When it comes up in casual conversation that I research climate change mitigation and adaptation, I’m usually asked a series of predictable questions. How are we doing in fighting climate change? What should I do to reduce my emissions? Do carbon offsets and cap and trade work? What is the climate change projection for where I live?
Each of these questions is both relevant and innocent. But when I receive these inquires, I often interpret that I’m being asked two deeper, more disturbing questions:
How bad is it?
Can we survive this?
I struggle to answer.
Typically, these questions are directed to me as a scientist. And as a scientist, I have been trained to communicate information neutrally while respecting uncertainty and the bounds of my mandate. Though the scientific community has started to debate the legitimacy of the scientist-activist, or at least the scientist-citizen, a conservatism that favors shallow harmony and the status quo nonetheless dominates the scientific enterprise.
From this viewpoint, the scientist in me wants to respond:
If you consider species extinction, ocean acidification, natural disasters, and food and water insecurity to be bad, then it’s bad. We predict, with great confidence, that climate change has caused and will increasingly cause these phenomena across the entire planet. Human activity – namely, the burning of fossil fuels paired with habitat devastation – is to blame.
Can we survive this? Technically, yes. We have both the insight and the technologies necessary to slow climate change and buffer human and natural systems against the worst effects. Of course, more research will be helpful, but the climate picture is resolved enough at this point for effective action.
This answer is true, and yet it feels impoverished, inadequate, cheap.
The thing is, I’m not just a scientist. I’m also a young adult who will live most of her life in dangerous climate abnormality. I’m a Buddhist practitioner engaged with the inextricable interconnections of people and planet. I’m a dedicated citizen who worries about the survival of democracy and civil society under the tandem pressures of scarcity and fear. I’m a graduate student concerned about my financial security now and in decades to come. Each of these identities informs my viewpoint.
How bad is it?
Can we survive this?
Sometimes, I want to discard my scientific mantle and respond by giving voice to dread, pessimism, and doubt. Does this reduce or augment my credibility? In this age of contestable reality, I don’t know. But more and more, I am cautiously representing both the scientist and the citizen in how I respond in order to feel more integrated and aligned.
Can we survive this? Yes, I believe we can. But will we survive? That, I don’t know.
To survive climate change, we must learn to live together, with less. The American dream of ownership, entitlement to consume, and complete individual freedom must dissolve. A new American dream - an archetype of fulfillment that we both live by and export - must assimilate visions of collective sacrifice, mutual care, fierce compassion, and the repair of legacies of violence.
To persist, we must answer fundamental questions that we are unpracticed in exploring together in public: How much is enough? What does it mean to provide for one another? What is the place of the human species in the threatened biodiversity of our planet? What does it mean to be mortal, to live amidst impermanence and suffering?
These are not scientific questions. Certainly, scientists can bring their tools to bear in the inquiry, but these questions are fundamentally spiritual and civic. And I believe that the language necessary to explore, answer, and live into such questions must come from our contemplative and moral traditions. This new (or rather, ancient and renewed) language has to replace the stale and distorted words we are so accustomed to - words like “innovation,” “win-win solutions,” “cost effectiveness,” and “economic growth.” We cannot produce and consume our way out of climate crisis.
We must also recognize that with climate change comes loss and grief. We have seen species and ways of life go extinct - often unequally, aligned with historical axes of power, extraction, and oppression. To survive, this loss and accompanying sadness must be seen, allowed, and honored.
It’s possible that in retrospect, the 21st century will be viewed as an era of planetary hospice and palliative care. We’re not yet ready for the task. We haven’t even acknowledged the pain yet.
I don’t know how to end this written meditation on a high note. I don’t even know that I should try. Climate science and the pace of social change do not prompt upbeat forecasts. But I can say this: if we survive, if our highest moral and civil ideas persist, it will be because we radically transformed into a society that values stewardship over short-term gains, vitality over convenience, and one another over profit.
I’d like to see that future.