Was it enough, and what now?
Fall 2022. Major sustainability reports are piling up again, digitally that is, on my desktop—falling as fast as the leaves outside my window. The next climate conference is near, so those unnerving reports are right on time. Sad reports about the numbers of birds and mammals lost in the past few decades are here too.
Close to home. So many reports are showing profound losses over a timeframe of the last 50 years. This hits close to home since this period coincides with my career—one that I see largely as trying to make progress on ecological sustainability. To me, the record on progress during that time includes some genuine and heartening highlights for sure, and that should not be discounted by any means—we must celebrate the gains. Yet, on balance I feel confident in saying that we are seriously losing ground—far more loss than gain. How could you otherwise interpret the reports that worldwide populations of vertebrate species studied by the World Wildlife Fund have declined 69% since 1970? That a number of critical tipping points in climate change are near or already reached? Or that half of US birds are declining?
Earth’s Music. A book I have read and studied this year has so many dog-eared pages that the book is thicker than when I began. Earth’s Wild Music by naturalist-philosopher-ethicist Kathleen Dean Moore is a hard-hitting yet lyrical account of her 50-year career, also coinciding with the time span of the reports on my desktop and with my career. She reflects on her early writings “when loving the world seemed pure and simple,” and goes on to recount—sadly but beautifully—the losses. In an analogy to the common five stages of grief, she sees her passage in coping with these losses as “Tremble—Weep—Awaken—Sing Out.”
Sadness and determination. An anonymous reviewer on Amazon of Moore’s book paraphrased this progression in a way that I can identify with more readily as “Celebration—Lamentation—Bewilderment—Determination.” Less eloquently, I see it as Sad-Mad-Glad: sad at what has been lost in the natural world, mad at how and why this has happened, but glad that there is so much beauty and awe still left in the world to enjoy and protect—and that we have so many things we can still do to help stem the losses and heal the natural world and our relationship to it. People are finding a variety of ways of coping with the losses, but I do see the need for paying attention to what is going on, feeling okay with the stream of emotions it can bring, but ending up at a point recommitted to doing all we can to protect and heal the planet.
What did we miss over the past 50 years? How did we end up at such a precarious spot? I have gone back to textbooks I used in teaching college science in the 1970s and 1980s. I have looked back at weather, climate, and environmental class lectures I gave starting in the mid-1970s. Michael Mann’s new book, The New Climate War, recounts clearly the history of what we knew of climate change over the past decades, and goes on to reveal the disinformation campaigns that I think our society still finds far too convenient to accept. LBJ’s warning to Congress came over 50 years ago, Hansen’s warning nearly 35 years in the past. It’s clear to me that we had plenty of indications early on of where we were heading—lacking some details and a clear timeline of course—as well as the broad direction of what was needed to avoid the catastrophes facing us today. We weren’t so much missing sufficient information as missing many critical opportunities. What opportunities are we failing to act on today?
The Everglades Paradox, as I call it, strikes me whenever we visit our daughter in South Florida. In preparing for these trips, I have read much about how the Everglades have been devastated by human greed and indifference. So many birds and other animals have been lost as the ecosystems were ravaged. Yet, whenever we visit, the expansive views of sawgrass and the fascinating ecosystems that arise from just a few feet of elevation change are awesome. And so many birds! We can’t—or shouldn’t—ignore the history of loss as we delight in what is still here to enjoy, what is still here needing our protection and restoration. The Everglades are the clearest case for me of this contradiction, but I see it everywhere—that there has been so much loss, but much remains. Keeping both competing ideas in mind may be the only way to summon the determination to keep fighting for the natural world.
Staying engaged in fighting for our children’s future is critical. It is easy to become disheartened, bewildered, fatalistic, apathetic, and too paralyzed to act. The forces of disinformation that feed the status quo are all too effective. The status quo will not serve us or our children. As Moore concludes The Earth’s Wild Music, “Our work is not to save our way of life, but to save the world from this way of life’s destructive power.” For me, staying engaged in protecting the natural world, being outside immersed in it, being saddened by the loss but buoyed up by the beauty, the awe, and the good that we can still do is exactly the therapy and inspiration I need.
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