| FALTER Has the Human Game Begun To Play Itself Out? Bill McKibben New York: Henry Holt & Company, April 2019 |
Rating: 4.5 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-1-250-17826-8 | ||||
| ISBN-10 1-250-17826-6 | 291pp. | HC | $28.00 | |
This is not a book about climate change.
Or, to put it in more accurate but less attention-getting terms, this is a book that considers climate change just one of the existential threats facing human civilization. The others are global thermonuclear war, artificial general intelligence, germline engineering, and human-life extension.
Oh, it contains chapters that lay out the list of our present predicaments flowing from the excess of carbon dioxide we have added to Earth's atmosphere and oceans: rising sea levels, heavier downpours, stronger storms, hotter heat waves, etc. And it reflects its author's lifelong understanding of, and opposition to, the damage our industrial society is doing to the natural world. But the heart of the book is its description of the fifty-year burgeoning of libertarianism. Fostered by Ayn Rand's novels and promulgated by a secretive coterie of billionaires,1 this is simply the idea that the wealthy are the most productive members of society2 and their invaluable efforts deserved to be unfettered by any constraints imposed by a democratic system.
This, in my opinion, is the most important part of the book. The details about the current impacts of climate change are important, of course — vitally important — but the knowledge that powerful people are willing to subvert our democracy to assure their own comfort is even more vital. Such people will not hesitate to deceive the public about climate change, or economic policy, or health care, or immigration. In fact, they have been doing so, and under Trump are emboldened to do it more freely.
"The world, we are told, was made especially for man—a presumption not supported by all the facts. A numerous class of men are painfully astonished whenever they find anything, living or dead, in all God's universe, which they cannot eat or render in some way what they call useful to themselves." – John Muir, from his diary (quoted on Page 252) |
And the most crucial aspect of this is what Bill McKibben calls "leverage": the fact that these people have attained power at the particular time when climate change threatens to push past some tipping point, after which it will be uncontrollable. If that should happen, very likely our civilization is doomed. We would not be able to keep up with the cascading effects: heat waves, stronger storms, record droughts, diseases and insect pests, wildland fires, hordes of climate refugees — and of course the rising sea. Think about the Middle East with its millions of refugees from Iraq and Syria. On the other side of that putative tipping point, refugee numbers increase by orders of magnitude, due to both conflict and climate; and as they bump against borders in trying to reach safety, they ignite more conflict. The total breakdown of social order is a real possibility under those conditions.3
True, there is a lot of gloom and doom in these pages. But it is rational gloom and doom, well supported by observations and citations. It doesn't take much beyond personal experience to accept as valid the limits on safe outside temperature and humidity found by research.
About a decade ago, Australian and American researchers set out to determine the maximum survivable combination of heat and humidity. They concluded that a "wet-bulb temperature" of 35 degrees Celsius set the limit—that is, when temperatures passed 35 degrees Celsius (95 degrees Fahrenheit) and the humidity was above 90 percent, "the body can't cool itself and humans can only survive for a few hours, the exact length of time being determined by individual physiology." – Page 59 |
We've already seen isolated deaths of young, healthy men like football players due to training in similar conditions in the U.S., and heat waves kill more people, often the elderly. In Central America, heat is more of a problem, especially for those who have to work outdoors. It's associated with an emerging epidemic of kidney failure, called Mesoamerican nephropathy, that results from prolonged heat stress and lack of sufficient potable water.4 As average summer temperatures creep upwards and heat waves become more common, Americans will suffer more and more from the problems they bring.
Every human era has had its Gloomy Gus. In the prehistoric Middle East, various Old Testament prophets warned that the wrath of God was about to fall on a heedless populace. The Roman scholar bemoaned the sad times and customs: "O tempora! O mores!" The Greeks had Cassandra. No doubt other civilizations had their own doomsayers. And yet there always were other civilizations. The fall of the Roman Empire wiped out a good deal of knowledge and wealth. But this was not a total catastrophe because of places like Tenochtitlan and Chichen Itza and Ulan Bator and Great Zimbabwe, among others.
Our world is different. Our civilization covers the planet, and while distance and separate jurisdictions provide some insulation between portions of it, that is nowhere near as complete as the isolation of past ages. More significant is the fact that we have entered the Anthropocene: the time when our actions rival the potency of natural forces. No longer can it be said that puny humans cannot overcome nature. We foul the seas with plastic, rivers with fertilizer and pollution, the atmosphere with dust and smog and lately with extra carbon dioxide. Not a pollutant in the traditional sense, still CO2 has a harmful effect: it raises the planet's temperature.
The dire warnings of our age are not of imminent destruction by natural forces or vengeful gods. They are more insidious, telling us that we may do ourselves in, gradually, by failing to notice or to heed the signs of disaster creeping toward us until it is too late — or by failing to rein in the unfettered greed of a few. And if that disaster should arrive, it will be truly global. Humans will very likely survive. Human civilization, however, is at great risk: a risk that grows greater year by year of business as usual.
I cannot omit the fact that McKibben ends his book on a hopeful note. Indeed, he begins it that way as well. His hope is a guarded one, with no sense of ebullience about it — just what you would expect from a veteran of a long campaign. Still, it is hope. I'll quote from his opening, since his prose there is more terse.
Thirty years ago, in 1989, I wrote the first book for a wide audience on climate change—or, as we called it then, the greenhouse effect. As the title indicates, The End of Nature was not a cheerful book, and sadly its gloom has been vindicated. *
* * This volume is bleak as well—in some ways bleaker, because more time has passed and we are deeper in the hole. It offers an account of how the climate crisis has progressed and of the new technological developments in fields such as artificial intelligence that also seem to me to threaten a human future. *
* * I know, too, that this bleakness cuts against the current literary grain. Recent years have seen the publication of a dozen high-profile books and a hundred TED talks devoted to the idea that everything in the world is steadily improving. They share not only a format (endless series of graphs showing centuries of decreasing infant mortality or rising income) but also a tone of perplexed exasperation that any thinking person could perceive the present moment as dark. *
* * I'm grateful for those books because, among other things, they remind us precisely how much we have to lose if our civilizations do indeed falter. But the fact that living conditions have improved in our world over the last few hundred years offers no proof that we face a benign future. That's because threats of a new order can arise—indeed, have now arisen. *
* * Still, there is one sense in which I am less grim than in my younger days. This book ends with the conviction that resistance to these dangers is at least possible. – Pages 1-2 |
I apologize to Bill McKibben for excising so many of his words. I do it only because I feel dire warnings and invocations to caution are best delivered succinctly.
Here we have a book that treats several diverse topics. McKibben is a skilled writer; he does a good job. Still, I could have done without the portions on germline engineering, life extension, artificial intelligence, and (in the Epilogue) space travel. They each deserve a fuller treatment, and there are better treatments in other books. This book is a good read, and an important contribution to the literature on climate change. It provides extensive endnotes, which cite numerous books and media stories. Its index is excellent. I'll call it a must-read. I won't call it a keeper for everyone — but for those keeping track of climate change impacts, or of the libertarian greed that impedes our efforts to mitigate those impacts, it is a valuable supplement to the books by MacLean and Mayer.
To contact Chris Winter, send email to this address.