Get Used to Climate Change

     "Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."

          —Physicist Richard Feynman in the final report on the Challenger Disaster

     Life has had to deal with environmental change, especially climate change, since the beginning of its existence on Earth. Species adjust or go extinct, and both have happened. For life-forms with our kinds of cells—eukaryotic, the kind with distinct organelles—the average existence of a species is about 1 million years, and, on average, one species goes extinct a year, at least of the species we have named and know, including those we know only from fossil records.

     Early man was part of this dance between life and environment. Homo erectus, the first of our kind who left Africa, would likely have migrated as a matter of course. They may not have thought of it as migration in our modern sense; they were going where the environment, including sources of food and water, was better. Environmental change and moving along with it were only natural.

With the beginning of civilization and the construction of buildings that could last a long time, and with investments of time and effort in agricultural fields, as well as the discovery of specific sources of minerals and the building of mines to get them, people's lives changed in ways that led to a desire for constancy. Establishment of property rights and national boundaries (beginning with tribe-established land boundaries) augmented the need and desire for constancy of place and of environment. One can argue that it is our species that most needs and most desires constancy and has therefore formed worldviews that not only require environmental constancy but have turned it into a fundamental belief, a folkway, a series of myths.

     The more technologically and legally advanced a civilization, the greater the need and desire for environmental stability, for a balance of nature. Hence, our modern dilemma vis-à-vis climate change. Rather than claim the world is constant except for our sinful interference with it, we need to acknowledge and work out ways to live with environmental change. This can include doing our best to stop or slow that change, as we do in the short term with agricultural irrigation, stabilizing the "precipitation," so to speak. But the harder we work to force environmental constancy onto our surroundings, the more fragile that constancy becomes and the greater the effort and energy it takes. The use of groundwater for crop irrigation illustrates that fragility. Large aquifers that took many thousands of years to develop are being depleted for crop irrigation over comparatively short times—decades or centuries.

Excerpt from The Moon in the Nautilus Shell: Discordant Harmonies Reconsidered, by Daniel B. Botkin.