My Climate Change book club has started a new book, and as such, it is time to philosophize about the meaning of climate change in the face of the hopefully long and prosperous life I plan on leading, which I’m not going to lie, is uncomfortable. We have started the book: Tales of Two Planets: Stories of Climate Change and Inequality in a Divided World. An apropos pick for a group of science nerds trying to cope with climate change, Covid, and long term social isolation. BUT THAT’S NOT WHAT I’M HERE TO TALK ABOUT. In the introduction to the book, the editor John Freeman ponders climate inequality and he observes “... here is the thrust and heave and beauty of life on a planet that seems hostile to our presence.” What struck me in this sentiment and sent me scrambling towards my computer is the view that our planet is hostile towards us, HUMANS!!! I had the pleasure of making the acquaintance of some fellow sailors while I was on my trip sailing up the East Coast, and as conversation these days always seems to drift, we found ourselves talking about the Covid virus, and my companions strayed towards the idea that nature couldn’t be so insidious towards people, that there was no natural explanation for this seemingly hostile virus. Aside from my knee-jerk reaction to respect the opinions of the VAST MAJORITY of scientists who work on the topic at hand in the case of Covid the immunologists, doctors, and say I don’t know the virologists. But what really bothered me was this notion that the Earth is simply here to be our sunshine-filled perfect habitat. The natural world is filled with SO MANY EXAMPLES of the hostile dog-eat-dog world that we have walked away from to build our own definition of civilization - one that I am more than happy to be a part of. But we can’t expect that the whole world is going to resemble our perfect condition petri dish that we’ve created for ourselves. Natural selection is at play all around us - pushing evolution forward in an endless march that we are lucky enough to witness in real time! But alongside the march of evolution comes the subsidence of different organismal regimes - from the early Cambrian when microscopic life flourished in the oceans to the legendary reign of the dinosaurs in the Triassic to the slowly changing progression of dominant reef-building organisms from sponges to corals in our shallow oceans over millions of years. I could go on for thousands of words pondering the progression of life, but what really strikes me is the terminology Freeman uses to describe our planet. “...Here is the thrust and heave and beauty of life...” Wow. I remember where I first heard the word “ephemeral.” I was sitting in a lecture hall halfway around the world in Brisbane, Australia listening to my professor talking about ephemeral pools that appeared and vanished in the course of weeks in the Australian Bush habitat. I sat dumbfounded in my class wondering if it was a uniquely Australian word like “billabong,” and was embarrassed to learn from a classmate that, no Bree “ephemeral” means lasting for a short time. It clicked into place the concept of a pond that exists for only a short period in a desert, and it’s a word that jars me back to reality whenever I contemplate climate change. Even before we consider the possibility of human-affected climate, the Earth is remarkably violent in its movement. Earthquakes can move tons upon tons of rock, shifting feet at a time in some cases. Volcanoes erupting from continental crust destroys pieces of mountains. Entire sides of mountains just exploding out. Tsunamis can move a wall of water miles inland due to the underwater shift of land mass. Hurricanes don’t count as hurricanes (by our human metrics) until they reach 74mph of sustained wind. THAT’S THE LOWEST CATEGORY OF HURRICANE!!! Have you every stood outside on a windy day and moved inside because the wind was irritating? I have. I get pretty unhappy when the wind blows faster than about 25 mph JUST A THIRD OF WHAT THE SMALLEST OF HURRICANES PRODUCE!!! Hurricanes have the capacity to blow down trees and level islands. At its core, nature is thrusting and heaving. And it is beautiful. Because life is resilient. Life takes nature’s tricks and evolves new and incredible ways to survive. Earthquakes are responsible for the shift of the continents - plate tectonics have given us some of the absolute breath-taking diversity we see through isolation of populations and allopatric evolution. Why we see amazing marsupials that flourished and monotremes that to a lesser extent survived in Australia, but left the rest of the continents with placental mammals like us! Following volcanic eruptions, lichens are the first life to infiltrate the charred remains, and so they begin the colonization of newly available real estate. And all of this flies in the face of the hostility the Earth shows towards its inhabitants. Now the scientist in me says Bree, the Earth can’t think and therefore can’t be hostile towards you, which leaves us with an even more terrifying possibility: that the Earth is indifferent towards us and all other life here. And in the face of this indifference life has diversified and multiplied and expanded into the most unlikely places from the hottest places to the coolest places, the most directly hit by sunlight to the places that will never see the light of the sun. And all of it is constantly changing and shifting and growing and dying, and somehow we find ourselves in the middle of it all. An ephemeral existence on a blue spinning rock flying through space entirely indifferent to our existence. Or almost indifferent. We are undeniably having a negative effect and irreversible on the very climate we have engineered solutions to survive and flourish in. And these negative effects are coming for all of us, especially if we don’t hit the breaks soon. I think a lot about why I’m not absolutely dejected in the face of climate change. It was a question posed to me months ago and it bounces around when I sit down to talk about Marine Ecology, or at Climate Change Book Club, or will sneak up on me when I’m on a long walk. The fact of the matter is I am terrified. But each one of us that is here comes from a long line of survivors. We definitely have work to do and definitely need to apply the brakes to climate change before it's too late (since we went screaming by the first too late deadline). But I have trust in the beauty that lies in life surviving the thrust and heave of this magnificent, hostile, perfect planet.
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AuthorBree Gibbs, here. I'm a recent Master's Grad just trying to share what it's like to be a trash scientist (for those who aren't in the know, I'm a marine biologist). Categories
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