We face so many challenges that the task of choosing which ones to emphasize and which can be edited out for the sake of brevity is nearly impossible. So many injustices afflict our fellow human beings that, of those that make the shortlist to be attacked and redressed, determining an order of priority is best left unattempted even by — especially by — those with the best intentions. (Yet we must and we shall. This process is called “politics.”)
One matter, however, is so self-evidently far ahead of the rest that calling it an “issue” doesn’t come close to doing it justice: the environment. Without a clean, healthy planet to live on, nothing else matters. Human extinction or, failing that, the collapse of civilization, as has been predicted by 2050, renders all debate on all other issues and policies moot.
Without a planet that sustains life, college affordability is irrelevant. If you are starving and there isn’t enough food, access to free health care cannot save you. A nuclear war would not be as devastating or as final as environmental collapse.
Because it somewhat granularizes the daunting magnitude of ecocide, it feels easier to focus on various aspects of environmental degradation: global warming/climate change, water pollution, smog, drought, species extinctions, food insecurity. There’s nothing wrong with that — we need our best and brightest experts on each facet of the environment. If ever there has been a phenomenon that requires holistic analysis by society as a whole, however, it’s ecocide. You can’t separate drought from rising temperatures. These problems are so intricately and inexorably intertwined and intimately interdependent that it’s nonsensical to discuss them discretely on a political level, lest we get lost in the dying weeds. There is one issue, the biggest issue ever: Humanity is killing its habitat and so is imperiling our survival as a species.
Healthy soil, a basic necessity for life on earth and agriculture, is composed of at least 3% to 6% organic matter. But 40% of the earth’s dirt has so few nutrients that it is completely degraded. By 2050, an additional area the size of South America will be depleted. And that will be with a global population of over 9 billion. Even if we abolish rapacious capitalism on a close to global scale in order to prioritize feeding the hungry over profits — an essential move toward saving ourselves — there won’t be enough decent soil to grow enough food to feed everyone.
Thirty percent of the world’s commercially fished waters are overfished. Not only does this mean less to eat, fish-free waters are under-oxygenated and have become dead zones for other life. Oceans absorb a third of carbon dioxide emissions — or they did, before ocean acidification and seas of plastics destroyed it.
So it goes, on and on and on. Air pollution kills millions of people a year. Ninety percent of humans breathe air containing sky-high levels of toxic particulate. Within five years, the world will be down to 10% of its forests; they’ll all be gone by 2100. Populations of mammals, fish, birds, reptiles and amphibians plunged an average of 68% between 1970 and 2016. Plenty were lost before and since. Oceans are boiling, hurricanes are more powerful than ever, sea levels are rising, hundreds of thousands of species of animals and plants are going extinct. Even among scientists, few are aware of what we’ve lost before industrialization.
“It’s a common misconception that the human impact on climate began with the large-scale burning of coal and oil in the industrial era,” Julia Pongratz of the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology says. “Actually, humans started to influence the environment thousands of years ago by changing the vegetation cover of the Earth’s landscapes when we cleared forests for agriculture.” Pongratz was referring to her work on the 13th-century Mongol invasion of Central Asia and Eastern Europe. Genghis Khan’s empire chomped its way east, with a massive impact on what are now grassland steppes. Native Americans subjected North America to mass deforestation. Likewise, ancient Romans cut down so many trees that they contributed to global warming.
A recent survey of successful prognosticators found that the average forecaster believes there is a 6% chance that humanity will go extinct by 2100, and a 10% chance that a catastrophic environmental event or series of events could kill 10% of the global population. (World War II killed under 4%.) Considering that we’ve been around for hundreds of thousands of years, those are high odds.
Many climate experts say the climate crisis poses a relatively low risk of human extinction. Others disagree. Calling the existential threat “dangerously unexplored,” a 2022 statement in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences warned: “Facing a future of accelerating climate change while blind to worst-case scenarios is naive risk management at best and fatally foolish at worst.”
Dr. Luke Kemp at the University of Cambridge’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, who led the analysis, explained: “Paths to disaster are not limited to the direct impacts of high temperatures, such as extreme weather events. Knock-on effects such as financial crises, conflict and new disease outbreaks could trigger other calamities.” Cyclones might destroy infrastructure needed to cool them during a heatwave. Crops could fail. Countries might go to war over geoengineering.
A relatively low risk of catastrophe should be weighted more heavily than a higher risk of problems with lower consequences. If there was a 6% probability that an asteroid impact might wipe out the human race, no sane astrophysicist would advise us not to worry about it. Logic suggests that stopping that asteroid would become the world’s top priority, with massive resources directed toward averting the catastrophe as lesser threats were put on hold. Six percent is too high to cross your fingers and hope for the best. It follows logically that we should do the same now when it comes to the environment.
The U.S. and other nations — but we’re Americans, so let’s us do us and hope other countries join us after we set an example — should adopt a prime directive into our constitutions that puts the planet first. It should read something like this:
In any situation where there is a conflict between a policy or law or regulation that would benefit the environment and a competing concern, including but not limited to the economy, the natural environment shall take precedence.
Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis.
