Why I Hardly Sweat the Small Stuff Anymore
One thing put everything else in perspective.
I am virtually cured of envy; I want what nobody has and everybody needs.
When I look back on the person I was 10, 5, and even 3 years ago, it’s as though I was inhabiting a different world than the one I do now. I was still labouring under the misapprehension that the underpinnings of life were assured. Of course, I could lose my loved ones, my income, my health, or be killed in a traffic accident, but the world was going to be OK.
Even then, I worried about the consequences of ecocide. My heart bled for the loss of biodiversity. And I alienated people through my habit of proclaiming the merits of structural and behavioural change over climate change.
But despite my exasperation at the inadequacy of people’s (and my own!) response to the greatest injustices and threats of human history, it was an unqualified optimism that things would turn out OK in the end. Policymakers would see sense. Enough clever people would eventually rise to the challenge. Humans always find a way. It’s what we do! In my mind, it was a question of whether we would act now to prevent needless damage or act later to save the day in the nick of time, albeit with many regrets.
Beware irrational optimism about the human enterprise. Before the end, every species boasts a 100% success rate in evading extinction.
In a state of cognitive dissonance, I went on engaging in the ordinary pursuits of life. Investing in a future that has been losing promise as long as we’ve been holding this course we are currently on — longer than my 36 years. I let what I now see as pipe dreams hold sway over my life. I let what now seem like trivialities deeply affect me. And I made, perhaps, the worst decision one can make in a failing world — I had a child.
But now we have entered the era of the unimaginable. The scientific warnings are increasingly dire, tinged with undertones of desperate pleading. And we are not heeding them. We are not making the necessary changes. We are not even lowering emissions. We are raising them!
The illusion can no longer be maintained that our leaders and this system will lead us toward a stable future.
Now, what matters has narrowed to one thing. The One Thing that encompasses everything.
I ask you…
- Will it matter that you earn a 6-figure income when the banking sector collapses and takes the companies or platforms or clients you depend on down with it?
- Will it matter whether or not you are considered beautiful when the food supply chains break down and the supermarket shelves empty?
- Does the number of social media followers you have matter more than the number of close ties with people who have direct access to the necessities of life?
- Will your position on the career ladder serve you when people are only interested in staying safe and alive?
If you think I’m being unreasonable in calling into question the precedence of these pillars of modern life, please understand that I am not saying that they are not important; I am saying they are all contingent on the One Thing.
Our short lives and narrow frames of reference often make it difficult for us to grasp the fragility of all the mechanisms on which our everyday existence depends. Now, in much of the developed world, despite inflation, the deteriorating state of democracy in the US and elsewhere, and the war in Ukraine, life seems pretty predictable, even mundanely so. For all our concerns, most of us have a roof overhead, running water, food in the fridge, our social media platform of choice, and Netflix on the TV — the old basic necessities of life, plus some new ones.
Our implicit trust in the every day affords many of us the luxury of giving a damn about long-term career success, vacation-filled retirements, and dreams of high-status careers for our children.
But the trust is misplaced, and the luxury is one we cannot truly afford.
Nothing is discrete in this world.
A major change for even one species can have a ripple effect throughout the world. Small or, at first, unnoticed events in one sector can have global consequences in another. Everything is a node in a complex web of connections.
Climate change accelerates change in manifold areas and extends the reach of those changes, potentially destabilising entire systems.
Take this one recent and still salient case in point.
The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated our slide into the largest economic crisis in more than a century. A plethora of emergency fiscal policies helped to cushion us from the full force of the injuries inflicted, but they merely staved off the inevitable. Households are now experiencing the knock-on effects. Salaries are failing to rise with inflation, which means that spending is down, which impacts the economy, which impacts tax revenues, and the financial sector.
Now put this in the context of climate change. It has already begun and will continue to aggravate and increase the spread of infectious disease by raising temperatures and destroying habitats that served as barriers between us and undiscovered diseases. Our ability to pull through the last pandemic has had negative economic consequences that are predicted to haunt us for a decade. Is it really such a leap of the imagination to conceive of how worse and simultaneous pandemics could not only cripple the global economy but trigger economic collapse?
One of the primary drivers of the rise in novel infectious diseases such as the coronavirus is habitat loss, which is primarily driven, in turn, by our global food system. The latter is responsible for three-quarters of deforestation, releasing significant stores of carbon and reducing the Earth’s capacity to capture carbon, thereby increasing the average global temperature. It is on a path to threatening 90% of biodiversity by 2050. Biodiversity loss won’t just result in a quieter, less interesting world for humanity to live in. It is just one more possible driver of civilisational collapse.
Let me illustrate our vulnerability to biodiversity loss with one important example plucked from the innumerable services provided by healthy ecosystems. Both our agricultural practices and climate change are driving a great decline in pollinating species. The US honey bee population decreased by 40% in the winter of 2018 to 2019 alone, with some regions seeing a drop of 90%. Wild pollinators may be faring even worse, with several extinctions documented in recent years. Around 35% of our food production depends directly on pollinators. Their loss could weaken our food system (and health) to a staggering degree. But what of the plants humans don’t eat? Bee species coevolved with plants such that their shapes, bodies, and preferences are matched in perfect harmony. The loss of even a few species could mean the disappearance of many plants. Their disappearance, in turn, would affect every creature linked to them, with the possibility of ecosystem collapse.
Changes in the climate drive changes in biodiversity and civilisation.
Changes in human activity drive changes in the climate and biodiversity.
Changes in biodiversity drive changes in the climate and cilivisation.
To say climate change is multi-faceted seems like a gross understatement. The threat of climate is one that will attack us on all flanks, often simultaneously. The extinction of keystone species, glacier loss, sea level rise, dead zones, heat waves, droughts, floods, forest fires, hurricanes, epidemics, pandemics, the breakdown of food supply chains, the disappearance of breadbasket regions, economic disasters, international conflict, social collapse.
Are you worried yet?
Maybe not. Existential threats on the scale of climate change have never been encountered by our species before. Human brains evolved to dodge visible, fast-moving, and relatively diminutive threats, not threats that span the globe and wage on for countless generations.
Which goes some way to explaining why most of us would rather not think about climate change and preoccupy ourselves instead with sweating the “small stuff.”
But we can no longer afford to let the small stuff get in the way of seeing and acting to avert the One Thing that everything depends on.
Thank you for reading. Now, how about a more hope-inspiring article? The IPCC made it clear earlier this year that there is hope for keeping global temperature rise below 1.5 degrees Celsius. I wouldn’t write these articles if I didn’t believe you had it in you to be the hero these times require you to be.
