In days gone by, prior to the advent of electronic carbon monoxide sensors, coal miners used canaries to detect the presence of dangerous gases that accrued in mining tunnels. The miners knew that if the canary died, carbon monoxide levels were high enough to either asphyxiate the miners or cause spontaneous combustion in the mines.
Although miners discontinued the practice of sending canaries to their death in coal mines some time ago, the “canary-in-the-coal-mine” metaphor has persisted. It can be applied to other species, for other reasons, as well. For instance, scientists see the precipitous decline of worldwide bee populations as an early indicator of ecosystem collapse, just as they do an uptick of birth defects in frogs. Bees and frogs are fragile. When nature is ill, they are among the first casualties. They suggest to us that more trouble lies ahead.
In fact, we have already got trouble aplenty: Record-breaking, deadly heat spikes are becoming commonplace due to rising global temperatures. Overheated oceans are roiling, swelling, and threatening both human coastal populations and the marine life that sustains them. Tsunami-level storms are destroying entire communities. Residents of Florida are learning, in the days after their homes are swept away by devastating hurricanes, that they cannot rebuild in the same locations because their insurance has been canceled. The same is true of Californians experiencing catastrophic climate events due to years of droughts and wildfires, followed by historic precipitation and flooding, followed by increased earthquake activity made worse by the practice of fracking.
The affluent are not immune. Nature doesn’t care about your bank account, especially if you are one of the captains of industry who have blithely poisoned the planet in pursuit of massive personal wealth and prioritized the accumulation of that wealth over the health of the planet that sustains us.
Parts of the planet previously judged to be viable habitat for humans, animals, and plant life are quickly becoming scorched earth, incapable of sustaining life as we know it. As habitat shrinks, food and water insecurity grows, leading to increased famine and the forced migration of climate refugees.
Food shortages, potable water shortages, and habitation shortages tend to mushroom into economic, social, and political crises. In such situations, the “haves” might find themselves at a disadvantage as legions of “have-nots” express their displeasure in no uncertain terms.
If you don’t believe me, I suggest that you reflect on the fate of French Empress Marie Antoinette. There are few things scarier, or more powerful, than a hoard of enraged, starving paupers. To paraphrase the immortal Janice Joplin, “revolution” is just another word for “nothing left to eat.”
I am confident that a number of readers of this column will be tempted to brand me as a communist who is calling for the global redistribution of resources. In fact, I am no such thing, although I think there is merit in the notion that all human beings should have access to clean food, clean water, and basic healthcare. But I am no communist, I assure you. I am a realist and a humanist who has spent a lifetime trying to understand the lessons of history, and who is watching the planet that I live on, and love, succumb to the first self-inflicted mass-extinction episode of all time.
For those who have not yet made the conceptual leap, I would like to assure you that the United States of America is not its own, divinely protected biome. What happens to the rest of the planet also happens to us. What happens ecologically in Africa, or Asia, or South America, doesn’t remain confined to those locations. Eventually, what happens there happens everywhere. If several of the rooms in your house are on fire and you take no action, it is only a matter of time until the rest of the house burns down.
While it is true that humankind is not entirely responsible for climate change, only the deliberately obtuse, the profoundly indifferent, or the irredeemably stupid would suggest that human activity is not implicated in the accelerating destruction of our planet. We are the primary drivers of ecosystem collapse. We frack. We drill. We pollute. We burn. We clear-cut. We poison our rivers and lakes and streams. We are drowning in microplastics and pesticides and fossil fuels and PCBs and human-generated waste. We blame the government for our sticker-shock at the grocery store but never consider that dwindling supplies lead to escalating prices.
We are experiencing the sad results of our own piggery; our own addiction to convenience; our own addiction to disposability; our own addiction to shiny, new things; and our own unwillingness to change any of our personal behaviors, even if doing so would perhaps ensure, or at least extend, the health of the planet on which we live. Our selfishness, sloth, and refusal to recognize the obvious is slowly killing us and everything else that lives here.
It would be easy—and who doesn’t love easy?—to shrug one’s shoulders and concede defeat: “If the planet is dying, it’s dying,” one might say, “and there’s nothing I can do about it, so I might as well have a good time until we fry.”
That attitude is nihilistic and unhelpful. If we could travel back in time and ask the Emperor Nero to reflect on the wisdom of fiddling while Rome burned, he would probably ask for a do-over.
While it is possible that we have already reached the point of no return—that we have so thoroughly destroyed our own fragile environment that greenhouse gasses are now multiplying, exponentially, on their own—I refuse to capitulate. Here is what my partner and I are doing to reduce our own carbon footprint:
- We drive a hybrid car.
- We have plumbed our house for solar energy.
- We are doing our best to eliminate plastics from our lives, which is way more difficult than one might think.
- We recycle.
- We do not buy, or eat, “convenience foods.”
- We prioritize and utilize public transportation whenever possible.
- We try to make purchases locally, not only to support neighborhood businesses, but to reduce mail-order packaging waste.
- We are eating far lower on the food chain than we ever have before.
- We try to maintain and repair the things we already have, instead of chucking everything into the landfill.
There are undoubtedly other changes we can make, and eventually, we will. On the other hand, there are things that we could do differently, but won’t. For instance, you will never find a composting toilet in any of our bathrooms. You’re welcome.
We all live on this planet. We are all canaries staring into the same abyss. Let’s all try a little harder not to make it worse.
