World Enough and Time

My title line, as any English major knows, is from the poem “To His Coy Mistress” by Andrew Marvell. The first two lines are: 

                   

            “Had we but world enough and time,

            This coyness, Lady, would be no crime.”

I am not referring to ‘country’ matters here, though. I’m referring, somewhat tongue in cheek, to what is far more serious: the emergency, the cosmic crime of global warming. Had we a whole other world that could substitute for this one; or had we several decades or centuries to counteract the damaging effects of pouring greenhouse gases like CO₂ and methane into the atmosphere, then we could indulge the idiotic coyness of those who keep insisting that the sky is not really falling, and be secure in the knowledge that they’ll finally wake up in time to save us. But we have neither. Neither world enough nor time. What we have is alarm bells ringing all around us, and the predictions from the scientists who study climate and its chemistry that we are about to reach (or have long since reached) the tipping point. Once that tipping point is reached, and the amount of CO₂ and other gases in the atmosphere push the average global temperature above 2 or 3 or 5 degrees Celsius, we are cooked. There will be no turning back, because the effects of atmospheric pollution are delayed by at least forty years (which means that what’s already released is just starting to affect us). More than that, the runaway effects of greenhouse gases means that a warmer climate will feed back into the already accelerating effects to push climate change faster and farther than we can even imagine. The release of methane by warming air from the tundra where it has been safely deposited for eons, and the release of methane from the warming ocean bottoms where it has also been safely deposited for eons, will be one feedback mechanism that has long been predicted, and whose real damage no one can calculate.

            So we have no time. None. And yet, the world’s leaders—aside from Pope Francis with his recent encyclical—continue to dither, continue to bow to the importuning of corporations and the political leaders hiding in the back pockets of those corporations, and refuse to take definite steps to commit themselves and their nations to reducing carbon. Too high a price, they say. Our economies (that is, their obscene profits) depend on energy from fossil fuels.

            I have written about this ad infinitum. So have countless others. But two articles that came out this past week have stimulated me to try once again. For one, a study cited by John Abraham in the UK’s Guardian newspaper on 23 June, posited that the effects of global warming can now be reasonably proved to affect smaller weather events. Using information from Hurricane Sandy, the recent typhoon in the Philippines, and heat waves and droughts in various countries, the study’s author, Kevin Trenberth, writing in Nature Climate Change has said that global warming affects the weather in roughly two ways. First, it raises the odds that any extreme weather event like Sandy will happen. And second, and more important, “it makes the events more severe.” This means, with respect to Hurricane Sandy, that global warming made the hurricane more likely; and global warming also increased its severity—for example with regard to the already-risen sea level that made the drastic flooding more damaging. The summary of this research by the aforementioned Kevin Trenberth is clear:

The climate is changing: we have a new normal. The environment in which all weather events occur is not what it used to be. All storms, without exception, are different. Even if most of them look just like the ones we used to have, they are not the same.

            Another piece, this time in the Washington Post on June 25, looks ahead to one of the likely effects that global warming will have—mass migration of people who will be displaced by rising oceans—and what should be done about it. Its author is Michael B. Gerrard, of Columbia University’s Earth Institute and its Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. Professor Gerrard’s conclusion is contained in his title: “America is the worst polluter in the history of the world. We should allow climate change refugees to resettle here.” His reasoning is simple. If climate pollution is not reversed—and again, this assumes that there’s even time to do this, which many scientists, including Guy McPherson, says is a pipe dream, and which even the International Energy Agency says (based on current national promises to the U.N. climate summit due in Paris later this year) will still lead to a 4.7 degree F. rise in temperature by 2100—rising seas will put nations like Bangladesh, the Philippines, Indonesia, Pakistan, Egypt and Vietnam, among others, partly under water. Too, many nations in Africa will turn into deserts, while other nations depending on (now melting) glaciers in the Himalayas and the Andes will be without drinking water. Hundreds of millions of people from these nations will be desperate (as many migrants trying even now to get into Europe are desperate) to find a safer place to live. Many will use any expedient to save themselves and their families, up to and including the use of violence. Where are all these people going to go? Is there a way, Gerrard asks, to distribute them more equitably than by relying on chance and putative good will?

            Gerrard—not without some tongue in cheek himself—opines that there is. He writes that those who have contributed most to global warming should be the ones to take in the most migrants displaced by it. Using World Resources Institute figures, he finds that between 1850 and 2011, the nations emitting the most carbon dioxide were: the United States, 27%; the European Union, 25%; China, 11%; Russia, 8%; and Japan, 4%. THEREFORE, if we estimate (to make figuring easy) that 100 million people will need new places to live by 2050, this means that old numero uno, the US of A, should take in 27 million refugees! And the combined nations of Europe should take in 25%, China 11%, and so on.

            Of course, Gerrard admits that none of this would be easy. There are no international legal conventions that recognize refugees displaced by climate change. Most of the habitable land in most countries is already occupied. Finding places for refugees to go would be even more difficult than finding places for the few thousands that are now flooding Europe. One can guess that there would be not only armed vigilantes in many nations, but real fear and chaos everywhere. The prospect of millions upon millions of tired, hungry and thirsty refugees roaming the land and sea with no place to go is something out of the worst distopias we can imagine. And Gerrard ends his piece with a cautionary scenario from one of the places most likely to disgorge refugees: the low-lying island nation of Maldives. Its president, before he was deposed by a military coup, was Mohamed Nasheed, and he staged an underwater cabinet meeting in 2012 to dramatize his country’s plight. More recently, he conveyed to Gerrard his message to developed nations:

“You can drastically reduce your greenhouse gas emissions so that the seas do not rise so much. Or when we show up on your shores in our boats, you can let us in. Or when we show up on your shores in our boats, you can shoot us. You pick.”

            One more thing. A book I’ve been perusing recently gives some idea, by virtue of its gorgeous photographs and astonishing accounts of animal evolution, just how much is at risk from global warming and the attendant extinctions we are facing. It’s called, simply, Animal Earth: The Amazing Diversity of Living Creatures (Thames & Hudson: 2013). If your library doesn’t have it, it should. Written by Ross Piper, it contains 540 of the most beautiful illustrations I have ever seen. There are animals from every species, every family, most of which we humans never see, for we, in our self-centeredness, and limited by our senses, are aware of mainly the large animals, the mammals like ourselves, the land animals, and some of the sea creatures that we use as food. But the astonishing number and variety of other animals, most of them small and hidden in the deep seabed or in the soil or in the interior of other animals whom they parasitize, is simply staggering. As Piper writes at an early point:

Most animals are small and rarely encountered (at least knowingly) by humans. Aquatic sediments, particularly those on the seabed, are alive with a glorious variety of minute creatures, collectively known as meiofauna. In this microcosm we can find representatives of at least 19 of the animal lineages—the most of any habitat (10). 

            What Piper gives us is a chapter on each of the 35 major animal lineages (all member animals share a defining body plan and evolutionary history), from Ctenophora (comb jellies) to Tunicata (sea squirts), to Nematoda (nematodes) to Arthropoda (arthropods), to Mollusca (molluscs), to Platyhelminthes (flatworms, etc.), to the ones we know and love, Craniata (vertebrates, etc.). He tells us that some 1.5 million species have been formally identified so far, “yet it is estimated that the total number of species could be anywhere between 10 and 200 million.” That’s species! While we like to think of our revered species and our earth-bound relatives as the summit of all nature, Piper devotes only a small amount of his book to the “Craniata,” i.e. those species with a brain, like ours. Rather, he points out that of the 1.5 million species now known, it is the Arthropods (millipedes, centipedes, insects, crustaceans, arachnids) who are the real champions of evolution: they number no less than 1.2 million species—fully 80% of the total of all animal life. They are the most diverse animals on the planet and probably the most successful, ranging in size from

            “minute wasps small enough to parasitize the eggs of other insects, and microscopic   crustaceans and mites, scarcely visible to the naked eye, to giant spiders whose legs         would span a dinner plate and deep-sea crabs with a body as big as a football and legs    spanning more than 10 feet…In myriad seemingly insignificant ways they keep life on earth        ticking over, living out their lives in often strange and sometimes even mind-boggling ways    (149).

And while we like to think of the special attributes we have, like our great sensory systems and color-perceiving eyes, Piper points out that the compound eyes of insects like the mantis shrimp have at least 16 different types of light-sensitive cells (we have 4), and can see over 100,000 colors, plus “infrared, polarized light and four types of ultraviolet light.”

Such insects evolved their astonishing flying ability 350 million years ago, 100 million years before any other animal. Finally, the lineage Tardigrada (its species include ‘water bears’ that look like tiny armored tanks) have developed an ability to enter a state of suspended animation called ‘cryptobiosis.’ They do this when their habitat dries up (perhaps we need to figure out how to do this ourselves), and, thus suspended, can “tolerate temperatures ranging from close to absolute zero (much colder than liquid nitrogen) up to 120⁰  C (250⁰ F), huge doses of radiation, and pressures ranging from hard vacuum to 6,000 atmospheres, which is about ten times the pressure in the oceanic abyss.” And they can enter this state in about an hour!

            Anyone interested in contemplating the astonishing variety of animal life on this planet should get a copy of this book right away: the photos alone are worth the price. But its real value lies in reinforcing for us, once again, the almost incomprehensible and truly awe-inspiring scale of the life process of which we are a part, which we are. And the corresponding scale of the catastrophe we are bringing about through our ignorance of it, our failure to appreciate it. I am referring, of course, to the casual way in which we are polluting and poisoning the habitat that is home not only to us, not only to the myriad species of which we are aware, but to the millions of species we have almost no knowledge of. Many writers and scientists have alluded, recently, to the five great extinctions that have nearly denuded our planet previously, and the sixth great extinction we humans are now bringing about. We are doing it with our industrial civilization, with our chemical poisoning of everything that we consider “useless” or “harmful” to that which we consider ‘beneficial,’ with our heating up of the atmosphere with the CO₂ that is the by-product of our comfort. But the word ‘extinction’ hardly seems to penetrate our consciousness. It is too abstract. When we actually see—if only in a photograph (many of these creatures are so minute we need the scanning electron microscope to even see them)—the life, the swarming, swirling, amazingly complex variety of the solutions life has found to the knottiest problems, all in elegant forms that no human, no computer could ever mimic, then surely we must stop. We must grieve for what we are doing. We must vow to do whatever we can, whatever it takes to try to ameliorate, to whatever degree we can, the catastrophe we are blindly bringing about. Because the alternative is to passively collude in a massive crime: the mass murder of life (and again, the word is too poor to convey the absolute, irreplaceable glory of it) on this planet.

Lawrence DiStasi

Pope Francis' Call for Revolution

I don’t know about you, but I’m loving what I’ve read of the new encyclical Pope Francis issued on June 18. Entitled “Laudato Si,” (Praise Be), On the Care of Our Common Home,”  it calls for no less than a “cultural revolution” to change the economic and political systems that have led us to the brink of disaster from climate change: “Humanity is called to recognize the need for changes of lifestyle, production and consumption, in order to combat this warming or at least the human causes which produce or aggravate it.”  The Pope actually labels the world’s dominant economic system (i.e. capitalism) “structurally perverse” for the way it produces gross inequality, the exploitation of the poor by the rich, and an Earth that has become an “immense pile of filth.” And most important, it calls for viewing the issue of climate change from a moral perspective, thus cutting through the attempt to sideline this Pope and other spiritual leaders for butting into an issue which is ‘political.’ No, says the Pope, climate change is a moral issue because it stems directly from the “unfair, fossil-fuel based industrial model that harms the poor most” (Christian Science Monitor, 6/18/15.)

The document is clearly meant to influence the UN climate negotiations due to convene in Paris later this year. As if echoing the Nature’s Trust argument (see my blog on Nature’s Trust, 6/3/15), the Pope called for an awakening of all people of faith from all religions to “save God’s creation for future generations.” This is because the “dominion” over all other creatures that climate change doubters often cite as Biblical permission for humans to do whatever they choose to the Earth and animal life, is actually a charge for humans to “care for” the Earth and its creatures. Engaging in activities, as humans have for hundreds of years, that lead directly to pollution and mass extinctions, is thus characterized as a breach of Christian teaching. The Pope underlines this love for and duty to god’s creation by using the words of his namesake, St Francis of Assisi: “brother sun and sister moon.” He’s also quite specific about how this duty trumps both politics and the ‘might is right’ philosophy that guides much of our economic and political action:

This vision of 'might is right' has engendered immense inequality, injustice and acts of violence against the majority of humanity, since resources end up in the hands of the first comer or the most powerful: the winner takes all…Completely at odds with this model are the ideals of harmony, justice, fraternity and peace as proposed by Jesus. (quoted in CS Monitor).

Predictably, countless conservative and political actors have responded to the Pope’s encyclical with alarm, dismay and contempt. Jeb Bush, himself a Catholic through conversion, said on the basis of the leaked portion of the document, “I think religion ought to be about making us better as people and less about things that end up getting into the political realm.” And the ever-moralistic, often mawkish David Brooks, commenting on NPR and the PBS Newshour, credited the Pope with a “beautiful” document on the connectedness of all life, but criticized his politics, saying that the Pope should stick to morals rather than getting embroiled in the political arena where he’s naïve and would have little effect anyway. As for his economics, which has been setting off alarm bells since he became Pope, conservatives, free-market advocates and the energy lobby have been uniform in their condemnation of the Pope’s call to reduce consumption and turn to renewable energy sources. “Energy is the essential building block of the modern world,” said Thomas Pyle of the Institute of Energy Research, a fossil-fuel ‘think’ tank. And the Wall Street Journal ran a headline saying that “Pope Blames Markets for Environment’s Ills.” But the Pope’s encyclical has anticipated most of these critics, including those who have condemned his Latin American concern for the poor as socialist or Marxist. No, insists the Pope, caring for the poor is not a sign of communism but the basic concern of Christians and Christianity. Further, Christianity does not simply concern itself with souls and the afterlife, but with the lives of humans and other creatures here and now, on Earth, which he actually calls “mother earth.” And still further, the Pope has demonstrated that he has a rather keen sense of politics and the limits of what politicians can accomplish:

A politics concerned with immediate results, supported by consumerist sectors of the population, is driven to produce short-term growth. In response to electoral interests, governments are reluctant to upset the public with measures which could affect the level of consumption or create risks for foreign investment. The myopia of power politics delays the inclusion of a far-sighted environmental agenda within the overall agenda of governments.

Not bad for a ‘naïve’ spiritual leader with his head in the clouds.

But rather than interpret what the Pope or his predictable critics say, perhaps some excerpts from the encyclical will better serve to convey both the radical substance and tone of this transformative (we devoutly hope) document.

We all know that it is not possible to sustain the present level of consumption in developed countries and wealthier sectors of society, where the habit of wasting and discarding has reached unprecedented levels… We fail to see that some are mired in desperate and degrading poverty, with no way out, while others have not the faintest idea of what to do with their possessions, vainly showing off their supposed superiority and leaving behind them so much waste which, if it were the case everywhere, would destroy the planet. In practice, we continue to tolerate that some consider themselves more human than others, as if they had been born with greater rights.

We know that technology based on the use of highly polluting fossil fuels – especially coal, but also oil and, to a lesser degree, gas – needs to be progressively replaced without delay. Until greater progress is made in developing widely accessible sources of renewable energy, it is legitimate to choose the lesser of two evils or to find short-term solutions. But the international community has still not reached adequate agreements about the responsibility for paying the costs of this energy transition.

Once more, we need to reject a magical conception of the market, which would suggest that problems can be solved simply by an increase in the profits of companies or individuals….Where profits alone count, there can be no thinking about the rhythms of nature, its phases of decay and regeneration, or the complexity of ecosystems which may be gravely upset by human intervention.

Saving banks at any cost, making the public pay the price, foregoing a firm commitment to reviewing and reforming the entire system, only reaffirms the absolute power of a financial system, a power which has no future and will only give rise to new crises after a slow, costly and only apparent recovery. The financial crisis of 2007-08 provided an opportunity to develop a new economy, more attentive to ethical principles, and new ways of regulating speculative financial practices and virtual wealth. But the response to the crisis did not include rethinking the outdated criteria which continue to rule the world.

..it is essential to show special care for indigenous communities and their cultural traditions. They are not merely one minority among others, but should be the principal dialogue partners, especially when large projects affecting their land are proposed. For them, land is not a commodity but rather a gift from God and from their ancestors who rest there, a sacred space with which they need to interact if they are to maintain their identity and values. When they remain on their land, they themselves care for it best. Nevertheless, in various parts of the world, pressure is being put on them to abandon their homelands to make room for agricultural or mining projects which are undertaken without regard for the degradation of nature and culture.

A change in lifestyle could bring healthy pressure to bear on those who wield political, economic and social power. This is what consumer movements accomplish by boycotting certain products. They prove successful in changing the way businesses operate, forcing them to consider their environmental footprint and their patterns of production. When social pressure affects their earnings, businesses clearly have to find ways to produce differently. This shows us the great need for a sense of social responsibility on the part of consumers. (all excerpts courtesy of Reuters.)

Again, this would be impressive as a position paper from a radical environmentalist. From the leader of the normally conservative Catholic Church, which historically has been anything but eager to confront political or economic powers whose favor it has, rather, tended to curry, this is indeed revolutionary. Rather than take cover as one of the great sacred cows of our world, Francis’s Church has exposed the sacred cows of political and economic sovereignty that have heretofore enjoyed virtual immunity. And this, in turn, speaks to the fact, less and less deniable with each day, that current generations do indeed face one of the greatest crises in all of human history. All one can say is thanks be to whatever influences (we know of some, like Cardinal Peter Turkson of Ghana, President of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, whose office wrote the draft of the encyclical) and whatever in his Latin American background has disposed Pope Francis to cultivate his obvious concern for the poor and exploited of the earth, and for the earth itself. It is long overdue.

Lawrence DiStasi