaced due to water stress by 2030. Earlier forecasts cited by UN agencies that a billion people could be desperately displaced by 2050 do not seem improbable.

But I get it. This isn’t how we’re supposed to talk about the future. I too grew up imbibing and propagating the common technotopian fantasies of the late-20th Century zeitgeist, of a belief in humanity’s manifest destiny of multi-planetary spread and dominion. I imagined I might live to see people permanently inhabiting distant space stations or launching forays to colonize and terraform Mars. Though I’d always been aware that the non-human world around me was being annihilated, I squashed my intuitive fear about that growing danger with my learned techno-optimism about the future. Like most people of my time and place, I just didn’t put the pieces of the puzzle together. Not until very recently, that is. Not until I began truly digging in and trying to understand climate change.

India: A Forecast

A thread of 20 tweets, on what I see ahead in India. Click below to read the rest.

India: A Forecast 🧵
India is on a sinister path, much darker than most worried citizens foresaw in 2014. Things have gone downhill rather fast. So what do I see as the near-term outlook (5–7 years) for India? I offer my provisional thoughts in this thread. Hope I’m wrong. (1/20)

— Namit Arora (@NamitArora0) May 3, 2022

This Is Not the Zombie Apocalypse

[The 18th in a series of essays, On Climate Truth and Fiction, in which I raise questions about environmental distress, the human experience, and storytelling. It first appeared on 3 Quarks Daily. The previous part is here.]

Early in the story of The Walking Dead—the enormously popular, post-apocalyptic, television series—sharpshooting everyman, Rick Grimes, finds himself cast as leader to a group of beleaguered survivors, who must navigate the malignant chaos of a world suddenly overtaken by zombies. Every comfort, convenience, and civic structure of modern American life has collapsed. The threat of death lurks beyond every hillock or behind any tree. Ordinary people are left to fend for themselves against overwhelming forces, with nothing but guns (and the odd pickaxe or crossbow) for aid. And sentimental attachments to other people only leave individuals more vulnerable to attack. In this world that has slipped the grip of civilization, Grimes works to keep a strain of justice and mercy aloft within his desperate band.

But torn away from the cogency of his ordinary, 21st-century life, and cast into unrelenting danger and uncertainty, even Grimes’s kinder impulses are slowly ground away by his unabating experiences of horror and loss. His moral compass spins erratically. By the fifth season of The Walking Dead, the line separating Grimes from the threats he’s fought for years to hold at bay has worn distressingly thin. In fact, much before this, the show’s storylines and characters have already notably shifted their attention from the horrors of the zombies to the horrors of relying upon one’s fellow dislocated human beings for refuge and assistance in an ongoing crisis. Confronting the atrocities committed by the living profoundly changes Grimes and every member of his crew, as they also become more adept killers. Yet, uncannily, the social world they inhabit together doesn’t change much at all.¹ New narratives or mythologies grasping for new understandings of their changed environment, moral quandaries, or identities have not begun to emerge. None among them bothers much about making a reliable living or teaching the children or searching for meaning. Oddly, they remain wholly fixated upon their enemies and armaments. Seemingly lacking in dreams, imaginative hunger, or pragmatic creativity, they don’t begin to re-conceive society in ways that take shape in collaboration with whomever and whatever is left. They remain, throughout, an eternally ragtag cadre of survivalists hoping or despairing for the world only as it was, rather than as they might make it.

Stories of Collapse

[The 17th in a series of essays, On Climate Truth and Fiction, in which I raise questions about environmental distress, the human experience, and storytelling. It first appeared on 3 Quarks Daily. The previous part is here.]

The peopling of Polynesia was an epic chapter in world exploration. Stirred by adventure and hungry for land, intrepid pioneers sailed for days or weeks beyond their known horizons to discover landscapes and living things never before seen by human eyes. Survival was never easy or assured, yet they managed to find and colonize nearly every spot of land across the entire southern Pacific Ocean. On each island, they forged new societies based on familiar Polynesian models of ranked patrilineages, family bonds and obligations, social care and cohesion, cooperation and duty. Each culture that arose was unique and changeable, as islanders continually adjusted to altered conditions, new information, and shifting political tides. Through trial and hardship, most of these civilizations—even on some of the tiniest islands, like Anuta and Tikopia, discussed in the preceding essay—persisted for centuries or millennia, up to the present day. But others faltered, failing to thrive or even to maintain continuity.

Most Polynesian societies that met the tragic fate of famine and disintegration were on remote islands measuring but a few square miles. But size alone was not the decisive factor. In fact, the most famous case occurred on a substantially larger island of about sixty square miles, called Rapa Nui^1, widely known as Easter Island. Despite its relatively generous size, Rapa Nui suffered certain drawbacks. Owing to its more southerly latitude, outside the tropics, it was cooler, drier, and windier than most Polynesian islands—suboptimal conditions for some of their primary crops. Freshwater sources were also few, relative to the island’s size, and sometimes difficult to access. And the cooler surrounding ocean didn’t support the shallow reefs more common to tropical seas, making the islanders’ survival dependent on deep-sea fishing.

On the other hand, when the migrants first arrived, almost eleven hundred years ago, the pristine island was crowned with a dense forest of enormous trees, including a colossal species of palm found nowhere else on Earth, as well as other edible and useful plants. Small fish and shellfish could be gathered along the coast. In addition to several species of non-migratory birds inhabiting the forestland, seabird rookeries crowded the surfaces of rocky mounts just offshore. And the island’s three dormant volcanoes provided great quarries of stone suitable for making fine tools. The fate of the Rapanui people was in no way preordained.

Stories of Continuity

[The sixteenth in a series of essays, On Climate Truth and Fiction, in which I raise questions about environmental distress, the human experience, and storytelling. It first appeared on 3 Quarks Daily. The previous part is here.]

Was it inevitable, this ongoing anthropogenic, global mass-extinction? Do mass destruction, carelessness, and hubris characterize the only way human societies know how to be in the world? It may seem true today but we know that it wasn’t always so. Early human societies in Africa—and many later ones around the world—lived without destroying their environments for long millennia. We tend to write off the vast period before modern humans left Africa as a time when “nothing much was happening” in the human story. But a great deal was actually happening: people explored, discovered, invented, and made decisions about how to live, what to eat, how to relate to each other; they observed and learned from the intricate and changing life around them. From this they fashioned sense and meaning, creative mythologies, art and humor, social institutions and traditions, tools and systems of knowledge. Yet it’s almost as though, if people aren’t busily depleting or destroying their local environments, we regard them as doing nothing.

Of course, it is a normal dynamic of evolution that one species occasionally will outcompete another and drive it toward extinction. But for most of their time on Earth, human beings were not having an outsized, annihilating effect on the life around them, rather than co-evolving with it. That evolution was at least as much cultural as it was a matter of flesh. What people consumed, how they obtained it, and how quickly they used it up has always played a role in the stability and evolution of any ecosystem of which humans were a part. How fast human populations grew, how they sheltered, what they trampled and destroyed or nourished and promoted—all of this affected their environment. Naturally, their interactions with the environment were always driven by what they wanted. And what people want is intimately driven by what they believe, as in the stories they tell themselves. One thing we can safely presume: those who understood their own social continuity as contingent upon that of their environment weren’t telling the same stories we tell today.

What a Way To Go

[The fifteenth in a series of essays, On Climate Truth and Fiction, in which I raise questions about environmental distress, the human experience, and storytelling. It first appeared on 3 Quarks Daily. The previous part is here.]

I began writing this series eighteen months ago to explore the human experience and human potential in the face of climate change, through the stories we tell. It’s been a remarkable journey for me as I followed trails of questions through new fields of ideas along entirely unexpected paths of enquiry. New vistas revealed themselves, sometimes perilous, always compelling. And so I went. The more I’ve learned, the more I’ve come to realize that our present environmental predicament is actually far worse off—that is to say, more threatening to near-term human wellbeing and civilizational integrity—than most of us recognize. This journey is changing me. So when I now look at contemporary works of fiction about climate change—so-called cli-fi, which I’d hoped might provide fresh insights—so much of it strikes me as somewhat underwhelming before the task: narrow, shallow, tepid, unimaginative, or even dishonest.

At the same time, a few conclusions have begun to coalesce in my mind. Some of these may seem controversial, largely because they run contrary to the common narratives that anchor our dominant understanding of how the world works—our stories of human exceptionalism, technological magic, and the tenets of capitalist faith. Indeed, many of my own assumptions and worldviews have been challenged, altered, or broken. In their stead, new ways of thinking have taken root, as I began seeing through at least some of our most cherished cultural fabrications to understand our quandary with a different perspective.

Learning these things has been emotionally taxing, but I don’t believe there’s any way forward without a clear-eyed, big-picture view of our planetary and civilizational plight. And so, for better or worse, I wish to sum up my thoughts here, before ending my explorations through this series, which I next expect to turn toward thoughts on how one might respond to it all: hope, despair, expectation, fear, carrying on, looking ahead, finding new stories. I trust there are others out there, who would also rather reckon with what’s happening than go on pretending we needn’t adjust our expectations for the future… although, I confess, there are certainly days when I envy those who are able to go on pretending. What follows isn’t for the faint of heart:

Toward a Polyphony of Stories

[The 14th in a series of essays, On Climate Truth and Fiction, in which I raise questions about environmental distress, the human experience, and storytelling. It first appeared on 3 Quarks Daily. The previous part is here.]

Our human story has never been simple or monotonous. In fact, it has been nothing less than epic. Beginning from relatively small populations in Africa, our ancestors traveled across the globe. As they went, they mastered new environments, even while those environments were continuously changing—sometimes in predictable cycles, sometimes unpredictably, as the planet wobbled in its orbit, the sun flared, a volcano blew, or other geophysical events transpired. Born during the ever-fluctuating conditions of the ice age, early humans soon mastered a great variety of adaptive living strategies. They combined cycles of nomadism and settlement. They fished, trapped, followed game herds, ambushed seasonal mass-kills, or even forbade the consumption of particular species at various times and places. They tended forests and grasslands with controlled fire, spread seeds, shifted cultivation, pruned and grafted trees, fallowed lands, and followed seasonal produce, among other techniques, managing their local environments and recognizing that their own wellbeing was intimately tied up with the health of local ecosystems. Through these practices, each community relied upon diets that included hundreds of species of edible plants and animals, from palm piths to pine needles, sea slugs to centipedes, mosses to mongooses—far beyond the foods we ordinarily think of today—and developed material cultures and pharmacopeias that might have included hundreds more. Such flexibility and breadth of environmental understanding promoted resiliency among what grew into a great diversity of peoples over hundreds of millennia, many of whom managed to steadily inhabit a particular region, maintaining an unbroken cultural continuity over hundreds of generations.

Stories of Wealth and Distribution

[The thirteenth in a series of essays, On Climate Truth and Fiction, in which I raise questions about environmental distress, the human experience, and storytelling. It first appeared on 3 Quarks Daily. The previous part is here.]

In the world of Star Trek, no one ever goes hungry or lacks access to healthcare. No one wants for housing, education, social inclusion or any other basic need. In fact, no citizen of the United Federation of Planets is ever seen to pay for everyday goods or services, only for gambling or special entertainments. The Federation suffers no scarcity of any kind. All waste is presumably fed into the replicators and turned into fresh food or new clothes or whatever is needed. Yet despite ample social safety nets, there’s no end to internecine politicking, human foibles and failures, corruption and vanity, charisma and venality. The world of Star Trek appeals so widely, I think, because it presents us with something colorfully short of a utopia, a flawed human attempt toward a just, caring, and individually enabling social order. It imagines a society based on a shared set of human values—fairness, cooperation, political and economic egalitarianism—where basic human needs are equitably answered so that no one has to compete for basic subsistence and wellbeing. As the venerable Captain Picard has put it, “We’ve overcome hunger and greed, and we’re no longer interested in the accumulation of things.” Some Libertarian Trekkies have been scandalized to realize that Star Trek actually depicts a post-capitalist vision of society.

But Star Trek’s world is premised upon the existence of a cheap, concentrated, and non-polluting source of effectively infinite energy. Obviously, no such energy source has ever been discovered (solar-paneled dreamscapes notwithstanding). And the replicator, which eliminates both material waste and scarcity, is a magical technology. The Star Trek vision is also a picture of human chauvinism and hubris, presuming H. Sapiens as the only relevant form of Earthly life. So it falls short of a vivid and plausible imagining of an ecologically sustainable, technologically advanced, and egalitarian human civilization.

It is, of course, too much to expect the creators of Star Trek, by themselves, to fully and flawlessly reimagine our global human society. Indeed, it’s become an aphorism of our age that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. Yet, though this might sound like a joke, at this point the matter is all too serious, and reimagining human civilization is a project we all must engage with, to whatever extent we’re able.

Musings on the Anthropocene

[The twelfth in a series of essays, On Climate Truth and Fiction, in which I raise questions about environmental distress, the human experience, and storytelling. It first appeared on 3 Quarks Daily. The previous part is here.]

In the late 1960s and early 70s, Pocatello, Idaho, was one of the fastest growing towns in the United States. It was, and still is, a bland little place in the arid montane region of the American West. I don’t know why it mushroomed then; it has since stagnated and even shrunk. Nevertheless, the summer I turned four, my family was one among many who moved to reside there. Our little red brick house, still unfinished on the day we moved in, was the last house at the end of a newly laid street, still half-empty of houses. Our street stretched like a solitary finger into a kind of wilderness, an austere, high-desert landscape that surrounded our foundling residential colony. From my vantage as a child, preoccupied with the flowers, spiders, and thistles that stuck to my socks, I would see this place transformed.

Little did I know that this landscape was, in fact, already overgrazed and degraded, that some of the plants, which so quickly became familiars—like the Russian Thistle, aka tumbleweed—were actually invasive species. Despite that, it thrived. The undulating hillsides were coarsely matted with hard grasses and sedges, sagebrush, gnarled juniper, all hues of dusty green and wood. Here and there, yellow flares of prickly pear blossoms. Blood red Indian paintbrush splashed across the pale dirt. A sprinkling of white sego lilies.

All the new, single-story homes along our street were encircled by large, grassy yards, where the neighborhood kids played for hours into the lingering, northerly summer sunsets. Next to our house, a dusty trackway wound down the hillside toward a rustic, little ranch below. A brook that passed by the ranch could be made out by the vibrant streak it traced through the pale grasses and shrubs, an incongruous density of ferns and spindly, deciduous trees that grew up from its steep banks. A set of fences out beyond the dirt road sometimes corralled a few horses or cows. Alongside them, a scratch of a trail led further up into the open hills.

Of Gods and Men and Human Destiny

[The eleventh in a series of essays, On Climate Truth and Fiction, in which I raise questions about environmental distress, the human experience, and storytelling. It first appeared on 3 Quarks Daily. The previous part is here.]

In the beginning, the god of the Biblical creation myths makes the Earth and sky. Over the next several days, he makes the sun, moon, and stars, grasses and fruit trees, most of the animals, and rain. Then, scooping up a bit of fresh mud, he molds a being who looks much like himself, a man, and into this homunculus he breathes life. As a dwelling place for this newborn Adam, he plants a lavishly abundant garden, filling it with beautiful and delicious plants. The creator tells Adam, “Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat. But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it, for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.” Then, realizing that Adam might feel lonely, the deity gives him cattle, fowl, and all the “beasts of the field.” Yet none of these quite seems a suitable companion, so from one of Adam’s ribs, god fashions a woman.

Quite pleased with his handiwork, the divinity instructs his new humans on how to live. He tells them they must increase their population. They must also replenish the Earth, and in doing so, subdue it and exercise dominion over all its living things. The almighty then leaves the newlyweds alone to get on with their business of eating, procreating, replenishing, and dominating, which they apparently take to just fine. Indeed, neither of the pair has any memorable comment on their situation, until the day Serpent piques Eve’s curiosity, telling her that if she and Adam were to eat from the one forbidden tree, rather than die, “your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.” Now Eve takes new notice of this tree, understanding that it could make her “wise.” Enticed, she picks a fruit and munches it. Whatever she discovers then—new knowledge or wisdom or just fine flavor—is simply too good not to share with her husband and, despite their creator’s clear injunction to him, Adam follows his wife’s lead. Yet soon the hapless couple realize that this new state they find themselves in—their eyes having been opened—is indeed problematic. They seem to have transgressed some cosmic order and find themselves possessed now of a discomfiting self-awareness, of moral judgments and political motives, just like the god who made them—and distinctly unlike the beasts they lived among.

On Progress as Human Destiny

[The tenth in a series of essays, On Climate Truth and Fiction, in which I raise questions about environmental distress, the human experience, and storytelling. It first appeared on 3 Quarks Daily. The previous part is here.]

On February 18, 2021, NASA landed Perseverance rover on the surface of Mars. Perseverance is the latest of some twenty probes that NASA has sent to bring back detailed information about our neighboring planet, beginning with the Mariner spacecraft fly-by in 1965, which took the first closeup photograph. Though blurry by today’s standards, those grainy images helped ignite widespread wonder and fantasy about space exploration, not long before Star Trek also debuted on television. By the 1970s, science-fiction storytelling was moving from the margins of pop-culture into the mainstream in film and television—and so followed generations of kids, like myself, who grew up expecting off-world adventurism and alien encounters almost as much as we anticipated the invention of video-phones and pocket computers and household robots, as our conceptual bounds for the human story were pushed ever farther outward.

And so much of our expectation has come true. Smartphones and Zoom calls and Roombas are just the most mundane examples of how our techno-fantasized future has manifested in daily life. There’s promise of even more to come, as cultural forces continuously work to realize not only our imagined technotopia of flying cars and jetpacks, but even to seek out those elusive alien encounters. Perseverance rover is, in fact, a robotic astrobiologist: its purpose on Mars is to seek out direct signs of alien life—microbial fossils, if not living microbes themselves. But even should the Martians disappoint us by their absence, information gathered by Perseverance is still intended to help us make that next “giant leap for mankind”: human colonization of Mars. What was until quite recently still generally regarded an outlandish notion seems now widely accepted as the obvious next chapter in our human Manifest Destiny. Indeed, the more we know about the unsuitability of that cold, airless, radiation-beleaguered rock, the more we seem inspired to conquer it.

Meanwhile, a rich ecosystem of high-tech wonderworks has been created here on Earth, in support of all this space adventurism: vast reservoirs of monetary funds; a steadily flowing pipeline of brilliant scientists and bold adventurers, who share the dream; massive networks of accreted infrastructure, including giant telescopes, prodigious computer resources, cutting-edge research laboratories and suppliers across countless fields of expertise, and I-don’t-even-know-what-all-else. NASA itself, Earth’s most elite astronomical research and engineering institution, is a crown jewel of human achievement, still thriving more than half a century beyond its initial impetus of the “international space race” to enter a world of international cooperation on this new frontier. Fueled by the ingenuity-oriented culture of the wealthiest nation in human history, it’s now accelerated by multi-billionaire, science-fantasist allies, like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. Humanity appears to be progressing well along what seems our ordained path of discovery and dominion; from our present vantage, the scope of human potential can only leave one awestruck.

Upheaval and Migration

[The ninth in a series of essays, On Climate Truth and Fiction, in which I raise questions about environmental distress, the human experience, and storytelling. It first appeared on 3 Quarks Daily. The previous part is here.]

—Change. Resilience. Where do we start? I’ve got no idea. What happens after this? Listen! The answer is here!—

These words, splashed on posters, jumped out at me from images sent by a friend. The posters were part of an exhibition called We Need To Talk About Fire, hosted at an artists’ gallery along the Nowra River, about halfway between Sydney and Canberra. The Nowra River region had been hard-hit by the catastrophic Australian bushfires of 2019–20, following an unprecedented drought. Fire season in Australia is worsening as the planet warms, just as it is in the western United States, the Amazon, and Siberia. And the 2019–20 Australian season was particularly horrific, igniting a follow-on spate of depression and suicides in the area. What struck me about these posters was the raw simplicity of their messages, which ranged from forceful platitudes to agonized queries.

In their talk about these bushfires of extraordinary fury, worsened by climate change, there’s no mention of technical solutions. No demand for new wind farms or lowered carbon intensity. Instead, the posters surface what so often gets buried beneath the statistics, acronyms, and cost-benefit analyses common in our dialogs on climate and environment. They voice the thoughts of people who narrowly escaped the flames as the sky burned. People who lost pieces of their lives in an incomprehensible inferno—loved ones or homes or a quietude of mind. For me, the posters recalled the millions more, elsewhere, who might also be expressing similar feelings: Survivors of entire towns leveled by fire in the western United States, from Paradise, California in 2018, to the several communities of Detroit, Blue River, Vida, Phoenix, and Talent, Oregon in 2020. Survivors of back-to-back typhoons Kenneth and Idai, the two most powerfulcyclones ever to strike Mozambique, which hit within six weeks of one another, in March and April of 2019, fueled by rising sea surface temperatures. Survivors of typhoon Goni, the strongest recorded cyclone ever to make landfall anywhere, which hit the Philippines just days after typhoon Molave had hammered the same region, during the Covid-19 pandemic in October and November of 2020. Others too, for whom the damages and dangers of our rapidly changing planet must already feel immediate, existential, and relentless, eclipsing hopes for a return to “normalcy.”

Views of Future Earth

[The eighth in a series of essays, On Climate Truth and Fiction, in which I raise questions about environmental distress, the human experience, and storytelling. It first appeared on 3 Quarks Daily. The previous part is here.]

In the late fifteenth century, European seafarers began searching for what they called the “Northwest Passage,” a fabled route across the Arctic Ocean, which would allow them to sail northward from Europe directly into the Pacific in search of fortune. But the Arctic of their time, during the so-called Little Ice Age of the fourteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries, was covered by thick, impenetrable sheets of ice and densely packed icebergs. Nor had they any reasonable expectation that the great mass of ice would soon melt away. That they imagined finding a reliably navigable route through a polar sea seems to me a case of wishful thinking, a folly upon which scores of lives and fortunes were staked and lost, as so many adventurers attempted crossings, only to flounder and often die upon the ice.

But now that the Arctic sea ice is melting away, the Northwest Passage has become real in a way the adventurers of old could not have dreamed. Today, nations encircling the Arctic Ocean jockey for control of its waters and territorial rights to newly exposed northern continental shelves, which promise to be full of oil and gas. What had been a deadly fantasy is now a luxury cruise destination flaunting an experience of rare wonder, including opportunities to watch polar bears on the hunt. “A journey north of the Arctic Circle is incomplete without observing these powerful beasts in the wild,” entices the Silversea cruises website, with nary a note about the bears’ existence being threatened by the very disintegration of their icy habitat that makes this wondrous cruise possible. Meanwhile, in China, the emergent northern sea routes have been dubbed the Polar Silk Road, projecting a powerful symbol of their past wealth and influence onto an unprecedented reality.

By now, we’re all aware that the planet is profoundly changing around us: angrier weather, retreating glaciers, flaming forests, bleaching coral reefs, starving polar bears, disappearing bees. Yet how blithely we go on making plans, as though the future will follow as neatly and predictably from today, as today did from yesterday. From buying a new beachside home to booking a cabin in the redwoods a year in advance, the ongoing planetary changes apparently figure little in the plans so many people make. It seems I regularly read articles in which mainstream economists make predictions that entirely disregard the changing climate and collapsing biodiversity, as though these concerns lie beyond our economies. Even governments and corporations who seek to profit from changes like the opening of the Arctic Ocean often presume themselves the drivers of “disruption,” creating new market opportunities in an otherwise stable or predictable world. They don’t seem to recognize that the true nature of what’s upon us might just be greater than they imagine and far more consequential.

Yet the visible changes we already notice in the world are merely harbingers of deeper and more far-reaching changes we don’t yet see—and even changes we might see but don’t pay much attention to. These changes, visible and invisible, will drive further changes; some we might try to predict, but others we won’t—especially those resulting from causes we’re not tracking, including the unknown unknowns.

INDIANS: A Book Trailer

My sales pitch for Indians, or as they euphemistically say in the industry, a ‘book trailer’. :) 

A shorter book trailer with just music (and on-screen text) is here. To learn more about the book, click here.

Our Moment on Earth

[The seventh in a series of essays, On Climate Truth and Fiction, in which I raise questions about environmental distress, the human experience, and storytelling. It first appeared on 3 Quarks Daily. The previous part is here.]

“Our plan B has always been grounded in our beliefs around the continued evolution of technology and engineered solutions to address and react to whatever the climate system and its outcomes present to us, whether that be in the form of rises in sea level, which we think you can address through different engineering accommodations along coastal areas, to changing agricultural production due to changes in weather patterns that may or may not be induced by climate change.” —Rex Tillerson, as CEO of ExxonMobile, to shareholders in 2015

***
For the past few years, I’ve been taking a fairly deep dive into attempting to understand the physical and ecological changes occurring on our planet and how these will affect human lives and civilization. As I’ve immersed myself in the science and the massive societal hurdles that stand in the way of an adequate response, I’m becoming aware that this exercise is changing me, too. I feel it inside my body, like a grey mass coalescing in my chest, sticking to everything, tugging against my heart and occluding my lungs. A couple of months ago, I decided to stop writing on this subject, to step away from these thoughts and concerns, because of their discomfiting darkness.

But I’ve discovered that walking away from this matter is no longer something I can just choose to do. For I now experience the world in a different way than I once did, as this grey mass clouds my vision and leaves its residue on everything I touch. I’ve come to see the changing Earth as the greatest single force shaping human affairs into the future, the backdrop against which the human story will play out and respond. 

Just as the temperate stability of the Holocene once enabled the shift from nomadism to settled farming and all of civilization, so the ongoing mass extinction of species and the rapidly warming climate will erode our present modes of life and maps of political order to make way for something new. Not just new, but very likely burdened by unprecedented collective hardship that stresses and tests our political systems, economies, infrastructures, and provisioning networks as never before. Some of these systems will fail. Without knowing how extremely or how quickly the planetary changes will occur, but knowing with some predictive capacity—unlike our Paleolithic ancestors—that an essential and irreversible change is underway, makes it difficult not to feel frightened and aggrieved for our future, even if I may not live to see the most startling changes. But then, what I’ve already witnessed has been startling enough.

Modern Myths of Human Power

[The sixth in a series of essays, On Climate Truth and Fiction, in which I raise questions about environmental distress, the human experience, and storytelling. It first appeared on 3 Quarks Daily. The previous part is here.]

“The American way of life is not up for negotiation.” —George HW Bush to international diplomats at the Earth Summit, Rio de Janeiro, 1992

“Much talk. Talking will win you nothing. All the same, the woman goes with me to the house of Hades.” —Thanatos to Apollo in a scene from Alcestis by Euripides, 5th Century BCE

***

In Classical Greek mythology, Thanatos was Death. As a minor god who got little press in the surviving tales, he appears in the play, Alcestis, as something of a functionary, dutifully gathering those whose time had come and spiriting them to the underworld. Not that he doesn’t find some satisfaction in his work, but he wields his power neither masterfully nor hungrily. The touch of Thanatos did not bring on death from war or violence—those deaths were the domain of other deities—but an ordinary death, as experienced by most. In ancient times, Thanatos was often depicted as a winged youth, as a babe in the arms of his mother, Nyx, goddess of Night, or with his twin, Hypnos, Sleep. Thanatos was not a villain. But he was ruthlessly inevitable.

In the 21st Century Marvel film franchise, Thanatos has been reinvented as Thanos. In this reimagining, Thanos still wields death, but he sees his job in larger terms: he wants to bring peace to the universe, which is engulfed in strife. “Too many mouths. Not enough to go around,” he explains, referring to the overpopulation of the Marvel Universe. Thanos’s solution is to reduce the number of living things through a painless existential cleanse that will magically drift across the universe, gently annihilating half of everybody. He understands himself as the only being possessed of both will and power enough to act upon the need of the hour—to turn every other being into dust, thus restoring balance and enabling peace among the untold trillions who will survive. His desire to erase half of all the living isn’t personal, nor is it inspired by cruelty, venality, or a lust for power. Like his Greek inspiration, Thanos is pragmatic, goal-oriented, and transactional. Though he’s depicted with the stature of a supervillain, in command of limitless legions of grotesque warriors, he’s motivated by a sense of duty: the universe is out of balance and must be set right. “I am inevitable,” he quietly declares.

But, for his heartlessness, Thanos is set upon by the full pantheon of the Marvel Universe demi-gods, the so-called Avengers—a collective of winsome and righteous superheroes—who do not accept inevitability, limitations, or balance. To defeat this supervillain, the Avengers pound their way through a series of epic battles that rage for some five hours of high-CGI viewing in two back-to-back blockbuster films. I don’t think I’m giving anything away to say here that, in the end, the Marvel superheroes win their war.

These two films, Avengers: Infinity Wars (2018) and Avengers: Endgame (2019), became the highest grossing superhero films of all time—and by a good margin—capping off a monumental saga spanning twenty-two films released over the past decade, each of which earned on average nearly a billion dollars at the box office. Presumably, films become such mega-blockbusters, in large part, because they tap effectively into something of the current Zeitgeist, telling a story that audiences want to hear. Many such blockbusters and classic films have become our modern folk stories, providing a vernacular of metaphors, presumptions, and expectations about our world, generating broad conversation, popular analysis, and living threads of storytelling across people of diverse backgrounds and social locations. Stories powerfully tap into our prevalent paradigms, beliefs, and notions, amplify and edify them—or chip away at them. And if, as I’ve suggested in my previous essays in this series, ancient folktales and myths reveal something about our collective understanding of how the world works, or should work, then so do these blockbuster Avenger flicks.

Lost and Found in Eden

[The fifth in a series of essays, On Climate Truth and Fiction, in which I raise questions about environmental distress, the human experience, and storytelling. It first appeared on 3 Quarks Daily. The previous part is here.]

High in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta of northern Colombia, the Kogi people peaceably live and farm. Having isolated themselves in nearly inaccessible mountain hamlets for five hundred years, the Kogi retain the dubious distinction of being the only intact, pre-Columbian civilization in South America. As such, they are also rare representatives of a sustainable farming way of life that persists until the modern era. Yet, more than four decades ago, even they noticed that their highland climate was changing. The trees and grasses that grew around their mountain redoubt, the numbers and kinds of animals they saw, the sizes of lakes and glaciers, the flows of rivers—everything was changing. The Kogi, who refer to themselves as Elder Brother and understand themselves to be custodians of our planet, felt they must warn the world. So in the late 1980s, they sent an emissary to contact the documentary filmmaker, Alan Ereira of the BBC—one of the few people they’d previously met from the outside world. In the resulting film, From the Heart of the World: The Elder Brother’s Warning (1991), the Kogi Mamos (shamans) issue to us, their Younger Brother, a warning akin to that which the Union of Concerned Scientists would also later issue in their World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity (1997, with a second notice in 2017): that we must take heed of our damage to the planet; that if we don’t stop what we’re doing to it, we will destroy the world we know.

The Kogi warning, however, is couched in the language and metaphor of their own knowledge system. They speak of The Great Mother, who taught them “right from wrong,” and whose teachings still guide their lives. “The Great Mother talked and talked. The Great Mother gave us what we needed to live, and her teaching has not been forgotten right up to this day,” they tell us. It’s Younger Brother who is causing problems. “They are taking out the Mother’s heart. They are digging up the ground and cutting out her liver and her guts. The Mother is being cut to pieces and stripped of everything,” the Mamos scold. “So from today, stop digging in the Earth and stealing the gold. If you go on, the world will end. You are bringing the world to an end.” You can hear in their tone that it doesn’t occur to them that Younger Brother might not listen.

For the Kogi, gold is the blood of the Great Mother; it holds for them a value entirely apart from the way we value gold. For them, the wellbeing of the Great Mother is paramount, and they live now—as they always have—in service to her, our world. During the millennium before Columbus bumped into the Caribbean islands, the ancestors of the Kogi had created the complex, non-literate Tairona civilization, stretching from the Caribbean Sea up into the Sierras. They farmed and fished, their subsistence practices enmeshed within a sophisticated knowledge system that described the complex local ecology. They built cities of stone connected by roadways, marvels of engineering, working in league with what nature provided, rather than against it. Their several settlements were located within the different ecological zones of the diverse landscape, and each played its part in providing for their larger civilization. For example, the coastal Tairona fished and collected salt, which they shared with their sister settlements, from whom they received maize and other goods, each of which was produced within its own optimal ecozone, sustainably supporting a population of three hundred thousand people.

Tales From a Changing World

[The fourth in a series of essays, On Climate Truth and Fiction, in which I raise questions about environmental distress, the human experience, and storytelling. It first appeared on 3 Quarks Daily. The previous part is here.]

Tabea Bakeua lives in Kiribati, a North Pacific atoll nation. Her country is likely to be the first to disappear completely under the rising seas within a few decades. Asked by foreign documentary filmmakers if she “believes” in climate change, Bakeua considers and tells them, “I have seen climate change, the consequences of climate change. But I don’t believe it as a religious person. There’s a thing in the Bible, where they say that god sends this person to tell all the people that there will be no more floods. So I am still believing in that.” She smiles, self-consciously, as she continues. “And the reason why I am still believing in that is because I’m afraid. And I don’t know how to get all my fifty or sixty family members away from here.” She’s still smiling as tears fill her eyes. “That’s why I’m afraid. But I’m putting it behind me because I just don’t know what to do.” She turns, apologetically, to wipe away her tears. [from “The Tropical Paradise Being Swallowed By The Pacific” by Journeyman Pictures]

***

Bakeua’s response is one of many that people now have about anthropogenic climate change. Grasping for magic or miracles in the face of destruction and helplessness, her narrative is common among her hundred thousand fellow citizens. Having remained self-sufficient and sustainably prosperous in their way of life for thousands of years—while contributing effectively zero carbon emissions—they will abruptly be left with nothing as the encroaching tides sweep their lands out from under them, sacrificing their islands for the greater prosperity of other countries. The people of Kiribati played no part in triggering this annihilation and have no way of withstanding it. Nor is the international community throwing them a life raft—through compensatory rights to lands, housing, livelihoods, and autonomy, elsewhere, as would be just—nor even expressing any meaningful concern for their plight.

How did we get to this tragic moment? Whose responsibility is it to help save the people and culture of Kiribati? And what of other, similar cases now arising around the globe? Our politics seem wholly unequipped to deal with our ongoing and anticipated climate-forced migrations; our worldviews and political formulations evolved on a planet different from the one presently emerging. And a planet now reeling with nearly eight billion souls and a collapse of biodiversity also offers less resource flexibility to respond to the looming global challenges. Knowing these limitations, however, doesn’t absolve us of our responsibility to do everything we can to address the crises; rather, we must figure out how to change ourselves to meet the moment.

We know that human beings have always had to contend with changing climates since our species first emerged in Africa, during the Pleistocene ice age. In earlier eras, having more wilderness and fewer people on Earth afforded a great deal of climate resiliency—inhabitants of drowning islands could readily enough find somewhere else to go, for instance. But as so many of us have been feeling distress or denial about the effects of the changing climate, I’ve wondered how our distant ancestors experienced the changes they lived through. Did they change themselves to meet their moment? What stories did they tell?

Of Wanderers and Nomads

(The third in a series of essays, On Climate Truth and Fiction, in which I raise questions about environmental distress, the human experience, and storytelling. It first appeared on 3 Quarks Daily. The previous part is here.)

At the beginning of our story—paraphrased from an origin story remembered by a Cree elder—two figures are walking along the clouds. They’ve been walking long and far. Looking down through the spaces between the clouds, they spy a beautiful, green landscape, rich and inviting. They long to go down to this land, but they don’t know how to get down from the clouds. So the two keep walking. When at last they see a speck on the horizon, in the far distance, they walk toward it. The speck grows, looming larger than they are as they get nearer. When the two look up at it, it looks back down at them—it’s Great Spider.

The people tell Great Spider how much they wish to climb down from the clouds and inhabit the land below, and they ask him for his help. So Great Spider begins to weave a web. He weaves and weaves and weaves, until he’s woven a boat. The two climb into the boat with Great Spider’s web still attached, and Great Spider lowers it down from the clouds. Despite his care, the boat rocks and sways precariously. After a long and harrowing downward journey, the boat ends up stuck in the top of a huge tree.

Now the Earth is almost within reach, but the people don’t know how to get down from the top of the tree. Below them they can see Caribou and other animals walking around. They call out for help, but none of the animals is able to help them. Finally, they ask Fisher-weasel, who scampers up the tree and carries each of them safely to the ground. Once they’re on the ground, Brother Bear befriends the people and teaches them everything they need to know as they make their way in this world.

I’m neither a member nor a student of the Cree people and I don’t know what this story means to a Cree person, nor what was left out or changed in this telling. But I’m struck by the tale as both alien and familiar and brimming with humility and kindness in a way that’s unlike many other ancient myths I’ve heard. Before Europeans invaded the Americas, the Cree people were nomadic foragers living in what today is Canada. They traveled in family bands of around ten people, give or take a few, related by blood or marriage; each of these family bands associated with other bands to form larger, more loosely related sociopolitical groupings. These larger groupings facilitated working and socializing together, while each family band maintained its independence. When larger group decisions were called for, every band had a vote; unresolvable disagreements could also be handled by fissioning the larger group associations, with dissenting bands going their own way—voting with their feet, as anthropologists are fond of saying.

A Story of Fire and Ice

(The second in a series of essays, On Climate Truth and Fiction, in which I raise questions about environmental distress, the human experience, and storytelling. It first appeared on 3 Quarks Daily. The first part is here.)

When I was a kid, I used to wonder about the possibility that the planet could slip back into an ice age. I grew up in the Rocky Mountain region of the northwestern USA, where winters lasted half the year and summers were brief and blustery. I hated being cold all the time. Aware that ice ages result from some sort of natural cycles, I worried what might happen if the planet should head that way again. I tried to imagine how we would construct cities and farms, how we would travel between countries or even build roads, if huge glaciers grew down from the Arctic Circle and smothered our little mountain town.

So I was surprised to learn, much later, that we actually do live in an ice age. In historical memory, we’ve been enjoying a warmish, rather pleasant phase of this ice age, to be sure—an interglacial phase, called the Holocene, that’s persisted for about ten thousand years. But interglacial phases, like our present one, have only been brief respites, as the ice age has cycled between glacial and interglacial phases over the past two million years. Past interglacials never lasted very long and, left to its own geological devices, all signs suggested that this one would end too, to be followed by a much longer glacial phase—the stuff of my nightmares.

In fact, a 2016 study indicates that the Holocene interglacial should already be ending. As it was, the weather of the fourteenth through mid-nineteenth centuries was already given to frequent fits and bouts of cold weather extremes. The precise causes for the drop in temperatures are complex, and though it didn’t get cold enough to become a real glacial age, the period is now playfully referred to as the Little Ice Age. During that time, centuries of sporadic, crop-crippling cold led to erratic harvests, reducing grain yields and causing periodic famine, helping to topple Chinese dynasties and destabilize the feudal order of the European Middle Ages. Persistent hunger and poor nutrition amplified the depredations of plague and other diseases across Europe. In England, the Thames regularly froze over. In North America, even the Rio Grande froze up more than once. Peoples across southern North America suffered frequent droughts and malnutrition, especially in the southwest, which remained persistently dry for a span of decades. Some agricultural peoples were forced to return to lives of nomadism. Across the northern latitudes, glaciers extended themselves. The Norse Greenland colony, which had been thriving for centuries, collapsed and was abandoned by around 1500 CE. Early European colonists in North America struggled to survive frequent winters of bitter cold and failed harvests.

What We Talk About When We Talk About the Weather

(The first in a series of essays, On Climate Truth and Fiction, in which I raise questions about environmental distress, the human experience, and storytelling. It first appeared on 3 Quarks Daily.)

In 1997, I was living on Ambae, a tiny, tropical island in the western South Pacific. Rugged, jungle-draped, steamy, volcanic Ambae belongs to Vanuatu, an archipelago nation stretching some 540 miles roughly between Fiji and Papua New Guinea. There, under corrugated tin roofs, in the cinderblock classrooms of a small, residential school, I taught science to middle- and high-schoolers as a Peace Corps volunteer.

That December, the rainy season was in full force, with heavy downpours most afternoons, lasting sometimes long into the night. Never before had I, and never again would I, witness rains like those, where the water poured straight down, not in drops, but in globs and sheets. Standing in it felt like standing under a waterfall; I’d catch myself stepping forward or back, left or right, in an attempt to get out from under the flow, but it was everywhere. It seemed impossible that the sky could hold so much water, constricting summer’s broad daylight to a sodden gloaming.

One evening, during such a downpour, I left a teachers’ year-end potluck to return to my room—one in a row of tiny, concrete flats for the school’s single female staff. Mine was not much more than 100 yards away across an open lawn, which was now filled with ankle-deep water flowing gently down the long campus green toward the sea. As this was not my first deluge, I wasn’t concerned by the prospect of a routine water-logging; it was only water, after all, and not at all cold. The only problem was that the rains had washed away all light into a blind, enveloping darkness. I knew that once I stepped into it I would become disembodied, aware of my limbs only through my untrained sense of proprioception. How dependent we are upon the faculty of sight, even to know where we end and the external world begins.

Standing in front of the large, glaring light, which the principle had set up outside the classroom doorway, I pointed myself in the direction of my house. I held out my arms and stepped forward. Walking in perfect darkness feels like stepping in place, going nowhere. There’s only the light sensation of your feet tapping over a surface—or in this case, shuffling through a pool of water nearly indistinguishable from the cascade of water also flowing over my body. And at the time, I didn’t know that a person who tries to walk a straight line with no bearings will end up traversing an arc. But I continued moving, certain that after about a minute I would run into one of the papaya plants in front of my house. This did not happen.

Of Migrants, Muslims, and Other Non-People

(First published in The Baffler)

The Coronavirus entered India by plane, hidden in the lungs of upper-class travelers. It then jumped to their family members, colleagues, drivers, and maids. The first case of Covid-19 was reported on January 30, but it was only over a month later, in early March, that the government began screening passengers from all international flights. By then, there were twenty-eight known cases in five states; in some parts of the world, the virus was killing nearly as many people as all other causes of death combined.

India is the world’s second most populous country. Yet it boasts one of the globe’s lowest levels of public expenditure on health care, just 1.3 percent of GDP, less than a fifth of what the European Union countries invest. Knowing this, the government recognized the virus as a grave, perhaps catastrophic, threat. Public health officials heroically pursued contact tracing. “Social distancing” and “self-isolation” rapidly entered the national lexicon. By March 23, with the number of confirmed cases nearing five hundred, the government had prudently shut down all domestic and international flights and hardened its borders.

The following day, amid a growing sense of alarm, Prime Minister Narendra Modi abruptly ordered a nationwide lockdown, the largest in the world, meant to last twenty-one days. He made the declaration via a live telecast to the nation at 8 p.m., leaving people just a few hours to plan their affairs. The timing of the announcement was needlessly theatrical, as if he wanted to take the public by surprise. In this it resembled his decision in 2016 to rescind all higher denomination banknotes overnight, an order intended to defeat the shadow economy run by “black money”; the foolishly conceived plan, known as “demonetization,” never stood a chance of achieving this stated goal, though it struck a brutal blow to India’s vast informal sector, which relies on cash transactions. Other parallels soon emerged: the same disastrous planning and execution, callous disregard for the poor, and ruthless policing. As before, Modi continued to avoid all interaction with the press, defying a rather basic expectation in a democracy.

The response to Modi’s announcement was chaotic. He had conveyed the gravity of the situation well—so well that his speech triggered panic shopping that very night. People descended on food and liquor stores, making a mockery of social distancing. By midnight, all factories, offices, and businesses were shut; alarmingly, so were all passenger trains, buses, and taxis. Going forward, no one would be allowed to step outside their homes except for essential services.

But then, not everyone can afford to stay indoors. The next morning, hundreds of thousands of migrant workers were leaving cities and walking home along highways, carrying their belongings in cloth sacks, pitiful scenes that reminded many of Partition. More than twenty died from exhaustion or hunger, often hundreds of miles from home. When a fleet of buses was dispatched in Uttar Pradesh to aid the migrants’ journey, hundreds of thousands more swamped the city bus depots, once again defeating the aim of social distancing and risking the spread of the virus to remote villages.

What Is Climate Catastrophe?

The changing concentration of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. Carbon dioxide is a potent greenhouse gas.

The looming catastrophe of climate change is not only about the increasing frequency of natural disasters that we already see causing hardship and economic stress to communities. The worst catastrophe is not even the horror that will befall more and more people over the coming decades as their food, homes, livelihoods, and security are eliminated by these disasters and the uncertainties that follow in their wake. Most of us are unaware that there are already millions of people displaced by climatic factors—droughts, storms, floods, desertification, sea-level rise, heat, and fire—across the world. Within the next decade already, the UN estimates that there will be tens of millions of climate refugees looking for food, shelter, and safety. This will affect geopolitics, as we’ve already seen. This will spawn untold scenes of humanitarian disaster as famine, disease, and violence propagate. But perhaps 20 or 30 or even 50 million refugees are something the world can deal with, a hardship from which our systems can eventually bounce back.

 

However, if we do not shift our present course and take RADICAL action to eliminate fossil fuels and restructure our ways of life on this planet as quickly as humanly possible, we are looking at a future where more than a billion refugees are expected to accrue over the coming decades. It’s difficult to see how such a situation would NOT spell the collapse of modern human civilization. This is the ultimate catastrophe climate scientists are urging us to act to avoid.

 

To avoid this catastrophe, we must prepare ourselves to reimagine how we live upon this planet—our energy systems, our food systems, our urban infrastructures, our politics, and everything in between. People are understandably resistant to this idea. It requires a commitment to chart an unknown path for humanity, fraught with uncertainty, and to do it collectively with people from all walks of life, even those we may consider our enemies. But if we do NOT accept this and do not do our best to adjust ourselves and our civilizations to mitigate the worst ravages of climate change—still yet to come—we will face not only the sincerely difficult task of demanding the best of ourselves, not only the genuine risks of exploring unfamiliar ideas and directions for innovation, but also the near certainty of total collapse, much sooner than most of us are willing to imagine: we will feel the shift in our own lifetimes; our children will struggle in a rapidly devolving world as they reach middle age; our grandchildren will bear the brunt of this catastrophic failure. This is if we continue on our present course of denial and inaction.

What can you do? If you live in even a moderately functioning democracy, the most important thing you can do is to put your efforts toward empowering leaders who will suitably address the emergency, enact policies that begin the needed transitions of our infrastructures and business practices, and hold the responsible bodies accountable for positive change. In other words: VOTE for climate-conscious candidates. Learn what you can. Teach what you can. Make noise.

The latest IPCC report that was released this past week was about the feedback between land use and climate change. It recommends sweeping changes to our current land use patterns, without which we will not meet the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5ºC above the pre-industrial baseline temperature. Implicit in this are changes to what we grow, where we grow it, how we grow it, and therefore, what we eat. One fundamental recommendation is to eat less meat, especially beef. Even if you aren’t a person who's concerned about the systematic torture of animals, climate change concerns alone should be an incentive to minimize your consumption of meat. Another major concern is food waste—an absolutely easily avoidable practice by those who live in developed countries!

If we begin to imagine the necessary changes today, giving ourselves time to mentally and emotionally prepare for them, there is still hope that we can preserve what is best about what we as a species have built.

The Climate Crisis and India

(A version of this article first appeared as the cover story in The Caravan, The End of Nature: Ecological myths and warming climates.)

FIVE YEARS AGO, there was some speculation as to whether Narendra Modi, the prime minister of India, was a climate-change sceptic, after he made a remark that indicated he was unconvinced about the phenomenon. “Climate has not changed,” he said, in September 2014, during a televised address to a group of schoolchildren. “We have changed. Our habits have changed. Our habits have got spoiled. Due to that, we have destroyed our entire environment.” In a remark made to a group of students at Sacred Heart University around the same time, he displayed total incomprehension of the matter: “The reality is this that in our family, some people are old ... They say this time the weather is colder. And, people’s ability to bear cold becomes less.”

These statements contradict Modi’s imperative to readers of his 2011 book, Convenient Action: Gujarat’s Response to Challenges of Climate Change, in which he references Al Gore, the environmentalist and former vice-president of the United States, who has been vocal about the need for urgent action to save the planet in his 2007 documentary An Inconvenient Truth. It is also entirely at odds with some of his other public statements, such as his declaration at the World Economic Forum, last year in Davos, that climate change constitutes the “greatest threat to the survival and human civilization as we know it.” This apparent contradiction is reflected in the disparity between statement and action when it comes to his government’s measures to protect the environment. For example, his acknowledgement that climate change is our greatest existential threat does not align with the present government’s lack of urgency around decarbonising India’s transportation sector or its energy grid. It has created no institutional structures designed to specifically tackle such a grave existential threat. His government has even failed to properly allocate earmarked funds toward environmental initiatives.

Previous governments were resistant to setting targets for limiting emissions, citing development priorities. The Modi administration at least signed on to the much lauded Paris Agreement in 2015, which aimed to get countries to voluntarily reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, with the goal of limiting the rise in global average temperature to 1.5º Celsius above what we call the pre-industrial baseline, or the average global temperature in the centuries before the Industrial Revolution, when the mass burning of fossil fuels began to change the atmosphere. In addition, under Modi, India ratified the International Solar Alliance, an agreement intended to nurture cooperation among “solar rich” tropical countries in developing and deploying solar power infrastructure. Such measures that the Modi government intends to undertake are helpful but not substantial. While India’s carbon emissions are expected to rise for some years, far more aggressive steps need to be taken to alter the emissions trajectory that India is currently on.