Climate change is putting human exceptionalism to the test.
For eons, we judged the world with our eyes and our feet and we knew the Earth was flat. It was common sense — no need to overthink things. When we learned math and science we corrected our mistake. The intelligent mammals were reminded to question the obvious.
It’s still seductive to judge the world by what we see in front of us. We measure change in minutes and days instead of decades. To the eye, we’ve mastered the world so completely that food, water, and shelter can be taken for granted. We are exceptional; exceptions to the limits constraining other forms of life. We wear fashionable clothes and trade numbers on computers to build resorts and fly spacecraft. In the process we forget that we’re still mammals.
In Charles C. Mann’s 2018 book The Wizard And The Prophet, the late microbiologist Lynn Margulis suggested that any successful species, in the absence of new predators, will consume to the limits of its resources and perish. She dismissed the idea that humans were exceptions to this in any way. So far our response to global warming, and the voracious consumption patterns of the first world, support her claim. The choices we make today will soon prove whether Homo Sapiens is any different from the bacteria she watched regularly consume themselves to death.
The evolutionary scientists I interview point out how little human instinct prepared us for the economic and social changes of the industrial revolution. The few centuries since then hardly register to a species hundreds of thousands of years old. We got those instincts honestly from a million years of hominid evolution, and another billion before apes walked on two feet. Now those instincts are guiding us to over-consume dangerously, simply because it feels good and we can. Our media add fuel to the fire by using the psychology of advertising to encourage us to consume even more.
Climate change isn’t the disease. It’s the fever of a world trying to rid itself of an infection; a symptom of just how far consumption is overshooting our resources. The cure won’t be easy for anyone, but the disease will be worse. We must have difficult conversations about consuming less. It goes against what our lizard brain tells us is right. It goes against our economic models. But the math doesn’t lie. We can’t continue the cycle of producing, buying, disposing, and producing, irrespective of our needs.
Mann’s book describes two ways we can approach the problem. One (the wizard) is to science our way out of it. We use our big brains to innovate solutions that make our consumption cleaner and remove carbon from the air. Wizarding comes naturally to us. We’ve gotten used to scientists and technology solving our problems without the rest of us having to do much. Wizarding gets us off the hook, promising growth can continue without consequences.
Prophets point out that overconsumption always has a cost. A recent report in the New York Times shows the demand for energy is skyrocketing, driven in part by the electrification climate wizards encourage. The economics of our power grid leave little choice but to build more fossil fuel plants to implement those green solutions in time. The fix remains part of the problem.
Prophets say the solution is not to build greener, it’s to stop building. Drive whatever car you own less. Don’t create the new data center. Fly less. But each of these things is attached to someone’s revenue stream. Revenue streams are how humans protect themselves in a credit-driven market economy. In such a world, maintaining growth registers on an instinctive level as a survival skill. That’s why these conversations are so hard. But none of it changes the math.
Meanwhile, the biggest consequence of our overshoot isn’t the warming. It’s the social stress induced by the warming. Climate change steals resources, one fishery and irrigation well at a time. As each one is removed from the board, we feel more insecure and afraid, leading to distrust and the eventual breakdown of the social contract itself.
Daniel Hoyer is a historian and an expert in complex social systems. His discipline calls this “polycrisis,” and history is full of examples where smaller crises converge to form bigger ones. Hoyer believes we’re already seeing it. He says the increased social stress is important because it prevents us from working together to solve the problem. Each failure to honestly confront our consumption patterns hardens us. It’s a viscous cycle — the consequences of failing to solve the problem create distrust which makes it even harder to solve the problem.
The end game if we run out the clock will be ugly. Fearful humans become self-protective and dangerous. The veneer of civilized behavior stretches thinly across our cultures. Our supply chains are highly strung and fragile. Covid-19, and the navigational failure of one cargo ship in the Suez Canal, showed us how little it takes to inflict global economic pain. In a credit-driven economy which stretches the the limits of just-in-time fulfillment, economic pain all too often becomes physical pain. Convergent stresses lead to social powder kegs needing little to ignite. The kindling is drying today in more ways than one.
Humans are the only species with the ability to choose its own destiny. In that respect we are exceptional. We have all the tools we need to fix this. The question is whether we’re truly so different from the other animals that we can rise above our instincts and act like it. Climbing temperatures are the dead canary in the mine. They tell us we’re burning the floorboards for heat, yet we’re content to simply enjoy the warmth. These aren’t the actions of an exceptional species. They’re the gluttony of a sated one.
When we thought the world was flat we sailed it anyway, daring the edge to show itself. We had courage. We wanted to see the truth for ourselves. Many humans still feel that way. But when explorers departed for uncharted seas, they left behind populations preoccupied with daily life. They were too busy to care about new lands. They had food to grow and families to raise. For the first time in three hundred thousand years, that isn’t good enough. This moment requires all hands on deck if we don’t want to lose everything we’ve built. We must all decide whether we’re just conventional mammals, or something truly different.
— Dave Coulter 4/25/24
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