[D66] Falter - Has The Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?

[R.O.]

https://www.utne.com/environment/bill-mckibben-falter-zm0z19uzhoe


  The End of Nature, Part Two

By
Michael Engelhard
utne.com
3 min
View Original 
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/Photo provided by Henry Holt & Co./

After decades of efforts to protect Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife 
Refuge and attacks on it thwarted, the pendulum, with the last election, 
swung back again. Oil reserves suspected under the caribous’ calving 
grounds have been fast-tracked for drilling. Federal environmental 
regulations and agencies are being watered down or dismantled. Science 
has taken a back seat to short-term profits. Meanwhile, in that far 
north where haywire thermoregulation manifests urgently, visibly, and 
pervasively, homes topple from eroding ocean bluffs, skeletons emerge 
from thawing soil, polar bears starve, snowmachine riders drown in 
thinning sea-ice, shore-bound walruses trample each other to death, and 
permafrost melts, spewing methane into an already hothouse atmosphere.

The specter is nothing new. The activist and environmental studies 
scholar Bill McKibben was the first to raise broader public awareness of 
a climate crisis with his 1989 classic /The End of Nature/. Despite 
mounting, incontrovertible evidence in the past 30 years, the problem 
has worsened, that book’s gloom, sadly, has been vindicated. “The human 
experiment is now in question,” McKibben warns in /Falter/, a sequel of 
sorts. He’s the founder of 350.org, the first global citizens movement 
to fight anthropogenic climate change—the organization’s name refers to 
its goal of reducing atmospheric carbon dioxide to 350 parts per 
million, the upper limit of what is considered safe to avoid 
tipping-point chain reactions. Favoring localized economies and 
alternative energy forms, McKibben, no Luddite, advocates for social and 
environmental justice. The primal threat, he insists, are entrenched 
elites averse to structural change, because “so far, things have been 
working out”—famous last words from a skydiver with a faulty parachute.

Somewhat jarringly jetting to global hotspots, McKibben reports scenes 
from the frontlines: dead coral fields resembling “an empty parking 
garage,” flights into Delhi canceled when smog makes the runway 
invisible, or cannon fire in the “war zone” of vast, hellish Alberta tar 
sands operations, meant to scare off birds for their own good. He allows 
that /Falter/’s bleakness “cuts against the current literary grain” of 
upbeat TED talks and current-affairs books that chart recent 
improvements in living standards. Many of those come at a high price, 
with costs to the environment. “Because of the way power and wealth are 
currently distributed on our planet,” McKibben writes, “we’re uniquely 
ill-prepared to cope with the emerging challenges.” Yet, “Resistance to 
these dangers is at least possible.” One may object to or tire of his 
metaphor of the human enterprise as a game. But we’d still better listen 
to him.

/Falter/’s pages brim with “sentences uttered with your back to the 
wall,” in Thoreau’s phrasing. For relief, McKibben injects humor, 
summarizing cryogenics as collecting heads in a giant thermos, or 
describing a Silicon Valley mogul whose self-centeredness “makes Ayn 
Rand look like Mother Theresa.”

Our backs always have been against the wall in the grand quest for 
survival. The ability to cooperate in nomadic bands and pass on lessons 
learned, resulting from our sophisticated brain, led to our species’ 
ascendancy. It’s also what might enable us to resolve this current mess. 
Unfortunately, the technology that serves to establish global action 
networks keeps us enslaved. “A man with a phone more or less permanently 
affixed to his palm is partway a robot already,” McKibben writes. 
Virtual worlds can be isolating, alienating, trapping us inside 
make-believe realities or social-media echo chambers, while the 
foundation of all known life crumbles around us.

The fallacy that some fix, some invention sprung from ape minds can save 
our civilization and the planet is easily uncovered. It’s what got us in 
trouble in the first place. Take the Global Seed Vault dug into an 
Arctic mountain on Svalbard. Climate-controlled, using coal mined nearby 
for refrigeration, it stores samples of crucial food crops and is 
intended to last for ages. Heavy rains already once flooded its entrance 
tunnel and then froze. Forests denuded? Dig up coal or drill for oil. 
Feed exponentially growing populations? Industrial agriculture. Oceans 
overfished? Design more efficient sounders and sonars for trawlers, farm 
seafood, or switch to lab-grown protein substitutes. Species extinction? 
Transplant wildlife or dabble in resurrection biology. Congested cities? 
Air taxis and Amazon drones . . . The next, large-scale step in our 
can-do frenzy, geo-engineering, holds its own set of unforeseen or 
ignored consequences. Ultimately, these are not technological or even 
political but moral dilemmas.

The refusal to act in the face of crisis or acting half-heartedly, 
sluggishly, is a choice. This, too, is part of our mental makeup. We 
evolved facing dire wolves in plain sight, not creeping automation or 
the latter-day, nebulous foe that will uproot our descendants and 
extinguish our other-than-human kin. A writer doesn’t owe readers hope, 
only honesty, McKibben states, offering “engagement not despair.” Do not 
expect solutions from /Falter/, but trends smartly examined, which may 
yet ring in a sustainable future.

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