Keith E McNeal
Isn’t it strange how we hear so much about climate change, and yet most of us still understand so little?
That’s partly because it’s so big and endlessly complicated. Too much to wrap your head around. Even scientists who spend their days thinking about it really only grasp their areas of specialisation. There are so many dimensions of our majestic planet that interact and make up the larger whole.
But as critical as it is, the scientific side of things isn’t the whole story. Climate change is also a cultural problem.
Pumping carbon and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere traps heat, with all sorts of noxious consequences we most often hear about.
But “climate change” is about much more than global warming alone. The web of industrial changes and energy-system transformations producing more intense and catastrophic climatological events are also affecting planetary processes and life forms in new and countless ways, such as the microplastics now flowing through our veins or the fact that concrete has now entered the geological record.
[caption id="attachment_1004126" align="alignnone" width="730"] Keith McNeal -[/caption]
The manifestations are vast and many-tentacled, but the underlying source of these epic changes can be readily identified: our modern-industrial world-system.
Half of Earth’s surface is now used for agriculture, forestry, and habitation. Three-quarters of the biosphere has been altered by human activity. Sea levels rise, oceans acidify, coasts erode, soils deplete. Industrial civilisation uses over half of renewable fresh-water sources. Accelerating rates of species extinction and loss of biodiversity are weirdly counterpointed by a massive increase in domesticated industrial biomass in the form of humans, poultry, pigs, cows, and a few other “lucky” creatures. All of these indicators and many more have been studied and it is clear that everything began to significantly shift on a planetary scale with the rise of industrialisation, powered by fossil fuels, but especially took off since the mid-20th century, in a period now referred to as the Great Acceleration.
But if global warming and all the rest are anthropogenic – caused by human activity – then “climate change” is primarily a cultural and therefore political problem, not a scientific or technical one, per se.
And if it’s cultural, not natural, then we can do something about it. Cultures are always changing. Nothing lasts forever.
Yet we must learn to see ourselves in the thing itself before we can begin to tackle the problem together. Climate change is a magical mirror. Our reflection in this mirror isn’t straightforward or self-evident, but it’s there all the same, whether we like it or not.
Covid19 is a similar mirror. The inert piece of RNA that quickly became known as the “novel” coronavirus hailed from a family of already-known respiratory coronaviruses, which is why many Asians already wore facemasks or were primed to quickly don them. Covid19 moved from a non-human animal host – likely b
