World leaders are about to gather in New York for a climate change conference and many will call for action to “save the planet”. Frankly that is arrogant nonsense. Our planet will survive long after homo sapiens is a distant memory. There have been mass extinctions of species before. There is no reason to believe that our species will survive in any great numbers the mass extinction event we are currently going through, the planet will. The cause is not some threatening asteroid, it is homo sapiens.
Around 540 million years ago (or 5500 BCE if you believe the Creationists), the Earth was populated by huge numbers of multi-cell organisms known to us as Ediacaria. As far as we can tell, they extracted the nutrients they needed directly from their surroundings. Then some bright spark evolved a mouth and they and their descendants live high on the hog gobbling up the Ediacaria and screwing up the enviroment to make their survival impossible. Commenting on his paper published in the “Proceedings of the Royal Society” in 2015, Simon Darroch of Vanderbilt University wrote.
After 60 million years, evolution gave birth to another major innovation: animals. All animals share the characteristics that they can move spontaneously and independently, at least during some point in their lives, and sustain themselves by eating other organisms or what they produce….
“These new species were ‘ecological engineers’ who changed the environment in ways that made it more and more difficult for the Ediacarans to survive,” said Darroch.
Today, we are the “ecological engineers” and perhaps also the Ediacaria. We delude ourselves with science fiction that tells us technology will solve all our problems and we will all be living on Mars or in distant solar systems so we don’t have to bother about doing anything for our own planet. But to survive in any great numbers we must evolve into homo sapientior.
This will not mean developing tiny hands or something, We will have to evolve what’s going on in the big lump of fatty tissue behind our eyes.
Sorry to those who rely on the Macawber belief that “something will turn up”; that “scientists” will produce great ideas that will produce machines to suck up all the excess CO2 . and make it into unicorns. Ain’t going to happen in time. There are some interesting developments like the bio-curtains for buildings but there is no single solution like the fantasies of huge forests of artificial trees sucking it out.
The other, now too prevalent in politicians, is to use every excuse to procrastinate. The worst manifestation of this is the “after you Claude” view that you’ll do something once those people on the other side of the fence do something. Blame China as an exuse to do nothing. This is often allied to the denial that, even if there are climate changes, industry is not the cause. Trump is perhaps the worst example of this as he fail to understand that the climate instability we are already seeing is not “different weather”. He even manages to combine it with his bothsiderism.
President Donald Trump has said he believes climate change "goes both ways" following a 90-minute discussion with environmentalist Prince Charles.
"I believe that there's a change in weather and I think it changes both ways," Mr Trump told Piers Morgan in an interview….
[sidenote: I had thought TV producers had devised a scheme to “let the punishment fit the crime” (against journalism and general good taste) when I saw the title of his series “Piers Morgan and Killer Women”. Unfortunately it turned out to be just interviews with females in US prisons. However WS Gilbert did foresee a female version of the punishment Trump appears to be undergoing.]
The lady who dyes a chemical yellow
Or stains her grey hair puce,
Or pinches her figure,
Is painted with vigour
With permanent walnut juice
At best Trump is an irrelevance in the efforts to save our species from its own decimation. At worst he is spreading the disinformation of those whose financial interests lay in promoting activities that accelerate our dying off.
There is no “big ideal”. I am in my late 60s and for the last 40 year’s science’s great white hope for energy, nuclear fusion reactors, have been “20 years away”. Even if that were true today, they come too late. But it is not all gloom and doom.
The distinguished primatologist Dr Jane Goodhall has given an interview to a London newspaper which expresses her hopes for the new generation and suggests what we should be doing.
(S)he said that the actions of the younger generation were her ‘greatest reason to feel hopeful’, citing Greta Thunberg, who is sailing to the US. When I talked to these young people, they basically all said the same that we, the older generation, have compromised their future and there’s nothing they can do about it. We have been stealing their future and we are still stealing their future now.
It’s getting worse with some of the far right governments who put economic development ahead of protection of the environment. But when the young people said there was nothing they could do about it, that’s when I thought, “No, we’ve still got a window of time. There is hope.”
Dr Goodall went on to assert that every one of us makes some impact on the world every single day and we get to choose what sort of impact we make. There are people living in desperate poverty whose concern is to get enough food to eat regardless of the effect on the environment or animal welfare. On the other hand there is rampant consumerism in “throwaway” societies which are unsustainable.
Dr Goodall is patron of a charity, Population Matters that campaigns for access to birth control to keep the human population within sustainable limits. She believes that nature can bounce back if given a chance but there is something everybody can do.
The main thing is for everyone to understand is that there is something they can do, even if it seems tiny. When millions of people do tiny good things, it adds up. Everyone can play a part in making this a better world and we need to get together now and start working harder.’
The small steps we can take are well rehearsed on here but as I quoted Donald Trump let me remind you of one; our use of things made of plastic. Now in themselves plastic goods are not a problem — Greta Thunberg’s yacht even has a blue plastic bucket for a “convenience”. You can even see them as a way of sequestering carbon rather than burning coal or natural gas for energy. The problem is us using too many products and disposing of them irresponsibly after using them once.
The enviromentalists’ mantra on plastics is “reduce, reuse and recycle”. I have diligently recycled everything my local council will collect. It is surprising what cannot be recycled due to current technology in the recycling process. They cannot recognise what black plastic containers are made of so those are disposed of. Neither will containers contaminated by food be accepted so those greasy pizza boxes, despite being card, have to go elsewhere. What about reuse?
Now I do not always carry it with me the reusable water bottle I have but there is nothing wrong with drinking tap water (in the UK), after all Coca-Cola source their Desani from municipal supplies. If there are problems with the supply or its taste, get a water filter. Despite the scare stories, you can refill empty “spring” water bottles and if it means you don’t buy one or two more before you finally recycle them, it is a small contribution.
Have a look at the plastic packaging items you do have to buy. My Quorn burgers come in plastic trays which can be reused. I clean them and use them to freeze and store food like stews or curries when I make more than I need on the day (sorry Tupperware). I also used them to make giant ice cubes when we had a heatwave. I am currently working on a cunning plan to recycle plastic tubs for the IKg of peanut butter into hanging plant pots.
What about cleaning products? I suspect we all have one of those very handy pump action spray bottles to attack dirt on this that and the other surfaces. The pump spray mechanism is quite complex and must take quite a bit of energy to fashion and assemble. So why are we expected to throw away a perfectly good piece of equipment just because we have used the 750ml of product it came with? The chemical companies have a dirty little secret. Virtually all of these spray cleaners use variations on a standard detergent with perfume added. One way to reuse them is to get a giant bottle of “all purpose cleaning liquid” and use it diluted to refill those bottles. There are also many homemade cleaners that can be more effective and which can be convieniently used in one of those reused bottles. They also save you money! You are also saving the fuel it takes to transport those full bottles of Whizzo cleaner specifically for “the bit behind the bath taps it’s difficult to clean” (even tho it’s the same stuff as the general bathroom cleaner in a different bottle).
Now these are just some small example of respecting the planet. They do not involve major changes in lifestyle that will be needed in the future, if only because the ordinary person will not be able to afford to carry on as usual.
However as Jane Goodall says, millions of people doing tiny good things adds up. Take a first step today.