The Climate Crisis
I was in a natural history museum a while ago. It’s a fascinating place. There are separate rooms devoted to different species of creatures. In one, there’s a display of butterflies, all arranged beautifully in glass cases, pinned through the body, scrupulously labeled, and dead. The museum grouped them by type and size, with the big ones at the top and smaller ones at the bottom. In another room, there are beetles similarly arranged by type and size, and in another, there are spiders. Organizing these creatures into categories and putting them in separate cabinets is one way of thinking about them, and it’s very instructive. But this is not how they are in the world. When you leave the museum, you do not see all the butterflies flying in formation, with the large ones in the front and the small ones at the back. You don’t see the spiders scuttling along in disciplined columns with the small ones bringing up the rear, while the beetles keep a respectful distance. In their natural state, these creatures are all over each other. They live in complicated, interdependent environments, and their fortunes relate to one another.
Human communities are exactly the same, and they are facing the same sorts of crises that are now confronting the ecosystems of the natural environment. The analogy here is strong.
The relationships of living systems and our widespread failure to understand them was the theme of Silent Spring, Rachel Carson’s hard‐hitting book published in September 1962. She argued that the chemicals and insecticides that farmers were using to improve crops and destroy pests were having unexpected and disastrous consequences. As they drained into the ground, these toxic chemicals were polluting water systems and destroying marine life. By indiscriminately killing insects, farmers were also upsetting the delicate ecosystems on which many other forms of life depended, including the plants the insects propagated and the countless birds who fed on the insects themselves. As the birds died, their songs were silenced.
Rachel Carson was one of a number of pioneers who helped to shift our thinking about the ecology of the natural world. From the beginning of the industrial age, human beings seemed to see nature as an infinite warehouse of useful resources for industrial production and material prosperity. We mined the earth for coal and ore, drilled through the bedrock for oil and gas, and cleared the forests for pasture. All of this seemed relatively straightforward. The downside is that, three hundred years on, we may have brought the natural world gasping to its knees, and we now face a major crisis in the use of the earth’s natural resources.
This evidence of this is so strong that some geologists say we are entering a new geological age. The last ice age ended ten thousand years ago. Geologists call the period since then the Holocene epoch. Some are calling the new geological period the Anthropocene age, from the Greek word for human, anthropos. They say the impact of human activity on the earth’s geology and natural systems has created this new geologic era. The effects include the acidification of the oceans, new patterns of sediments, the erosion and corrosion of Earth’s surface, and the extinction of many thousands of natural species of animals and plants. Scientists believe that this crisis is real, and that we have to do something profound within the next few generations if we’re to avoid a catastrophe.
One climate crisis is probably enough for you. But I believe there’s another one, which is just as urgent as and has implications just as far‐reaching as the crisis we’re seeing in the natural world. This isn’t a crisis of natural resources. It is a crisis of human resources. I think of this as the other climate crisis.
The Other Climate Crisis
The dominant Western worldview is not based on seeing synergies and connections but on making distinctions and seeing differences. This is why we pin butterflies in separate boxes from the beetles—and teach separate subjects in schools.
Much of Western thought assumes that the mind is separate from the body and that human beings are somehow separate from the rest of nature. This may be why so many people don’t seem to understand that what they put into their bodies affects how it works and how they think and feel. It may be why so many people don’t seem to understand that the quality of their lives is affected by the quality of the natural environment and what they put into it and what they take out.
The rate of self‐inflicted physical illness from bad nutrition and eating disorders is one example of the crisis in human resources. Let me give you a few others. We’re living in times when hundreds of millions of people can only get through their day by relying on prescription drugs to treat depression and other emotional disorders. The profits of pharmaceutical companies are soaring, while the spirits of their consumers continue to dive. Dependence on nonprescription drugs and alcohol, especially among young people, is also rocketing. So too is the rate of suicides. Deaths each year from suicide around the world are greater than deaths from all armed conflicts. According to the World Health Organization, suicide is now the third highest cause of death among people aged fifteen to thirty.
What is true of individuals is naturally true of our communities. I live in California. In 2006, the state of California spent $3.5 billion on the state university system. It spent $9.9 billion on the state prison system. I find it hard to believe that there are three times more potential criminals in California than potential college graduates, or that the growing masses of people in jails throughout the country were simply born to be there. I don’t believe that there are that many naturally malign people wandering around, in California or anywhere else. In my experience, the great majority of people are well intentioned and want to live lives with purpose and meaning. However, very many people live in bad conditions, and these conditions can drain them of hope and purpose. In some ways, these conditions are becoming more challenging.
At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, there was hardly anybody around. In 1750, there were one billion people living on the planet. It took the whole of human existence for the world population to reach one billion. I know that sounds a lot, and we’ve agreed that the planet is relatively small. But it’s still big enough for a billion people to spread out in reasonable comfort.
In 1930, there were two billion people. It took just one hundred and eighty years for the population to double. But there was still plenty of room for people to lie down. It took only forty more years for us to get to three billion. We crossed that threshold in 1970, just after the Summer of Love, which I’m sure was a coincidence. After that came a spectacular increase. On New Year’s Eve 1999, you were sharing the planet with six billion other people. The human population had doubled in thirty years. Some estimates suggest that we’ll hit nine billion by the middle of the twenty‐first century.
Another factor is the growth of cities. Of the one billion people on Earth at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, only 3 percent lived in cities. By 1900, 12 percent of the almost two billion people lived in cities. By 2000, nearly half of the six billion people on Earth lived in cities. It’s estimated that by 2050 more than 60 percent of the nine billion human beings will be city dwellers. By 2020, there may be more than five hundred cities on Earth with populations above one million, and more than twenty mega‐cities, with populations in excess of twenty million. Already, Greater Tokyo has a population of thirty‐five million. This is greater than the total population of Canada, a territory four thousand times larger.