If We’re Going to Unfuck the Planet, This Decade is Our Last Chance

The photo you see here was something I took in May of last year. I was in Grand Teton National Park, a vast swath of wilderness perched in the Rocky Mountains of Wyoming, just an hour’s drive south of the more famous Yellowstone National Park. I had the privilege of spending most of the month living in a lodge overlooking Jackson Lake following the end of my spring semester. On rare days toward the end of my stay, snowy weather turned to sunny skies, and the soaring peaks of the Tetons finally revealed themselves. It remains perhaps one of the most stunning wild places I’ve ever seen in the flesh.

It was also a place increasingly overburdened with the stresses of our current climate crisis. Half of the trees in the park were withered husks, unable to yield fruit or seed. An invasive species of pine beetle apparently has thrived as the planet has become ever warmer due to humanity’s unyielding urge to consume and toxic dependence on fossil fuels. Typically, the winters in northwestern Wyoming are supposed to be cold enough, for long enough, to kill off this species. Instead, the beetles are thriving, and the forests that so many species depend on are being pushed to the brink.

Beyond invasive species, it was difficult to ignore the human impact in a place that, on its face, appears so wild and pristine. While canoeing to an island in the middle of this miles-long lake with a colleague, I discovered no less than three large identifiable pieces of plastic trash that we collected for disposal. In a ten minute walk along the lake shore, I could’ve ended up at an air-conditioned convenience store in Coulter Bay, filled with single use plastics, beer and junk food – the amenities of any major U.S. city, smack in the middle of one of the country’s most fragile ecosystems. On the main roads of the park, tanker trucks carrying fuel could be seen, while grizzly bear stalked elk calves in the valley below.

Even the mountains were vulnerable. Hiking through a canyon in the shadow of the eponymous Grand Teton, my colleagues and I were able to go shirtless while fresh snow lay on the ground. Glaciers that had carved vast gashes into these ancient monuments of the natural world were all but extinct in this range. The roar of airplanes could be heard, even in this place, seemingly so far removed from the human world. Nature still existed in the fringes of this scenic landscape – mountain goats gave us wary stares so far in the distance that we needed binoculars to confirm their presence – but even in a place like this, it was evident how mankind has pushed nature to the wayside.

I offer this personal anecdote to underscore the scale of the climate crisis every living creature on Earth will be subject to for the remainder of their lifespan, and that every living creature born over the next thousand years must conspire to survive in spite of.

There’s a good chance that you’re aware of what brought us to this precarious epoch of Earth’s history. The burning of fossil fuels is the primary culprit, with humans burning oil, coal and gas on industrial scales over the past two centuries to create the creature comforts we have today, all while the industry knowingly hid the ugly truth of their consequences to a global public either too ignorant or too enraptured by economic growth to address. Global trade and economic growth in both the developed and developing world produce literal mountains of trash. The production of plastic trash since the end of the Second World War alone has ended up in countless landfills and Texas-sized debris fields in the world’s oceans. Each continent is running out of wild, unspoiled spaces. Nitrates in agricultural runoff create oxygen-less dead zones in our waters. Black markets are encouraging the destruction of our planet’s most vulnerable and charismatic species. I’ve surely missed numerous other small culprits – the collapse of our biosphere is nothing if not a death by thousands upon thousands upon thousands of cuts, far too many for any human alone to catalog, administered every minute of every day. At times, the scope and scale of this crisis can feel staggering, and keeping a mental checklist of how much is wrong with the world can drive a man to tears.

I am part of this problem. My typing this on my MacBook to write this piece will only contribute to greenhouse emissions in our atmosphere. The phones you use do, too. So does the food you eat, the car you need for work, the heat in your home, the clothes you wear, the soap you use to keep yourself clean when you shower.

I don’t think I need to explain how our gross mistreatment of the planet has worked out for its species, ourselves included. Fire season in the American West and in Australia is year-round, with towering infernos burning away Cuba-sized swaths of land, leaving thousands homeless and hundreds of millions of animals dead. The Arctic and Antarctic have been melting more since 2015 than they have between roughly 1970 and 2015 – the amount of ice that once took a week to melt now takes a day to disappear into the oceans. Hell, an island in Antarctica hit 70 degrees this February – as warm as Los Angeles was at the same time.

Speaking of those oceans, in addition to our plastic pollution problem, they’re warming up in ways that deprive the water of oxygen. Coral reefs, once living organisms, are now bleached graveyards. And entire ecosystems are collapsing under waves that will soon swamp coastal cities from New York to Miami to Singapore to Sydney. Rainforests in the Amazon and the Congo are burning away, communities around the equator – India, for instance – are becoming too hot to be habitable, and we’re nearing the point where permafrost in the Arctic will melt and release even more CO2. Things can spiral swiftly and with terrifying magnitude in real time.

All the while the engine behind the climate crisis continues to churn without missing a step. The fossil fuel industry appears to have even increased its operations, extracting oil and gas at a greater pace than ever before. Carbon and greenhouse emissions around the globe have either increased or remained at unsustainable levels. We as a species are barreling towards the end of a cliff, and are literally stepping harder on the gas pedal toward calamity.

I also probably don’t need to tell you who among us, in a society that has become chillingly comfortable and at ease with the very forces that are poised to unravel it thread by thread, are most responsible. Approximately 100 companies around the world are responsible for 70% of the world’s carbon emissions. Billionaires, whose aggregate wealth is far more than probably could be spent in as many generations as humanity has existed as we know it, pay lip service to the notion of investing in climate initiatives while profiting off fracking investments and ride-sharing and economic supply chains that belch millions of tonnes of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, just so things like clothes and toys and computers can be made across oceans for slave wages. And our politics, not just in the United States but the world at large, have fallen on deaf ears, indifferent to the imminent calamity we all will suffer, or actively profiting off of inaction or, worse, are profiting from exacerbation of the problem. It’s a lot easier for those in power to say that our global crisis is a Chinese hoax than it is to accept reality and plan accordingly, especially when there’s still money to be made in oil. And current fascist movements around the world will certainly find ways to multiply the human toll of the climate crisis when essentials like drinkable water become scarce, valuable commodities.

I don’t need to tell you things are bad. But I do need to tell you that this is our last opportunity to salvage a future for the natural world. Ourselves included.

The 2018 IPCC report on the climate crisis laid bare the timelines that we have to work with, although by this point, I’m certain even those projections are depressingly outdated. In case you didn’t pursue through the abstract, the consensus of the global scientific community warns us that, in order to avoid global average temperature increases beyond 2 degrees Celsius — we’re already locked into about 1.5 degrees Celsius, which will guarantee that we’re in for some severe hardships in the coming years and decades — that the world must collectively lower carbon emissions to below what the world circa 2000 emitted by 2030. This is likely an optimistic projection – in all likelihood, we have less than a decade to fix shit.

If we have any chance to unfuck the only home life as we know it has known, it starts with us, and it starts today. Right now, indigenous peoples of the First Nations are putting their lives on the line to stop trains from Alberta and Saskatchewan from shipping tar sands (among the worst sources of greenhouse gas emissions when burned) from arriving at refineries. Indigenous peoples in the Amazon are standing up to the Bolsonaro regime’s hunger for deforestation and farmland, even while logging companies are killing them off. Young people across the world took Greta’s message to heart, and are beginning to work toward resisting the inert powers that be in whatever ways they can. And there’s a faint but palpable sense that maybe, just maybe, the youth movement can succeed.

Which brings me to what we can do. Realistically, it is asking a lot of many of us to give up fixtures of modern life when our livelihoods are at stake. I can’t tell you to give up driving a car if that’s the only way you can get to work. Or to live in a city to reduce your carbon footprint when rent is too damn expensive. I’m certainly not going to stop you from enjoying beef. What does one person’s personal sacrifices matter when there are billions who act in such ways to nullify that individual’s choices many times over?

I’ll tell you what we can do.

What we can do is organize. We can put pressure on those in power to divest from fossil fuels, to get rid of nitrates in our fertilizer, to invest in green technologies that don’t actively kill the planet to use. We can vote craven motherfuckers out of office that don’t fight for the people’s welfare, and do our best to vote in people who recognize the gravity of the current situation. We can protest against the wills of the few and rich and powerful. We can reach out to our communities, educate our neighbors on the situation, and form grassroots coalitions for the future of life on a habitable planet. And if all else fails, we fight with force against these injustices against life. That means social injustices too — Latinos are among the most environmentally conscious demographics in the country, indigenous tribes in the States have been fighting against corporate desecration of natural resources for decades, black communities in most major metropolitan areas in the United States are also those that will feel the effects of the climate crisis more acutely and sooner than the rest of us, and the poor and destitute of all walks of like will likely die from the climate crisis first. The stakes are too great, the consequences too dire, and the time to act too limited, not to fight for us all.

There’s still beautiful places left in this world that we haven’t ruined. I want a world where I can one day show my son or daughter places like those mountains in Wyoming, where life still teems, before our world chokes the life out of it. Frankly, I probably won’t have kids at all unless we can make progress in halting the greatest challenge our species has ever faced.

Things may be bad, but there’s a fiery spit of hope among us still. And that counts for something. It has to. And I can’t accept that we can’t fucking prove the odds wrong and pull off a moonshot to save the world we love.

Don’t lose the will to fight. Please. Never lose the will to fight. There are still many battles ahead of us, and it is on us to see them through. It’s on us to make those fights count.

And I would love it if we made it.