Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?

by Bill McKibben

  But humans have also now set aside beaches for turtles and have organized patrols to protect their nests—in some places, they cage each nest in wire to keep the raccoons at bay. They’ve mandated “turtle excluder devices” on shrimp nets. Even the new dune built along the launchpad complex was designed in part to block the lights that often confused the turtles emerging to build their nests. And so, in some places, populations have begun to rebound—only, of course, to be threatened anew by rising heat (the temperature of the sand determines the sex of the eggs) and soaring acidity.

  * * *

  I take two ideas from that turtle nest.

  The first is we really do live on an unbearably beautiful planet. We don’t think of it often as a planet—we live our daily lives on flat and often prosaic ground, and when we’re in the air, the flight attendant usually makes us lower the window shade so as not to interfere with the movie. But even with seven billion of us, the planet remains an astonishing collection not just of cities and suburbs, but of mountains and ice and forests and ocean. I’ve been to the highest year-round human habitation, the Rongbuk Monastery in Tibet, and stared up from its rocky ground at Everest overhead, its summit so high that it sticks into the jet stream and unrolls a long pennant of white cloud. I’ve wandered the Antarctic Peninsula, watching glaciers calve icebergs with a thunderous roar. I’ve climbed on the endless lava fields of Iceland and watched the magma pour into the Pacific Ocean from Kilauea, in Hawaii, birthing new land before my eyes. I’ve seen the steam puffing from the top of Mount Rainier and wondered if I’d managed to climb it the day it would erupt. And I’ve lain on my stomach in my backyard, watching beetles wander by, watching dew hang on stalks of grass. I’ve seen penguins, I’ve watched whales, I’ve played with my dog.

  We live on a planet—we live on a planet. And it’s infinitely more glorious than the others we head for at such risk and expense. The single most inhospitable cubic meter of the Earth’s surface—some waste of Saharan sand, some rocky Himalayan outcrop—is a thousand times more hospitable than the most appealing corner of Mars or Jupiter. If you wanted for some reason to turn that Saharan desert green, you could do it with some water. You can breathe to the top of the highest peak. Everywhere there is life.

  And—this is for me the second lesson—the most curious of all those lives are the human ones, because we can destroy, but also because we can decide not to destroy. The turtle does what she does, and magnificently. She can’t not do it, though, any more than the beaver can decide to take a break from building dams or the bee from making honey. But if the bird’s special gift is flight, ours is the possibility of restraint. We’re the only creature who can decide not to do something we’re capable of doing. That’s our superpower, even if we exercise it too rarely.

  So, yes, we can wreck the Earth as we’ve known it, killing vast numbers of ourselves and wiping out entire swaths of other life—in fact, as we’ve seen, we’re doing that right now. But we can also not do that. We could instead put a solar panel on the top of every last one of those roofs that I described at the opening of this book, and if we do, then we will have started in a different direction. We can engineer our children, at least a little now and doubtless more in the future—or we can decide not to. We can build our replacements in the form of ever-smarter robots, and we can try to keep ourselves alive as digitally preserved consciousnesses—or we can accept with grace that each of us has a moment and a place.

  I do not know that we will make these choices. I rather suspect we won’t—we are faltering now, and the human game has indeed begun to play itself out. That’s what the relentless rise in temperature tells us, and the fact that we increasingly spend our days staring glumly at the rectangle in our palm. But we could make those choices. We have the tools (nonviolence chief among them) to allow us to stand up to the powerful and the reckless, and we have the fundamental idea of human solidarity that we could take as our guide.

  We are messy creatures, often selfish, prone to short-sightedness, susceptible to greed. In a Trumpian moment with racism and nationalism resurgent, you could argue that our disappearance would be no great loss. And yet, most of us, most of the time, are pretty wonderful: funny, kind. Another name for human solidarity is love, and when I think about our world in its present form, that is what overwhelms me. The human love that works to feed the hungry and clothe the naked, the love that comes together in defense of sea turtles and sea ice and of all else around us that is good. The love that lets each of us see we’re not the most important thing on earth, and makes us okay with that. The love that welcomes us, imperfect, into the world and surrounds us when we die.

  Even—especially—in its twilight, the human game is graceful and compelling.

  NOTES

  AN OPENING NOTE ON HOPE

  1. Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress (New York: Vintage, 2017), p. 262.

  PART ONE: THE SIZE OF THE BOARD

  CHAPTER 1

  1. Youtu.be/3UgGVKnelfY CertainTeed Roofing, “How Shingles Are Made,” youtube.com

  2. Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (New York: HarperCollins, 2017), p. 15.

  3. Nicholas Kristof, “Good News, Despite What You’ve Heard,” New York Times, July 1, 2017.

  4. Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (New York: HarperCollins, 2015), p. 247.

  5. Kaushik Basu, “The Global Economy in 2067,” Project Syndicate, June 21, 2017.

  6. “Scientists’ Warning to Humanity ‘Most Talked about Paper,’” March 7, 2018, sciencedaily.com.

  7. Nafeez Ahmed, “NASA-Funded Study: Industrial Civilization Headed for ‘Irreversible Collapse’?” Guardian, March 14, 2014.

  8. Baher Kamal, “Alert: Nature, on the Verge of Bankruptcy,” September 12, 2017, ispnews.net.

  9. Clive Hamilton, Defiant Earth: The Fate of Humans in the Anthropocene (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2017), p. 42.

  10. John Vidal, “From Africa’s Baobabs to America’s Pines: Our Ancient Trees Are Dying,” Huffington Post, June 19, 2018.

  11. Anne Barnard, “Climate Change Is Killing the Cedars of Lebanon,” New York Times, July 18, 2018.

  12. Damian Carrington, “Arctic Stronghold of World’s Seeds Flooded After Permafrost Melts,” Guardian, May 19, 2017.

  13. William E. Rees, “Staving Off the Coming Global Collapse,” TheTyee.ca, July 17, 2017.

  14. Eelco Rohling, The Oceans: A Deep History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), p. 15.

  15. Donella H. Meadows et al., The Limits to Growth: A Report of the Club of Rome (New York: Universe Books, 1972), abstract.

  16. “A Greener Bush,” The Economist, February 13, 2003.

  17. Peter U. Clark et al., “Consequences of Twenty-First-Century Policy for Multi-Millennial Climate and Sea-Level Change,” Nature Climate Change 6, no. 4 (February 2016): 360–69.

  18. Adam Gopnik, “The Illiberal Imagination,” The New Yorker, March 20, 2017.

  CHAPTER 2

  1. Michael Safi, “Pollution Stops Play at Delhi Test Match as Bowlers Struggle to Breathe,” Guardian, December 3, 2017.

  2. Mehreen Zahra-Malik, “In Lahore, Smog Has Become a ‘Fifth Season,’” New York Times, November 10, 2017.

  3. Aniruddha Ghosal, “Landmark Study Lies Buried: How Delhi’s Poisonous Air Is Damaging Its Children for Life,” Indian Express, April 2, 2015.

  4. Hilary Brueck, “Pollution Is Killing More People than Wars, Obesity, Smoking, and Malnutrition,” Business Insider, October 24, 2017.

  5. Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development, “Climate Change Could Kill More than 100 Million People by 2030,” http://www.igsd.org/climate-change-could-kill-more-than-100-million-people-by-2030/

  6. Joe Romm, “Earth’s Rate of Global Warming Is 400,000 Hiroshima Bombs a Day,” thinkprogress.org, December 22, 2013.

  7. Rohling, The Oceans, p. 106.

  8. Ibid., p. 107.

&n
bsp; 9. Justin Gillis, “Carbon in Atmosphere Is Rising, Even as Emissions Stabilize,” New York Times, June 26, 2017.

  10. Eric Holthaus, “Antarctic Melt Holds Coastal Cities Hostage. Here’s the Way Out,” grist.org, June 13, 2018.

  11. Harry Cockburn, “Worst Case Climate Change Scenario Could Be More Extreme than Thought, Scientists Warn,” Independent, May 15, 2018.

  12. Damian Carrington, “Record-Breaking Climate Change Pushes World into ‘Uncharted Territory,’” Guardian, March 20, 2017.

  13. Eleanor Cummins, “Tropical Storm Ophelia Really Did Break the Weather Forecast Grid,” Slate, October 16, 2017.

  14. Brett Walton, “Cape Town Rations Water Before Reservoirs Hit Zero,” circleofblue.org, October 26, 2017.

  15. Samanth Subramanian, “India’s Silicon Valley Is Dying of Thirst. Your City May Be Next,” Wired, May 2, 2017.

  16. Marcello Rossi, “In Italy’s Parched Po River Valley, Climate Change Threatens the Future of Agriculture,” Reuters, July 27, 2017.

  17. Catherine Edwards, “The Source of Italy’s Longest River Has Dried Up Due to Drought,” thelocal.it, September 6, 2017.

  18. Chelsea Harvey, “Scientists Find a Surprising Result on Global Wildfires: They’re Actually Burning Less Land,” Washington Post, June 29, 2017.

  19. Michael Kodas, Megafire: The Race to Extinguish a Deadly Epidemic of Flame (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017), p. xii.

  20. Ibid., pp. xii, xv.

  21. David Karoly, “Bushfires and Extreme Heat in South-East Australia,” realclimate.org, February 16, 2009.

  22. Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo, Twitter post, May 4, 2016, 9:28 AM.

  23. “Greece Wildfires: Dozens Dead in Attica Region,” bbc.com, July 24, 2018.

  24. Kodas, Megafire, p. 116.

  25. Will Dunham, “Bolt from the Blue: Warming Climate May Fuel More Lightning,” Reuters, November 13, 2014.

  26. Kodas, Megafire, p. 20.

  27. Jack Healy, “Burying Their Cattle, Ranchers Call Wildfires ‘Our Hurricane Katrina,’” New York Times, March 20, 2017.

  28. Michael E. Mann, “It’s a Fact: Climate Change Made Hurricane Harvey More Deadly,” Guardian, August 28, 2017.

  29. Doyle Rice, “Global Warming Makes ‘Biblical’ Rain Like That from Hurricane Harvey Much More Likely,” USA Today, November 14, 2017.

  30. Ibid.

  31. Scott Waldman, “Global Warming Tied to Hurricane Harvey,” Scientific American, December 14, 2017.

  32. Seth Borenstein, “Florence Could Dump Enough to Fill Chesapeake Bay,” Associated Press News, September 14, 2018.

  33. Somini Sengupta, “The City of My Birth in India Is Becoming a Climate Casualty. It Didn’t Have to Be,” New York Times, July 31, 2018.

  34. “Extreme Precipitation Events Have Risen Sharply in Northeastern U.S. Since 1996,” Yale Environment 360, May 24, 2017.

  35. Hiroko Tabuchi et al., “Floods Are Getting Worse, and 2,500 Chemical Sites Lie in the Water’s Path,” New York Times, February 6, 2018.

  36. “Glacier Mass Loss: Past the Point of No Return,” University of Innsbruck, uibk.ac.at, March 19, 2018.

  37. Stephen Leahy, “Hidden Costs of Climate Change Running Hundreds of Billions a Year,” National Geographic, September 27, 2017.

  38. Fiona Harvey, “Climate Change Is Already Damaging World Economy, Report Finds,” Guardian, September 25, 2012.

  39. Richard Harris, “Study Puts Puerto Rico Death Toll from Hurricane Maria Near 5,000,” All Things Considered, NPR, May 29, 2018.

  40. Solomon Hsiang and Trevor Houser, “Don’t Let Puerto Rico Fall into an Economic Abyss,” New York Times, September 29, 2017.

  41. Pinker, Enlightenment Now, p. 69.

  42. “Climate Change Aggravates Global Hunger,” Agence France-Presse, September 15, 2017.

  43. Lin Taylor, “Factbox: Conflicts and Climate Disasters Forcing Children into Work—U.N.,” Reuters.com, June 12, 2018.

  44. Laignee Barron, “143 Million People Could Soon Be Displaced Because of Climate Change, World Bank Says,” Time, March 20, 2018.

  45. Daniel Wesangula, “Dying Gods: Mt. Kenya’s Disappearing Glaciers Spread Violence Below,” Climate Home News, August 2, 2017.

  46. Lorraine Chow, “The Climate Crisis May Be Taking a Toll on Your Mental Health,” Salon, May 22, 2017.

  47. Ilissa Ocko, “Climate Change Is Messing with Clouds,” edf.org/blog, August 24, 2016.

  48. Brian Resnick, “We’re Witnessing the Fastest Decline in Arctic Sea Ice in at Least 1,500 Years,” vox.com, February 16, 2018.

  49. Henry Fountain, “Alaska’s Permafrost Is Thawing,” New York Times, August 23, 2017.

  50. Gillis, “Carbon in Atmosphere Is Rising.”

  51. Tom Knudson, “California Is Drilling for Water That Fell to Earth 20,000 Years Ago,” Mother Jones, March 13, 2015.

  52. Carol Rasmussen, “Sierras Lost Water Weight, Grew Taller During Drought,” nasa.gov, December 13, 2017.

  53. Matt Stevens, “102 Million Dead California Trees ‘Unprecedented in Our Modern History,’ Officials Say,” Los Angeles Times, November 18, 2016.

  54. Thomas Fuller, “Everything Was Incinerated: Scenes from One Community Wrecked by the Santa Rosa Fire,” New York Times, October 10, 2017.

  55. Andrew Freedman, “The Combustible Mix Behind Southern California’s Terrifying Wildfires,” mashable.com, December 6, 2017.

  56. Nora Gallagher, “Southern Californians Know: Climate Change Is Real, It Is Deadly and It Is Here,” Guardian, March 3, 2018.

  57. Ibid.

  CHAPTER 3

  1. “Failing Phytoplankton, Failing Oxygen: Global Warming Disaster Could Suffocate Life on Planet Earth,” sciencedaily.com, December 1, 2015.

  2. Jasmin Fox-Skelly, “There Are Diseases Hidden in Ice and They Are Waking Up,” bbc.com, May 4, 2017.

  3. Susan Casey, The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks, and Giants of the Ocean (New York: Doubleday, 2010), p. 153.

  4. Ibid., p. 253; and Akshat Rathi, “Global Warming Won’t Just Change the Weather—It Could Trigger Massive Earthquakes and Volcanoes,” qz.com, May 24, 2016.

  5. Joe Romm, “Exclusive: Elevated CO2 Levels Directly Affect Human Cognition, New Harvard Study Shows,” thinkprogress.org, October 26, 2015.

  6. Anna Vidot, “Climate Change to Blame for Flatlining Wheat Yield Gains: CSIRO,” ABC Rural, March 8, 2017.

  7. Georgina Gustin, “Climate Change Could Lead to Major Crop Failures in World’s Biggest Corn Regions,” InsideClimate News, June 11, 2018.

  8. Bill McKibben, “While Colorado Burns, Washington Fiddles,” Guardian, June 29, 2012.

  9. Daisy Dunne, “Global Warming Could Cause Yield of Sorghum Crops to Drop ‘Substantially,’” carbonbrief.org, August 14, 2017.

  10. Tobias Lunt et al., “Vulnerabilities to Agricultural Production Shocks: An Extreme, Plausible Scenario for Assessment of Risk for the Insurance Sector,” Climate Risk Management 13 (2016): 1–9.

  11. Elizabeth Winkler, “How the Climate Crisis Could Become a Food Crisis Overnight,” Washington Post, July 27, 2017.

  12. Helena Bottemiller Evich, “The Great Nutrient Collapse,” Politico, September 13, 2017.

  13. Brad Plumer, “How More Carbon Dioxide Can Make Food Less Nutritious,” New York Times, May 23, 2018.

  14. Evich, “Great Nutrient Collapse.”

  15. Bob Berwyn, “Global Warming Means More Insects Threatening Food Crops—a Lot More, Study Warns,” InsideClimate News, August 30, 2018.

  16. http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2013/10/sea-level-in-the-5th-ipcc-report/

  17. Peter Brannen, The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth’s Past Mass Extinctions (New York: Ecco Books, 2017), p. 258.

  18. Robert Scribbler, “New Study Finds That Present CO2 Levels Are Capable of Melting Large Portions of East and West Antarctica,” robertscribbler.com, August 2, 2017.

  19. Michael
Le Page, “Alarm as Ice Loss from Antarctica Triples in the Past Five Years,” New Scientist, June 13, 2018.

  20. Ian Johnston, “Earth Could Become ‘Practically Ungovernable’ If Sea Levels Keep Rising, Says Former NASA Climate Chief,” Independent, July 14, 2017.

  21. “How Much Will the Seas Rise?” conversations.e-flux.com, February 26, 2018.

  22. David Smiley, “Was Jorge Pérez Drunk When He Made Controversial Sea Level Rise Comment to Jeff Goodell?” Miami Herald, May 31, 2018.

  23. Jeff Goodell, The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World (New York: Little, Brown, and Company, 2017), p. 148.