The Human Age: The World Shaped by Us

by Diane Ackerman

  A warmer world won’t be terrible for everyone, and it’s bound to inspire new technologies and good surprises, not just tragedy. Change is the byword everywhere, and if there’s one unchanging fact about humans it’s that we loathe change in nature, perhaps because we feel we can’t control it. We may thrive on changes in technology and locale, but we want nature to be permanent and predictable, even when shaken, like the world inside a snow globe. We yearn for continuity, and yet we live in a wildly changing world. We love life fiercely, and yet we’re creatures who die. These aren’t reconcilable paradoxes.

  We may not be noticing all of our leavings in the fossil record, but from the melting ice-skating rinks of Canada and the paling reefs of Samoa to dry creeks in Australia and receding glaciers in Chamonix, people are noticing the rude change in weather. We are beginning to see, firsthand, how our tinkering with the climate touches the globe from top to bottom. In my own extended backyard of New York State, the new normal recently wore the name of Sandy.

  GAIA IN A TEMPER

  The weather app Budi touches opens with a fright that his wild relatives have witnessed firsthand many times: torrential rains, snorting winds, and trees snapping—the familiar trees that orangutans mentally map for food and travel, just as we do houses, streets, and stores. Lately, though, whipped up by climate change, hurricanes like this one are growing to unforeseen and unimaginable fury.

  A FREAK WINTER storm and tropical hurricane rolled into one, Sandy drew breath off Africa’s west coast, barreled across the Caribbean, and charged up the eastern seaboard of the United States, swinging left with a gut punch that smashed in houses, sucked boats out of harbors and hurled them, masts and rigging flying, into front doors and garages.

  Only a day before Halloween, the scene was beyond macabre, as if a Chagall painting had suddenly come to life in a 90 mph whirlwind of whizzing trees, animals, and objects. People unlucky enough to be caught outside were pulled sideways down the streets. It was as if a monster were wrestling electrical lines to the ground, clawing up roads, turning neighborhoods into sandboxes. Piers and boardwalks crumpled like cardboard as the superstorm slapped them into the sea.

  In this most densely settled area of the United States, prone to both hurricanes and nor’easters, record tides are usually measured in fractions of an inch. A major hell-raiser, Sandy even shattered the record for record-keeping—its tides had to be measured in feet. In one seaside community in Queens, after tidal surges beat the local record by three feet, a twenty-foot wave washed the whole research station into the ocean. In another town, the storm smashed furnaces and gas pipes, igniting fires that leapt from home to home, where doubly stunned residents found their first floors flooded and their roofs alight. The homes burned like surreal Fourth of July sparklers. In the beachfront town of Breezy Point, Queens, a blaze devoured 110 homes in one neighborhood while firefighters struggled to reach them through fast-flowing streets. All three regional airports shut down and canceled twenty thousand flights; Amtrak halted service to the whole Northeast Corridor. Forty-three million gallons of water gushed through the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel. The pounding ocean filled tunnels and subways and submerged lower Manhattan, where a flotilla of cars bobbed like colorful beetles.

  I’ll never get used to sweetheart names—Debby, Valerie, Helene—referring to land-scrubbing, wave-rearing, homewrecking, cyclonic mayhem. The name Sandy sounds like it belongs to an innocent, sun-kissed surfer. I’m not sure why we choose to domesticate cataclysmic violence in this way. It’s too reminiscent of World War II pilots painting their girlfriends’ names on warplanes, a paradox captured with lyric poignancy by the pilot and poet Randall Jarrell, who wrote, “In bombers named for girls, we burned / The cities we had learned about in school.”

  Before the frenzy was over, Sandy killed fifty people in the United States and sixty-nine in the Caribbean, flattened the homes and gutted the lives of thousands, and left millions more without food, water, or electricity. She also dropped three feet of wet snow in West Virginia and the Carolinas, and Tennessee received the heaviest snowfall on record. At times it seemed as if Gaia were so pissed off she finally decided to erase her workmanship, atomizing the whole shebang and flicking our Blue Marble back into the mouth of the supernovas where our metals were first forged.

  Sandy is on my mind because it recently besieged my state, but 2012 also saw massive flooding in Australia, Brazil, and Rwanda; fifty major wildfires in Chile; wicked drought in the Sahel; record-setting cold, rain, and snow in Europe; and typhoons in China destroying sixty thousand homes. My head is still spinning from 2011’s Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. Who can forget Louisiana’s 2005 ordeal with Katrina? And, dwarfing all of these, Haiyan, the most powerful typhoon ever recorded, which charged through the Philippines in 2013 and killed over five thousand people.

  New York and New Jersey had felt relatively safe, until Sandy rearranged their silhouettes, gouging inlets and bays, creating new marshes and sandbars, changing the map, literally and metaphorically. Climate change hits hard when it batters at childhood memories. Watching news footage of homes collapsing, over and over, I kept returning to the beacon of Atlantic City, where my family spent brief summer holidays. There were no casinos lining the boardwalk then, no fancy restaurants. But what a delicious, hot, sandy carnival it offered kids. The wide beach was duned deep with scorching sand that became soothingly damp a few inches down—the perfect consistency for sculpting.

  The boardwalk held endless fascinations, including saltwater taffy vendors, Belgian waffles with whipped cream and strawberries, a penny arcade with a mechanical gypsy fortune-teller and Skee-Ball bowling machines, a kazoo-playing man in front of the 5 & 10, the giant Planters Peanut Man, the charcoal artists who did quick portraits, and the crablike processions of three-wheeled wicker chairs. Because the wooden planks were warped, riding over them became a bumbling, creaking amusement ride. Pushed along, we laughed as high-heeled women kept getting stuck in cracks between the boards. And then there was Steel Pier, with all of its amusements and its diving horse.

  All the run-of-the-mills neighborhoods rely on, and the balm of meaning absorbed by homes, objects, streets, and piers—all gone.

  Hurricane season brings a humbling reminder that, despite our best efforts and prophesies, nature remains unpredictable. Even aided by hindcasts, as forecasters call reading the entrails of past hurricane seasons to predict the future, we really don’t know what stew of storms the Atlantic will dish up, especially now that we’ve dumped in strange seasonings. We can’t yet predict the location of the next typhoon or tornado, even with all our high-tech weather instruments, any more than we know the final scores of the Caribbean’s upcoming cricket matches.

  For people living in coastal communities, the sea has always proved a generous or temperamental neighbor. But at least they knew broadly what mood swings to expect. Experts are duly unnerved. “Freak weather events happen, right, but twice in the last two years?” said meteorologist Jeff Masters. “I think something’s up,” he added. “I think we’ve crossed over to a new climate state where the new normal is intense weather events that kill lots of people.”

  YUP’IK ESKIMOS HAVE spent over a decade trying to relocate to higher ground. On the northwest coast of Alaska, only four hundred miles south of the Bering Strait, in the tiny Yup’ik village of Newtok, the residents can smell the salty breath of disaster, robed in liquid gray and pulling at their feet. Sabrina Warner suffers from a recurring nightmare: waking terrified to find the ice-clotted sea crashing in, washing the bed out from under her and collapsing her home. She and her young son swim for their lives, clinging to rooftops as their village is washed away. But there’s nowhere safe to shelter. One roof slips from her fingers after another, until no harbor remains but the roof of the school, the largest building in the village, perched like a precarious osprey nest atop twenty-foot beams that have been driven into soft earth. And then that, too, is swallowed by the blue-black mouth of the sea.


  This is a plausible nightmare. As the sun-reflecting ice melts, the planet is thawing much faster in the far north, where winters have warmed by 3°F since 1975 (double the world average). The widening riverbed and marshes of the Ninglick River, which snakes around three sides of the village, are tearing at its innards before pouring into the sea. Any day now the whole village and many neighboring indigenous communities will sink into the melting permafrost, as if it were white quicksand, to join the realm of polar bears and narwhals in the rich seams of Eskimo lore. By 2017, if the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ predictions are right, numerous native villages along the northwestern coast and barrier islands will be in the same fix.

  As America’s first climate-change refugees, the Yup’ik have appealed to the state and federal government for help, but, according to international law, people only qualify as refugees if they’re fleeing violence, war, or persecution. And federal disaster relief laws only grant money to repair infrastructure and damage in place, not to help with relocation after slow-motion disaster. Our humanitarian laws aren’t keeping up with the Anthropocene’s environmental realities. Robin Bronen, an Anchorage-based human rights lawyer and a frequent visitor to Newtok, is working tirelessly to change them.

  “This is completely a human rights issue,” she argues. “When you are talking about a people [the Yup’ik tribe] who have done the least to contribute to our climate crisis facing such dramatic consequences as a result of climate change, we have a moral and legal responsibility to respond and provide the funding needed so that these communities are not in danger.”

  When the residents of Newtok do move to their new town of Mertarvik on Nelson Island, a mere nine miles away, most will return to their familiar ice-coast life of subsistence fishing, but they’ll be exemplars of a different epoch.

  Tuvalu, another palm-frond island country in the South Pacific, has begun evacuating its people to New Zealand. And the president of Kiribati, an island nation of thirty-two atolls sprinkled across 3.5 million kilometers of ocean between Australia and Hawaii, is negotiating with Fiji to buy five thousand acres of land so that his population of over 102,000 can relocate. One Kiribati native, Ioane Teitiota, appealed for refugee status to Auckland, New Zealand, arguing that none of Kiribati’s atolls is more than two meters above sea level, and therefore his life was endangered by the rising seas of global warming. The judge who heard his case found the claim novel, but not persuasive.

  BRAINSTORMING

  FROM EQUATOR TO ICE

  Such claims may soon become less novel, but fortunately humans are gifted with a taste for the novel that’s leading us to some innovative responses—not only old-style mechanical solutions like fossil-fuel-powered Industrial Age steel floodgates, but promising new ways of addressing root causes and harnessing solar power.

  Some countries have been stalwartly battling tides for years. Maeslantkering, one of the largest moving structures on Earth, is part of a network of sluices, dams, dykes, levees, and storm surge barriers protecting the Netherlands from the blustery North Sea. Galveston, Texas, is designing what will be the United States’s longest sea wall, affectionately known as the “Ike Dike,” to protect the low-lying city from impending floods. In Venice, the $5.5 billion MOSE Project—seventy-eight mobile, underwater steel gates—will isolate the Venetian lagoon from the Adriatic Sea and shield the city from floods.

  In London, gated crusaders are already at their posts. Like a row of giant knights standing up to their necks in water, armor gleaming, weapons hidden, the Thames Barrier spans the river near Woolwich, downstream of central London. Behind each helmet looms an antique vision of the brain, all levers and hydraulics. Trapped in futuristic folded steel, the fixtures appear lighter than water, though in reality each gate weighs about 3,300 tons. Altogether they can close ranks beneath the waves to protect the city from storm surges.

  Like so many other rivers, the Thames is not as wide as it used to be. We encrust the banks of our rivers with shops and houses, nosing out into the water, as if we long to be osmotically part of the current, in the process narrowing channels and putting our lives and property at risk. London has flooded famously in the past—307 people died in the 1953 flood—and with the world’s sea levels rising, and the city steadily sinking at a foot a century, it needs not so much Knights Templar as Knights Temperature.

  In mild days and years, the gates lie open, and you can sail between the five-story-high helmets, admiring their sleek beauty and wondering what London’s son John Milton would have made of them in the 1600s. “They also serve who only stand and wait,” he wrote in a sonnet about his blindness. He meant himself, serving God, but the Knights of the Order of the Barrier also stand and wait, reminding Londoners of climate change’s reality, and how it will play out in their backyards, streets, and wharves if they don’t take steps. Meanwhile gleaming guards defend the shores. Peer into their faces and darkness greets you. They will serve a few years more before their metal weakens and they’re replaced by newer and abler paladins.

  There is something ironic and fitting about using the very process that has led to trouble—the burning of fossil fuels—to forge the protectors to combat the ongoing sequelae of that very climate change, technological lords of deliverance we hope will protect us from ourselves. Better to harness the sun.

  One of the most heartening solar stories comes from northwestern Bangladesh, home to the world’s largest floodplain. Even though it’s not raining at the moment, the humidity is nearly 100 percent, and the air feels thick as rubber. The monsoon season is ending, and though the sky can still rip with fierce downpours, children wearing colorful tunics and trousers hurry to the riverbank to board their solar-powered school boat. Older villagers wait for the health boat or library boat or agricultural extension boat. Thanks to one man’s ingenuity and generosity of spirit, hope floats whenever it floods.

  Mohammed Rezwan, an architect and climate-change activist who grew up here, ached to see his country being ravaged by ever-worsening floods. He’s noticed that as temperatures rise and more snow melts in the Himalayas, more water surges across the Bangladeshi floodplain. Every year one-third of Bangladesh lies underwater, as if a giant eraser annually scrubs away the hand-drawn pictures of family life.

  Rezwan decided that he didn’t want to design buildings only to see them and whole communities washed away before his eyes. So, in 2008, he founded Shidhulai Swanirvar Sangstha (which means “self-reliance”), a nonprofit that deploys a fleet of one hundred boats with shallow drafts that can skim across the lowlands, serving as libraries, schools, health clinics, and three-tiered floating gardens. He persuaded local boat builders to outfit these traditional bamboo boats with solar panels, computers, video conferencing, and Internet access. The fleet also provides volunteer doctors, solar-powered hurricane lanterns, and bicycle-powered pumps. Solar batteries on each boat can power cell phones and computers, and people may recharge lamps to take home—provided their children keep attending school. Thus far, the project reaches 90,000 families, and it expects to reach another 81,500 families by 2015.

  Because people become stranded and can’t feed themselves in flood season, Rezwan invented a technique for them he calls “solar water farming.” As he explains: “The system includes floating beds made of water hyacinth (to grow vegetables), a portable circular enclosure created by fishing net and bamboo strips (to raise fish), and a floating duck coop powered by solar lamps. It has a recycling system—duck manure is used as fish food, cold-water hyacinth beds are sold as organic fertilizer, and the sun energy lights up the duck coop to maintain the egg production.”

  So giggling children attend school, even during flood months, and their families can produce food and clean water despite the deluges. In this way, if monsoons or conflicts push people from their homes, the flotilla creates lifesavers of education, medicine, food, lighting, and communication.

  Rezwan can’t single-handedly fight climate change, but his brilliantly simple solution is helping
people adapt. The words “adaptation” and “mitigation” are appearing more and more often in the lexicon of climate scientists, who use them to cover practical (and impractical) responses to climate change.

  Remember blue-green algae, to whom we owe our oxygen-besotted lives? One controversial idea is seeding the Antarctic Ocean with iron to trigger the growth of such algae. Algae thrive by absorbing sunlight and carbon dioxide, which they use to forge chlorophyll, but for that they need iron. As algae soak up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, they sink down to the ocean floor and die. Scientists aren’t sure yet if widespread “iron fertilization” is safe for ocean animals, so they recently tried a small test, dumping iron powder into an Antarctic whirlpool (so that it wouldn’t spread). Sure enough, a giant bloom of algae diatoms arose, sucking carbon dioxide from the air, and after a few weeks many diatoms carried pearls of CO2 to the bottom and died. Would it work safely on a large scale? That’s the big unknown. Geoengineering is a highly controversial plaything. We won’t know except by trying, and a bad outcome could be deadly. We’ve already been geoengineering the planet for decades, unintentionally, by saturating the air with CO2 and the oceans with fertilizer—not with good results.