AStarlings gather in a murmuration over an electricity pylon in the south of Scotland.
This book opened with some questions. What, in the 2020s, does it mean to save the planet? Can we? Should we? Whose planet is it anyway?
A traditional green answer is that the planet is so much more than us, and that we can and indeed must ‘save’ it, or at least fight those who threaten the other species who share the Earth with us. To do so, we probably need to be more humble in the face of nature, to step back and give it more space.
Anthropocene thinking challenges this. Or at least invites us to a vision of the Earth dominated by humans. We might draw back in revulsion at this, to aim to end the age of the human with some sort of managed retreat. Alternatively, we could run with it, follow the logic that we can shape the world so why not build more to bend it to our aims? Let’s hack our planet, with geoengineering projects, massive rewilding, CRISPR trees, whatever works.
There is also a middle ground, one that makes peace with humans’ use of technology while also ensuring space for the rest of nature to thrive. We can blend nature-based solutions such as rewilding and tree planting with more political and technological options, from giving indigenous people power over land to technology-based innovations such as plyscrapers, solar and wind power (big and small), CRISPR-boosted crops and microbes that munch through plastics, assuming we are comfortable they are safe.
BThis floating solar farm in Anhui province (China’s coal centre) has been developed on a lake caused by a coal mine that collapsed and flooded over a decade ago due to over-mining. When completed, the solar farm’s 166,000 panels should produce enough electricity to power a city, making it one of the largest floating solar projects in the world.
AA stork caught in plastic packaging. Images of wildlife tangled in plastic grab media attention, but we also need to worry about plastics pollution we cannot see. Microplastics have been found in tap water and rain around the world.
Possibly the most profound thing we can take from Anthropocene thinking is that we have to live with a planet we have damaged. Saving the Earth in the 2020s – or perhaps the sorts of activities we used to call saving the Earth – is about accepting, grieving for and adapting to the destruction humans have caused. We are inheriting a mess. In the 1980s and 1990s, when people started campaigning about climate change in earnest, people would talk about solving global warming. Roll on a few decades of inaction, and now we have to cope with a major dose of climate change and biodiversity loss while also still battling to prevent more. It is less about solving the problem and more about managing it.
Humans may have made the Anthropocene epoch, but can they survive it?
BVillages in southern Bangladesh, water locked due to flooding, summer 2019. Bangladesh is one the countries most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. Researchers warn that Bangladesh could lose more than 10% of its land to rising seas in the next few decades, displacing 18 million people.
We can hope. As a Nature paper argued in 2017, it is not geophysically impossible for us to keep to 1.5°C (2.7°F) degrees global warming. That was in 2017 though. Moreover, there is a long, winding road between something being not geophysically impossible, and it being a social, economic, political and cultural reality. Plus, 1.5°C (2.7°F) is not exactly ideal. We are already living with the impacts of around 1°C (1.8°F), and for some people, it is already hurting. The planet might not be ‘saved’ in a traditional sense, but it can be habitable. The space we have left for action is diminishing even faster than the ice caps, but we still have that space. The time to act is now. Environmental activists have been saying this for decades, but that does not make it any less true, just more urgent.
There is an oft-repeated Obama line that we are the first generation to really feel the impacts of climate change, and the last generation with the power to do anything about it. It is more complex than ‘we have ten years to save the world or we go extinct’, but the 2020s are crucial in terms of changing how we live. The window of opportunity is getting smaller every day, but it exists.
APeople dressed in white crowd the Olympic park to form a glacier during the ‘Global Climate March’. Organized by environmental NGOs on 29 November 2015 in Munich, southern Germany, the march took place on the eve of the official opening of a 195-nation UN climate summit in Paris.
BA solar installer in the south of England puts the finishing touches to a pilot study to power trains directly with renewable energy. The project, which was first conceived by community groups looking to build locally owned solar farms in response to controversies over fracking, could help accelerate the decarbonization of railways around the world.
CThe crew of a two-year NASA project investigating the changing conditions of the Arctic retrieves a canister of supplies from sea ice melt ponds.
Are we drifting into a position where we take light, half-hearted environmental action, all a bit too late? Where we keep the worst storms at bay, but it is still bad; the billionaires are able to insulate themselves in solar-powered pods, with the rest left to drown, starve and burn? Possibly, but we still have the option to avoid this fate. Moreover, we have a variety of choices regarding how we might go about building the sort of planet on which we can thrive.
Instead of debating whether we should act or not, we should be battling over how we go about it.
AKolmanskop, Namibia, once boasted a ballroom, a casino, a hospital with the first 2-ray station in the southern hemisphere and Africa’s first tram. Today, it’s a ghost town.
If we make the type of profound, radical changes we need, we will be building a whole new world. What do we want this world to look like? What political ideologies do we want to govern it? Who do we want to be its architects? Silicon Valley, the fixer movement, the climate strikers? What new cultures do we want? Less state control, or more? Less consumerism, or different consumerism? We still have choices, and it is vital that we discuss the available options; decide what we want and what compromises we’re willing to make with others who might think differently.
Change is coming, either way. It might come from society, a shift in the way we choose to live our lives, or it might come from the sky, in the form of storms, or the soil, as it gradually blows away. It is up to us to decide what sort of change we want to live with.
It might be a myth to say that ‘we are all in this together’, because some people are hurting more than others just as some are polluting more than others. But we are all in this whether we like it or not. You personally can have a powerful role; just work out how to invite others to come with you. Be the person who takes action and gets other people to join in, whether you do that by shifting what you eat or how you travel, or by supergluing yourself to a railing on the street.
We are the generation that gets to save humanity. You might not want to be cast in that role, but that is where we are now.
At least we still have the chance to save the planet. Future humans might not be able to say the same.
BThe futuristic redesign for a highway in Bao’an, China. Instead of simply enlarging the road, the designers propose a smaller, more fluid route built for a range of transport types.