Humankind’s hubris
Update 2019/01/14: extinction table in the middle and call-out at bottom.
COP24 is a well-publicized meeting in Katowice, Poland in an ongoing global effort to address equally well publicized, and denied, Climate Breakdown or Emergency to quote George Monbiot or Extinction Rebellion respectively.
But then along comes a voice of youth, @gretathunberg — “15 year old climate activist with Asperger’s” speech on Democracy Now! YouTube:
Karl Lam echoed that (paraphrasing) “Imagine if we all stopped doing what society asks of us, collectively we’d exert a power that is unstoppable". Having attended COP23, it’s little surprise that he echoes her words — CNN then relates last Friday (14/12/18) school walkouts as one civil disobedience at youth’s disposal — but she brings a rawness only youth can bring to us as a wake-up call, as George Monbiot relating Extinction Rebellion in London:
A young woman called Lizia Woolf stepped forward. She hadn’t spoken before, but the passion, grief and fury of her response was utterly compelling. “What is it that you are asking me as a 20-year-old to face and to accept about my future and my life? … This is an emergency. We are facing extinction. When you ask questions like that, what is it you want me to feel?” We had no answer.
I am, however, a geologist quite familiar with the five extinctions in the geologic record — see details of the above here — I was privileged to do field mapping in the Canadian Rocky Mountains, two main mountain ranges from the Burgess Shales an extraordinary testimony to extinct life forms. I also spent a summer in the Canadian Arctic Islands on the summer that never was, near cooler interlude two winters before one I never stopped wearing trainers in Calgary, when the Winter Olympics had unseasonably mild weather. I now live in Cambridge UK where the Sedgwick Museum in Downing College, albeit ‘old school’ and in sore need of modernizing, hosts some living fossils as pictured atop.
Having lived and traveled around the world most of my life, allow me to look askance at mankind’s ability to “get it together in twelve years", the purported Climate Breakdown deadline: I’m absolutely convinced that as a species, we’re so self-imbued that we worry more about current affairs — Brexit, US or French internal economics and Russian external politics— than about Climate Breakdown and what to do about it such as Extinction Rebellion.
This has happened before : how many civilizations like Hopi in SW US or Khmer of current Kampuchea disappeared off the face of the earth — linked photos c/o travels with my parents — for having outstripped their environments' capacity to sustain them? Why do we think we’re better, just because we have a lot more tech? C’mon folks … prove me wrong!
I grew up as a teen under the shadow of atomic MAD that made me reluctant to bring kids to the world. I then started a family late as we tried to do this consciously. And now I’m keenly aware of what I/we may be leaving behind for generations. So I’m clearly neither a Denier nor a Fatalist:
- Via my blog I help concerned citizens get the right tools to help them create a correct world view, in my specialism of easy-to-use maps from easy-to-acquire data
- as a citizen of the world, I helped with local election efforts for my compatriots again in my specialism
- published in Anthropocene Review how to foster cogent public discourse through informative maps
- and I continue writing on this channel incl. this # 9 in a series, or my professional also incl. a series of ten
G. Mace said in 1998 that the “current rates of species loss at least equivalent to the mass extinctions in the past”… Now that human extinction is just over the horizon, all of a sudden this becomes a branle-bas de combat, an action stations!
Again, who do we think we humans are? As a geologist, I can only call out this hubris of humankind!
