Bad News for Lovers of the Pleistocene:

It appears that we have cancelled the next ice age.

 I have been fascinated for some time about this mind-bending prospect, having heard it mentioned casually by a scientist a few years ago. So, I have been watching for substantiating research ever since.

New research from the Potsdam Institute is helping explain more clearly what causes ice ages to start—a combination of lower-than-average summer solar radiation (due to variations in earth’s orbit) and low CO₂ levels. We haven’t yet changed the earth’s orbit to speak of, but CO₂—decidedly yes. The upshot is that the CO₂ that humans are adding to the atmosphere will remain there for so long, and set processes in motion, that the next scheduled ice age is being postponed many thousands of years and essentially cancelled.

The justifiable caveats and conditional statements of scientists are always frustrating, but as the lead author of the study puts it, “The bottom line is that we are basically skipping a whole glacial cycle, which is unprecedented.”

 What to do?

1. Stop thinking that we can just fix global warming and get back to normal in any reasonable human timeframe.
2. Stop thinking that there is nothing left to do—how much and how quickly we reduce CO₂ emissions will still make a huge difference in our children’s and grandchildren’s future.
3. Travel lightly, use energy wisely, recycle, grow food, eat healthy local climate-friendly food, pay fair wages, fight corporate control of our lives and politics, and get really serious about electing wise leaders.
4. Get out and enjoy the gifts of the Pleistocene—cirques, tarns, eskers, drumlins, remnant glaciers, moraines, glacial lake beds, and more—and dream of ice ages past and future.

—through our local foodshed that is.

The yellow plume winding its way through the beautiful Animas River Valley and Durango last August is a well publicized visual — one that many wish would just go away. Not so fast. This was a real disaster and one that we must learn from — a teachable moment on many counts.

 I hesitated to write about it at the time – so much talk, so many accusations, so much political posturing, so many unknowns at the time. The public conversation was curious but ultimately predictable: sadness, followed by madness, then gladness. The sadness in our community was the most striking to me; how could this happen here in this area known for its grand beauty and beckoning environment? The sadness remains. Madness quickly emerged as fingers were pointed — now mostly in the very capable hands of lawyers and politicians. As soon as the color subsided, there was a rush to declare it all over — back to pre-spill conditions for the river, river sports, and the Durango tourist economy. Gladness was officially proclaimed.

My self-imposed throttle on feeling glad was as unscientific, self-centered, and arbitrary as some of the commentary I heard this Summer and Fall. My favorite residents of the Animas River are the ouzels or American Dippers as they swim into the shallows even in winter after the tiny invertebrates that were of such concern during the August spill. I worried that these plump little birds might have given up on our river, and my highly scientific method was to keep looking for them whenever I happened to be in town, if the lighting was right, and if traffic on River Road allowed me to pull off safely. When I finally saw them this Fall, I was glad, and finally ready to more openly ponder what had happened and what it all meant.

There are plenty of more immediate causes of this spill, but the underlying causes seem clear, and not surprisingly, similar to the underlying causes of dysfunction in our industrial food system. Our hands-off attitude toward mining corporations mirrors that toward the agribusinesses that control our food system from seed to plate. Our ability to not see the often ugly impacts of mining (the yellow sludge is gone after all) stems from the same character flaw that allows us to ignore the all too common ugly treatment of farm animals, farm workers, the land, and the environment. We are just as unwilling to pay upfront the true costs of minerals and fossil fuels as we are to pay the true cost of food.

With my lens of local food, I was concerned about the irrigating farmers and ranchers, the immediate impact of shutting down ditches, losing an entire cutting of hay in some cases, Navajo and other farmers downstream, and lingering worries about sediments waiting to be stirred up. What became clear was that this was an eye-opening illustration of how the health of our local foodshed — that area we should look first for our food and that area we should feel most responsible for — is so connected to the health of the surrounding landscape.

What to do? Our efforts to clean up our rivers or rebuild healthy local foodsheds will not get very far if we don’t also address those underlying issues: corporate control including campaign finance reform, willingness to see the impacts of our consumerism, and willingness to pay true costs. We must work on the immediate and the underlying issues.

We also would be wise to pay closer attention to the indicators of health of our whole beautiful foodshed — for us that would include the mine discharges upstream, changing snowpack due to more warm winter storms, the plight of heat-intolerant pikas in the high alpine. Bees, bats, beavers, and birds. Essential carnivores. Soil, air, and water quality. And of course, our ouzels.

A bright young Dartmouth grad turned up at our Old Snowmass office of Rocky Mountain Institute years ago when I ran the water and agriculture programs there. Schooled in systems dynamics, fueled with ideas and idealism, and without a ride home (did I mention he was confident), we quickly added him to our team.

Fast forward, Drew Jones is now with his Climate Interactive team at the Paris climate talks, providing real-time projections to delegates and the public of how various nations’ pledges to cut emissions would affect our world’s temperature in 2100. As this seven-minute video clearly indicates, the pledges already brought to the table go a long way to reducing that temperature rise and show an encouraging willingness to tackle this huge problem. The other clear message in the video is that these initial pledges must be implemented now and followed by continued serious reductions, and on an aggressive timescale — a good example of the need for “Getting Serious Now.”

But how? Leaving fossil fuels in the ground, changing our expectations of “the good life”, upending our travelling habits — daunting tasks that require a much different public will than we have now. In response, Drew’s Climate interactive team uses the term Multisolving to describe climate solutions that help solve other problems at the same time. Wendell Berry calls this seeking “whole solutions.” It’s at the core of permaculture systems. Many call it a “win-win” approach, or in some respects a “no regrets” strategy. We at HCFS see the development of healthy local food systems as multisolving for good food for all, while addressing local economic woes, biodiversity losses, rising health care costs, climate change, and other environmental crises.

I don’t think we need other benefits to justify taking aggressive action on climate change, but in a less-than-perfect world, those collateral benefits may well be the key to generating the requisite public will — and to creating a bit-more-perfect world at the same time.