Three Stupid Ways to Think About Climate Change
To be utterly clear, I believe climate change is real, caused by humans burning fossil fuels, could end human civilization, and must be aggressively confronted, now. Concerning ourselves with the greatest crisis in human history isn’t stupid, but the ways in which we think about it often are.
The ways we frame the crisis using language can set us up for failure as we mistake philosophical constructs for empirical truths. Moving away from these resilient patterns of thought and reframing the crisis using different terms can lead us to discover inventive new ways to confront it.
Here are three ideas about climate change that I find particularly counterproductive and, well, honestly kind of stupid.
- The earth is the victim
Recently, upon returning to terra firma after a short jaunt into space aboard a Blue Origin rocket, William “TJ Hooker” Shatner emoted to Jeff Bezos, “I can’t even begin to express … what I would love to do is to communicate as much as possible is the jeopardy. The moment you see the vulnerability of everything; it’s so small.”
What’s actually small is humanity. As a species, we’ve been here a ridiculously short amount of time. Our impending mass extinction isn’t the earth’s first rodeo. Not even its second. It’s potentially the sixth time the planet has quickly lost over 75% of its life forms. And after each time, it bounced back just fine, no thanks to us.
So let’s not flatter ourselves into thinking we can be “eco-friendly.” The earth doesn’t need us to be its buddy. It actually doesn’t need anything from us at all. It’s we who entirely need it. Deluding ourselves into pitying the poor little earth is the height of anthropogenic arrogance.
The earth is strong. It’s a survivor. It’s got plenty of microbes stashed in its crust that can evolve when we’re gone, and it’s got the luxury of at least a couple billion years to experiment with. It’s us who are weak, small, and vulnerable. Let’s stop mistaking suicide for homicide.
2. The very concept of “artificial”
Nothing is artificial. Literally nothing. Electric grids, nuclear warheads, the Kardashians — all are natural, natural, natural.
The very concept of artificiality is perhaps the only thing that actually is artificial. Humans are composed of matter that evolved. Natural. Humans manipulate other matter into new forms. Totally natural. These new forms are used to create other forms. Also natural.
Humans operate according to the laws of physics and chemistry, invent things that also operate according to the laws of physics and chemistry, and sometimes these things make us grumpy, at which point we label them “unnatural.” But the concept of “unnatural” is itself unnatural because everything — by which I mean every thing in the universe — follows the laws of nature.
We seem to have gotten hung up about this around the time we believed that gods judged our sexual fantasies and forbid us from consuming shellfish. We transposed old religious hangups about metaphysical beings who we perceived to have power over us onto hangups about the technologies we perceive to have power over us. And we still tend to treat the categories of “natural” and “artificial” as self-evident rather than as the collectively agreed-upon constructs they actually are.
This leads many of us to blame technology for our climate crisis, rather than embrace it as nature giving us a way save our asses. We’re wasting a lot of time dithering over whether we should look to technology as a way out of this crisis. Of course we should. But some remain stuck on the notion that technology, despite having come into being thanks to totally natural biological brains figuring out new ways to configure 100% natural matter into new forms that faithfully obey the laws of nature, can’t be trusted with nature, despite having arisen entirely within the confines of nature.
3. Humans suck
As a kid, I was a big fan of the Disney movie Never Cry Wolf, based on the work of Canadian naturalist Farley Mowatt. I later stumbled upon an interview with Mowatt in which he declared that if there was a button he could push that would immediately eradicate all of humanity, he wouldn’t hesitate to push it. This made me think Farley Mowatt was a total asshole.
I mean it’s understandable, we evolved so fast over what, a mere 100,000 years, that no wonder we consider ourselves entirely removed from the animal kingdom. And yet, like the animals we truly are, we too eat, shit, fuck, and die.
Remember when, thirty million years ago, an asteroid slammed into what we now call the Yucatan Penninsula, instantly eradicating 95% of life on earth, including all those badass dinosaurs? In response, a bunch of furry nobodies developed the ability to make tools, evolving at lightning speed into a species able to scan the galaxy for other killer asteroids, splice DNA, split atoms, wire the globe into a massive electronic nervous system, and raise the temperature of the climate.
It’s difficult to absorb the mounting ugliness of our climate crisis and not come to the immediate conclusion that man, do we ever suck. Yet this belief itself will defeat us. Conceiving of the earth as the victim and humanity as the antagonist prevents us from fully utilizing our entirely natural capacity to develop ever more sophisticated —not to mention 100% natural — technologies to confront this crisis of our own making.
Weird, isn’t it, that an exponential, hockey-stick shaped problem is happening at precisely the moment the trajectory of technological evolution is also approaching a hockey-stick shaped, exponential trajectory? Could this mean something? Could it be that we smelly primates have timed the Singularity precisely to meet this moment of complete ecological collapse so that an entirely new planet teeming with life and intelligence emerges in a cosmic flash?
I admit, I’m a huge fan of human beings. Have been ever since I was born. How about we stop drowning ourselves in guilt as we drown our coastlines and recognize everything that’s great about us homo sapiens — our imaginations, empathy, resourcefulness, and the foresight and intelligence necessary to even recognize the climate crisis as a crisis to begin with? In my admittedly biased opinion, we’re nature’s greatest creation, a biological technology waking up on this gorgeous planet to ensure the persistence of consciousness in our lonely corner of the universe.
