Faltering Humanity

Bill McKibben has been a warrior in the arena of climate change for many years. One of the co-founders and leaders of the climate group 350.org, he has researched, written, demonstrated, gone to jail numerous times and helped sue the government for failing to act to stop the rise in carbon emissions in our atmosphere. His books, beginning with The End of Nature, have been bestsellers over many years and galvanized millions around the world to protest the inaction of governments regarding the existential threat of global warming. Now he has a new book, Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? and the theme is similar. But this time, McKibben takes aim at bigger game.

            This is not to say that Falter neglects to warn about the threat of climate change. He devotes several chapters not only to the dangers accelerating from the rising levels of carbon in our atmosphere (now at over 414 ppm, well above the 350 ppm that 350.org proclaimed to be the upper limit of sustainability), but also to the vicious and deliberately deceptive campaigns long mounted by the fossil fuel industry. For example, he cites this infuriating instance when, in 1977, one of Exxon’s senior scientists, James F. Black, addressed the company’s top leaders: 

“There is general scientific agreement that the most likely manner in which mankind is influencing the global climate is through carbon dioxide release from the burning of fossil fuels.” McKibben then comments: That is to say, ten years before James Hansen’s Senate testimony made climate change a public issue, Exxon, the world’s largest oil company and, indeed, in those days, the world’s largest company period, understood that its product was going to wreck the planet (72). 

For another example, this one new to me, McKibben documents one of the oft-overlooked side effects of excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere—that the basic foods we now grow are losing their nutritional value. Citing a paper in the journal Environmental Research, McKibben points to the conclusions that rising carbon dioxides levels, by speeding plant growth, are reducing the amount of protein and other key nutrients in basic food crops: 

When researchers grow grain at the carbon dioxide levels we expect for later this century, they find that minerals such as calcium and iron drop by 8 percent, and protein by the same amount…In 2018, rice researchers found “significantly less protein” when they grew eighteen varieties of rice in high-carbon dioxide test plots (38).  

As one researcher of the study put it, “We are completely altering the biophysical conditions that underpin our food system” (39). Indeed we are, and not only for our food. The protein content of pollen from goldenrod, a plant we call a weed but one needed by bees (whom we need for our domestic crops as well) “has declined by a third since the industrial revolution” (39), e.g. when the carbon dioxide increase really took off.  

            As to the campaign by fossil fuel companies and their cronies in the political establishment to deny outright or confuse the public over the reality and threat presented by climate change, McKibben sums it up in one paragraph:

So: global warming is the ultimate problem for oil companies because oil causes it, and it’s the ultimate problem for government haters because without government intervention, you can’t solve it. Those twin existential threats, to cash and to worldview, meant that there was never any shortage of resources for the task of denying climate change (121).

In other words, the money accumulated by oil companies and which they see at risk, married to  the hatred of politicians, especially Republicans, for truly significant government intervention, have formed  an almost impregnable wall against the information and government action that’s needed to stop global warming from truly wrecking our planet for human habitation. 

            All this might be predictable in a new book by McKibben. What is not so predictable is the emphasis he devotes to the alarming effects of new technology—both as a solution to the dangers of global warming, and as a distraction from the painful realities it presents. He cites some alarming statistics (alarming at least to me) about, for instance, the habitual use of cell phones:

The average person now touches, swipes, or taps his phone 2,617 times a day. Eighty-seven percent of people with smartphones wake up and go to sleep with them (176).

But he doesn’t stop with just these frightening stats. McKibbben cites a recent article in the Journal of Physical Therapy and Science that found “significant differences in the craniovertebral angle, scapular index, and peak expiratory flow depending on duration of smartphone usage” (177). McKibben comments: 

That is, having taken a few million years to stand up straight, we are hunched once more—text neck, iPosture…We spend roughly ten hours a day looking at a screen and roughly seventeen minutes a day exercising (ibid). 

McKibben, like others, is clearly disturbed by this dependence on our devices. Or rather, on our growing lack of distinction between machines and humans. As he notes with a pungent quip, but one meant to be taken very seriously: “a man with a phone more or less permanently affixed to his palm is partway a robot already” (ibid; emphasis added).

            Mckibben is also clearly alarmed by the growing power and influence of the anti-human ethic presented by Silicon Valley engineers and billionaires. This includes the not identical but closely related biotech industries. Given the rapid advances in CRISPR technology, for example, biotech scientists are drawing ever closer to the ability to modify the human genome before babies are born (McKibben cites the example of the now-disgraced Chinese bioengineer, He Jiankui, who has actually done this). Thus, the real possibility exists that parents can have their babies designed to be more intelligent, or healthier, or taller, or more agile. McKibben relates this danger to the related danger of climate change: “As climate change has shrunk the effective size of our planet, the creation of designer babies shrinks the effective range of our souls” (172).  And of course, the additional danger is that those who can obtain pre-designed babies will be those who can afford it—thus magnifying the already critical problem of wealth inequality by giving the progeny of the wealthy even greater advantages.  

            For McKibben, though, it is the moral stance of the technologists that presents the greatest risk. One of his prime examples is the renowned computer nerd, Ray Kurzweil, the “director of engineering” at Google. Kurzweil, interviewed by McKibben, compares the coming linkage of our brains with computers to the development of the neocortex two million years  ago—“the enabling factor to invent language, art, music, tools, technology, science” (113). Then he notes how humans can advance even more without having to grow the bigger brains that would make our skulls unviable: 

“My thesis is we’re going to do it again, by the 2030s. We’ll have a synthetic neocortex in the cloud. We’ll connect our brains to the cloud just the way your smartphone is connected now. We’ll become funnier and smarter and able to more effectively express ourselves. We’ll create forms of expression we can’t imagine today, just as other primates can’t really understand music” (135).

Apparently, Kurzweil’s boss, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, thinks the same way: “You should presume that someday we will be able to make machines that can reason, think, and do things better than we can” (ibid). Given computers’ recent success at beating humans at chess and the even more complicated game of Go, and the advances in language learning, and driving by computers, not to mention robotic simulation, there seems little reason to doubt these forecasts. 

            For McKibben in this book, though, the critical question is not “can we?” but “should we?” And that is where the moral heart of this book lies. McKibben gives us some instances of the kind of technological initiatives that are already under way. Jeff Bezos, for example, the world’s richest man as CEO of Amazon, has already invested in the hunt for extending life, possibly indefinitely. He is said to have “diverted some of his cash” to San the Francisco-based startup, United Biotechnology, which is said to be “hard at work on a ‘cure for aging’” (184). Then there is a company called Alcor, which “currently has 147 human beings on ice, each of whom paid $200,000 to preserve their whole bodies.” Alcor also offers a cheaper, or ‘neuro’ option, costing only $80,0000, which involves sawing off the individual’s head and preserving only that relevant (to the brainiacs in Silicon Valley) part (184). This appears to be the macabre direction in which the “best and brightest” are headed—preserving themselves and their precious embodied existence, if possible forever. And if that involves becoming more and more robotic, that’s perfectly fine with them. The life of the individual human is, after all, to them the most precious commodity of all.

            And it is here that McKibben cries halt. His cri de coeur is worth citing at length. 

…it’s that incredible self-absorption that should be the clue to what a bad idea all this really is. I’ve taken the time to lay out the various advances we may be capable of if we fully embrace the newest technologies—we can “improve” our children; we may be able to live without work (or we may have to); we may be able, in some sense, to live forever—but none of that is living, not in the human sense (187).

            So what, exactly, does McKibben think is ‘living in the human sense’? He gives us another one of his little aphorisms:

            Those who exalt humans too highly devalue humanity (188).

Not a bad way to put it. Here is what he means. The technologists, he grants them, value individual humans—which is, after all, the core of our western heritage. But, he insists, they actually place too much value on individuals: “no one can be allowed to die; we must collect their heads in a giant thermos.” The result of this hyper-valuation of the individual is that “they value humanness far too little.” Humanness. Humanity. The full spectrum of humanity, which involves, whether we like it or not, sickness, aging and death, which must come to us all. The knowledge of which end is what makes us humans. The ancient Greeks knew this too, the centrality of this knowledge of death, and had a felicitous way of putting it. Animals, they said, don’t know they are going to die, and so are less than human. Gods, they said, don’t die at all, and so are deprived of the aching sense of their mortality that humans have. Only humans, said the Greeks, know they are going to die, and that very knowledge amounts to both a sadness, and a glory, for it gives our life its human savor. 

            McKibben puts it in a similar but slightly different form. 

A world without death is a world without time, and that in turn is a world without meaning, at least human meaning. Go far enough down this path and the game is up (188).

That is it exactly. Give humans a world without death, give them indefinite life extension, albeit robotized or preserved in a giant thermos, and life no longer has meaning. And humans without meaning, as we’re already seeing, will never be able to organize sufficiently to save humanity. If only individuals matter, then the game, the human game—which has always involved, preeminently, humans working together, for each other, even or especially in the face of death—is lost. So says Bill McKibben. And I think he’s right, not just about global warming and the existential threat it presents, but about our future at the human game itself. One can only hope that enough humans believe him—in time. 

Lawrence DiStasi

Demagogues Rising

This past Sunday, Heather Cox Richardson wrote a piece for Salon.com titled:

“It is time to get very afraid: Extremists, authoritarians now run the GOP—and no one can stop them.” Her piece, well worth reading, runs through some of the history of the rise of conservatives in the United States, beginning with William F. Buckley and continuing through the Goldwater run for the presidency in 1964, the Nixon ‘southern strategy’ to take advantage of white outrage over the Johnson-era civil rights bills, and into Ronald Reagan and the consolidation of radical-conservative thinking into what almost seems a majoritarian hold on American life. She also takes us through the Bush W. years and today’s rise of the clown car of Republican presidential hopefuls, all of whom would have been considered absolutely beyond the pale in Republican primaries of the Eisenhower era and before. Not any more. Republican presidential aspirants now try to outdo each other in the rabid radicalism of their utterings. They deny climate change, they deny that taxes are necessary, they deny that Obamacare is legal, they insist that Obama is a Muslim and a foreigner, they indulge in outright lies—Carly Fiorina insisted that she ‘saw’ a video of Planned Parenthood  people dealing in foetal body parts, and when confronted with the truth, tried to produce a fake video to compound the lie—and never even blanche when caught. They “double down” as the media loves to call it, rather than, the media I mean, holding aspirants for the highest and most powerful office in the world to account, to even a bare minimum of truth-telling. And above all, Republicans have, since the aforementioned Buckley, maintained that government is the enemy, government is unnecessary, government is what deprives red-blooded Americans of their freedom and must be “drowned in the bathtub.” This leads to idiocies such as Tea Party activists chanting “get your hands off my Medicare,” all the while directing their wrath at the very government that in fact gives them Medicare.

            Isaac Asimov is reported to have once written:

“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’”

In the situation that now faces us, it would be tempting to join Asimov in attributing the ravings now convulsing the Republican Party to sheer stupidity. Americans are stupid, they are proud of knowing nothing about politics or science or world affairs, and this is why the Republicans can make a virtual cult of ignorance, spouting the most outrageous and dangerous falsehoods, stupidities, and pretend-cures like no taxes, and get away with it.

            But that would be too easy. Americans in general are ignorant and poorly educated, yes. But even a stupid population would see through the flim-flams of someone like Donald Trump. They seem not to. Ever since he entered the Republican primary race, with his nasty, narcissistic, authoritarian insults of his rivals and everyone else, Trump has not only led the field, he has overwhelmed it. He seems to appeal to some atavistic impulse of Tea Party arch-conservatives to bring on the most hateful, boorish leader available and have him “clean house.” Get rid of government ‘insiders’ and intellectuals. Trump’s recent “tax plan,” announced this weekend, will have delighted them: it promises reduced or much-lowered tax rates for poor and lower-middle classes as a cover to disguise the fact that the upper echelons (the real ‘insiders’) are actually the ones who will make out like bandits, including massive corporations and those richest of the rich who have big estates that benefit from reduced estate taxes. Not to mention the fact that the vastly reduced revenues that will result will be taken out of critical social programs like Medicare, Social Security, Medicaid, and every other public program that will be starved in the way that rich Republicans have always wanted them to be starved. And of course Trump scapegoats the most disadvantaged, the immigrants coming over our borders, with his promise to build a border wall to rival the Israelis’ wall of shame keeping out Palestinians (to Republican ‘minds’, there is always enough federal money to finance walls, aircraft carriers, nuclear weapons, drones and every other form of welfare-for-the-rich-and-powerful their devious brains can imagine).

            All of this might be just mildly annoying or even funny if it weren’t for the fact that events seem to be playing into Trump’s (or fate’s) hands. The 2007-8 financial collapse drove the country into an economic downturn from which it has still not fully recovered. Though the stock market has been cratering of late, it rose to unprecedented heights to make billions for the very Wall Street scam artists and banksters who brought the whole economy down in the first place. This powerfully exacerbated the wealth gap between the richest and the poorest Americans, a gap not seen since before the Great Depression. While salaries for the poor and middle classes have remained stagnant since the Reagan years, the income for those who do not work for their money but earn it through financial investments has skyrocketed. A permanent underclass has emerged with even less hope than most for carving out a decent life. And for the white male portion of the population, easily persuaded that the benefits they should have are being given to the ‘underserving’ poor and colored classes, the gravity of the labor situation is compounded by resentments against their ‘vanishing rights.’ These kinds of hopeless conditions and resentments are what prepared Germany to accept the lunacies of Adolf Hitler and his gang in 1930s Germany. That is the real danger here. When whole populations get desperate, they become ever more susceptible to the ravings of demagogues.

            One other condition seems to me to be adding to the danger. Hillary Clinton, the once-inevitable nominee for the Democratic Party, has been faltering badly. Her campaign seems unable to put any distance between the candidate and the manufactured scandal of her private email servers. Months have gone by and she is still peppered with questions at every turn about whether she violated the law. This has meant that the unlikely Bernie Sanders has been able to catch and surpass her in the latest polls: he leads in both Iowa and New Hampshire, the first two primary states. Now Bernie Sanders is the candidate I prefer. But he has made no secret of his attraction to socialist principles. He believes in big government, he believes in New Deal type policies to re-distribute income to benefit those who need economic help, he believes in social programs to help the poor and disadvantaged, he believes in taxing the rich so that they pay what he believes is their fair share to support the government programs he believes in. And his message seems to be resonating, at least with primary voters and a sizable portion of Democrats polled so far.

            If Sanders were to become the nominee of the Democratic Party, and Trump were to grab the Republican nomination—as he now seems likely to do—we would then have a Trump v. Sanders presidential race. Two outsiders (more or less; though Sanders has been a politician his whole adult life, he has always been an Independent). And two men who tend to say, largely unedited, what they think. But I fear that the campaign would be a disaster for the truth-teller, for the rational man, for the man who believes that everyone deserves a fair chance to thrive. Because history shows us that in the conditions that pertain in the world today, and will pertain even more in the future, the demagogue usually triumphs. The big liar triumphs. The man who pretends to know the answers—simple answers that everyone can understand—wins. Most people, especially in a crisis, want someone to tell them what to do. People want someone to tell them that their country is, and has always been, the best the world has ever known. That their country is prompted by good and noble aims. That their country always works for the good guys for the good solution on the side of the angels. And that it is only the outsiders, the marginalized Others, who are causing trouble. Hitler played this song in the 1930s in Germany and succeeded beyond what anyone might have imagined. Mussolini did the same in Italy. We are great. We come from noble Roman stock. Our nation must take its destined place at the head of Europe. We deserve our own empire. And all those who say otherwise are defeatists, losers, cowards, and pathetic intellectuals who never do anything. If not communists or terrorists.

            This is how the campaign—if it does turn out to be Sanders v. Trump—could well go. The authoritarian, the man who brags about his wealth and dismisses everyone else as stupid and incompetent because they haven’t made the money he has, will garner the headlines, will continue to fascinate the media with his sound-bite style, and make mincemeat of the more sober, rational, serious man of the people. And what I fear more is that this will be only the beginning. As Naomi Oreskes imagines it in her recent novel, The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future, the fate of nations under global warming conditions will favor the authoritarian governments most able to handle the crises that will result. Migrants, millions of them, will be on the move due to the ravages of floods and storms and drought and sea-level rise displacing whole populations. They will be swamping borders wherever they can, just as migrants from Syria and Afghanistan and Africa are now over-running the borders of Greece and Italy and Hungary and everywhere else in Europe. In such a situation, suggests Oreskes, democracies will be more or less paralyzed. They will need to fashion consensus, pass laws, take precious time to determine whom to accept and whom not to accept, and where to put them, and how to enforce what they decide. A nation with an authoritarian government, by contrast, will be able to act much more swiftly and decisively. A dictator will simply be able to say: ‘no more; build the fence, build the wall; allow no one to enter except the few we can use.’ And will have no qualms about using force to maintain those closed, inviolate borders.

            Hateful as it is to think it, in such a situation, it is the Donald Trumps of the world, the bloviating, narcissistic, ruthless assholes who can lie without blinking an eye and condemn whole populations as worthless, who will manage to captivate the loyalty and approval of the masses. The masses will want protection. They will want simple solutions. They will choose security over liberty every day of the week.

            That is what I fear. And that is what we should all be worried about, as Heather Richardson writes, right now. Before it is too late. The time is very very short, but there is still time. There is time to agitate, and demonstrate, and educate, and work for candidates who are driven by more than ego and money and power and the ignorance of contempt.

            Within a very few years, there may not be.  

Lawrence DiStasi

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