I just finished reading Peter Frankopan’s The Earth Transformed. I have to admit that it was a bit of a slog, as there’s only so much depressing reading you can do at one time. Still, I highly recommend it as it emphatically brings home the horrors we may face as a result of climate change.
The book, which is clearly well researched, recounts the many times humans have had to deal with climate changes caused by various natural events, such as volcanic eruptions, and the many and varied ways in which humans have altered the natural environment, most often in ways that come back to haunt them. Anthropogenic changes to the environment are nothing new, but our current technology, combined with globalization, has enabled those living today to alter the environment more quickly, and more profoundly than was possible in the past. One can’t read this book without coming to the conclusion that the entire human race is approaching a crisis that will be devastating. How it will play out is not a certainty, but there are few optimistic scenarios, and all of them require political leadership that takes the problem seriously and takes serious action to minimize the effects of climate change. As Frankopan observes:
It is worth bearing in mind, however, that much of human history has been about the failure to understand or adapt to changing circumstances in the physical and natural world around us, and the consequences that ensue.
Those failures have wreaked havoc in the past, but they tended to be somewhat localized, while our current failure promises worldwide havoc.
The book should be required reading for every member of every legislative body in this country. You never know. Maybe one or two congressional Republicans would decide that saving the planet is more important than stopping drag shows or persecuting trans people, though I admit that’s unlikely. Unfortunately, if history, both of the sort Frankopan recounts and we have experienced from Republicans recently, is any guide, then we have little hope that the coming crisis will be averted or its impact mitigated by constructive action. I now have three little grandchildren, and I am truly afraid of how they will fare in the world that we have inflicted on them.
Post a Comment