There Is Hope Yet

It has been truly shocking these last couple of weeks to see so many disasters happening around the world that are tied to climate change: flooding, runaway fires, tornadoes, droughts, melting glaciers, hurricanes, air quality hazards, record-breaking heat. Even though most of us still have safe places to be, it is becoming clearer that the future of our planet is in jeopardy. When years ago scientists started predicting that climate change was going to have an adverse effect on us, they didn't predict that these things would happen so quickly. And back then, a large proportion of our country's population did not believe these forecasts. Even now, I know of too many good smart people who reject the concept of climate change, blaming it on the liberals' over-active imaginations, seeing the warning from the liberal branch of our society as arrogantly attempting to discredit common folks' lifestyles. 

To me, this refusal to accept that our planet is changing is a defensive stance. Hearing that humans caused climate change riles people up, for they do not want to be blamed. And the easiest way to defend themselves is to totally reject the climate change idea. Actually, if we could just look at the facts and get away from blame, it seems like anyone with a brain would be trying to find ways to back out of the corner we find ourselves in. After all, even if the total effect of human civilization on the climate has been cumulatively catastrophic, none of us set out to trash the earth. As our cultures evolved, we tried to control nature in an effort to make our lives more comfortable and predictable. It is relatively recently that we realized the negative effect we have had on our earth mother. Now it is time to lay aside blame. It is time to face reality. It is time to prioritize cleaning up our act and the earth.

Awhile back I watched David Attenborough's most recent film "A Life on Our Planet". He calls it his Witness Statement. At the age of 93, he is looking back over a life filled with exploration of this earth, a lifetime devoted to marveling at the living world and the processes of the planet. And more recently, his life has been focused around telling the truth about what is happening to degrade the health of our home because of the actions of human civilization. Many of the facts in my blog post here come from Attenborough's film, and I urge you to watch it yourselves. He begins by telling the story of earth's phases. Over millions of years, nature has crafted miraculous life forms that evolve into an interconnected whole. And then something happens to upset the balance and we have an extinction. And then the process starts again, first tiny forms of life that evolve and evolve into a rich beautiful ecosystem, and then again something happens and there is another extinction. In 4 billion years, this has happened 5 times on earth. It took one million years for volcanoes to change our atmosphere so much that it caused an extinction. Now it has taken 200 years of burning fossil fuels to bring us close to a 6th extinction. It is time to open our eyes.

One of the concepts we are beginning to understand is that the earth is one interconnected being, and its health depends upon balance. The more diversity we have, the greater the possibilities of balance. And one of the things that has come with a growing human population is the eradication of many species. Large wild areas are also disappearing. Too much of earth's surface is dominated by human cities and fields. Many, many rain forests are being cut down, so we are losing earth's most diverse areas. It is hard to find an enemy here. People are cutting down rain forests in order to use the land to make a living. And yet in the grand scheme of things, it turns out to be a tragedy.

Historically, humans have seen the natural world as being there for their own use. Once a species is valued by us humans, it has tended to be hunted or harvested to extinction. The natural world was viewed as a source of food and materials, and there has been little thought about the lives of the life we destroyed until recently. Our superior brains enabled us to break free of the restrictions that governed other life forms, and this ended in huge population growth. Our predators were eliminated, disease became more under control. With nothing to stop us, we have been consuming the earth until we've used it up, little by little. We know all of this, of course. But sometimes it's good to look at the broad picture,

When humans went to the moon and sent home that first picture of earth from space, this one view from afar had an enormous effect on our mindset. We saw that our world had edges, was finite. And we saw how much of it was populated by one species, ourselves. Since then, we have been making more efforts to protect large wild areas. That's a good start, but we need many more such reserves if we are to begin to balance our atmosphere and our earth again. We all have heard the predictions of what will happen if we do nothing much to rescue us from another extinction: by the 2030's the Amazon will be a dry savannah, the arctic will be ice-free in summer, and thawing soil will release methane; by the 2050's coral reefs will have died, fish populations crashed; by the 2080's soils will have become exhausted, pollinating insects will be gone; by 2100 the earth will be 4 degrees warmer, the 6th extinction event underway.

In the first part of Attenborough's witness statement film, he describes the long history of the earth and our part in its present state. Seeing and hearing about this is not fun. And no one is more disturbed than he is. But the tone of the film changes when he gets to what we can do to rescue our planet. Right, he has not given up. As he sees it, it is not really a complicated fix. We just have to gather as a species to do what's needed. And he tells us that what we need to do is restore diversity. Re-wild the world. He goes into specifics next.

Population: Every other species tends to top out and stop growing when it reaches the limit of food availability. We are probably headed that way too but we have manipulated the environment to such an extent that when we run out of food, our whole world will be truly in peril. However, in some nations the population has already leveled out as the standard of living got better. If we work at raising the standard of living worldwide, populations could all start to decline. Fewer people, less stress on the environment.

Fuel: If we phase out fossil fuels and use sunlight, water, wind and geothermal renewable energy, we'll never run out and will not be polluting the atmosphere.

Ocean: The ocean can be our ally in reducing carbon in the atmosphere. We need to replenish diversity by stopping pollution of our waters and expanding protected areas. A healthier habitat will produce more fish.

Diet: Eating meat involves a huge expanse of space. The planet can't support so many meat-eaters. We can change our diet, eat more fish, explore new non-meat foods.

Forests: Widen our expanses of forest. They are a sacred ground for hosting wide diversity as well as absorbing carbon from our air.

Nature: It is our biggest ally. We need to follow its examples, its lessons. No species can thrive unless everything else around it thrives too. We each need to school ourselves in nature-studies. The truth is that even without our help, the natural world would eventually rebuild. But as things look now, the human species would no longer be here unless we act together soon. As David says at the end of his film, "We require more than intelligence. We require wisdom."

When I watched the film "A Life on Our Planet", I was so inspired that I wanted to run to my computer and write a blog post that very night. But actually it has been several weeks now, and I have been living my life more inspired and more hopeful. It is finally time to share this with you. And I do urge you to watch Attenborough's film yourself. It's his latest one, perhaps his last one. There is hope if we act together. I'm ready....