Awe is inspired by two things: beauty and vastness. It’s hard to imagine anything more transformatively beautiful and vast than the planet as seen from space, especially as it is framed by a seemingly infinite black emptiness. It is perhaps the clearest visual illustration of interconnection, the evolution of life, deep time, and infinity. From this vantage, the “environment” is no longer an environment, a concept, a context, over there, outside of us. It is everything, including us.
The overview effect changes people. One Apollo astronaut became a preacher upon returning to Earth. One began transcendental meditation and devoted himself to volunteering. One, Edgar Mitchell, founded the Institute of Noetic Sciences, which researches human consciousness. “On the return trip home,” Mitchell said, “gazing through 240,000 miles of space toward the stars and the planet from which I had come, I suddenly experienced the universe as intelligent, loving, harmonious.”
Since Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space, in 1961, only 567 people have seen our home with their naked eyes. Most astronauts have seen Earth only in partial shadow, and the rarity of witnessing the fully illuminated planet is likely what motivated the Apollo 17 crew member to photograph it. According to the space engineer Isaac DeSouza, “540 [now 567] people experiencing space is a novelty. One million people experiencing it is a movement. One billion people, and we’ve revolutionized how the planet thinks of the Earth.” For that reason, he cofounded SpaceVR, a start-up intending to send a satellite equipped with high-resolution virtual-reality cameras into orbit. The company’s goal: “to give everyone in the world the opportunity to experience the ‘Overview Effect.’”
Commenting on this possibility, the University of Pennsylvania researcher Johannes Eichstaedt noted, “Behavior is extremely hard to change, so to stumble across something that has such a profound and reproducible effect, that should make psychologists sit up straight and say, ‘What’s going on here? How can we have more of this?… In the end, what we care about is how to induce these experiences. They help people in some ways be more adaptive, feel more connected, reframe troubles.”
Describing his nonvirtual experience of the overview effect, the astronaut Ron Garan said, “I was flooded with both emotion and awareness. But as I looked down at the Earth—this stunning, fragile oasis, this island that has been given to us, and that has protected all life from the harshness of space—a sadness came over me, and I was hit in the gut with an undeniable, sobering contradiction.”
What contradiction? That our planet protects us from the harshness of space but we don’t protect it from the harshness of us? That while everyone knows we live on Earth, you can believe it only by leaving?
Glimpses of Ourselves
The earliest spectacles, made in Pisa, date back to around 1290. A decade later, in Venice, the convex glass mirror was invented—likely an accidental discovery, connected with the development of the lenses used in glasses. The rare mirrors that existed before were dull, imprecise, and distorted. Just as a journey to the moon enabled us to see our own planet, an invention meant to help us see others enabled us to see ourselves.
While the first clear images of Earth inspired its inhabitants to protect it, kick-starting the environmental movement, the first clear reflections of our ancestors inspired them to understand themselves. By 1500, a wealthy person could afford a mirror. “As the fourteenth century drew to a close and people started to see themselves as individual members of their communities,” writes the historian Ian Mortimer, “they started to emphasize their personal relationships with God. You can see that transformation reflected in religious patronage. If in 1340 a wealthy man built a chantry chapel to sing Masses for his soul, he would have the interior decorated with religious paintings, such as the adoration of the Magi. By 1400, if the founder’s descendant redecorated that chapel, he would have himself painted as one of the Magi.” The rise of the glass mirror also precipitated a rise in self-portraiture (which might be considered early selfies) and first-person novels, and intensified personal reflection in letters.
When babies begin to recognize their reflections, they display avoidance, withdrawal, and embarrassment, perhaps best exemplifying the term “self-conscious.”
Only a few nonhuman species are known to recognize their reflections in mirrors. These include orcas, dolphins, great apes, elephants, and magpies. A recent addition to this list is a species of tiny coral fish called the cleaner wrasse, so-named because it eats mucus, parasites, and dead skin off larger fish. Usually, scientists test mirror recognition by placing a dot on an animal’s face and seeing if the animal engages with it, making the connection between its face and its reflection. To test the cleaner wrasse, scientists placed individuals in tanks with mirrors. At first, the fish behaved aggressively, attacking their reflections. “But eventually,” reports National Geographic, “this behavior gave way to something far more interesting.” The fish started “approaching their reflections upside-down, or dashing towards the mirror quickly, only to stop right before touching it. At this phase, the researchers say, the cleaner wrasse were ‘contingency-testing’—directly interacting with their reflections, and perhaps just starting to understand that they were looking at themselves and not another wrasse.” After the fish got used to the mirrors, scientists injected some of them with a colored gel that could be seen under their skin—a change they could detect only if they looked at their reflections. Some were injected with a gel that did nothing to their skin, and others were injected with the colored gel but were not offered mirrors. “Fish injected with a clear mark didn’t scrape, and neither did those with a colored mark when no mirror was present. Only when the fish could see their mark in a mirror did they try to scrape it off, suggesting that they recognized their reflections as their own bodies.”
Cleaner wrasse live in the kinds of reefs that will become extinct even if we successfully meet the Paris accord’s goals and warm the earth by only two degrees.
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About a decade after “The Blue Marble” circulated around the globe, incontrovertible evidence of anthropogenic global warming emerged. In 1988, the NASA scientist James Hansen testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources. “Global warming,” he said, “has reached a level such that we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence a cause and effect relationship between the greenhouse effect and the observed warming.” His testimony helped to upload the term “global warming” into the American vernacular. That same year, then-presidential nominee George H. W. Bush, a self-identified environmentalist, gave a speech in Michigan, the car capital of America, in which he said, “Our land, water and soil support a remarkable range of human activities, but they can only take so much and we must remember to treat them not as a given but as a gift. These issues know no ideology, no political boundaries. It’s not a liberal or conservative thing we’re talking about.” He pledged to “fight the greenhouse effect with the White House effect.” That year, forty-two senators—about half of whom were Republicans—urged Reagan to press for an international treaty modeled on the ozone agreement.
It’s worth revisiting the ozone agreement, if only because it demonstrates the possibility of international environmental cooperation. Signed in 1987, it was called the Montreal Protocol, and its original version required developed countries to begin phasing out chlorofluorocarbons—ozone-destroying compounds found in refrigerants and aerosol propellants—in 1993 and achieve a 50 percent reduction by 1998. They were also required to halt their production and consumption of halons, compounds used in fire extinguishers that damage the ozone layer. According to the EPA, “Because of measures taken under the Montreal Protocol, emissions of ODS [ozone-depleting substances] are falling and the ozone layer is expected to be fully healed near the middle of the 21st century.”
About six years before James Hansen’s congressional testimony, and after a decade of investment in climate change research, Exxon slashed its budget for investigating how CO2 emissions from fo
ssil fuels would affect the planet, reducing it by 83 percent. Then the fossil fuel industry launched a disinformation campaign, producing false reports that, if believed, would excuse America from a painful self-examination. In his investigative article “Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change,” Nathaniel Rich writes: “It is incontrovertibly true that senior employees at the company that would later become Exxon, like those at most other major oil-and-gas corporations, knew about the dangers of climate change as early as the 1950s. But the automobile industry knew, too, and began conducting its own research by the early 1980s, as did the major trade groups representing the electrical grid. They all own responsibility for our current paralysis and have made it more painful than necessary. But they haven’t done it alone. The United States government knew … Everybody knew.”
And yet we still displayed avoidance, withdrawal, and embarrassment. We were—and to some extent remain—in the earliest stages of development when it comes to examining our impact on our planet: babies recognizing ourselves in the mirror.
In the first one hundred days of George W. Bush’s presidency—thirteen years after his father’s speech in Michigan—he retracted a campaign promise to regulate emissions from coal-fired power plants and withdrew the United States from the Kyoto global climate change treaty. His justification was as significant as the withdrawal itself: he cited scientific doubt. Bush promised that “[his] Administration’s climate change policy will be science-based.” That same year, he established the U.S. Climate Change Research Initiative, one of whose chief priorities was to study “areas of uncertainty” in climate change science. In his speech discussing why the United States would not take part in the Kyoto Protocol, Bush said, “We do not know how much effect natural fluctuations in climate may have had on warming. We do not know how much our climate could or will change in the future. We do not know how fast change will occur, or even how some of our actions could impact it.”
In America, it is easier than ever for the Left to blame the Right for our environmental negligence, especially now that we have a president who shrinks national forests, opens protected land to oil interests, renders the Environmental Protection Agency a Fossil Fuel Protection Agency, tries to defibrillate the coal industry, removes federal protection of waterways, and pulls out of the Paris accord. But that blaming can also be a means of turning away from our own reflections. Although his administration achieved some environmental progress, Obama failed to push climate legislation forward during his first two years in office, when he had a Democratic Congress. Recently, supposedly progressive hotbeds have failed on climate change: Washington State rejected a carbon tax, and Colorado refused to slow down oil and gas projects. Abroad, the French turned out in huge numbers to protest a gasoline tax. After three weeks of violent demonstrations, Emmanuel Macron announced that the tax would be suspended.
Signs of progress like We Are Still In (a coalition of American leaders committed to achieving the goals of the Paris accord without the help of the federal government), the Last Plastic Straw, Meatless Mondays, the plastic-bag tax, and even China’s 2020 action plan for pollution and climate change—are they all just contingency-testing? Are we merely experimenting with how our behavior affects our reflections, as the cleaner wrasse did before making the connection? Just starting to understand that we are looking at ourselves and not governments or corporations? These are first steps, certainly, but they are only baby steps. And we need to be sprinting toward change.
Almost fifty years after the Apollo 17 astronauts took “The Blue Marble,” and about thirty years after James Hansen first testified on global warming, America elected a president who has posted more than one hundred tweets expressing climate change skepticism, including these:
We should be focused on magnificently clean and healthy air and not distracted by the expensive hoax that is global warming!
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They call it “climate change” now because the words “global warming” didn’t work anymore. Same people fighting hard to keep it all going!
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This very expensive GLOBAL WARMING bullshit has got to stop. Our planet is freezing, record low temps, and our GW scientists are stuck in ice.
What is your response to those statements? Anger? Terror? Defiance? They fill me with a primitive rage that I feel only when someone endangers my children.
But those responses are misplaced.
There is a far more pernicious form of science denial than Trump’s: the form that parades as acceptance. Those of us who know what is happening but do far too little about it are more deserving of the anger. We should be terrified of ourselves. We are the ones we have to defy. Self-recognition does not always indicate self-awareness, critics of the mirror test say. I am the person endangering my children.
Mortgaging the Home
“I am convinced that humans need to leave Earth,” Stephen Hawking said. “The Earth is becoming too small for us, our physical resources are being drained at an alarming rate.”
The Global Footprint Network (GFN) is a consortium of scientists, academics, NGOs, universities, and tech institutions that measures the human ecological footprint. By looking at the natural resources required to produce what we consume, as well as how much greenhouse gas is emitted, the GFN calculates a budget that lets us know to what extent we are living within our means. The answer depends entirely on who is referred to by “we.” If the 7.5 billion people on the planet had the needs and outputs of the average Bangladeshi, we would require an Earth the size of Asia to live sustainably—our planet would be far more than enough for us. Earth is approximately the right size to supply the Chinese budget—despite being the face of environmental villainy, the Chinese currently get the balance right. For everyone to live like an American, we would need at least four Earths.
According to the GFN, the end of the 1980s marked the end of Earth’s ability to supply earthlings’ demands. From that point forward, we have been living in what might be called ecological debt—spending at an unsustainable rate. The GFN estimates that by the 2030s, we will have reached the point of requiring a second Earth to satisfy our earthly needs.
Most readers of this book live with some kind of debt, whether it be student loans, auto loans, credit card debt, or a home mortgage. (Seventy-three percent of American consumers have outstanding debt when they die.) When considering a loan, banks look at the applicant’s debt-to-income (DTI) ratio. Most financial planners consider a debt-to-income ratio of 36 percent or lower to be healthy. No one with a DTI ratio of higher than 45 percent is likely to get a loan from a bank. (A key part of the Dodd-Frank Act, a response to the financial crisis of 2008, was the qualified-mortgage rule, which stipulated that borrowers must have a DTI ratio of 43 percent or less to qualify for a loan.) Humanity has a DTI ratio of 150 percent, meaning we are consuming natural resources at a rate 50 percent greater than Earth’s ability to replenish them.
The expression “mortgaging our children’s future” has been used in many contexts, from tax cuts that will produce debt to a lack of investment in infrastructure. Someone will have to pay for our choices, we know without believing. We are also mortgaging our children’s future with lifestyles that will create future environmental calamities. In fact, twenty-one youth plaintiffs have filed a “constitutional climate lawsuit” against the federal government, asserting that “through the government’s affirmative actions that cause climate change, it has violated the youngest generation’s constitutional rights to life, liberty, and property, as well as failed to protect essential public trust resources.” The Trump administration tried to intervene and get the case dismissed, but the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in favor of the youth plaintiffs, allowing the case to proceed.
The American dream is to have a better life than one’s parents—better primarily in the sense of affluence. My grandparents lived in a larger and more valuable home than that of their parents. My parents live in a larger and more valuable home than tha
t of their parents. I live in a larger and more valuable home than that of my parents. This defining of “having enough” as “having more” is the mentality that created both America and global warming. It is problematic on all scales, and self-destruction is built into the model, because nothing can grow forever. Many economists argue that millennials are the first generation of Americans since the Great Depression to do worse, financially, than their parents.
My grandmother and I used to arrange coins into paper rolls to take to the bank and exchange for bills; if we left with five dollars, we were rich. On supermarket trips, she bought sale-priced foods as if shopping not only for her living family but for all her dead relatives. When taking me out for breakfast—a treat reserved for special occasions—she would buy two bagels, one with cream cheese, and then transfer half the cream cheese onto the dry bagel. And when she retired, after decades of twelve-hour days managing corner grocery stores, she had more than half a million dollars in savings. She wasn’t putting away all that money so she could leave it to her children and grandchildren. She simply wanted to make sure that she would never have to take anything from us—that no one would ever have to pay for her care.
My great-grandparents lived in a wooden house with no indoor plumbing and on cold nights would sleep on the kitchen floor by the stove. They never could have believed the things I have: a car that I drive for convenience rather than necessity, a pantry stocked with foods imported from all over the planet, a home with rooms that aren’t even used on a daily basis. And my great-grandchildren won’t believe it, either, although their disbelief will have a different spirit: How could you have lived so high and left us with a bill too large to be paid—too large to be survived?
Debts caused by tax cuts can be negotiated. Infrastructure that has fallen into disrepair can be fixed or replaced. Even many forms of environmental damage—ocean dead zones, water pollution, biodiversity loss, deforestation—can be and have been reversed. But with respect to greenhouse gas emissions, the notion of mortgaging doesn’t make sense: no one—no institution, no god—would give us a loan so wildly out of proportion with our means. And while humankind might feel too big to fail, no one will bail us out.
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