Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?

by Bill McKibben

  We know about the previous great disruptions in the Earth’s biology because of the fossil record. Five hundred forty million years ago most of the major animal phyla appeared in the fossil record. We call this the “Cambrian explosion,” using the word explosion in its joyful sense. Life seemed suddenly abundant, as evolution tried out many schemes for thriving on our planet. Five times since, much of that life has suddenly disappeared. We call these periods mass extinctions. The common thread that runs through them all is carbon dioxide.

  It’s hard to look back 443 million years to the end of the Ordovician and the first of those debacles, but clearly something went “haywire” in the carbon cycle, which shows “wild swings” throughout the “catastrophe,” in the assessment of Peter Brannen, in his fine book on extinction.13 Brannen quotes one geologist who specializes in the period: “When there are severe, rapid changes in the carbon cycle it doesn’t end well.”14 We know a good deal more about the Permian extinction, 250 million years ago. Among other things, we know it was the worst of all time, and almost the end of all life on earth. The cause was volcanism—not the eruption of charismatic cinder cones like Mount Fuji, but “burbling floods of lava” that poured out of formations called the Siberian Traps. Volcanoes produce lots of carbon dioxide themselves, but in this case the lava also lit off huge deposits of coal, oil, and gas that had built up over hundreds of millions of years.15 Before long (in geologic time), the earth was a kind of hell, the ocean was profoundly acidified, and most of the world’s species were gone forever—this is the only extinction that did serious damage even to the insect kingdom.

  A similar “continental flood basalt,” though this time along fissures from Long Island to Quebec and Mauritania to Morocco, triggered the Triassic-Jurassic extinction, which cleared the planet for the dinosaurs to flourish. And then, sixty-five million years ago, came the event that wiped those dinosaurs out. The end of the Cretaceous is the moment most of us think about when we think about extinctions, and what we see in our mind’s eye is a giant asteroid hurtling in from outer space, “a rock larger than Mt. Everest traveling twenty times faster than a bullet” (in Peter Brannen’s description), one that carved a giant crater into the Gulf of Mexico, triggering a tsunami a thousand feet high and sending huge quantities of earth up into space, which then returned in a “worldwide blizzard of meteorites.”16 Cue the exit of lumbering Tyrannosaurus and the eventual rise of … us.

  Except that the Hollywood picture of the end of the Cretaceous turns out to be, if not wrong, then considerably more complicated. Something else slightly less dramatic but at least as big was going on across the planet from the asteroid strike: the eruption of yet another massive continental flood basalt, this time in what are called the Deccan Traps, in present-day India. “So profound was this Indian volcanism that it would have been enough to cover the entire lower forty-eight United States in 600 feet of lava,” according to Brannen. And enough to do most of the work of driving the fifth great mass extinction via the usual route: carbon dioxide, global warming, ocean acidification. It’s possible that the asteroid “was the gun and the Deccan Traps the bullet.”17 The volcanic eruptions were already under way when the asteroid hit, but studies released in 2018 indicate that its impact “fueled an acceleration,”18 perhaps opening new fissures underwater along the edges of the tectonic plates.19

  In our time, another cloud of carbon dioxide once again envelops the planet. This time it’s not coming from volcanoes; it’s coming from tailpipes and smokestacks. Continent-size floods of lava are not setting vast deposits of coal on fire; instead, continent-size power grids are burning through vast deposits of coal. V-8 engines work as effectively as volcanoes, it turns out—and, surprisingly, a good deal faster.

  There’s not as much carbon to burn as there was at the end of the Permian—carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere will never reach peaks anywhere near as high—but we are burning our hydrocarbons far more quickly than those “continental basalt floods.” For two hundred years, human economic activity has largely consisted of digging up fossil fuels and setting them alight, and while two hundred years seems like a long time to us, in geological terms it’s like a bat out of … well, out of hell. We’re currently injecting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere ten times faster than during the End-Permian, which was, just to repeat, the worst event in the earth’s history.20 (If you compare it to the extinction crisis at the end of the Devonian, 360 million years ago, we’re pushing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere at somewhere between 12,000 and 40,000 times the ancient rate.)21 During the End-Permian, which wiped out 90 percent of marine species, the ocean acidified by 0.7 pH units over the course of 10,000 years; on current trends, we will have dropped the pH by 0.5 units in the 250 years ending in 2100.22 We emit 40 gigatons of carbon dioxide annually at the moment. Our leaders express pride that we seem to be plateauing around that level, but that level is the fastest rate at any time in the last 300 million years, which contains the End-Permian—which, remember, was the definition of bad. Seth Burgess of the U.S. Geological Survey recently published new research on the pulse of carbon dioxide that came as those ancient Siberian lava flows burned all that coal. A reporter asked him if it was appropriate to compare the event with our current situation. “I don’t think the comparison is ridiculous at all,” he said. The timescales of past mass extinctions are “frighteningly similar to the timescales over which our current climate is changing. The cause might be different but the hallmarks are similar.”23

  So, let’s define the plausible outer limits of our danger. What a large team of scientists in 2017 called a “biological annihilation” is already well under way, with half the planet’s individual animals lost over the last decades and billions of local populations of animals already lost.24 In 2018, researchers reported that some local populations of insects had declined 80 percent—and it’s hard to wipe out insects. Even with more charismatic fauna, we don’t notice the declines at first, because there are still plenty of pictures. (A study found that a French person sees more photos of lions in a year than there are actual lions left in West Africa.)25 But these losses come from a multipronged assault: forests cleared for timber and farmland, coastal waters poisoned, tasty animals overhunted and overfished. And now we are, far more rapidly than ever before in Earth’s history, filling the atmosphere with the precise mix of gases that triggered the five great mass extinctions. It’s not that the planet can’t eventually deal with this: over the very deepest time, all that carbon will eventually be turned into limestone in the ocean, and into oil and gas and coal, and eventually the cycle will repeat itself. If you back up far enough, nothing matters.

  But perhaps we, of all creatures, shouldn’t back up that far. Unlike the fishes of the Permian, we’ve been given a warning. Unlike the sauropods of the Cretaceous, we can do something about it. As Peter Brannen wrote in his history of the great cataclysms, “Thankfully we still have time”26—though clearly not much.

  5

  Privilege lies in obliviousness. (White privilege, for instance, involves being able to reliably forget that race matters.) One of the great privileges of living in the affluent parts of the modern world is that we’ve been able to forget that the natural world even exists. In our lifetimes, and the lifetimes of our parents, it’s served mostly as a backdrop. A subdivision is named for what used to be there: Fox Ridge. A suburb is designed to hide the natural world: where, amid the curving streets, are the creeks? A great city seems to produce wealth out of thin air. This is illusion, of course, but powerful illusion. I didn’t start to see through it until, as a young New Yorker reporter, I spent a year tracing every pipe and cable that entered and exited my Greenwich Village apartment, following the water mains and the electric lines and the sewers to their ultimate sources and destinations. In the process, I came to understand the remarkable physicality even of New York: the vast water tunnels built at unimaginable expense and danger and effort, the supply lines that stretched to the hydr
o dams of Hudson Bay and the oil wells of the Amazon Basin.

  Given that it all works so smoothly, we can be forgiven for ignoring the natural world most of the time. It is safely underground or in the walls or out of sight, at the power plant or the waste treatment station. But that smooth operation, that humming efficiency, is beginning to buckle under the pressure of a changing climate. Hurricane Sandy came ashore in New York City, channeling the energy from a record-hot Atlantic Seaboard and riding the raised level of the sea—and suddenly FDR Drive was awash in whitecaps and the South Ferry subway entrance was a cascade of saltwater pouring onto the tracks below. Napa explodes in fire; Cape Town, parched by drought, rations drinking water.

  Let’s put aside, for the moment, the thought of mass extinction. Cataclysm on a geological scale is clearly possible; you can make an argument that the game is up. But even if that is our eventual due, life will first look and feel different. Life as we know it won’t suddenly end, but it will be crimped; in many places, it already is. To use our metaphor, the size of the board on which we’re playing the game is going to get considerably smaller, and this may be the single most remarkable fact of our time on earth.

  * * *

  That shrinkage is, in itself, novel. For all of human history we’ve been playing out the opposite story. We seem to have begun in Africa and then spread out, slowly at first and then much faster. For North Americans, the chief architects of the modern game, this expansion is close enough chronologically to be our national story. Many of us descend from Europeans who, fed up with the crowded conditions and religious strictures of the Old World, came to a new one. Upon arrival, they slaughtered or pushed aside the people already inhabiting this continent, and then imported boatloads of human chattel to do much of the work of building the “New World.” Those basic and tragic facts haven’t stopped us from deciding that the wealth created here was a sign of moral superiority: we Americans believe that we were particularly innovative and entrepreneurial and brave. In fact, however, our achievement was less the result of noble character, or even the constant willingness to oppress others, than it was a pure windfall. Those who settled North America vastly expanded the board on which Europeans were playing the game, and this new section was beyond compare.

  As the great environmental historian Donald Worster points out, Columbus was looking for a new route to Asian wealth: silks, spices, and so on. What he found was so much better: “an unexpected abundance of space, land, soil, forests, minerals, and waters, an abundance that was almost free for the taking.”1 It was almost as if the Europeans had landed on a new planet—not one of the gaseous, hostile, barren planets of our solar system, but a planet like Europe or Asia, except mostly intact and undegraded. “Somewhere within its borders the United States offered almost everything that people wanted: the world’s greatest expanse of prime soils; a supply of fresh water that seemed limitless (until one got to the western deserts); a forest cover that surpassed in quality, diversity, and utility that of any other nation; a vast renewable resource of furs and fish; and almost every mineral known to man,” Worster observes.2 Imagine, say, the impact of the invention of the internet on modern economic life, and then multiply it by many times. “The discovery of America, and that of a passage to the East Indies by the Cape of Good Hope, are the two greatest and most important events recorded in the history of mankind,” wrote Adam Smith. They brought “dreadful misfortune” to the native inhabitants of those places, but by enlarging the game board, those new colonies raised “the mercantile system to a degree of splendour and glory which it could never otherwise have attained to.”3

  Eventually, of course, North Americans managed to fill up much of the new continent, but that didn’t stop our expansion. By the 1890s, when Frederick Jackson Turner was declaring the frontier closed, another new continent was opening up, this one underground. Humans everywhere were quickly learning to burn fossil fuels, and so once again our range was expanding. Part of that expansion was literal: instead of being confined to the few villages where a horse or your feet could carry you, everyone was able to move about, a liberation from geography that changed everything, right down to whom you might marry. And cheap power led, at the turn of the century, to air-conditioning, which in turn meant that places once so hot as to be marginal were now “the Sun Belt.” But the biggest part of this new expansion was economic: everyone in the Western world now had access to, in essence, slaves who would do absurd amounts of manual work. A barrel of oil, currently about sixty dollars, provides energy equivalent to about twenty-three thousand hours of human labor. The great economist John Maynard Keynes once calculated that from “two thousand years before Christ down to the beginning of the eighteenth century, there was really no great change in the standard of living of the average man in the civilized centers of the earth. Ups and downs, certainly visitations of plague, famine and war, golden intervals, but no progressive violent change.” What changed that was coal, and then oil and gas. All of a sudden, the standard of living was doubling every twenty or thirty years.

  These were onetime gains. There are no new continents to be discovered, and even if enthusiasts chirp excitedly on about someday mining asteroids, that is a step down from discovering the vast forests of Appalachia. (Movie astronaut Matt Damon sort of managed to grow potatoes on Mars, but only because his own dung provided the necessary nutrients. That’s not quite as good as Iowa topsoil.) We are, of course, discovering new kinds of energy. The solar panel, in particular (as we shall see in the final part of this book), is a variety of miracle, but a different kind of miracle from fossil fuel, which was so dense with power, so easy to transport. Our world has been broadening for centuries, and that broadening is, to a large degree, what we think of as normal and ordinary: if the economy doesn’t grow larger each year, we now suffer as a result, because our systems, and our expectations, have become dependent on that growth. We play the game on a much larger board than our ancestors, and we play it with much more power.

  But thanks to global warming, that broadening is now coming to an end, and a period of contraction is setting in. Instead of new continents to inhabit, our space is beginning to shrink. Our earth is large, but it is finite, and we’re beginning to lose parts of it.

  * * *

  Sheer heat—heat alone, the most obvious effect of climate change—has begun to narrow the margins of our inhabitation. Nine of the ten deadliest heat waves in human history have happened since 2000.4 Even places that define cool, like the Pacific Northwest, now see stretches where the heat soars into the triple digits, and 70 percent of the homes in Portland are now air-conditioned.5 But in Portland, a hideous heat wave means that the city opens pet-friendly “cooling centers” stocked with board games. In India, by contrast, the average rise in temperature of a single degree Fahrenheit since 1960 has increased the chance of mass heat-related deaths by 150 percent.6 Those heat waves are unbearably savage. In the summer of 2016, temperatures in cities in Pakistan and Iran peaked at slightly above 129 degrees Fahrenheit for a couple of days in July, the highest reliably recorded temperatures ever measured on planet Earth. (I just checked the oven in my kitchen, and you can set it at 130 degrees.) But as hot as those places were, it was a dry, desert heat. The same heat wave, nearer the shore of the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman, combined triple-digit temperatures with soaring humidity levels to produce a heat index over 140 degrees Fahrenheit. In 2015, in Bandar-e Mahshahr, in Iran, the heat index reached 165 degrees, the highest ever witnessed on the planet.7

  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.” That’s because evaporation off the s
kin slows down in the humidity; you can’t cool yourself by sweating. “Not even the fittest of humans can survive, even in well-ventilated shaded conditions, when the wet bulb temperature stays above 35,” said one of the scientists. They went on to conclude that about 1.5 billion people, a fifth of humanity, lived in a crescent-shaped area at high risk of such temperatures as the planet warmed. That includes some of the world’s most densely populated regions, in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, as well as those Middle Eastern cities along the sea. In these places, extreme heat waves that now happen once every twenty-five years will become “annual events with temperatures close to the threshold for several weeks each year, which could lead to famine and mass migration.”8 Because, of course, these are precisely the places where most of the population works outdoors. In 2018, new research made it clear that the North China Plain, with 400 million residents, fell squarely in this red zone. “This is going to be the hottest spot for deadly heat waves in the future,” one MIT professor explained. “Continuation of current global emissions may limit the habitability of the most populous region of the most populous country on earth.”9

  So: the world we’ve known is quickly being replaced by a new one, and this planet is effectively closer to the sun. As a result, by the 2070s, tropical regions that now get one day of truly oppressive heat a year can expect 100 to 250 days. By 2100, the most recent study notes, “even under the most optimistic predictions for emissions reductions, experts say almost half the world’s population will be exposed to potentially deadly heat for twenty days a year.”10 “Lots of people would crumble well before you reach” these maximum readings, one of the analysts explained. “They’d run into terrible problems.” The result, he added, would be “transformative for all areas of human endeavor—economy, agriculture, military, recreation.”11 Already, increased heat and humidity have cut the amount of work people can do outdoors by 10 percent, and that effect should double by midcentury.12 A new report on Florida farmworkers found “more and more people that have dehydration” as a result of rising temperatures. Undocumented migrants are “especially vulnerable, as they are less likely to demand rest, shade or water for fear of retaliation.”13 In many places, it will simply be too muggy for humans to do the work of humans.