We're kicking off a series of special posts featuring guest voices on climate change with Professor Paul A. Morgan, Ph.D.
In just a few weeks,
representatives from more than 190 nations will gather in Paris for COP21, the
21st session of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework
Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The stakes are high. This may be the last best chance to reach a
global agreement to reduce emissions enough to avoid overshooting the
target of a two degrees Celsius average rise in global surface temperature
above preindustrial levels. Beyond that number
we invite “climageddon.”
The good news is that for
more than a year now there has been a remarkable quickening of awareness and
action on climate change. In September 2014, I joined hundreds of thousands of
people in New York City for what was hailed as the largest climate march in
history. A primary aim of the mobilization was to pressure world leaders
gathered at the United Nations (U.N.) to take bold action on climate
change.
Less than two months
later, the U.S. and China announced their intentions to significantly reduce greenhouse
gas emissions. These commitments from the planet’s two largest emitters
generated much needed momentum for the UNFCCC’s COP20 held in Lima, Peru in
December 2014. After the relatively successful conclusion of that meeting,
there was steady progress and guarded optimism.
To ensure success in
Paris, though, there must have been calls for divine intervention. How else can
we explain the phenomenon of Pope Francis and the release in June of Laudato
Si’, his encyclical on climate change and the environment? In September,
the planet’s new climate change rock star went on tour, traveling to the United
States where he spoke with moral authority on climate and other issues in the
first ever papal address to a joint session of Congress. This was followed
by a speech at the U.N. General Assembly that coincided with the formal
adoption of the new global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). It has been an extraordinary year for
climate action and sustainability.
Of course, the story
does not end here. Even if there is an
ambitious agreement reached in Paris, it will only be a beginning, a
commencement. There will no doubt be setbacks and much difficult work for
years and decades to come. Still, can we now say that the momentum has finally
shifted in favor of sustainability, climate sanity, and a fossil free future? I
wish it were so. I can’t be the only one who has had the experience of being
jolted awake and catching a glimpse a different reality outside the protective
bubble of affluence, distractions, and day-to-day consciousness. It’s usually
brought on by a sobering news report, an alarming article, or an eye opening presentation.
The overwhelming realization is that there is a very different story unfolding
outside the bubble.
To begin, there are
serious doubts about whether national emissions reduction pledges, the
so-called Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs), will add up to
what the science tells us is needed. Moreover, there are credible doubts about
whether a two-degree Celsius target is too high. In a provocative and, yes, eye
opening article
that came out this summer, climate scientist James Hansen and his colleagues called
that goal “highly dangerous.” These shortcomings could possibly be addressed in
subsequent meetings, but there are even more volatile forces at play that can’t
be so easily remedied with an international agreement.
By 2050, when today’s
young people will be in their prime, the human population is projected to reach
at least 9 billion and perhaps as many as 11 billion. The Earth may be able to
handle that number, but the vast majority of those people will aspire to live
like . . . me. Unfortunately, it’s not possible. The global development project
of the last century has been a planetary Ponzi scheme. We in the wealthy
industrialized countries got in early and have established a consumptive
culture that simply cannot and should not be replicated. Yet there will nothing
in a Paris agreement that compels cultural transformation or a reassessment of
an economic system premised on endless growth.
There’s also the
question of justice, which is more than an interesting topic for the leisured
theory class. The effects of climate change are already affecting communities
throughout the world. As more and more
poor people experience the impacts of droughts and rising sea levels, they are
going to look to the countries that have historically contributed the most to
climate destabilization. That’s us. The current refugee crisis in
Europe is just a taste of what may become a chronic crisis of climate
refugees. The introduction of such a chaotic variable could quickly lead to
conflicts and the unraveling of the social fabric, thereby rendering any
climate agreement a quaint relic of a relatively stable past.
Such a scenario is
imagined in a bracing 2014 book
by Naomi Oreskes of Harvard, and Erik M. Conway of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab.
Titled The Collapse of Western
Civilization: A View from the Future, they have crafted a work of science-based
fiction that is more than a little frightening. Their premise is as follows:
The year is 2393, and the world is
almost unrecognizable. Clear warnings of climate catastrophe went ignored for
decades, leading to soaring temperatures, rising sea levels, widespread drought
and--finally--the disaster now known as the Great Collapse of 2093, when the
disintegration of the West Antarctica Ice Sheet led to mass migration and a
complete reshuffling of the global order. Writing from the Second People's
Republic of China on the 300th anniversary of the Great Collapse, a senior
scholar presents a gripping and deeply disturbing account of how the children
of the Enlightenment--the political and economic elites of the so-called
advanced industrial societies--failed to act, and so brought about the collapse
of Western civilization.
If that seems
preposterous, consider this passage from Hansen’s article
cited earlier:
We conclude that continued high emissions
will make multi-meter sea level rise practically unavoidable and likely to
occur this century. Social disruption and economic consequences of such large
sea level rise could be devastating. It is not difficult to imagine that
conflicts arising from forced migrations and economic collapse might make the
planet ungovernable, threatening the fabric of civilization. This image of our
planet with accelerating meltwater includes growing climate chaos and
storminess, as meltwater causes cooling around Antarctica and in the North
Atlantic while the tropics and subtropics continue to warm. Rising seas and
more powerful storms together are especially threatening, providing strong
incentive to phase down CO2 emissions rapidly.
What these passages tell
us is that science fact is beginning to
align with science fiction. The framing of climate change as an existential
threat is now commonplace in popular culture, even if the frightening implications
haven’t penetrated the bubble. One of the biggest movies of last year was Interstellar, which followed a team of
NASA astronauts searching the stars for another planet where humans might be
able to relocate, now that climate change has made Earth almost uninhabitable.
Interesting, but NASA and Space X are having trouble getting rockets off the
ground, and this year’s big movie, The
Martian, only reinforces how absurd it is to think we can simply pack our
bags and move to another planet if the situation gets too dicey. None of this
bodes well for the future of humanity.
Meanwhile, if you’re a
species other than a homo sapien,
these are the worst of times – the worst in 65 million years anyway. It’s
difficult to tell just by looking outside, but we’re in the midst of a mass
extinction event. Elizabeth Kolbert’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Sixth Extinction, chronicles what is
surely the most overlooked and most important story on the Earth. Of the planetary
boundaries that have been crossed, the global loss of biodiversity is the
most distressing because it is irreversible. Extinctions are permanent, and the
news is not getting any better.
Kolbert’s 2014 book was eclipsed in June of this year with the
publication of a study
concluding that the sixth mass extinction is underway and that “the average
rate of vertebrate species loss over the last century is up to 100 times higher
than the background rate.” The last mass
extinction was caused by an asteroid. This time it’s an “usteroid.” It’s
human-induced. Our increasing numbers, our consumptive culture, and our
uncontrolled experiment with the climate have radically changed the conditions
in which life has flourished for millions of years. We’re often reminded that each
of those species plays an important role in the provision of ecosystem
services. It’s true, but they also have a right to exist, despite claims that
they are our ‘natural resources.’
There you have it, a
sampling of the story that is unfolding outside the bubble of privilege,
affluence, distraction, and consumption. No Paris agreement can possibly get at
the scale and urgency of the challenge. There is an enormous gap, a chasm,
separating the severity of our climate challenges and even our best responses. It’s
an absolutely unique historical moment. As Jon Kohl puts it, “for the first
time in human history, a particular worldview . . . is becoming conscious of
its own impending fall (all previous civilizations collapsed probably without
ever understanding why) and has the opportunity to consciously re-forge its
worldview to confront the threat.”
To get a sense of what this means, imagine a set of railroad tracks extending into the distance.
Our civilization began chugging along these
tracks as a steam locomotive more than a century ago. Since then, more and more
people have boarded and for those in first class, we have transformed that
locomotive into a sleek high-speed civilizational train hurtling into the
future. For the past several decades scientists in the front cars have warned
us that there may be trouble ahead, but today, there is no doubt. The science
is clear. The tracks will eventually end at the edge of a precipice. If we
continue on these tracks we are headed for certain catastrophe.
How have we responded to
his news? Some people are a little freaked out because they see what’s coming
and are walking toward the back of the train. Many of us, myself included, have
been busy greening the train. We are changing light bulbs on the train; we are
making it a hybrid train; we are installing energy-efficient windows on the train;
we are putting a green roof on the train; we are installing waterless urinals
on the train; we are serving local, organic food on the train; and we are even
talking a lot about sustainability and climate change on the train. What’s the
problem? We’re still on the train. Contrary to an often repeated claim, our
greening efforts are not making the train – our civilization – more sustainable; we’re making it less unsustainable. As John Ehrenfeld
has argued in his
writing, reducing unsustainability does not create sustainability. There’s
a fundamental fallacy at work, a kind of magical thinking that believes doing
more of what we are already doing will eventually, magically, get us where we
need to go.
We have been focused on
greening because, frankly, we don’t know what else to do. Greening is
comfortable and fits how the problem has been framed. Climate change has
typically been framed as a normal problem, a tame problem that can be addressed
with the usual tools and strategies – technology, policy, education, and
behavior change. A normal problem can be extremely serious and difficult, such
as AIDS, but you can chip away at it and make steady, measurable, linear progress.
A game changer, on the other hand, is
different. It requires that we focus not on what surrounds us, what is easy to
see on the train, but instead on the often invisible but powerful assumptions
of our culture. These are the tracks
that give direction to everything we do. Our climate crisis isn’t simply human-caused;
it’s the result of people who are enacting specific answers to fundamental cultural
questions: What kind of world is this? How do we fit into the world? What is
happiness and how can it be achieved? What is progress? What is our vision of
the future? Built into the answers are all kinds of questionable assumptions,
for instance, about the possibility and desirability of limitless economic
growth. It is becoming clear that this worldview is not designed for the long
haul because it is out of sync with the way the world actually works. One consequence is climate change, a wicked
problem that has to be addressed with more than ‘climate action.’ It will
require a systemic transformation, a change of state.
Where
do we go from here? We
are currently locked into a rendezvous with catastrophe because we literally
cannot imagine life off those tracks. A vision of the future has been implanted
in our heads that promises a gleaming techno-utopia of flying cars and endless
iPhone innovations. It’s the dream of the Jetsons, Back to the Future, and
countless other fantasies that assume we can take leave of the real world of ecosystems,
watersheds, soils, and other species. The Jetsons promised a future in which
white people fly around in a world without trees eating food out of machines.
It’s not desirable, but we are so entranced by such fantasies that they go
unchallenged. Is our destiny to fulfill the story of the future we have been
conditioned to accept as desirable and inevitable, even as it consumes the
world? If not, our most urgent task is to wake up from our techno-utopian
trance and envision a new future. This is primarily because we can’t create
what we can’t imagine.
The unprecedented
challenge before each of us is to operate in the old game (on the train) –
where we have our jobs and a habitual way of life – while simultaneously helping
to create fertile conditions in which a radically new way of being, a genuinely
sustainable culture, might begin to emerge. On a practical level this means
increasing the pressure and turning up the heat. The temptation is to focus exclusively on winning the old game of policy
proposals and technological innovation. While these may buy us time, eventually
we must begin creating a new game, a new set of tracks, with a new set of
assumptions that can provide humanity and all species a viable future for the
long haul. A tea kettle will not boil (change state) if we turn down the
heat every time we celebrate a new Tesla or a new international climate
agreement.
For inspiration, we
should imagine the story people will
tell two hundred years from now – in 2215 – about how we managed to get off
track and begin making a new culture. The COP21 in Paris may be mentioned, but
the real story may be how regular people woke up and catalyzed a cultural
transformation of epoch-changing proportions. At the heart of this will be
something that Richard Louv, author of Last
Child in the Woods, highlighted in a talk he gave several years ago. He
said, “Because of climate change and
other mounting ecological threats, everything must change. We may be entering
the most creative period in human history.”
Paul A. Morgan is a
Professor in the Department of Professional and Secondary Education at West
Chester University of Pennsylvania (pmorgan@wcupa.edu)
This Earth Day, April 22, 2016, world leaders will gather at the United Nations in New York City to formally sign onto the Paris climate agreement. 
