The Uninhabitable Earth – Now What?
The sea is where all life begins
The ocean is our origin
If she dies, nothing survives,
No nothing can, nothing can
And who will look with awe upon the monuments of man?
~ SONG FOR THE EARTH words by Joel Sattler & Jim Scott/music by Jim Scott
READING
If you have made it this far, you are a brave reader. Any one of these twelve chapters contains, by rights, enough horror to induce a panic attack in even the most optimistic of those considering it. But you are not merely considering it; you are about to embark on living it. In many cases, in many places, we already are.
Wallace-Wells, David. The Uninhabitable Earth (p. 138). Crown/Archetype. Kindle Edition.
READING “We, the member congregations of the Unitarian Universalist Association, covenant to affirm and promote:respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.”
SERMON
“Adults keep saying we owe it to the young people to give them hope. But I don't want your hope, I don't want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic, I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act, I want you to act as if you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if the house was on fire, because it is.” Greta Thunberg challenging The World Economic Forum in Davos - January 22, 2019
Greta is sixteen years old. She is an internationally recognized activist for climate change and a massive global response adequate to forestall or at least to lessen the devastation that is the known predictable consequence of human behavior right now.
Recently, I’ve been terrorizing myself by reading about the history and the impact of climate change. It’s not just Greta Thunberg and Al Gore who want us to panic. What’s interesting to me is that the people doing speeches and lectures and TED talks and talk shows and book tours about the horror of climate change are not scientists. They are high school & college students and thirty-something writers – journalists who more-or-less fell into a professional practice of covering climate change
Nathaniel Rich is 39 years old. Before he was born, we already knew almost everything we now know about the effect of increasing CO2 into the air, the greenhouse effect and climate warming. He wrote “Losing Earth, A Recent History” about what happened to the science of climate change and climate scientists in a single decade – the first decade of his life – 1979 to 1989.
By 1979, we knew nearly everything we understand today about climate change―including how to stop it. Over the next decade, a handful of scientists, politicians, and strategists, led by two unlikely heroes, risked their careers in a desperate, escalating campaign to convince the world to act before it was too late. Losing Earth is their story, and ours. (www.nathanielrich.com)
We have known how to prevent and even reverse the devastating effects of climate change for more than 50 years. We simply lack the political will to do it. For me, this was an astonishing revelation - - - we literally knew exactly what we were doing as long ago as the 1930s. We didn’t do what we might have done to stop the warming process because we were busy enjoying the rewards of industrialization and not thinking about the consequences for our grandchildren’s grandchildren.
The generation of people who will be forced to endure massive and widespread suffering as the planet continues to become more and more inhospitable to life of warm-blooded animals (that includes us, BTW) is already born.
Want more to set yourself into panic mode? David Wallace-Wells, age 36 and journalist and editor at New York Magazine, is your guy. In his 2019 book, The Uninhabitable Earth, Life After Warming, David Wallace-Wells tells us that the future is being transformed by climate change faster and more dramatically than we (even the pessimistic we) realized. Everything about human life on earth – politics, technology, cities, business, poverty and justice – will be changed by the massive force of a warming changing planet.
In a dozen chapters of possible, even probable, disaster based on climate impact and elements of chaos, he lays before us the details of what is coming. Heat, Hunger, Drowning, Wildfire, Disasters No Longer Natural, Freshwater Drain, Dying Oceans, Unbreathable Air, Plagues of Warming, Economic Collapse, Climate Conflict and Systems Crises. Each of these domains under the current “business as usual” model will experience change so drastic that there will be massive death of humans and other life.
I will tell you that reading this book is difficult. At the end of his recitation of disasters, he takes a pause in the narrative to acknowledge the sheer exhaustion of his readers. And . . . He does not let us off the hook.
If you have made it this far, you are a brave reader. Any one of these twelve chapters contains, by rights, enough horror to induce a panic attack in even the most optimistic of those considering it. But you are not merely considering it; you are about to embark on living it. In many cases, in many places, we already are.
Wallace-Wells, David. The Uninhabitable Earth (p. 138). Crown/Archetype. Kindle Edition.
The fact that climate change is all-enveloping means it targets all of us, and that we must all share in the responsibility so we do not all share in the suffering—at least not all share in so suffocatingly much of it. We do not know the precise shape such suffering would take, cannot predict with certainty exactly how many acres of forest will burn each year of the next century, releasing into the air centuries of stored carbon; or how many hurricanes will flatten each Caribbean island; or where megadroughts are likely to produce mass famines first; or which will be the first great pandemic to be produced by global warming. But we know enough to see, even now, that the new world we are stepping into will be so alien from our own, it might as well be another planet entirely.
Wallace-Wells, David. The Uninhabitable Earth (pp. 220-221). Crown/Archetype. Kindle Edition.
So what? Now what?
Do I become – or remain - one of the millions of people who continue to live my person and private life as best I can – not really believing I can in any way influence the direction and outcome of our collective march toward extinction? In other words, business as usual?
David Wallace-Wells, like Nathaniel Rich (Losing Earth: A Recent History, by Nathaniel Rich - April 2019) and Greta Thunberg (No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference by Greta Thunberg | Jun 6, 2019) wants us to panic.
Then, they want us to do something.
Solving the warming earth problem is not a technological or a scientific problem – technology and science have been providing solutions for fifty years and continue to do so today. The problem is a political problem – and an international political problem at that. The political leaders of the world have not been able to fashion a solution to this growing problem. At least not yet, and maybe not ever.
If the people of the world continue with the business as usual approach – as is now the most likely option - we will be forced, as we are now seeing, to address the impact of the devastating consequences and suffering of climate change. Massive floods, fires, droughts, hurricanes, earthquakes, wars over water and farmable land, etc.
In a moment of reflection, I realized that for me, this panic over global warming is a Unitarian Universalist 7th Principle moment.
We talk a lot about our principles and we actually revere our first and seventh principles. But, do I, and do we collectively, take seriously what we covenant to affirm and promote?
“We, the member congregations of the Unitarian Universalist Association, covenant to affirm and promote: respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.”
And what is it that we can do in this – our 7th principle moment?
Well, I’m a person of faith and I’m a person who believes in love as perhaps the most powerful force known to human beings.
Is it possible that love is the appropriate response to climate devastation?
Now before you roll your eyes and move into that place of skepticism and head shaking at such a silly and naive proposal, take a breath and consider the possibility that love can find a way where there is no way.
I’m not saying that love will provide the science and technology we need. I’m saying that the power of love in the universe might be able to move what has so far been an immoveable world political process in the direction of cooperation and solutions.
Love can reach out to those who will suffer most soonest – those already suffering … like today in Chennai, India where all the water has dried up and millions of city residents are now dependent on the water train to bring in fresh water. Without love, I suspect – predict even – that all the science and all the technology we have available right now will not be put to use. It will be love that reaches out to the suffering and demands a credible immediate response from leaders who thus far have lacked the will to act.
I’m saying that we must love those who suffer because of human made heat and all the other crises that result from a warming earth. Can we do this? I think our faith and our principles demand that we do. Am I alone?
As I read on in The Uninhabitable Earth, I got to the chapter where Wallace-Wells discusses Ethics at the End of the World and I thought maybe he would have some suggestions. He does. Sort of.
Then I read this ….
The meta-lesson is that we should draw roughly the same meaning from an understanding of the imminent death of the species as the Dalai Lama believes we should draw from an understanding of our imminent personal death—namely, compassion, wonderment, and above all, love. You could do worse in choosing three values around which to build an ethical model, and when you squint you can almost see a civics erected out of them.
Wallace-Wells, David. The Uninhabitable Earth (p. 205). Crown/Archetype. Kindle Edition.
Compassion. Wonderment. Above all, Love. Bingo!
These may well be the defining values of humanity’s response to our own demise and the inevitable and inequitable suffering that it will bring.
We love not just those whose lives are placed in peril. We also love those who hold the reins of power and money.
If technology and science have not been able to move the mountain of resistance to actually DOING something about our warming earth, we have nothing to lose and everything to gain by putting the power of love, compassion and wonderment to work in the service of each other and the entire interdependent web of existence.
We are the Love people. Maybe, just maybe, we can move mountains and save ourselves from ourselves because our love for each other and all our relations and this planet we call home is greater than our fear and our uncertainty and our helplessness in the presence of such an enormous challenge.
We’ll never know if we don’t put our faith-based and faith-nurtured principles to work for the good of all our relations and the interdependent web of existence of which we are a part. Let Love be the value we distribute in as many places and in as many ways as we can – knowing that of all the resources we have and can contribute, Love is the most abundant and renewable resource of all.
Blessed Be. I Love You. Amen.
