Thankful for What's Left

November 23, 2006

Elizabeth Kolbert has written for the New Yorker another clear and scary article about global climate change ("The Darkening Sea" 11/20/2006). This time she looks at the changes that are possible in the composition of the ocean. She cites Thomas Lovejoy on what these changes could mean in the future:

It is going to send all kinds of ripples through marine ecosystems, because of the importance of calcium carbonate for so many organisms in the oceans, including those at the base of the food chain. If you back off and look at it, it's as if you or I went to our annual physical and the body chemistry came back and the doctor looked really, really worried. It's systemic change. You could have food chains collapse, and fisheries ultimately with them, because most of the fish we get from the ocean are at the end of long food chains. You probably will see shifts in favor of invertebrates, or the reign of jellyfish. [74-5]

That last phrase sounds particularly ominous, conjuring up a vision of useless jellyfish crowding the oceans.

We are limited to reasoned conjecture when it comes to figuring out the ultimate results of global climate change. Some scenarios we can live with, and some we literally cannot live with. Our current vice president, according to Ron Suskind, championed a "one-percent doctrine." The idea was that if there is even a one-percent chance of an attack, the US needed to treat that attack as a certainty. After the last few years in Iraq, that kind of talk looks absurd.. But the doctrine goes some way toward showing the craziness of our current wait and see attitude to global warming. We have no other world.. no other place to go.. so we should recoil at the idea of changing in any fundamental way the makeup of our atmosphere and ocean.. that should be a red line.

I have to count myself as a pessimist when it comes to the idea that our nation—let alone the world—will be able to make the necessary changes to lifestyle and priorities that it would take to actually do something about the predicament. The US is the one country whose dedicated will to change could shake up the larger global picture.. but there is too much money and power and pride standing ready to hinder the important decisions.

But I count myself thankful as well, for my position in time.. that I have been able to live in the world with some of the old human expectations.. When I think of travel priorities for myself and my little family, I rank high my desire to see parts of this world that are likely to change.. glaciers and coral reefs.. things that will not always be around. When I think of my scholarly goals, I realize anew that the idea of preservation is central to my work.