In
this essay at Tomdispatch, “The Age of Inhuman Scale,” Rebecca Solnit
reflects on the difficulty of placing climate change in any sort of reasonable
human perspective. She goes on to make a case for divestment and other forms of
direct action against energy producers, a path I do not think I can follow. But in
this extract, about a fourth of the original essay, she traces out brilliantly
the radical sense of disproportion we feel in confronting things that are not
only bigger than everything else, but “bigger than everything else put
together.”
* * *
Last Saturday, . . . the New York
Times gave its story on the International Panel on Climate Change’s
six-years-in-the-making report on the catastrophic future that’s already here
below-the-fold front-page placement, more or less equal to that given a story
on the last episode of Breaking Bad. The end of the second paragraph did
include this quote: “In short, it threatens our planet, our only home.” But the
headline (“U.N. Climate Panel Endorses Ceiling on Global Emissions”) and the
opening paragraph assured you this was dull stuff. Imagine a front page that
reported your house was on fire right now, but that some television show was
more exciting.
Sometimes I wish media stories were
organized in proportion to their impact.
Unfortunately, when it comes to climate change, there is not paper
enough on this planet to properly scale up a story to the right size. If you gave it the complete front page to
suggest its import, you would then have to print the rest of the news at some
sort of nanoscale and include an electron microscope for reading ease. . . .
As it happens, we’re not very good
at looking at the biggest things. They may be bigger than we can see, or move
more slowly than we have the patience to watch for or remember or piece
together, or they may cause impacts that are themselves complex and dispersed
and stretch into the future. Scandals are easier. They are on a distinctly human scale, the
scale of lust, greed, and violence. We like those, we understand them, we get
mired in them, and mostly they mean little or nothing in the long run (or often
even in the short run).
A resident in a town on the
northwest coast of Japan told me that the black 70-foot-high wave of water
coming at him on March 11, 2011, was so huge that, at first, he didn’t believe
his eyes. It was the great Tohoku tsunami, which killed about 20,000 people. A
version of such cognitive dissonance occurred in 1982, when NASA initially
rejected measurements of the atmosphere above Antarctica because they indicated
such a radical loss of ozone that the computer program just threw out the data.
Some things are so big you don’t
see them, or you don’t want to think about them, or you almost can’t think
about them. Climate change is one of those things. It’s impossible to see the
whole, because it’s everything. It’s not just a seven-story-tall black wave
about to engulf your town, it’s a complete system thrashing out of control, so
that it threatens to become too hot, too cold, too dry, too wet, too wild, too
destructive, too erratic for many plants and animals that depend on reliable
annual cycles. It affects the entire surface of the Earth and every living
thing, from the highest peaks to the depths of the oceans, from one pole to the
other, from the tropics to the tundra, likely for millennia -- and it’s not
just coming like that wave, it’s already here.
It’s not only bigger than
everything else, it’s bigger than everything else put together. But it’s not a sudden event like a massacre
or a flood or a fire, even though it includes floods, fires, heat waves, and
wild weather. It’s an incremental shift
over decades, over centuries. It’s the
definition of the big picture itself, the far-too-big picture. Which is why we
have so much news about everything else, or so it seems.
To understand climate change, you
need to translate figures into impacts, to think about places you’ll never see
and times after you’re gone. You need to imagine sea level rise and understand
its impact, to see the cause-and-effect relations between coal-fired power
plants, fossil-fuel emissions, and the fate of the Earth. You need to model
data in fairly sophisticated ways. You need to think like a scientist. . . .
Not quite a year ago, a
climate-change-related hurricane drowned people when superstorm Sandy hit a
place that doesn’t usually experience major hurricane impact, let alone storm
surges that submerge amusement parks, the New York City subway system, and the
Jersey shore. In that disaster, 148 people died directly, nearly that many
indirectly, losses far greater than from any terrorist incident in this country
other than that great anomaly, 9/11. The weather has now become man-made
violence, though no one thinks of it as terrorism, in part because there’s no
smoking gun or bomb -- unless you have the eyes to see and the data to look at,
in which case the smokestacks of coal plants start to look gun-like and the
hands of energy company CEOs and well-paid-off legislators begin to morph into
those of bombers. . .
We tend to think about climate
change as one or two or five things: polar ice, glaciers melting, sea-level
rise, heat waves, maybe droughts. Now, however, we need to start adding
everything else into the mix: the migration of tropical diseases, the
proliferation of insect pests, crop failures and declining crop yields leading
to widespread hunger and famine, desertification and flooded zones and water
failures leading to mass population shifts, resource wars, and so many other
things that have to do with the widest systems of life on Earth, affecting
health, the global economy, food systems, water systems, and energy systems. .
. .
It’s huge. I think about it, and I
read about it, following blogs at Weather Underground, various climate
websites, the emails of environmental groups, the tweets of people at 350.org,
and bits and pieces of news on the subject that straggle into the mainstream
and alternative media. Then I lose sight of it. I think about everything and
anything else; I get caught up in old human-scale news that fits into my
frameworks so much more easily. And then I remember, and regain my sense of
proportion, or disproportion. . . .
* * *
Cf. Dickson G. Watts: “The distant is the great, the near
the little. But the little-near controls man rather than the distant-great.”
Rebecca Solnit, “The Age of Inhuman Scale,” TomDispatch.com,
October 6, 2013. Solnit is a amazing talent who writes regularly
for TomDispatch and has published a number of remarkable books, including Wanderlust: A History of Walking, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster, and
(just out) The Faraway Nearby (available via TomDispatch).
