Deep Future

by Curt Stager

  Most of the grains are light brown—that’s nitrogen. Nobody pays it much attention except as an inert lung-filler or as the preferred diet of a few microbes. About a fifth of them are white—that’s free oxygen. It wouldn’t be here if photosynthesis had never evolved to pump it out as waste, so by rights it ought to be called air pollution. But if photosynthesis had never existed, then neither would we, so we won’t be faulted for being thankful that plenty of oxygen is here for us to breathe. And less than one in a hundred of the little grains are gray—that’s CO2, a black carbon dot pinned between two white oxygen atoms.

  It strikes me as odd that I, an investigator of climate change who has apparently been somewhat “blinded by science,” have never made the gut-level connection between global warming and the touch of wind on my skin until this moment. The gases that are warming the world, acidifying the oceans, and changing the isotopic compositions of our bodies are not just words on paper or formulae on some professor’s chalkboard. They are filling your lungs and bumping into your face as you sit here reading my words and vibrating in a professor’s throat as she delivers a lecture. They flood the seemingly empty spaces between our eyes and the horizon, and between our hats and the clouds. As the diffuse substance of wind, they caress us in summer and freeze us in winter. And by the end of this century, there may be twice as many of them in the transparent sea of air as there were in 1750. Artificial greenhouse gases are as real and present in our daily lives as the Anthropocene is; as Bill McKibben argued in The End of Nature, they have already erased the last vestiges of untouched wildness anywhere on the planet. They’re right here among us and inside of us, they’re increasing in abundance, and they’re determining the climatic future of the world. If they were large enough to be seen with the unaided eye, it would be impossible for anyone to ignore them.

  A thick bank of chilling mist engulfs us as we pull into the waterfront town of Belfast, just a few miles away from my father’s house on the edge of Penobscot Bay. The early-evening air is calm and moist, and a foghorn hoots a low, resonant warning in the distance. Herring gulls shuffle aside to make room for our car in the parking lot overlooking the harbor, or what can be seen of it in this thick whiteness. We step out into a delicious tangle of smells that have been amplified by the humidity; the tang of salt, the sweetness of mudflats and seaweed, and the mouthwatering aromas of steamed lobster and melted butter leaking from the door of a nearby restaurant. First things first, though: we head for the water’s edge before following the scent trail to dinner.

  Brown, nut-sized periwinkle snails are grazing on soft algal films that coat the wet granite blocks on either side of the boat launch ramp. These animals, now as common as pebbles on this rocky coast, are accidental invaders who emerged from the watery holds of European ships during earlier centuries along with the little green crabs that scuttle among tufts of rubbery brown rockweed just below the waterline. And like me and everyone else who lives in the Americas, even the rocky coast itself is an immigrant of sorts. This section of eastern Maine was thrust up and welded onto the continent when a landmass that geologists call Avalon collided with proto-North America. It happened nearly half a billion years ago amid a long series of collisions that built the White Mountains on today’s route and crushed the ocean that the Champlain fossil reef once thrived in. Since its arrival on this shore, the remnant strip of Avalon has been roasted by volcanoes, scoured by ice sheets, and alternately stranded and flooded by glacial and interglacial sea-level changes.

  Why fear change when we live in such an inconstant world? I sometimes wonder if it’s not global warming that worries us so much as change of any kind. Take the rising trends of temperature or sea level from this century and flip them over their respective whiplash peaks into the reversed modes that will dominate the long tail of the CO2 curve, and they can seem just as worrisome either way. The retreat of Arctic sea ice may be dreadful to an Inuit seal hunter today, but the eventual refreezing of the polar ocean in the distant future could be equally troubling to northern fisherfolk who will live on the far side of the Anthropocene carbon peak.

  There may be good practical reasons, dating back to the earliest days of more tenuous human existence, for disliking change. In those times it might have brought a risk of starvation, or death by predators or foes, or dangerous exposure to the elements. But today we face another situation altogether. By succeeding so spectacularly, crowding into every imaginable habitat and weaving ever more complex social and economic networks, our species is now pressed so tightly against the physical limitations of life on a finite planet that almost any kind of environmental disturbance is potentially disruptive. Because we live everywhere, someone is bound to suffer somewhere regardless of whether it warms or cools or wets or dries. Our boat has been overloaded with gear and passengers, so it’s perfectly reasonable to fret about the wind and waves. But I can’t help thinking that it’s not so much the weather that is ultimately to blame as it is our own behavior.

  The edge of the sea is mostly smooth and still beneath its heavy blanket of fog. But from time to time an isolated swell rolls into view and pushes the edge a little farther up the boat ramp. Perhaps it’s an advance message from an approaching storm, a hint of rougher weather ahead, and it makes me think of the early signs of Anthropocene climate change and ocean acidification that are already stirring many of the more alert among us into action.

  I can understand why some activists feel justified in nudging the human herd in better directions by hook or by crook. But although I do hope that we control our pollution and stop driving so many species to extinction, I would rather have us do it on purpose rather than be tricked into it.

  That’s where science comes in. In a media-saturated world where public opinions are easily swayed by team loyalty, marketing strategies, and short-term self-interest, science stands apart as a rare source of relatively impartial, self-correcting information. The strict rules of scientific investigation favor well-supported ideas over weak ones, and the international peer-review system is a firewall of checks and balances that provides an additional line of defense against sloppy or slanted thinking. Good science provides a universal knowledge base that is unusually free of ulterior motives and spin. As that knowledge evolves with the input of new data and ideas, you may sometimes be frustrated by having it change your mind from time to time; I’m sure, for example, that some of the things that I’ve written on these pages might eventually require updating in the face of newly acquired information. But at least that challenge to your current worldview is not the result of someone trying to manipulate you for some hidden, possibly nefarious purpose.

  This is why aggressive activist stances among prominent scientists make me nervous. Most scientists try to stick closely to the facts, following the suggestion of ecologist Erle Ellis and geologist Peter Haff in a recent issue of Eos to “remain free of intentional distortion or personal bias” when giving advice in public. But I also know that at least one well-known figure in the climate community has purposely exaggerated the dangers of global warming in public presentations, because he told me so at a conference. His justification was this: “If people aren’t scared, they won’t pay attention.”

  Environmental professionals today are being called upon to use their scientific credentials as intellectual weapons, and some researchers are tempted to play up the fear factor and downplay their uncertainties in order to shape and hold public attention. But there’s an important difference between informing and promoting or selling, and once you step over that line you have left the fortress of objectivity to become just another mercenary whacking away at people. Worse still, you also risk dragging the good name of impartial science down with you into the muck of the battlefield. I believe that scientists are most valuable to society when they’re seen to stand a little apart from the fad-driven mainstream in order to raise or answer questions as impartially and insightfully as possible. It may be a lonely way to live at times, but I believe that it’s wor
th it; if people stop listening to scientists because they seem to take sides unfairly, then we’re all in trouble.

  We have a lot of work to do if we’re going to deal with our carbon crisis in a responsible manner, and to do it well we’re going to need to learn a lot more about each other and about the environments we live in, not just as they are now but also in the context of history and the foreseeable future. Hopefully, this book can help a bit in that regard. In any case, I’m confident that we have the smarts, the heart, and the time necessary to succeed if we set our minds to it.

  And that leads to the most important take-home message of all. Whatever we decide, we are the ones who will chart the course of this human-centered age and determine the fate of the ecosystems and species that will share the future Earth with us. In a literal sense that can be understood with or without the support of a religious tradition, we are participating in a new creation, the genesis of a world over which we hold an ever-increasing measure of dominion.

  We are not infallible gods, of course, and our role in this remaking of the world is a heavy burden of responsibility to bear, but it is also liberating to recognize the surprising degree of influence that we now have on our home planet, as well as the age-old influences that it still has on us. Finding the right balance between power and responsibility will be our primary task as we struggle to mature further as a wise species, hopefully to more fully merit the pretentious name that we have given ourselves, Homo sapiens.

  For better or for worse, we are both the products and the creators of this remarkable new Age of Humans, and we will be the ones to decide the direction it takes from here on into the deep future.

  Welcome, everyone, to the Anthropocene.

  References

  Prologue

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