Affection for our planet is misdirected and unrequited. We need to focus on saving ourselves.
In 2008, I wrote a piece for Salon about renaming ‘Earth’ Day. It was supposed to be mostly humorous. Or mostly serious.
Anyway, the subject of renaming Earth Day seems more relevant than ever in light of our inaction on climate change, the over-running of Congress by climate zombies, and Bill McKibben’s book, Eaarth.
In a 2009 interview, our Nobel-prize winning Energy Secretary, Steven Chu, said:
I would say that from here on in, every day has to be Earth Day.
Well, duh! Heck, we have a whole day just for the trees — and we haven’t finished them off … yet. If every day is Earth Day, than April 22 definitely needs a new name. So I’m updating the column, with yet another idea at the end, at least for climate science advocates:
I don’t worry about the earth. I’m pretty certain the earth will survive the worst we can do to it. I’m very certain the earth doesn’t worry about us. I’m not alone. People got more riled up when scientists removed Pluto from the list of planets than they do when scientists warn that our greenhouse gas emissions are poised to turn the earth into a barely habitable planet.
Arguably, concern over the earth is elitist, something people can afford to spend their time on when every other need is met. But elitism is out these days. We need a new way to make people care about the nasty things we’re doing with our cars and power plants. At the very least, we need a new name.
How about Nature Day or Environment Day? Personally, I am not an environmentalist. I don’t think I’m ever going to see the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. I wouldn’t drill for oil there. But that’s not out of concern for the caribou but for my daughter and the planet’s next several billion people, who will need to see oil use cut sharply to avoid the worst of climate change.
I used to worry about the polar bear. But then some naturalists told me that once human-caused global warming has mostly eliminated their feeding habitat — the polar ice, probably by the 2020s — polar bears will just go about the business of coming inland and attacking humans and eating our food and maybe even us. That seems only fair, no?
I am a cat lover, but you can’t really worry about them. Cats are survivors. Remember the movie “Alien”? For better or worse, cats have hitched their future to humans, and while we seem poised to wipe out half the species on the planet, cats will do just fine.
Apparently there are some plankton that thrive on an acidic environment, so it doesn’t look like we’re going to wipe out all life in the ocean, just most of it. Sure, losing Pacific salmon is going to be a bummer, but I eat Pacific salmon several times a week, so I don’t see how I’m in a position to march on the nation’s capital to protest their extinction. I won’t eat farm-raised salmon, though, since my doctor says I get enough antibiotics from the tap water.
If thousands of inedible species can’t adapt to our monomaniacal quest to return every last bit of fossil carbon back into the atmosphere, why should we care? Other species will do just fine, like kudzu, cactus, cockroaches, rats, scorpions, the bark beetle, Anopheles mosquitoes and the malaria parasites they harbor. Who are we to pick favorites?
I didn’t hear any complaining after the dinosaurs and many other species were wiped out when an asteroid hit the earth and made room for mammals and, eventually, us. If God hadn’t wanted us to dominate all living creatures on the earth, he wouldn’t have sent that asteroid in the first place, and he wouldn’t have turned the dead plants and animals into fossil carbon that could power our Industrial Revolution, destroy the climate, and ultimately kill more plants and animals.
All of these phrases create the misleading perception that the cause so many of us are fighting for — sharp cuts in greenhouse gases — is based on the desire to preserve something inhuman or abstract or far away. But I have to say that all the environmentalists I know — and I tend to hang out with the climate crowd — care about stopping global warming because of its impact on humans, even if they aren’t so good at articulating that perspective. I’m with them.
The reason that many environmentalists fight to save the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge or the polar bears is not because they are sure that losing those things would cause the universe to become unhinged, but because they realize that humanity isn’t smart enough to know which things are linchpins for the entire ecosystem and which are not. What is the straw that breaks the camel’s back? The 100th species we wipe out? The 1,000th? For many, the safest and wisest thing to do is to try to avoid the risks entirely.
This is where I part company with many environmentalists. With 6.5 billion people going to 9 billion, much of the environment is unsavable. But if we warm significantly more than 3.5°F from pre-industrial levels — and especially if we warm more than 7°F, as would be all but inevitable if we keep on our current emissions path for much longer — then the environment and climate that made modern human civilization possible will be ruined, probably for hundreds of years (see NOAA stunner: Climate change “largely irreversible for 1000 years,” with permanent Dust Bowls in Southwest and around the globe). And that means misery for many if not most of the next 10 to 20 billion people to walk the planet.
So I think the world should be more into conserving the stuff that we can’t live without. In that regard I am a conservative person. Unfortunately, Conservative Day would, I think, draw the wrong crowds.
The problem with Earth Day is it asks us to save too much ground. We need to focus. The two parts of the planet worth fighting to preserve are the soils and the glaciers.
Two years ago, Science magazine published research that “predicted a permanent drought by 2050 throughout the Southwest” — levels of soil aridity comparable to the 1930s Dust Bowl would stretch from Kansas and Oklahoma to California. The Hadley Center, the U.K.’s official center for climate change research, found that “areas affected by severe drought could see a five-fold increase from 8% to 40%.” On our current emissions path, most of the South and Southwest ultimately experience twice as much loss of soil moisture as was seen during the Dust Bowl (see “Dust-Bowlification“).
Also, locked away in the frozen soil of the tundra or permafrost is more carbon than the atmosphere contains today (see Tundra, Part 1). On our current path, most of the top 10 feet of the permafrost will be lost this century — so much for being “perma” — and that amplifying carbon-cycle feedback will all but ensure that today’s worst-case scenarios for global warming become the best-case scenarios (see NSIDC bombshell: Thawing permafrost feedback will turn Arctic from carbon sink to source in the 2020s, releasing 100 billion tons of carbon by 2100). We must save the tundra. Perhaps it should be small “e” earth Day, which is to say, Soil Day. On the other hand, most of the public enthusiasm in the 1980s for saving the rain forests fizzled, and they are almost as important as the soil, so maybe not Soil Day.
As for glaciers, when they disappear, sea levels rise, perhaps as much as two inches a year by century’s end (see “Sea levels may rise 3 times faster than IPCC estimated, could hit 6 feet by 2100” and here). If we warm even 3°C from pre-industrial levels, we will return the planet to a time when sea levels were ultimately 100 feet higher (see Science: CO2 levels haven’t been this high for 15 million years, when it was 5° to 10°F warmer and seas were 75 to 120 feet higher: “We have shown that this dramatic rise in sea level is associated with an increase in CO2 levels of about 100 ppm.”). The first five feet of sea level rise, which seems increasingly likely to occur this century on our current emissions path, would displace more than 100 million people. That would be the equivalent of 200 Katrinas. Since my brother lost his home in Katrina, I don’t consider this to be an abstract issue.
Equally important, the inland glaciers provide fresh water sources for more than a billion people. But on our current path, virtually all of them will be gone by century’s end.
So where is everyone going to live? Hundreds of millions will flee the new deserts, but they can’t go to the coasts; indeed, hundreds of millions of other people will be moving inland. But many of the world’s great rivers will be drying up at the same time, forcing massive conflict among yet another group of hundreds of millions of people. The word rival, after all, comes from “people who share the same river.” Sure, desalination is possible, but that’s expensive and uses a lot of energy, which means we’ll need even more carbon-free power.
Perhaps Earth Day should be Water Day, since the worst global warming impacts are going to be about water — too much in some places, too little in other places, too acidified in the oceans for most life. But even soil and water are themselves only important because they sustain life. We could do Pro-Life Day, but that term is already taken, and again it would probably draw the wrong crowd.
We could call it Homo sapiens Day. Technically, we are the subspecies Homo sapiens sapiens. Isn’t it great being the only species that gets to name all the species, so we can call ourselves “wise” twice! But given how we have been destroying the planet’s livability, I think at the very least we should drop one of the sapiens. And, perhaps provisionally, we should put the other one in quotes, so we are Homo “sapiens,” at least until we see whether we are smart enough to save ourselves from self-destruction.
What the day — indeed, the whole year — should be about is not creating misery upon misery for our children and their children and their children, and on and on for generations (see “Is the global economy a Ponzi scheme?“). Ultimately, stopping climate change is not about preserving the earth or creation but about preserving ourselves. Yes, we can’t preserve ourselves if we don’t preserve a livable climate, and we can’t preserve a livable climate if we don’t preserve the earth. But the focus needs to stay on the health and well-being of billions of humans because, ultimately, humans are the ones who will experience the most prolonged suffering. And if enough people come to see it that way, we have a chance of avoiding the worst.
We have fiddled like Nero for far too long to save the whole earth or all of its species. Now we need a World War II scale effort just to cut our losses and save what matters most. So let’s call it Triage Day. And if worse comes to worst — yes, if worse comes to worst — at least future generations won’t have to change the name again.
As a penultimate thought, I suspect that many environmentalists and climate science advocates will have their own, private name: “I told you so” Day. Not as a universal as “Triage Day,” I admit, but it has a Cassandra-like catchiness, no?
Finally, perhaps we should call it “science day.” We don’t have a day dedicated to celebrating science, and don’t we deserve one whole day free from the non-stop disinformation of the anti-science crowd?
As always, I’m open to better ideas….
Eaarth day?
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Language Intelligence: Lessons on persuasion from Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Lady Gaga
It used to be called Ecology Day.
Survival Day? Life Day? Future Day? Finally Time To Clean Up Our Mess Day? Oops Day? Leadership Day? Maturity Day? There are dozens of directions you could go with this. Triage Day has a real ring to it, but I suspect the word triage is a little too abstruse to capture the public’s imagination. Maybe since “Earth Day” has become such a recognized ‘brand identity’ we could keep it and dress it up with modifiers; Decide Not To Vanish From the Earth Day, or Staying Alive On Earth Day?
Dearth day? As in a dearth of common sense, a dearth of respect for nature, a dearth of food and fresh water by 2050?
One helpless human’s reaction to President Obama’s Earth Day Proclamation (and James Cameron’s deep sea dive, Tim DeChristopher’s interview in What Love Looks Like, and the two-year anniversary of the Gulf Oil Spill):
http://witsendnj.blogspot.com/2012/04/magical-thinking-and-draconian.html
Death Day
when we mourn for all the species that has been exterminated by human stupidity and promise to do better and to atone
I think that if the world of science wants to make a point then what it really needs a new name for is “Homo Sapiens”. If scientists could agree on a more appropriate name for a species that is destroying the environment it is dependent on, then that would make a very serious point indeed.
Maybe, Stop Being An Anthropocentrist For A Day, Day. Or STBAAFADD
Interesting to contrast Joe’s perspective with quotes from James Lovelock, from “The Vanishing Face of Gaia”:
“This crisis is the consequence of putting human rights before human obligations to the Earth and all the other life forms we share with it.”
“Much too slowly, some begin to understand that the welfare of Gaia is more important than the welfare of humankind.”
“To be truly environmentally friendly we have to rid ourselves of the illusion that we are separate from Gaia in any way.”
Why Lovelock insists on the name Gaia: “Until we all feel intuitively that the Earth is a living system, and know that we a part of it, we will fail to react automatically for its and ultimately our own protection.”
“Keep in mind that it is hubris to think that we know how to save the Earth: our planet looks after itself. All that we can do is try to save ourselves.”
“There was still no realization that ultimately harm to the Earth system, Gaia, was more serious than harm to humanity.”
Yes, people’s conception of what environmentalism is is obscured by the love and peace parade.
But what we are slowly realizing is that we are all (well the majority) environmentalist….
We want a comfortable and nourishing world to live in …. and one for our kids and their kids to live in.
My World Day…. Love Gaia Day.
Earth Day, The Day of Tears. Earth Day is best preserved as a day of remembrance for that which has been lost. A grief that is too vast to endure can be shared by the survivors on this day of remembrance of the vibrancy and diversity of life that we once celebrated with children’s parades and the championing of lost causes.
Joe- I love your blog. Thank you!
But I have to say, it’s time for you to admit it. You ARE an environmentalist. Call it conservationist! Call it what you’d like, but don’t shy away from it.
And as you explain, one day ain’t gonna do it, whatever we call it. This is a 24/7 effort for us all forever more….
Climate hawk.
The gigantic problem with anthropocentric hubris is understanding of just how ignorant we are. The fraction of Nature that we toss away may be exactly that on which the seventh generation will need to survive; “We only don’t know” should be stamped on all our foreheads. Case in point: we so concerned with furthering green energy generation because of global warming and the impending exhaustion of fossil fuels, but how do we address the exhaustion of so many other non-replaceable natural resources? It seems obvious to me that radical personal simplicity must become the rule if there is going to be a worthwhile human future. I for one would not want to live here if wild nature were to disappear.
I’m watching Frozen Planet, noting that David Attenborough has not mentioned human caused global warming in about 4 hours of viewing time. He is obviously selling his nice cadences and familiarity with the outdoors for a few bucks, since it’s unlikely “Sir” David is unaware of the science.
This makes him a marionette, mouthing scripted words and selling his soul in order to calm down the Discovery Channel’s advertisers.
Good post today, Joe, and worth of Earth Day. The forests will turn out to be just as important in all of this as the Arctic and the soils, though. Arctic ice degradation is caused by forcings outside the area; we can do nothing onsite. Soil loss is partly a function of GW caused floods, but also a consequence of mechanized and toxic industrial agriculture.
Forests we can actually do something about. Farmland will continue to be mined as intensively as possible, and we’re helpless to stop the disappearance of Arctic ice. Forests products are mostly of the throwaway variety, and we’re hammering vast ecosystems and carbon sinks. Here we have an opportunity to be proactive, and not just by joining a tree planting society. I hope you explore this more.
“Triage Day” I think Joe finally gets just how bad it could be.
The Earth will be fine, the biosphere may take millions or even tens of millions of years to recover, but it will recover. Humans, hopefully we not be one of the species that go extinct
The biosphere will not recover so long as anthropocentric industrial civilization on a large scale continues to stomp around the surface of the planet.
Climate Day
Triage Day is really appropriate Joe.
Joy, Climate Day is a really good one as well.
“stopping climate change is not about preserving the earth or creation but about preserving ourselves. ”
True. And anthropocentric, and selfish, and yet unavoidably true. Awful, hard to sell, and sadly true.
Triage day. Trails of tears day.
“It’s getting warmer in the Arctic and ice is disappearing. Whether this is a good or bad thing depends on your point of view:”-
David Attenborough tonight on Frozen Planet. It looks like they want to keep the people in the dark as long as they can. Maybe the owners of our country think they will be able to accumulate enough cash to buy armed fortresses in a river valley in Canada. Or maybe they’re not even thinking about the future beyond their next trip to the Bahamas or Paris.
Well, less ice is good from the POV of orcas.
Strongest statement was one sentence: sea level may rise 1 meter by 2100 affecting millions of people (not 10s or hundreds or millions). This is the supposedly hard-hitting last episode Discovery Channel almost didn’t air.
Joe, this post is important, so thanks for leavening the seriousness with a little humor and good nature.
Two pieces of advice for those who might call this post pessimistic, or alarmist:
1) Enjoy this planet and the fecundity and beauty that it offers today. Its suitability for our homes is not guaranteed.
2) When things get tough for our human societies, try to stick together.
Hansen seriously raises the prospect, in a “burn it all” scenario, of the Venus syndrome where the oceans boil away and Earth never has life again. I guess there are a lot of people who think they know more than Hansen. Read his 1981 Science article and see how right he was as of then. Then tell me how wrong he is now.
Based on what you said early in the post, many people might want to name it “Pluto Day”, at least if they are more concerned with Pluto. On the other hand, I was thinking of “D-Day” since the atmosphere is being invaded.
Here in New York you could have called it “Severe Weather Day” – “Deepwater Hroizon Memorial Day” comes to mind. “Earth Action Day” would argue against the celebrate-the-earth meme.
More: “Conservation Day”, “Clean Energy Day”
Joe, I have to agree with Ellie. You are a conservationist. It is a “conservative” point of view to want to retain the wondrous biodiversity that has evolved on this planet. And thanks for selecting wild-caught Pacific salmon vs. the environmentally destructive farmed Atlantic salmon.
I was on a field trip to Pt. Reyes yesterday with the eminent Professor Emeritus Eldridge Moores (my geology prof in the late 1960s) and his wife Judy (they both are activists who truly are “climate hawks.”) Part of their discussion of plate tectonics and how it has shaped California included a cross section of the Earth. Eldridge pointed out how incredibly thin our atmosphere is when looked at in this cross section, and how it is unique among the planets. Understanding how unusual the geological processes on the Earth, which over eons have allowed for the replenishment of oxygen in our atmosphere which has been essential for our diversity of life forms to evolve, makes one pause when we see what humans are doing to the climate in a quick blink in geologic time.
I have the same bitter taste in my mouth now for Earth Day as I do for Mother’s Day. Setting aside 24 hours out of 8,760 in a year to take a Hallmark Moment and then revert right back to biz as usual, taking both for granted (come on, we all do it), is not the way. Like eating, breathing, sleeping, and walking about, we need to weave in a deep appreciation for mother Earth’s delicately balanced ecosystems and an awareness that we are intertwined in this miracle of nature and that every action, every day, makes a difference. Earth Day makes no sense at all, in this context; it’s akin to designating a day to honor Breathing. Maybe that’s the answer: Breathing Day. On all other days, just take it for granted that the air will be there when we need it.
In honor of man’s undeterred hubris, civilization’s overwhelming demand on natural resources and the relentlessly growing waste stream it creates, and Earth’s inability to sustainably support these demands, and to honor Johannes Kepler, I suggest Mi Fa Mi Day. To remember how man brought misery and famine to the paradise that was once Earth.
Joe wrote: “all the environmentalists I know — and I tend to hang out with the climate crowd — care about stopping global warming because of its impact on humans … I’m with them.”
That’s really too bad — because it is precisely that anthropocentric view that is the driving force behind the climate change catastrophe, and all our other so-called “environmental” problems.
And actually, I think that Joe has it backwards with this “focus on saving ourselves”:
It’s too late to save ourselves — but we MAY still have time to save the Earth.
Which is to say, it is almost certainly too late to prevent anthropogenic global warming and climate change from destroying human civilization and causing a massive die-off of the human species. As far as I can tell from following the science, effects sufficient to do that are pretty much locked in now, even if we were to end all anthropogenic GHG emissions tomorrow.
But it MAY not yet be too late to prevent a mass extinction of most life on Earth and the more-or-less complete destruction of the Earth’s biosphere.
I’ll go with Doomsday. That might get the point across.
Since one day of Earth Love is ridiculous with 300+ days of foolishness surrounding it. Flip it.
How about overconsumption day. One day a year we feast and waste and be selfish, so the rest of the year can be just, conserving and wise.
Me Day
Feast Day
Gluttony Day