This is a Möbius strip of a parable, a sort of gimmicky tautology rather than a truth claim based strictly in observed data. And yet, I think, it is much more helpful than Fermi or Drake in thinking about climate change and the existential challenge of solving it in just the few decades ahead. There is one civilization we know of, and it is still around, and kicking—for now, at least. Why should we be suspicious of our exceptionality, or choose to understand it only by assuming an imminent demise? Why not choose to feel empowered by it?
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A sense of cosmic specialness is no guarantee of good stewardship. But it does helpfully focus attention on what we are doing to this special planet. You don’t need to invoke some imagined law of the universe—that all civilizations are kamikaze ones—to explain the wreckage. You need look only at the choices we have made, collectively; and, collectively, we are at present choosing to wreck it.
Will we stop? “Thinking like a planet” is so alien to the perspectives of modern life—so far from thinking like a neoliberal subject in a ruthless competitive system—that the phrase sounds at first lifted from kindergarten. But reasoning from first principles is reasonable when it comes to climate; in fact, it is necessary, as we only have a first shot to engineer a solution. This goes beyond thinking like a planet, because the planet will survive, however terribly we poison it; it is thinking like a people, one people, whose fate is shared by all.
The path we are on as a planet should terrify anyone living on it, but, thinking like one people, all the relevant inputs are within our control, and there is no mysticism required to interpret or command the fate of the earth. Only an acceptance of responsibility. When Robert Oppenheimer, the actual head of Los Alamos, later reflected on the meaning of the bomb, he famously said he was reminded, in the flash of the first successful nuclear test, of a passage from the Bhagavad-Gita: “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” But the interview was years later, when Oppenheimer had become the pacifist conscience of America’s nuclear age—for which, naturally, he had his security clearance revoked. According to his brother, Frank, who was also there when Oppenheimer watched the detonation of the device nicknamed “the gadget,” he said only, “It worked.”
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The threat from climate change is more total than from the bomb. It is also more pervasive. In a 2018 paper, forty-two scientists from around the world warned that, in a business-as-usual scenario, no ecosystem on Earth was safe, with transformation “ubiquitous and dramatic,” exceeding in just one or two centuries the amount of change that unfolded in the most dramatic periods of transformation in the earth’s history over tens of thousands of years. Half of the Great Barrier Reef has already died, methane is leaking from Arctic permafrost that may never freeze again, and the high-end estimates for what warming will mean for cereal crops suggest that just four degrees of warming could reduce yields by 50 percent. If this strikes you as tragic, which it should, consider that we have all the tools we need, today, to stop it alclass="underline" a carbon tax and the political apparatus to aggressively phase out dirty energy; a new approach to agricultural practices and a shift away from beef and dairy in the global diet; and public investment in green energy and carbon capture.
That the solutions are obvious, and available, does not mean the problem is anything but overwhelming. It is not a subject that can sustain only one narrative, one perspective, one metaphor, one mood. This will become only more so in the coming decades, as the signature of global warming appears on more and more disasters, political horrors, and humanitarian crises. There will be those, as there are now, who rage against fossil capitalists and their political enablers; and others, as there are now, who lament human shortsightedness and decry the consumer excesses of contemporary life. There will be those, as there are now, who fight as unrelenting activists, with approaches as diverse as federal lawsuits and aggressive legislation and small-scale protests of new pipelines; nonviolent resistance; and civil-rights crusades. And there will be those, as there are now, who see the cascading suffering and fall back into an inconsolable despair. There will be those, as there are now, who insist that there is only one way to respond to the unfolding ecological catastrophe—one productive way, one responsible way.
Presumably, it won’t be only one way. Even before the age of climate change, the literature of conservation furnished many metaphors to choose from. James Lovelock gave us the Gaia hypothesis, which conjured an image of the world as a single, evolving quasi-biological entity. Buckminster Fuller popularized “spaceship earth,” which presents the planet as a kind of desperate life raft in what Archibald MacLeish called “the enormous, empty night”; today, the phrase suggests a vivid picture of a world spinning through the solar system barnacled with enough carbon capture plants to actually stall out warming, or even reverse it, restoring as if by magic the breathability of the air between the machines. The Voyager 1 space probe gave us the “Pale Blue Dot”—the inescapable smallness, and fragility, of the entire experiment we’re engaged in, together, whether we like it or not. Personally, I think that climate change itself offers the most invigorating picture, in that even its cruelty flatters our sense of power, and in so doing calls the world, as one, to action. At least I hope it does. But that is another meaning of the climate kaleidoscope. You can choose your metaphor. You can’t choose the planet, which is the only one any of us will ever call home.
Acknowledgments
If this book is worth anything, it is worth that because of the work of the scientists who first theorized, then documented the warming of the planet, and then began examining and explicating what that warming might mean for the rest of us living on it. That line of debt runs from Eunice Foote and John Tyndall in the nineteenth century to Roger Revelle and Charles David Keeling in the twentieth and on to all of those hundreds of scientists whose labor appears in the endnotes of this book (and of course many hundreds of unmentioned others very hard at work). However much progress we manage against the assaults of climate change in the coming decades, it is thanks to them.
I am personally indebted to those scientists, climate writers, and activists who were especially generous to me, over the last several years, with their time and insights—helping me understand their own research and pointing me to the findings of others, indulging my requests for rambling interviews or discussing the state of the planet with me in other public settings, corresponding with me over time, and, in many cases, reviewing my writing, including portions of the text of this book, before publication. They are Richard Alley, David Archer, Craig Baker-Austin, David Battisti, Peter Brannen, Wallace Smith Broecker, Marshall Burke, Ethan D. Coffel, Aiguo Dai, Peter Gleick, Jeff Goodell, Al Gore, James Hansen, Katherine Hayhoe, Geoffrey Heal, Solomon Hsiang, Matthew Huber, Nancy Knowlton, Robert Kopp, Lee Kump, Irakli Loladze, Charles Mann, Geoff Mann, Michael Mann, Kate Marvel, Bill McKibben, Michael Oppenheimer, Naomi Oreskes, Andrew Revkin, Joseph Romm, Lynn Scarlett, Steven Sherwood, Joel Wainwright, Peter D. Ward, and Elizabeth Wolkovich.
When I first wrote about climate change in 2017, I relied also on the critical research help of Julia Mead and Ted Hart. I am grateful, too, to all the responses to that story that were published elsewhere—especially those by Genevieve Guenther, Eric Holthaus, Farhad Manjoo, Susan Mathews, Jason Mark, Robinson Meyer, Chris Mooney, and David Roberts. That includes all the scientists who reviewed my work for the website Climate Feedback, working through my story line by line. In preparing this manuscript for publication, Chelsea Leu reviewed it even more closely, and incisively, and I cannot thank her enough for that.