Here, finally, is some good reason for optimism.  With proper care of ruined grasslands, variously called managed grazing, holistic management, or carbon farming, we can restore billions of acres of the world’s soils. Along the way we can pull all the excess carbon out of the atmosphere and put it back into the ground where it belongs — in forty years or less. We can return to our long-gone preindustrial atmospheric concentrations of 280 ppm, the atmosphere that made the climate that made the planet very friendly to humans and many other creatures. It’s a climate strategy where we have the world to benefit, at minimal cost and very low risk:

• We can begin doing it right away (in fact, we already are), with or without government and/or corporate support.
• It costs nothing or less in the scheme of things.(i) For your local third-world family farmer, for your 100,000-acre rancher, and for everyone in between it will probably turn a profit.
• It requires no expensive and toxic fossil fuel inputs – fertilizers, pesticides – in fact, they will ruin it.
• It is so low-tech that it is mostly pre-tech (but a little bit of low tech can make it easier in some circumstances).  As a result, the risks of unintended consequences are minimal.
• While there’s still a lot to learn, as always, we already know how to do this very well. 
• Children will love it (they love animals and nature).
• It will feed millions or more people on sustainably harvested animal protein, animals that have been treated humanely throughout their lives, and it will maybe even put an end to the despicable practice of factory farming.
• It will heal billions of acres of land that industrial humans have ravaged and destroyed, restoring vital soil flora and fauna, and re-establish plant and animal diversity as well crucial hydrological cycles including groundwater replenishment, flood control, and patterns of rainfall.
• We don’t have to waste resources on nonsensical and dangerous geo-engineering schemes, nor do we have to keep hoping for miracles.

And all you need is a cow.

The Soil Story

But let’s back up a bit.

To state the obvious: soils, energized by the sun, are the source of all life on land. According to Australian soils scientist Christine Jones,

“The world’s soils hold three times as much carbon as the atmosphere and over four times as much carbon as the vegetation. With 82% of terrestrial carbon in soil (compared to only 18% in vegetation), soil represents the largest carbon sink over which we have control. Soil is also the world’s largest store of terrestrial diversity, with over 95% of life forms being underground (that is, only 5% of biodiversity is above ground).”[ii]

and because of the complex water-absorbing carbon compounds formed by living soil, every pound of soil carbon enables the storage of ten pounds of water.  Clearly, as a carbon sink soils also play a major role in hydrological cycles, which thereby also regulate local climate.

Healthy soils are abundant and miraculous collections of life: green plants, fungi, worms, insects, bacteria, small animals, all of which work together in extraordinarily complex relationships to keep their life support systems supporting them.  Ruined soils do little or none of the above.

From a scientific perspective, we have only begun to understand how soils work, although on a practical and spiritual level many indigenous cultures have understood the importance of the earth and its symbiotic relationships far better than we do.[iii]  But we don’t need to understand all the interactions and synergies to get started.  Nature has been building soils for eons, all we have to do is watch, listen and learn.  Some people have already done that, with stunning results.[iv]

Restoring the World’s Soils, Restoring the World’s Atmosphere

Here’s the short version of how it works.  I encourage you to dig deeper; the brief annotated bibliography below is a good place to start.

Grasslands and grazing animals co-evolved – they need each other.  Long-lived, deep-rooted perennial grasses, essential for pulling carbon into the ground, need to be eaten in moderation by animals in order to be healthy and make room for new growth.  So the grasses feed the animals, the animals feed the soils, the soils feed the grasses, in an iterative cycle all made possible by the sun. 

In the wild, ruminants graze in close herds for protection against predators, and while they graze they loosen the soil with their hooves and fertilize it with their urine and dung.  Then, not wanting to tarry in their own wastes, they move on to fresh pasture before they’ve had a chance to overgraze.  After the browsing and fertilizing, eager dung beetles, nematodes, fungi and bacteria work synergistically with green plants and pull carbon deep into the soils, where it can remain indefinitely. Soils are far more stable carbon sinks than forests, where most of the carbon is stored aboveground and is returned to the atmosphere as plants die.

When we farm with the earth as a complex system, we manage animals and pastures/grasslands the way nature does.  Current practice is to fence out predators and let ruminants wander everywhere, overgrazing, compacting and ruining the soil.  Using managed grazing we keep the animals in tight gr
oups and move them on a roughly daily schedule (the precise frequency will depend on climate and other local conditions).  This approach works well even with high animal densities.  Furthermore, the resulting soil recovery in as little as one year’s time can appear miraculous.

In this process, soil health and fertility is restored and maintained.  Biodiversity returns, teeming with complex life and relationships.  Healthy soils in healthy ecosystems remain moist, even during dry spells, improve rainfall patterns, and prevent flooding by readily absorbing water.

For carbon sequestration, we can capture around 0.5 – 1.0 tons of carbon per acre per year, possibly more, and soil-building is cumulative.  We have ten billion or more ruined acres across the planet that we could revive, with all manner of local benefits in addition to carbon sequestration, not the least of which is that soil restoration is very inexpensive thanks to the bounteous gifts of nature. 

If we utilize available lands worldwide, estimating sequestration on the conservative side at 0.5 tons per acre, we are capturing an additional 5 gigatons of carbon per year from the atmosphere, or the equivalent of 2.5 parts per million.  If we were to stop pushing carbon upwards, in roughly forty years we would be back to preindustrial levels of 280 ppm.  But this likely underestimates soil capacity, and it may be possible to accomplish sequestration even faster as we improve our understanding of the way soils work as carbon sinks. 

There are already thirty million acres under this kind of management in Africa, Australia and North America.  NGOs such as Heifer International are promoting agroecology and managed grazing as they provide third-world farmers with animals.[v]  Of course forest restoration efforts, especially in tropical and sub-tropical regions, will also help, as will newly evolving approaches to growing food.[vi]  And we can all participate in carbon farming, by turning our lawns into carbon sinks[vii], by supporting local farming, by partnering with farmers and ranchers (perhaps along the lines of sister city efforts), among a variety of possibilities (please share some of your ideas along these lines).

Methane

Since grazing animals are essential to this process, invariably the methane question is raised. The current orthodoxy tells us that because of digestive methane emissions, raising animals for food is a global warming problem, not solution.  This is true given current practice: crowded feedlots with grain-fed, drugged cattle and manure lagoons on devastated lands, shipped long distances.  But this is clearly not how grazers evolved.  We are drawing conclusions from a very skewed sample, as large as that sample may currently be.  In contrast, one cow’s worth of healthy land actually absorbs one hundred times the methane emitted by that cow in any given year.  And the methane-eating bacteria, which need healthy aerated soils to thrive, will continue to remove methane from the atmosphere as well.

What’s Stopping Us?

Here are the obvious birds-eye questions about carbon farming:  “Why don’t we know this?”  “Why aren’t we doing it full speed ahead?”

For farmers and ranchers, it likely has much to do with custom, habit and pressure from agribusiness and the educational and commercial institutions it supports.  Even when the soil tells us in no uncertain terms that what we’re doing isn’t working very well it can be hard for us to change, and the prevailing wisdom is to apply ever more fossil-fuel based synthetics.  Some of today’s most avid practitioners of holistic management were at the end of their lassos before they gave it a try.  It requires more complex thinking about interpersonal relationships as well as earth systems, and sometimes this is not an easy transition to make.  But once undertaken, it turns farms and lives around, economically as well as interpersonally and ecologically.

With climate activists, here’s what my surprising experience has been: they can’t hear it.  The obsession with chasing green and profitable technofixes and/or reducing emissions drowns out other thinking – they smile, say it sounds interesting, look quizzical and change the subject, e.g., what about Lackner’s proposed carbon eating machines?[viii]  It’s as if we can’t imagine that nature could ever be so clever without human invention.  I must say, though, that as climate disruption accelerates, activists and others are slowly opening to the possibilities of soil sequestration of carbon.

Ifs

Enter the big “If”:  We still have to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, as close to zero as possible as soon as possible.  But we also have to understand that only reducing emissions is not nearly enough, given already active positive feedback loops such as melting ice, non-linear phenomena in the wings, and the unpleasant time lag surprises lurking in the thermal mass of the oceans.[ix]  Even though sequestering carbon in soils can help blunt the effects of emissions along the way, while providing all the above-mentioned benefits of restoring soil health, we must stop spewing carbon into the atmosphere.

Here’s a bigger “If”: Will we grow up?  I am not the first to observe that our globalized Euro-American culture is a world of two-year olds – we want what we want when we want it and throw tantrums (e.g., war, structural adjustment, etc.) when we don’t get it.  Even real children grow up fast in the face of emergency, so surely those of us with adult faculties can do the same. 

Part of growing up is ending a culture of exploitation, destructive resource extraction, futile exponential growth, and cruel treatment of all the denizens of earth, flora and fauna.&n
bsp; Time to pledge allegiance to the new mantra of local, sustainable, self-sufficient.  As Richard Heinberg so pointedly wrote, the party’s over.[x]  Time to kick the hangover and get to work.

Finally, to address a frequent utterance of disbelief: is growing animals and restoring the land while stopping global warming too good to be true? 

The answer: only like sunsets and flowers and fish and trees – only like the inexpressible miracle of life on earth – is it too good to be true.

Annotated References

Soil Age Google group.  Some of us who are working on holistic management/carbon farming solutions have started this list, currently low volume, to further our understandings and activism (we have begun to plan a climate/soils conference in the Boston area in 2010).   All are welcome to join us!  http://groups.google.com/group/soil-age

Dan Dagget, Gardeners of Eden: Rediscovering Our Importance To Nature, Thatcher Charitable Trust/EcoResults! Press, Santa Barbara, 2005.  A great place to start reading, Dagget tells the stories of Tony and Jerrie Tipton and others who have brought all but dead soils miraculously back to bounteous life, along with insightful discussions of the fascinating relationships in the natural world and the obstacles created by cultural assumptions and dogmatic environmentalism.

Christine Jones is an internationally known Australian groundcover and soils ecologist.  Her website is Amazing Carbon, http://www.amazingcarbon.com.  Several informative papers are available on the site.  You can also listen to her keynote at the 2008 Queensland, Australia Landcare conference: http://www.qldlandcareconference.com/2008-conference/dr-christine-jones-soil-carbon-keynote/

Holistic Management International (HMI) was founded by Allan Savory, a pioneer in the management of grasslands, using his experience as a research biologist, game manager, rancher, farmer in Africa, and decades of experience in the United States.  http://www.holisticmanagement.org/  Savory also maintains his own website at  http://www.savoryinstitute.com/.  These sites have a wealth of downloadable articles, including archives of HMI’s journal for farmers and ranchers, “In Practice,” http://www.holisticmanagement.org/n7/Info_07/in17B_In_Practice_archive_07.html.  HMI has also produced a video, “The First Millimeter: Healing the Earth,” and will work with you if you’d like to host house parties, show it on local television, or hold other educational events, http://www.holisticmanagement.org/n9/PBS_announcement/pbs_announcement.php.

Carbon Farmers of America is an organization founded by a group of Vermont and Massachusetts farmers that works to support farmers in building high carbon soils.  CFA “trains, equips and provides ongoing consultation and support to member farmers across America to rapidly create new, high organic-matter topsoil. With our member farmers, we carefully record the process of soil building on each farm, and scientifically monitor the carbon levels in their soils each year http://www.carbonfarmersofamerica.com/.

The Rodale Institute has been conducting scientific soils and farming research for almost thirty years, the longest running trial comparing organic and conventional farming methods, and have documented agricultural solutions to climate change and the developing “green revolution” collapse in food production, http://rodaleinstitute.org/global_warming.

A couple of articles from non-profit organizations addressing soil sequestration of carbon:  Sara J. Scherr and Sajal Sthapit, “Mitigating Climate Change through Food and Land Use,” Worldwatch, 2008, http://www.worldwatch.org/node/6126; and Ronnie Cummins, “The Organic Revolution: How We Can Stop Global Warming,”  Organic Consumers Association, October 19, 2009,  http://www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_19404.cfm.

Copyright 2010 by Adam D. Sacks

Photo: Adam D. Sacks

Names of shame, ignominy, criminals against humanity, against planet Earth itself.  Agents of the lethal delays in our response to escalating, accelerating, catastrophic global warming.

Yet, as deniers of climate change, they’re amateurs compared to us.  Us activists, environmentalists, scientists, and certainly Copenhagen politicians.

Even though we’re believers, not skeptics, our denial is far more insidious and subtle.  So subtle, in fact, that we’ve managed to convince ourselves that we’re not in denial at all.  Quite the opposite.  Why, the thought is too absurd even to contemplate.

But it’s true.

We’re deniers every time we say “80 percent by 2050,” or even “80 percent by 2020″; every time we refer to tipping points in the future tense; every time we advocate substituting “clean” energy for “dirty” energy; every time we buy a squiggly light bulb or a hybrid vehicle; every time we advocate for cap-and-trade, or even a carbon tax; every time we countenance the mention of loopy geoengineering schemes; every time we invoke the future of our children and grandchildren and ignore the widespread suffering from global climate disruption today.

Every time we say these things and more, we’re promoting denial of dire climate reality, the reality that’s spinning out of our grasp so fast that we conduct our frenetic climate “solutions” efforts in a kind of stupor, obsessing with parts-per-million statistics, keeping desperately busy to ward off our own utter collapse borne of despair.

The reality we’re denying?  We’re denying that we’ve put so much carbon into the atmosphere already that positive feedback loops are well on their way to amplification hell.^[1] We’re denying that time lags between carbon emissions and their effects are frighteningly relevant, and that the disastrous effects we’re seeing now are from emissions of 30 years ago.  We’re denying that non-linear responses of physical systems cannot be calculated and therefore are perilously ignored. We’re denying that our consumption and waste have far exceeded planetary capacity, possibly irreparably so.^[2]

We’re denying reality because we’re not talking about it; we’re invoking fantasies and free lunches instead.^[3]

Why do we act like this?  Because just like the skeptics, we are inordinately fond of our cushy lives.  Because we don’t want to give up our privileged, well-stocked existences any more than the skeptics do (and enter the realms of unthinkable thoughts, to wit, go back to the jungles? the caves? the starving, thirsting millions — or is that billions? — never, never, never, not us).  Because in our heart of hearts, we want the skeptics to be right.  We are brothers and sisters.  And so we join them.

But our denial is much, much worse, because we are the ones presumably advocating for action on global climate disruption.  And when we fall short, who’s left to do the job?

Here’s an example, in a note from a friend of mine and fellow climate campaigner:

I was quite disappointed by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) presentation last night. The meeting title was “Roadmap to a Carbon-Free Society” or something like that. 

There was no roadmap discussed at the meeting. They showed a bunch of charts and graphs showing how we could get to a 26 percent carbon reduction by 2020 and a 56 percent carbon reduction by 2030 (from a 2005 baseline). All those carbon reductions were based on changes to U.S. and state policy, it wasn’t clear what those proposed policy changes would be, although they seemed to involve some sort of cap and trade and a renewable energy mandate. 

They were primarily focused on reducing carbon in electricity generation. They had only 2 to 3 percent savings in carbon in buildings. Their proposed savings in the transportation sector seemed to focus on switching to ethanol (but not from corn). 

There was absolutely no call to action. 

There was no elaboration of priority. 

There were no specifics regarding the changes that would need to be made. 

This was a U.S.-only proposal. When asked about global effects, they basically said that was out of scope for their project. 

I am looking hard for something I can do that will make a real difference in the lives of my children and their children. 

Mark

Here’s another example, from UCS again.  I don’t mean to pick on them — they have a lot of co-enablers — but they are real scientists, for goodness sake!  Yet they are as ensnared in the silencing trappings of culture as any of us.  They’re still on an 80-percent-by-2050 path (below 2005, not 1990, levels), and they still imagine that global warming is simply a consequence of greenhouse-gas emissions (“Global Warming Crossroads: Choosing the Sensible Path to a Clean Energy Economy”). As such, they avoid the lethal implications and challenges of the impossible exponential growth that drives our lives (more on this in my Aug. 23, 2009, post, “The Fallacy of Climate Activism”).

After attending some of their mildly alarming but strangely reassuring presentations, I have spoken with several UCS scientists personally, and with hardly a tickle of prodding they quickly confess how panicked they are.  Why don’t they just state it outright, in public?  Because, they say (just like so many climate activists, with such a uniform voice one might concoct a conspiracy theory), the public can’t take it.^[4] People will shrivel up into their TVs and McBurgers and never come out again.  Then we’ll really be in a fix. (But I thought we already were?)

In December 2008, the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI), another well-meaning house of denial, sponsored a forum aimed primarily at climate activists, oddly entitled “Taking Climate Change Seriously” (I guess they figured we hadn’t done that yet).  SEI folks are very nice, very smart people whom I like personally.  And they are working sincerely and hard on solutions (which, however politically palatable, nonetheless carry very little weight with the thunderous forces of nature). 

A very bright, well-spoken UCS scientist opened the show by revealing that she would speak frankly with us, in a way that she wouldn’t with a general audience because they wouldn’t be able to take it.  A cartoon flashes onto the screen, showing the entrance to two different movie theatres.  One is showing “An Inconvenient Truth,” which has no customers.  The other, “A Convenient Lie,” has drawn a large crowd.  The implication, of course, is that the public (whom we chronically assume is dumb) doesn’t want to know. She was pretty open about our dire circumstances, however, with those of us who already knew it (remember, we were there to take climate change seriously).

The irony of all of this is that her presentation itself is the embodiment of the convenient lie: that it’s the public’s fault, despite the fact that scientists and climate activists don’t tell them the truth!  How on earth are they supposed to know?  No wonder the skeptics hold such tenacious sway.

While An Inconvenient Truth was critically important as a wake-up call, the title of the movie became part of the problem: Climate change isn’t simply “inconvenient.”  It’s lethal.  Yet now that it’s been branded as “inconvenient,” it’s not so bad, we can live with it — we work around inconveniences, right?  We do it all the time.  Suppose that just yesterday a CFL burned out and it was dark in the hall and I stubbed my toe looking for my shoes and I had to bike to the hardware store (I don’t own a car) and it was chilly and wet outside and my glasses fogged up.  That’s “inconvenience.”

Here’s how the public can come to know the truth about climate: repetition.  Learning and comprehension require repetition.  Think about repetition being used to learn multiplication tables, or in advertising, or in political campaigns, etc.  Certainly dire climate explanations require even more repetition because it is difficult emotionally as well as cognitively.  But we haven’t yet even begun to tell that story, we are so spooked by our own reactions and what we think others’ reactions will be.

To reiterate, in order to elicit a response commensurate with the problem, we have to start telling the truth about climate.  We have never actually tried it!

If we tell the truth, certainly some people will run away at first.  But we keep telling it regardless.  Otherwise we engage in palliatives as the world crumbles.  There really is no other choice.

—–

Finally, I’d like to say a few words about the recent remarkable 350 day, Oct. 24, 2009, when thousands of coordinated demonstrations across the world stated the climate emergency message loud and clear.  An unprecedented and truly impressive organizing effort.  I attended the local convocation of several communities meeting in Concord, Mass.  We were regaled by activist politicians, a playful tug of war between costumed buckethead deniers and polar bears, post-hippie music, brochures, and photo ops galore. 

And generous dollops of denial.  I found it all rather depressing.  People were enthusiastic about sending our banners to Copenhagen, as if the “leaders” there would care (they would pretend, of course).  The clean energy revolution held center stage, as if simply substituting windmills and solar panels now would make a difference to our beyond-tipped-point physics, as if it were all just an energy problem.

But just scratch the surface and it was clear that we were grasping at straws, and the sense of helplessness and hopelessness, bleeding through the forced cheer, was pervasive.  Perhaps we must confront and embrace the depths of our despair before we can see clearly.  Once we do, however, the remarkable fact is that we can likely do something about climate catastrophe, despite the necessity, for the moment, of bypassing our globally failed political process. Very briefly, local self-sufficiency and sustainability, steady-state no-impact economics, eco-restoration, and rational birth reduction (starting with but clearly not limited to “developed” countries, whose impacts per capita are many multiples of third-world countries). 

Sounds difficult or even close to impossible.  The question is how badly do we want it.  Clearly not badly enough — yet.  It will require a dizzyingly quick cultural transformation, but the seeds have been planted and are starting to sprout worldwide.  We can turn this disaster into opportunity and hope.

But only if we transcend our denial, and stop lying to the public. 

And, especially, stop lying to ourselves.

—

Endnotes:

[1] Strictly speaking, it may be difficult to nail down a feedback loop in action, such as melting ice.  At what point can we say “the ice is melting and the resulting darker, warmer waters are more rapidly melting ice resulting in more darker, warmer waters” (amplifying feedback loop), as opposed to “the ice is melting simply because temperatures are warmer due to increasing atmospheric carbon” (no amplifying feedback loop, just garden variety endless global carbon pollution).

Here’s what I suspect is the key: acceleration. Think of moving a microphone towards a speaker, the volume and frequency of the feedback rapidly accelerate. Similarly, the climate phenomena that have arrived decades early, perhaps early by a century or more, may well be the manifestations of feedback loops in action before we know exactly what they are.

[2] I’ve written about this before, in “The Fallacy of Climate Activism,” but I think it bears a lot of repetition. I hope you will write about it too.

[3] Barry Commoner, in his 1971 book The Closing Circle, defined the four laws of ecology succinctly and directly: Everything comes from something (there’s no such thing as a free lunch), everything goes somewhere, everything is connected to everything else, and nature knows best.

[4] For a critically important alternative perspective, see Clive Hamilton and Tim Kasser, “Psychological Adaptation to the Threats and Stresses of a Four-Degree World” [PDF]. “Among the methods to encourage adaptive coping strategies, Crompton and Kasser recommend that that environmental campaigns could: help people express their feelings of fear, sadness and helplessness; gently point out when people are avoiding facing up to the facts of climate science; and, promote problem-focused strategies and mindfulness … Among the methods to encourage a value shift, Crompton and Kasser recommend that environmental campaigns could: avoid appealing primarily to selfish desires and motivations (such as by promoting “Ten ways you can save money by reducing your carbon emissions”); frame messages to connect with intrinsic values like cooperation and non-material benefits; and, deploy programs that activate an awareness of the inherent value of nature and empathy for non-human animals.” (pp. 7-8)

Photo: Adam D. Sacks

Having examined some of the what of our missteps in “Fallacy,” in this piece I take a look at some of the how: the timid, tentative, emotionally impoverished voice of our communications, the feelings unexpressed in the face of the premature and squalid end of so much of what we love, the unfathomable reluctance to speak to the depth of the grief we are bringing upon ourselves.

Global climate disruption — having graduated in short order from a spectre a century away to a battering present-day reality — foreshadows the demise of civilization, the failure of our life-support systems, and even, perhaps, the end of most life on earth.  Yet most industrialized humans, to date, remain largely unaware and only marginally concerned.  This is a remarkable puzzle, and were we to solve it perhaps we would take a major step toward addressing the climate catastrophe.

I offer you a key puzzle piece:  The end of all that we have known is an unthinkable thought,^[1] as are so many unprecedented abrupt and catastrophic events.^[2] When a thought is unthinkable, it is invisible even when writ large — we simply can’t see it, even when we have reason to try.^[3] If we do see it, it quickly falls from awareness.  If, finally, we accept it, perhaps after months or years of getting used to the idea, we find that we’re alone, mostly talking to ourselves.

Then, when the reality strikes us all irrefutably, undeniably, without mercy, we are completely unprepared, asking incredulously, “Why didn’t somebody tell us?”

And what hasn’t been told?

To date, most of our arguments about the reality of global warming have been data-driven, psychically tepid litanies of climate science and industrial “solutions,” peppered with the heartstring-tugging of cute polar bears and sad stories of people in distant lands whom we don’t care about very much (well, of course we care, but we don’t know them and there’s nothing we can do to help anyway, except perhaps changing lightbulbs).  Coastal insalination rendering vast swaths of farmland useless, houses plunging into the sea as permafrost melts, even wildfires threatening the City of the Angels, to name just a very few — these are far, far away and don’t really affect us.  Or we don’t see it.  (Yet.)

We climate activists are the ones who aren’t saying what needs to be said.^[4] Our silence is not the lack of words, it is the absence of an essence in urgent human relationships, an essence with power to break the bonds of unthinkable thoughts:

Passion.

To illustrate, I would like to reproduce for you an excerpt from one of my favorite speeches of the 19th century.  It is entitled “What to a Slave Is the Fourth of July,” and was delivered by Frederick Douglass before the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society on July 5, 1852 (he refused to speak on July 4, for reasons that will quickly become apparent).  Douglass, as you may remember, was one of the great political thinkers and orators of that horrific era, an escaped slave who taught himself to read and went on to become an erudite, articulate, and passionate abolitionist, a writer, a sought-after speaker, and a guest of President Lincoln.

Here are his words:

… What, am I to argue that it is wrong to make men brutes, to rob them of their liberty, to work them without wages, to keep them ignorant of their relations to their fellow men, to beat them with sticks, to flay their flesh with the lash, to load their limbs with irons, to hunt them with dogs, to sell them at auction, to sunder their families, to knock out their teeth, to burn their flesh, to starve them into obedience and submission to their masters?  Must I argue that a system thus marked with blood, and stained with pollution, is wrong?

… What, then, remains to be argued?  Is it that slavery is not divine, that God did not establish it; that our doctors of divinity are mistaken?  There is blasphemy in the thought.  That which is inhuman, cannot be divine!!  Who can reason on such a proposition?  They that can, may; I cannot.  The time for such argument has passed.  At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! had I the ability, and could reach the nation’s ear, I would, today, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke.  For it is not light that is needed, but fire, it is not a gentle shower, but thunder.  We need the storm, the whirlwind, and earthquake.  The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced.

What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?  I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.  To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. …

Well …

Today we are addressing the end of the world we know, quite possibly the extinction of homo sapiens and most other species on earth, and we can do little more than cite statistics?^[5] Surely an unravelled web of life, miserable ends for countless creatures great and small, and mass death of billions of human beings, mostly innocent, should call for “scorching irony,” at the very least. 

Where are our fire, thunder, ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, stern rebuke?  Why are we so polite?^[6] Why are we so obedient?  What are we thinking?  What aren’t we thinking?  What are we doing?  What aren’t we doing?  When do we start? ^[7]

I have a proposition for you.  Try your hand at a letter — to an editor, or to a friend, or to a lover, or to a child — availing yourself of all the passion you can muster as we hasten blindly toward world’s end.  Post it here for all to ponder — then we’ll send the collection to everyone we know, far and wide.

When do we start?  Now’s the time. 

Quill and ink (or keyboard) in hand, summon your muse and write for our lives!

—

Endnotes:

[1] Timothy C. Weiskel, “Selling Pigeons in the Temple: The Danger of Market Metaphors in an Ecosystem,” Harvard Seminar on Environmental Values, Harvard Divinity School, July 6, 1997.  “In democratically organized societies thought is not overtly censored. We are not forbidden to think about particular topics, but thought control manifests itself nonetheless in the far more subtle form of self-censorship. It is not what it is forbidden for us to think, but rather what it does not occur to us to think, that establishes the bounds of publicly acceptable thought in democratic society.”

[2] These could be natural disasters, such as unforeseen volcanic eruptions, hurricanes or changing climate; or the result of human activity such as the overshoot and collapse on Easter Island or the invasion of Europeans and consequent sudden disruption and/or extermination of indigenous peoples and cultures.  Prior to such occurrences, few if any members of the affected societies would have been able to envision the outcomes, and if told would likely have given short shrift to such “conspiracy theories.”

[3] John A. Livingston, pioneer environmentalist, preservationist, teacher, and writer, described his experience in addressing the challenges of giving voice to the realities of nature in our technoculture: “It is not that audiences disagree with us or resent our argument or are offended by it: it means that they cannot perceive it [emphasis is Livingston's]. They literally do not know what we are talking about.” The Fallacy of Wildlife Conservation, in The John A. Livingston Reader, McClelland & Stewart, 2007, p. 61.

[4] The scientists’ job is to be dispassionate analysts and observers, and they are doing it full well. The climate activists’ job is to put the science in the context of real lives, real communities, real future, and communicate with all the means at our disposal. So far, we have screwed it up, but good.

[5] For example, parts per million carbon dioxide is an obsession; necessary fundamental change in the ways we live on earth hardly merits a whisper. And by fundamental change I don’t mean switching to 35 mpg — or even 350 mpg — vehicles. That’s another obsessive and meaningless statistic among the many.

[6] Symptomatic of our wayward rationality is the data-driven response to climate “skeptics,” neo-classical economists, and other toxic relics of an unsustainable culture. They are paragons of delusion and dishonesty, unworthy of scorn and disdain, yet we respond to them as if we were having reasonable conversations with reasonable people. Not everyone will wake up (just ask ark-craftsman Noah), so let’s not waste our time, and spend our energies on the vast majority of people who are concerned about the future and willing to face it — if only we get around to starting a conversation about planetary realities.

[7] Of course there are some passionate writers who stir us beyond wind turbines and photovoltaic panels, but they are, to date, few and far between.

In the 20 years since we climate activists began our work in earnest, the state of the climate has become dramatically worse, and the change is accelerating — this despite all of our best efforts. Clearly something is deeply wrong with this picture. What is it that we do not yet know? What do we have to think and do differently to arrive at urgently different outcomes?^[1]

The answers lie not with science, but with culture.

Climate activists are obsessed with greenhouse-gas emissions and concentrations. Since global climate disruption is an effect of greenhouse gases, and a disastrous one, this is understandable. But it is also a mistake.

Such is the fallacy of climate activism^[2]: We insist that global warming is merely a consequence of greenhouse-gas emissions. Since it is not, we fail to tell the truth to the public.

I think that there are two serious errors in our perspectives on greenhouse gases:

Global Warming as Symptom

The first error is our failure to understand that greenhouse gases are not a cause but a symptom, and addressing the symptom will do little but leave us with a devil’s sack full of many other symptoms, possibly somewhat less rapidly lethal but lethal nonetheless.

The root cause, the source of the symptoms, is 300 years of our relentlessly exploitative, extractive, and exponentially growing technoculture, against the background of ten millennia of hierarchical and colonial civilizations.^[3] This should be no news flash, but the seductive promise of endless growth has grasped all of us civilized folk by the collective throat, led us to expand our population in numbers beyond all reason and to commit genocide of indigenous cultures and destruction of other life on Earth.

To be sure, global climate disruption is the No. 1 symptom. But if planetary warming were to vanish tomorrow, we would still be left with ample catastrophic potential to extinguish many life forms in fairly short order: deforestation; desertification; poisoning of soil, water, air; habitat destruction; overfishing and general decimation of oceans; nuclear waste, depleted uranium, and nuclear weaponry — to name just a few. (While these symptoms exist independently, many are intensified by global warming.)

We will not change course by addressing each of these as separate issues; we have to address root cultural cause.

Beyond Greenhouse Gas Emissions

The second error is our stubborn unwillingness to understand that the battle against greenhouse-gas emissions, as we have currently framed it, is over.

It is absolutely over and we have lost.

We have to say so.

There are three primary components of escalating greenhouse-gas concentrations that are out of our control:

Thirty-Year Lag

The first is that generally speaking the effects we are seeing today, as dire as they are, are the result of atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide in the range of only 330 parts per million (ppm), not the result of today’s concentrations of almost 390 ppm. This is primarily a consequence of the vast inertial mass of the oceans, which absorb temperature and carbon dioxide and create a roughly 30-year lag between greenhouse-gas emissions and their effects. We are currently seeing the effects of greenhouse gases emitted before 1980.

Just as the scientific community hadn’t realized how rapidly and extensively geophysical and biological systems would respond to increases in atmospheric greenhouse-gas concentrations, we currently have only a rough idea of what that 60 ppm already emitted will mean, even if we stopped our emissions today. But we do know, with virtual certainty, that it will be full of unpleasant surprises.

Positive Feedback Loops

The second out-of-control component is positive (amplifying) feedback loops. The odd thing about positive feedbacks is that they are often ignored in assessing the effects of greenhouse-gas emissions. Our understanding of them is limited and our ability to insert them into an equation is rudimentary. Our inability to grasp them, however, in no way mitigates their effects, which are as real as worldwide violent weather.

It is now clear that several phenomena are self-sustaining, amplifying cycles; for example, melting ice and glaciers, melting tundra and other methane sources, and increasing ocean saturation with carbon dioxide, which leads to increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide. These feedbacks will continue even if we reduce our human emissions to zero — and all of our squiggly lightbulbs, Priuses, wind turbines, Waxman-Markeys, and Copenhagens won’t make one bit of difference. Not that we shouldn’t stop all greenhouse-gas emissions immediately — of course we should — but that’s only a necessity, not nearly a sufficient response.

We need to find the courage to say so.

Non-Linearity

The third component is non-linearity, which means that the effects of rising temperature and atmospheric carbon concentrations may change suddenly and unpredictably. While we may assume linearity for natural phenomena because linearity is much easier to assess and to predict, many changes in nature are non-linear, often abruptly so. A common example is the behavior of water. The changes of state of water — solid, liquid, gas — happen abruptly. It freezes suddenly at 0°C, not at 1°, and it turns to steam at 100°, not at 99°. If we were to limit our experience of water to the range of 1° to 99°, we would never know of the existence of ice or steam.

This is where we stand in relationship to many aspects of the global climate. We don’t know where the tipping points — effectively the changes of state — are for such events as the irreversible melting of glaciers, release of trapped methane from tundras and seabeds, carbon saturation of the oceans. Difficult to pin down, tipping points may be long past, or just around the corner. As leading climatologist Jim Hansen has written, “Present knowledge does not permit accurate specification of the dangerous level of human-made GHGs. However, it is much lower than has commonly been assumed. If we have not already passed the dangerous level, the energy infrastructure in place ensures that we will pass it within several decades.”^[4]

Evidence of non-linearity is strong, not only from the stunning acceleration of climate change in just the past couple of years, but from the wild behavior of the climate over millions of years, which sometimes changed dramatically within periods as short as a decade.

The most expert scientific investigators have been blindsided by the velocity and extent of recent developments, and the climate models have likewise proved far more conservative than nature itself. Given that scientists have underestimated impacts of even small changes in global temperature, it is understandably difficult to elicit an appropriate public and governmental response.

Beyond the Box

We climate activists have to tread on uncertain ground and rapidly move beyond our current unpleasant but comfortable parts-per-million box. Here are some things we need to say, over and over again, everywhere, in a thousand different ways:

Bitter climate truths are fundamentally bitter cultural truths. Endless growth is an impossibility in the physical world, always — but always — ending in overshot and collapse. Collapse: with a bang or a whimper, most likely both. We are already witnessing it, whether we choose to acknowledge it or not.

Because of this civilization’s obsession with growth, its demise is 100 percent predictable. We simply cannot go on living this way. Our version of life on earth has come to an end.

Moreover, there are no “free market” or “economic” solutions. And since corporations must have physically impossible endless growth in order to survive, corporate social responsibility is a myth. The only socially responsible act that corporations can take is to dissolve.

We can’t bargain with the forces of nature, trading slightly less harmful trinkets for a fantasied reprieve. Geophysical processes care not one whit for our politics, our economics, our evening meals, our theologies, our love for our children, our plaintive cries of innocence and error.

We can either try to plan the transition, even at this late hour, or the physical forces of the world will do it for us — indeed, they already are. As Alfred Crosby stated in his remarkable book, Ecological Imperialism, mother nature’s ministrations are never gentle.^[5]

Telling the Truth

If we climate activists don’t tell the truth as well as we know it — which we have been loathe to do because we ourselves are frightened to speak the words — the public will not respond, notwithstanding all our protestations of urgency.

And contrary to current mainstream climate-activist opinion, contrary to all the pointless “focus groups,” contrary to the endless speculation on “correct framing,” the only way to tell the truth is to tell it. All of it, no matter how terrifying it may be.^[6]

It is offensive and condescending for activists to assume that people can’t handle the truth without environmentalists finding a way to make it more palatable. The public is concerned, we vaguely know that something is desperately wrong, and we want to know more so we can try to figure out what to do. The response to An Inconvenient Truth, as tame as that film was in retrospect, should have made it clear that we want to know the truth.

And finally, denial requires a great deal of energy, is emotionally exhausting, fraught with conflict and confusion. Pretending we can save our current way of life derails us and sends us in directions that lead us astray. The sooner we embrace the truth, the sooner we can begin the real work.

Let’s just tell it.

Stating the Problem

After we tell the truth, then what can we do? Is it hopeless? Perhaps. But before we can have the slightest chance of meaningful action, having told the truth, we have to face the climate reality, fully and unflinchingly. If we base our planning on false premises — such as the oft-stated stutter that reducing our greenhouse-gas emissions will forestall “the worst effects of global warming” — we can only come up with false solutions. “Solutions” that will make us feel better as we tumble toward the end, but will make no ultimate difference whatsoever.

Furthermore, we can and must pose the problem without necessarily providing the “solutions.”^[7] I can’t tell you how many climate activists have scolded me, “You can’t state a problem like that without providing some solutions.” If we accept that premise, all of scientific inquiry as well as many other kinds of problem-solving would come to a screeching halt. The whole point of stating a problem is to clarify questions, confusions, and unknowns, so that the problem statement can be mulled, chewed, and clarified to lead to some meaningful answers, even though the answers may seem to be out of reach.

Some of our most important thinking happens while developing the problem statement, and the better the problem statement the richer our responses. That’s why framing the global warming problem as greenhouse-gas concentrations has proved to be such a dead end.

Here is the problem statement as it is beginning to unfold for me. We are all a part of struggling to develop this thinking together:

We must leave behind 10,000 years of civilization; this may be the hardest collective task we’ve ever faced. It has given us the intoxicating power to create planetary changes in 200 years that under natural cycles require hundreds of thousands or millions of years — but none of the wisdom necessary to keep this Pandora’s Box tightly shut. We have to discover and re-discover other ways of living on earth.

We love our cars, our electricity, our iPods, our theme parks, our bananas, our Nikes, and our nukes, but we behave as if we understand nothing of the land and water and air that gives us life. It is past time to think and act differently.

If we live at all, we will have to figure out how to live locally and sustainably. Living locally means we are able get everything we need within walking (or animal riding) distance. We may eventually figure out sustainable ways of moving beyond those small circles to bring things home, but our track record isn’t good and we’d better think it through very carefully.

Likewise, any technology has to be locally based, using local resources and accessible tools, renewable and non-toxic. We have much re-thinking to do, and re-learning from our hunter-gatherer forebears who managed to survive for a couple of hundred thousand years in ways that we with our civilized blinders we can barely imagine or understand.^[8]

Living sustainably means, in Derrick Jensen’s elegantly simple definition, that whatever we do, we can do it indefinitely.^[9] We cannot use up anything more or faster than nature provides, we don’t poison the air, water, or soil, and we respect the web of life of which we are an intricate part. We are not separate from nature, or above it, or in any way qualified to supervise it.^[10] The evidence is ample and overwhelming; all we have to do is be brave enough to look.

How do we survive in a world that will probably turn — is already turning, for many humans and non-humans alike — into a living hell? How do we even grow or gather food or find clean water or stay warm or cool while assaulted by biblical floods, storms, rising seas, droughts, hurricanes, tornadoes, snow, and hail?

It is crystal clear that we cannot leave it to the technophiliacs. It is human technology coupled with our inability to comprehend, predict, and prevent unintended consequences that have brought us global catastrophe, culminating in climate disruption, in the first place. Desperate hopes notwithstanding, there are no high-tech solutions here, only wishful thinking–the tools that got us into this mess are incapable of getting us out.^[11]

All that being said, we needn’t discard all that we’ve learned, far from it.^[12] But we must use our knowledge with great discretion, and lock much of it away as so much nuclear weaponry and waste.

Time is running very short, but the forgiveness of this little blue orb in a vast lonely universe will continue to astonish and nourish us–if we only give it the chance.

Our obligation as activists, the first step, the essence, is to part the cultural veil at long last, and to tell the truth.

—

Endnotes:

[1] Many thanks to Richard Grossman, who posed that question fifteen years ago with respect to corporate domination of governance and culture when he founded the Program on Corporations, Law and Democracy (POCLAD). He understood that we must take the time to stop and penetrate beyond the obvious if we are to think outside of the cultural prescriptions that constrain our ability to act differently. Many thanks as well to Ross Gelbspan, a courageous and ground-breaking journalist, who early on investigated the forces driving the fossil fuel machine and has been sounding the alarm for almost two decades. See his excellent article, “Beyond the Point of No Return,” December 2007, which inspired many of the ideas in this piece.

[2] I would like to express deep gratitude to John A. Livingston, pioneer environmentalist, preservationist, teacher and writer. In 1981 he wrote “The Fallacy of Wildlife Conservation,” which inspired the title of this piece. The fallacy that Livingston was referring to is well-described in the foreword by Graeme Gibson: “The Fallacy of Wildlife Conservation, as a statement of belief, is one of the fiercest and most uncompromising of John Livingston’s convictions. Had he entitled it ‘The Failure of Wildlife Conservation,’ we might have tried again — without having to think too much about it. But he didn’t. … As a result of the word fallacy, we are confronted with an insistence that we rethink everything.” From The John A. Livingston Reader, McClelland & Stewart, 2007, pp. xiv-xv. So it is, with the fallacy of climate activism, that we must rethink everything.

[3] Endless (exponential) growth is an impossibility in a finite physical system (planet earth), and we have a wealth of examples of overshoot and collapse, non-human and human, all of which are fully predictable. Our cultural inability to grasp such an obvious reality is a primary obstacle to progress in addressing climate change and its root cause. Indigenous cultures tend to have much better understandings of these things. See Herman E. Daly and Kenneth N. Townsend, “Sustainable Growth: An Impossibility Theorem,” from Valuing The Earth: Economics, Ecology, Ethics, MIT Press, 1993, p. 267 ff. For a wide-ranging discussion of the demise of civilizations, see Jared Diamond, Collapse, Viking, 2005.

[4] James Hansen et al.(2007), “Climate change and trace gases,” Phil. Trans. Roy. Soc. A 365: 1925–1954 (2007).

[5] Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900 – 1900, Cambridge University Press, 1986, p. 92. The actual quote, referring to population, is, “Mother nature always comes to the rescue of a society stricken with the problems of overpopulation, and her ministrations are never gentle.”

[6] A word here about the skeptics, with whom we are also obsessed: Forget about them. They may appear to have control of the public discussion, but they are babbling into the abyss. Our enemy is us. By our own unwillingness to face the profound implications of climate change — that we have to reject civilization as currently conceived and come up with something completely different — we are doing far more damage to the cause of preserving life on earth than the deniers could ever do.

[7] “One of the more peculiar traits of our society is its assumption — its insistence — on solutions. Just as there are reasons for all things, so there are solutions for all things. Always there are ultimate answers; there is no problem that is not amenable to logical reduction. This, as we have seen earlier, in spite of such bewildering enterprises as ecology. I have no ‘solution’ to the wildlife preservation problem [read 'global warming problem']. There may not be one. But given the somewhat shaky assumption that one exists, I sense that I can at least feel the direction.” John A. Livingston, The Fallacy of Wildlife Conservation, p. 151.

[8] Our culturally skewed and defensive view of pre-hierarchical societies, seeing only lives that were “nasty, brutish and short” struggling to survive in “nature, red in tooth and claw,” has distorted earlier human experience beyond recognition. See, for example, Riane Eisler, The Chalice and the Blade, Harper & Rowe, 1987; and Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics, Tavistock Publications, Ltd. (London), 1974.

[9] Jensen is one of our most passionate and incisive cultural critics and environmental writers. His words are, “For an action to be sustainable, you must be able to perform it indefinitely. This means that the action must either help or at the very least not materially harm the landbase. If an action materially harms the landbase, it cannot be performed indefinitely …” From Derrick Jensen and Aric McBay, What We Leave Behind, p. 56.

[10] Although, as I indicate in footnote 12 in a brief discussion of holistic management of grasslands, we can and must repair enough of the damage so that the infinitely complex self-organizing systems of nature — the systems that gave life to all living creatures — can begin anew.

[11] For example, consider hare-brained schemes from very smart scientists, some of whom know that the schemes are hare-brained but in their desperation see no other way. A recent article in Rolling Stone, “Can Dr. Evil Save The World?,” has an interesting overview of the geo-engineering debate. The bottom line seems to be that we currently are able to do and think anything except changing the way we live, and risking the existence of life on earth is simply a chance we have to take (although 100 percent odds of failure is hardly a bet one should want to take, assuming there are any rational moments left). See also Ross Gelbspan’s article, “Beyond the Point of No Return,” footnote 1.

[12] Glimmers of hope lie in the remarkable restorative powers of the earth. One such phenomenon is ancient pre-history but new to us. That is the relationship between grazers and grasslands. Whereas conventional grasslands management destroys soils and diversity, nature’s way sequesters vast amounts of carbon in soils, with photosynthesizing plants as intermediators along with fungi, micro-organisms, insects, animals and birds — and creates productive and healthy land that, unlike forests, can bind carbon for thousands of years. We have the potential to remove gigatons of carbon from the atmosphere, reducing greenhouse gas concentrations by many parts per million with proper land management. Beyond grasslands, the planet’s power of regeneration, despite our assaults, remains extraordinary. See the Holistic Management International website.

Another example is the dramatic restoration of denuded rainforest in Borneo after only six years: “Planting finishes this year [2008], but already [Willie] Smits [the Indonesian forestry expert who led the replanting] and his team from the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation charity claim the forest is ‘mature’, with trees up to 35 metres high. Cloud cover has increased by 12 per cent, rainfall by a quarter, and temperatures have dropped 3-5°C, helping people and wildlife to thrive, says Smits. Nine species of primate have also returned, including the threatened orangutans. ‘If you walk there now, 116 bird species have found a place to live, there are more than 30 types of mammal, insects are there. The whole system is coming to life. I knew what I was trying to do, but the force of nature has totally surprised me. … The place became the scene of an ecological miracle, a fairytale come true,’ says Smits, who has written a book about the project.”