A year ago, during an excellent symposium (“The Dynamics of Possible Nuclear Extinction“) organized by the Helen Caldicott Foundation at the New York Academy of Medicine, Dr. Caldicott remarked that we must now “triage the threats we face,” or words to that effect.
I stumbled across those words recently, and again I thought they were good advice. Everything about us and our lives and work is finite.
The results of any such exercise will be different for each person, who is by definition unique. Each of us moves in unique circumstances. The Study Group for example has a unique role colored by our location, knowledge and experience, personal histories, and other circumstances. There are several billion unique ways to weigh a differing kaleidoscope of responsibilities and freedoms, and I don’t want to minimize that uniqueness and subjectivity one bit.
That said, all our personally-conditioned and subjective roles lie within a climatological and ecological context which is, globally, collapsing.
If that collapse continues and becomes self-sustaining as it threatens to become, there will be — one by one and bit by bit — fewer personal roles to play. Our freedoms will diminish. They already are.
In such a case our roles will be played in an increasingly-abridged natural world, with more and more species gone, and with less and less civilization, however we may define it.
In such a case all our fine dreams, large and small, individual and collective — of justice let us say, of human rights, urban gardens and permaculture, of democracy, of college educations, jobs — will fade and finally vanish. In such a case we will move down Maslow’s heirarchy of needs. All the way down.
Drought for example will end all our dreams, should it come to stay — as it certainly will here in New Mexico if effective climate mitigation is not achieved.
There is no human “adaptation” to uncapped global warming, no happy ending, no deus ex machina. Neither is there any “adaptation” of individuals in our brother and sister species when all the habitat is gone, or unreachable.
Such finalities can and usually do happen suddenly, in large part because weather is variable. There is water and food enough — until, quite suddenly, through a statistically predictable but still somehow officially-unpredicted chain of events, there isn’t. Climate loads the weather dice, the habitat dice, the extinction dice.
We face in other words, a total crisis, a moral, political, spiritual, economic, social, and religious crisis. It involves us in every way, inside and outside (where most of our soul can be found, said Plotinus).
So stepping back and looking at the problem of triage, aiming for a large and impersonal frame of reference based on science and human values, I see our highest-priority tasks as something like these, in brutal brevity and omitting the means for the most part.
- Rapidly mitigate global warming and prevent runaway heating
- Rapidly choke down greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from human activity (including CO2, CH4, and persistent GHGs, properly weighted for short-term impact, e.g. over 20 years). This means, for starters, very rapid investment in renewable energy and low-to-no-fossil-fuel transportation, a drastically lower consumption pattern across the board among so-called “developed” countries, and a halt to deforestation. This will mean economic decline at best, if not collapse. Decline is upon us in any case, for fundamental resource-limitation and thermodynamic reasons that are then refracted through our mal-investing financial and economic systems, as explained previously on this blog.
- Transform net terrestrial CO2 flux to strong absorption and sequestration by reforestation, organic soil building, and other techniques.
- Very rapidly protect and increase arctic albedo (ice caps, and tundra if possible). This almost certainly means active cooling. We need to gather experimental data, and have the debate.
- Rapidly slow oceanic and terrestrial release of CH4, which is potentially catastrophic.
- Effectively protect the diversity of life immediately
- Establish and protect a robust diversity of habitats and migration routes on land and in fresh water
- Protect the oceans and littoral zones
- Protect the vulnerable species being hunted for body parts and for food, with deadly force if necessary.
- Establish and protect a robust diversity of habitats and migration routes on land and in fresh water
- Protect vulnerable humans. Use ancient moral codes to accept and care for the stranger where modern laws fall short. This means a dramatic simplification of wants by the relatively wealthy and the selective abandonment of excess amenities and infrastructure, and it means intensive horticulture.
- Encourage negative population growth in most places, and overall. Without massive use of fossil fuels, the earth cannot long support its present population. Water is in critically short supply in many places and fossil fuels soon will be.
- Understand and accept the tragic fate that human greed, ignorance, and folly have fashioned, quite apart from the important questions of who and what are continuing to weave that fate and what to do about it. Our way of life is ending, no matter what. Embrace our duty to limit the damage and protect the vulnerable, to save what we can, while we can. This is the path of maturity, sanity, and fulfillment — perhaps the only such path at this moment in history.
- Dismantle militarism, aggressive war, and the nuclear doomsday cult including its instruments, ideologies, and institutions. We need to express our true solidarity with other people and species and we need do so materially, in collective action and policy. To do this we need the resources now devoted to war and aggression, and we need to free ourselves — especially in this country — of the deadly addiction to war.
As for lesser priorities, which we could all name, we may or may not have time or resources for them. If they conflict with these goals or similar ones, if they distract us, we may need to let them go. That is triage, something we face in disasters and war. We’re there now. Now we can devise and carry out skillful treatments.
Who is this “we?” I think many of us, more than we see in common hours, have taken a kind of Hippocratic vow, perhaps without knowing of it. Wordsworth wrote once of a morning when “to the brim/My heart was full; I made no vows, but vows/Were then made for me…” However variously we see our priorities, we will not go far wrong if we just take ourselves out of the way, and let the sun rise.