Tom Barry
The fog of doubt about climate change is lifting as the
climate-change deniers retreat fitfully to the sidelines. Science and simple
observation have, for the most part, triumphed over ideology. The most
retrograde politicians, policy institutes, and corporations are still busy
manufacturing and propagating this denial ideology.
The deniers no longer occupy the center of the climate-change
debate. Instead, the debate has increasingly moved to discussion about how to
best address the intensifying threats of global climate change.
The facts of higher temperatures, weird weather, and increasing
levels of atmospheric carbon are finally clearing away the ideological fog.
After more than three decades of fruitless debate, the consensus accepting human-induced
climate change rules.
With the climate-change deniers in full retreat, new camps among
climate-change activists are defining themselves and advancing new lines of
debate. Broadly speaking, it could be said that there are three new camps, each
with their own prophets and manifestos. The camps don’t stand in opposition,
and they share many of the same convictions. But priorities and emphases
differ.
The three camps might well be termed the Regulators, the Sinkers,
and the Adapters.
The dominant camp includes those activists, scientists, writers,
and policy advocates who constituted the vanguard in the public-education
campaign against the climate-change deniers. The Regulators insist that policy
changes at the local, national, and international levels are urgently needed.
The fundamental argument of the Regulators is as follows: Without
severe governmental regulation of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas
emissions – whether by financial disincentives, carbon-trading regimens, or
outright prohibitions on carbon releases – the planet and human civilization,
as we know it, will be but a wistful memory.
The second broad camp focuses less on prevention and more on plans
to trap and dissipate greenhouse gases, mainly carbon. As the Sinkers readily
acknowledge, regulations are needed to prevent and mitigate climate-change
aggravating emissions, Yet atmospheric levels are already dangerously high,
thus making it imperative, they assert, to seek solutions to sequester the
carbon that’s already wreaking havoc with climate and societies. The priority,
then, argue the Sinkers, is to preserve and to create (either naturally or
technologically) “carbon sinks.”
Climate-change adaptation is the third major camp with the new
climate-change consensus. While not disputing the need to reduce greenhouse gas
emissions through governmental regulation and to sequester as much atmospheric
carbon as possible, climate-change adapters focus on strategies designed to assist
communities to survive climate change with environmentally sustainable
techniques.
Determination
and Hope Amid Gloom
Generally, climate-change scenarios fall within doomsday futures. Yet
amid the prevailing doom and gloom new visions of more hopeful futures are
emerging, especially among the Sinkers and the Adapters.
The deepening consensus the climate change is already upon us and
will most certainly intensify has sparked a surge of new thinking and activism
about the contentious human-nature relationship. Among an expanding community
of climate-change activists -- environmentalists, scholars, entrepreneurs, and
technologists – there’s an incipient, growing determination to move beyond the
gloom to envision more stable and survivable futures.
Most of this more explicitly hopeful thinking about meeting the
challenges of climate change is found among the Sinkers. By adopting more
sustainable land-management practices that restore landscapes or by seeking
innovative technological solutions, the most enthusiastic of the carbon-sink
adherents argue that we can beat the climate-change crisis. Emblematic of
this type of Sinker optimism is a recent book titled Cows Save
the Planet – and Other Improbable Ways of Restoring Soil to Heal the Earth.
Adapters tend to think on smaller scale than the Regulators or
Sinkers -- less about saving the planet and more about preparing for the trends
and vagaries of climate change at the household or community level. In many
ways, the Adapters are the new survivalists. But members of this new breed of
survivalists aren’t retreating to the hills with their guns and stores of food
in preparation for a predicted social and economic collapse, as has been the
tradition of survivalists and “doomsday preppers,”
Adapters, for the most part, aren’t retreating. They are
standing their ground, reaching out for solutions and adaptations that will
sustain life and community even as environmental conditions change.
Overall, the Adapters are pragmatic realists. They accept climate change
as our new reality. Rather than finding escape routes, Adapters are seeking
practical adaptations to increased flooding, droughts, forest fires, and pest
infestations linked to disturbed climatic cycles.
The pragmatic realism of the Adapters would seem, by definition,
to exclude hope, optimism, and idealism. Certainly, for the most part, most
adaptation strategies are hardly visionary. Fortifying eroding shorelines with
sand transfers or constructing cross-regional aqueducts to supply drought-stricken
communities, for example, are short-term solutions that fail to break from
unsustainable development paradigms.
Recognizing the urgent necessity to adapt to changing climatic
conditions and weird weather events, a new breed of climate-change adapters are
embracing and propagating the tenets of environmental sustainability as
survival strategies. They are spreading hope by demonstrating that simple land
and water management techniques can restore some measure of stability while
putting communities back in touch with the vagaries of nature.
In the world’s aridlands -- comprising about 40% of the planet’s
land surface -- the escalating threats of higher temperatures, prolonged
droughts, and diminishing groundwater reserves are raising questions about
whether current populations can survive in these increasingly harsh and
degraded environments.
Among the most prominent voices among the Adapters in aridlands, including
the western U.S.-Mexico borderlands, is Gary Paul Nabhan, an ethnobotanist at
the University of Arizona. Nabhan’s
latest book, Growing
Food in a Hotter, Drier Land, addresses survivability issues by pointing to an inspiring array
of drylands adaptation strategies in the transborder West that could, if widely
adopted, begin to restore balance and let desert dwellers glimpse a future.
What’s clear is that no
living thing on this planet can count on the patterns and balances of nature to
which we have become accustomed. The escalating levels of atmospheric
greenhouse gases and the array of indicators that climate and weather patterns
have gone awry have led some to conclude that we are already past the point
where climatic conditions can be stabilized.
Climate-change activists
– whether they are Regulators, Sinkers, or Adapters – are well aware of these
indicators. Yet, increasingly, many are outlining scenarios of reform,
mitigation, and sustainable alternatives that instill hope. With determination,
good sense, and visions of more sustainable relationships with nature, they are
giving us some reason to be hopeful –especially about the capability of humans
– ourselves and our communities -- to adapt and change directions.
(Reviews of Cows
Save the Planet and Growing Food in a Hotter, Drier Land forthcoming.)