“What is threatened are higher life forms in general, and us in particular. What climate change will do is put under water places where people live, destroy the crops and water supplies they live on. It is because it would trigger unacceptable mass migration and deaths that it is a danger, not because we have some mystical union with the biosphere.
"Let's face it, we want to save polar bears because they are furry and impressive and the Brazilian earwig doesn't get the same consideration. I'm sure if we had been around at the time we would have wanted to save Triceratops, too.”
--Mark Mardell
(Full article available at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6339985.stm)
What Mark Mardell says is true. While some human beings undoubtedly feel a “mystical union with the biosphere,” the vast majority feel instead a “habitual union.” We like it the way it is now because we know it, because we saw polar bears at the zoo as a kid and not Brazilian earwigs, because we like to play in the snow in the wintertime, because we like the sea level right where it is, thank you, as it’s a gorgeous 20 yards from our beach-front property. We like it because we understand it, because we know how to cope with it. People in semi-arid agricultural regions in Africa know how to cope with 2 year droughts and still produce enough food to live. They don’t know how to do the same through 10 year droughts. People in the Mississippi River delta know how to deal with “50-year floods”. They don’t know how to deal with 50-year-floods every 5 years. People in the northern United States and Europe can endure 95 degree temperatures for a day. Many, especially the elderly, cannot endure them for a week.
We know how our crops grow in the world as it is today. We know how our water flows and where to get it. We know how the ocean behaves as it rises and falls with the tides. We know how weather systems relate to a location’s climatology. When that changes – when we change that – the consequences are a necessary reworking of our basic and comfortable assumptions about how the world behaves. It requires a restructuring of our cultures and our civilizations. And why is it any less noble to want to save ourselves and preserve our ways of life than it is to save the polar bears? The polar bears are trying to save themselves right now, even as we argue over whether they’re really in that much danger drifting around the Artic on ever-shrinking ice floes. If they had the mental capacity to discuss their predicament and develop complex, creative solutions, they would. Why should we feel any less entitled to do the same?
And to be clear, I don’t want polar bears to go extinct as a result of global warming. I want them to exist because I believe they have a right to exist in a natural climate system which is not dramatically altered by human behavior and activities. But that's my personal opinion. The fact of the matter is that everything dies eventually – every species goes extinct. That’s evolution – that’s how the biosphere grows and changes and adapts. The polar bears and the Brazilian earwigs would die some day anyway, but I don’t want to be the cause of their death today, or tomorrow, or in 30 years.
And I don’t think that any of us want to be in any way culpable for the deaths of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of displaced, starving, and dehydrated fellow human beings whose lives and livelihoods are disrupted or destroyed as a result of rapid, anthropogenic climate change. Why would we do that to ourselves? Is it really out of habit? Are we endangering the survival not only of each other but of our cultures and entire civilization simply out of habit? Because we in the developed world like big cars and big homes and lots of lights to make them brighter? Because we’re relentlessly exporting that very same cultural desire to developing nations like China and India who are now beginning to emulate our high demand for cheap, dirty energy? Because we like big agribusinesses and produce transported thousands of miles so we can enjoy a fresh pineapple in January? Are those things really worth the cost? Are they worth our health, potentially even our survival?
Our habits will have to change anyway in a globally warmed world. Old assumptions and old ways of interacting with our environment will be no longer advantageous or even viable. Let us choose to do it now, while we still have the choice, while we still have options to minimize the damage. Maybe we can’t save the polar bears and their Artic sea ice, but if we’re dedicated, if we apply ourselves and our proven ingenuity to what is not only a challenge, but an opportunity to advance our science, our technology, and our interactions across cultural and political boundaries, perhaps we can save ourselves.
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