The choices we’re making might cause everyone to die.
That’s kind of sad. I like being alive, and I like the thought that other humans might be alive even after I am gone.
Some people – the original Millennials, for instance – prefer to imagine that the world would end when their world ends. But for those of us who feel that helping others adds to the meaning of our lives, it’s more satisfying to imagine humanity’s continued existence. Each good deed is like a wave, rippling outward, causing people to be a little kinder to others in turn.
These waves of kindness can’t last forever – our universe began with a finite quantity of order, which we use up in order to live – but they could persist for a very long time. Humans could have many billions of years with which to colonize the stars.
Unless we go extinct sooner. Which we might. We’re destabilizing the climate of the only habitable planet we know.
Venus used to be habitable. We humans could’ve flown there and set up a colony. But a blip of excess greenhouse gas triggered runaway climate change. Now Venus has no liquid water. Instead, the planet is covered in thick smog. Sulfuric acid rains from the sky.
I would rather we not doom Earth to the same fate.
There are things you can do to help. In We Are the Weather, Jonathan Safran Foer lists the (abundant!) evidence that animal agriculture is the leading cause of climate change.
You should still turn off the lights when you leave a room. If you can walk to the park instead of driving, do it! Every effort you make to waste less energy is worthwhile!
But it helps to take stock of the numbers. If everyone with a conventional automobile could suddenly exchange it for a hybrid vehicle, we’d still be emitting 96% as much greenhouse gas. If everyone decided to eliminate animal products from their diet, we’d be emitting 50% as much.
Switching to hybrid vehicles wouldn’t save us. Deciding to eat plant-based foods would.
Unfortunately, it’s hard to make this switch. Not least because the peril we’ve placed ourselves in doesn’t feel compelling. It’s like the difference between venus flytraps and pitcher plants. With a venus flytrap, you can see the exact moment that a bug is doomed. Those spikey mandibles close and that’s the end! When a bug lands on a pitcher plant, though, its fate is sealed well before the moment when it finally topples into the digestive water. The lip of a pitcher plant is sloped and slippery; the actual boundary between life and death is unnoticeable.
Because climate change will be exacerbated by so many feedback loops, by the time we see the precipice it’ll be too late.
In Foer’s words,
The chief threat to human life – the overlapping emergencies of ever-stronger superstorms and rising seas, more severe droughts and declining water supplies, increasingly large ocean dead zones, massive noxious-insect outbreaks, and the daily disappearance of forests and species – is, for most people, not a good story.
When the planetary crisis matters to us at all, it has the quality of a war being fought over there. We are aware of the existential stakes and the urgency, but even when we know that a war for our survival is raging, we don’t feel immersed in it. That distance between awareness and feeling can make it very difficult for even thoughtful and politically engaged people – people who want to act – to act.
History not only makes a good story in retrospect; good stories become history. With regard to the fate of our planet – which is also the fate of our species – that is a profound problem. As the marine biologist and filmmaker Randy Olson put it, “Climate is quite possibly the most boring subject the science world has ever had to present to the public.”
I like that Foer tries to wring empathy from this dull story. He writes about his personal struggles to be good. If it were necessary to blow hot air from a hairdryer into a small child’s face each time we bought a cheeseburger, few people would buy them. But it’s more difficult to restrain ourselves when we instead know vaguely – rationally, unemotionally – that each cheeseburger we buy will exacerbate the hot air – and floods, and droughts, and malaria – that children will one day have to bear.
Our brains are good at understanding cause and effect when they are closely linked in time and space. Push a button, hear a sound! Even babies understand how to work a toy piano. Even my ill behaved dogs know better than to misbehave in front of me (chew the pillow, get shut in bathroom).
My dogs struggle when an effect comes long after the initial cause. Furtively chew a pillow, get shut in bathroom several days later, once the human finally discovers evidence? That’s not compelling for my dogs. The punishment is too long delayed to dissuade them from mastication.
Buy a cheeseburger today – make our children’s children’s children go hungry from global crop failure. That’s not compelling. Our brains can’t easily process that story.
We can understand it, but we can’t feel it.
And that’s the message of Foer’s book. How can we – collaboratively – create a world in which it’s easy to do the right thing? How can we make cheeseburgers feel bad?
An intellectual understanding – cheeseburgers requires farms with cows, cows emit methane, cows take space, farmers destroy forests to make space, cheeseburgers cause climate change – isn’t enough to create that feeling. Climate change is too dull a story.
Even worse, climate change isn’t even the most boring story to tell about our extinction. In We Are the Weather – an entire book in which Foer castigates himself for contributing to harms that will befall his descendants some 100 to 200 years in the future (because that’s when climate change will get really bad) – Foer doesn’t even mention that he’s also causing harms that will befall his descendants 30 to 60 years in the future.
Even though these nearer term harms are equally calamitous. Even though these nearer term harms are just as definitively known to be caused by cheeseburgers.
Climate change is dull. Antibiotic resistance is even more dull.
It’s pretty bad when something is more boring than talking about the weather.
Most farmed animals are constantly given low doses of antibiotics. As it happens, this is exactly the protocol you’d use for a directed evolution experiment if you were trying to make antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
There’s an old story about a king, Mithridates, whose father was assassinated with poison. Mithridates trained his body with exposure to low doses of poison so that he would be able to survive higher doses.
It was a clever strategy. We’re helping bacteria do the same thing.
Our world will be nightmarishly different once antibiotics stop working. My own children are three and five years old. They’ve gotten infections that we needed to treat with antibiotics about a dozen times. Two weeks of taking the pink stuff and my kids got better.
In a world with antibiotic resistant bacteria – which we are creating through animal agriculture – any of those dozen infections could have killed my kids.
You should watch the New York Times video about antibiotic resistance. By 2050, it’s likely that more people will die from antibiotic resistant bacterial infections than from cancer.
Huge quantities of money are being spent to develop new anti-cancer drugs – new ways for elderly people to stave off time. Meanwhile, it’s not just that we spend so little developing antibiotics. We are actively making these drugs worse.
Antibiotic resistance isn’t a compelling story, though. To feel a connection between a cheeseburger and your someday grandkid dying in bed, feverish and septic, you’d have to understand the biochemistry of lateral gene transfer, DNA replication, mutation, drug metabolism. You’d need to be able to see in your mind’s eye the conditions that farmed animals are raised in.
And, honestly? People who can vividly picture a concentrated animal feeding operation or slaughterhouse probably aren’t the ones buying cheeseburgers.
But if the world doesn’t change, their grandkids will die too.
.
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Featured image: Everglades National Park by B. Call.
Frank Brown Cloud 