Just keep swimming

LISTEN. Today in Environmental Ethics we continue to seek grounds for a less-than-devastating response to Bill McKibben's more-than-rhetorical subtitle query: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? 

One of us opined last time that climate change is not really all that frightening. Well, we know that some humans consider fear a sign of weakness. "Don't fear COVID" apparently reflects such an attitude. Sometimes, though, acknowledging one's wholly rational fears in the face of an unconquered challenge is the first step to mounting a suitable response, to respecting it as a necessary condition of subduing it.

So, true confession: I fear that we are well on the way to contaminating our oceans beyond the point of healthy recovery in the lifetimes of my children and theirs. "By the middle of this century the ocean may contain more plastic than fish by weight... since 1950 we've wiped out perhaps 90% of the big fish..." We've been more than a bit self-indulgent, imprudent, and downright disrespectful towards ocean habitats. We've failed to grasp their continuity with the rest of life on earth. We've taken them for granted, as an exotic but somehow entirely self-contained and self-sustaining world under the sea, beyond the reach of human malfeasance.  

"It was a bustling city, like in Finding Nemo. But now it just seems quiet, like the lights have been turned off," says the reef scientist. What would Dory do? Dory: "When life gets you down do you wanna know what you've gotta do? Just keep swimming. Just keep swimming. Just keep swimming." 

And, as I was trying to say last time in suggesting that McKibben's just-short-of-despair-but-engaged concern is complemented and not contradicted by Steven Pinker's statement that we should all be happier: "So, we’re cheating death now. That’s what we’re doing, and we’re having fun at the same time." In other words: restoration of damaged reefs and other ocean ecosystems must be a priority, in the human game your generation, class of 2020+, is destined to play. And you must insist on having fun doing it. Just keep swimming, and remember that a relatively few bad apples trying to subvert the EPA and other custodians of our only home don't spoil the whole bunch. There's enough good in the barrel to make restoration and recovery more than a vanishing hope. But 2050 will be here quicker than you can look up Donny Osmond, there's no time to waste. 

Another confession: I've also been guilty, on occasion, of spouting the hollow truism  that "the earth will be fine; its humans who are in trouble." The barely-technical truth of that statement depends on construing "earth" in the narrowest and most barren sense, already devoid of the teeming biodiversity Sir David's Blue Planet celebrates.

  

McKibben can't be "philosophical" about the sun's eventual explosion, he conceded at the end of chapter one. That's good, if being philosophical means being resignedly stoical and not proactively pragmatic. Whether or not we're on collision course with our own asteroid equivalent, we can only play the game well on the premise that it will continue. Hollywood endings are designed to end one show and prime audiences for another, but we're not just the audience. We're players in a more complicated story. Consider the Deccan Traps volcanism, for instance, an interesting complication to the asteroid narrative that might remind us not simply to wait around stoically for the space rock we can do nothing about. 

Will technology end or extend our game? I'm uneasy about Yuval Harari's attitude on this, when he says the potential to "re-engineer human minds" means the end of Homo sapiens and human history. This too, like the un-comforting reassurance that "earth will be fine," seems like a technical point that misses the bigger picture. Learning and adapting is also a re-engineering of minds. If Homo sapiens 2.0  has learned to sustain itself and to respect its place in a bio-diverse nature, won't it be writing the next chapter in our history? They'll not be post-human in our imagination unless we choose to think of them that way. Evolved species are still continuous with their antecedents, they still share an identity. From such simple beginnings, endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful...

More questions posed by today's reading: 

If "a suburb is designed to hide the natural world," can the suburb be reconceived and reconstructed? Or is dense urban living the only ecologically sound option, at least until we possess the infrastructure to support sustainable commuting? 

"If the economy doesn't grow larger each year, we now suffer as a result." So are we in an impossible Catch-22, committed to suffer whether we grow or not? How do we stop that merry-go-round? 

"Nobody with a choice ventures outside." Is that a world any human should want to live in? Not me.

"Tomorrow was always a problem for tomorrow..." We must listen to the Greta Generation. There is a tomorrow.