It's Time to Renature the Climate Conversation

On Jun 2nd, in a piece called Now for a Little Climate Perspective, I took us up to space to show, in a single glimpse, what I mean by “the climate according to life.” There we could see Earth in its planetary context, a living flower amongst a collection of stone flowers. It may be of a common category, a planet circling a sun, but it has its own dynamic, and that dynamic arises out of life. Then I pointed out that despite that, Earth’s climate is officially assessed by a “physical science basis.” That sounds great for a stone flower, but a living flower? What does the term mean, I asked, and attempted an answer in a follow-on piece, called The Climate According to Numbers, where I suggested that the physical science basis was originally intended as a tool for converting climate to mathematical terms for the sake of computer modelling, not as a theory postulating a purely physical climate. I also pointed out that in those early days, science had what meteorologist Millan Millan called a two legged view of climate, one leg for CO2 and the greenhouse effect, and another leg for land disturbance and water-cycle effects.

But what happens when the physical science basis, or the reduction of life to numbers, leaps beyond science and enters the broader human psyche? That’s what we’ll consider here.

As it turns out, this week is the twentieth anniversary of a highly influential essay called The Death of Environmentalism: Global Warming Politics in a Post-Environmental World, which provides some insight into what happens when a purely physical view of climate enters society. As the title suggests, it hasn’t been good for our relationship with other living things.

But before we get to that, we need to look at how such a leap happened. How did climate science, which at one time saw living things and landscapes as central aspects of climate, get construed into an argument for the death of an institution, environmentalism, which is mostly about defending living things and landscapes? It’s quite a leap when you think about it. Though it wasn’t a leap. It was more of a bridge-crossing. And the bridge? It assembled itself, as happens whenever scientific information needs to be conveyed to the public. It’s a structure made of government reports, articles, activist talking points, books, etc. And I would say it began formal construction in the summer of 1979.

That’s shortly after Jules Charney, a leading figure in the Global Atmospheric Research Program, led a small team to Woods Hole, Massachusetts to answer a simple question: “what would would happen if atmospheric CO2 levels doubled?” They gathered the world’s best models and pretty much averaged the results, producing what is known as the Charney Report. The answer? 3 degrees Centigrade. That may not sound like a lot, but it points to a planet completely unlike what we’re used to.

As I’ve written, the report was a bombshell, and put CO2 and global warming on the political map. Arguments immediately began flying for and against the report. Scientists attempted careful explanations. Media and journalism entered the fray. Global institutions like the IPCC and the UNFCC organized around it. Financial interests started seeing gold in the scale of industrial build-out being proposed as a fix. Politicians perceived a ballot-box miracle, being able to promote yet more development while being “green.” The bridge took shape and the science travelled across. But as you see, only one aspect of it, CO2, was provided passage. Or in Millan Millan’s parlance, only the CO2 leg walked across, the land-change leg got left behind, or perhaps it’s held up at a check point, being interrogated for its suitability in the models.

This could be called the second reduction. First nature was reduced to numbers for the sake of computer modelling and interpreted in physical terms. Then, all the number crunching was reduced a single causative agent: CO2, a reduction that science may not have originally called for. I don’t think Charney and his associates intended by their report to say that CO2 is the sole matter of climate. They were just answering a question. They could also have been asked, “what would happen if we doubled the rate of land destruction?” And I suspect they would have answered “great question, yet there’s no way we can answer it now because our models aren’t there yet. But we have some disturbing news regarding CO2.”

As mentioned, at that time science held a two-legged perspective on climate. Just a few months prior to the Charney Report, the World Meteorological Organization hosted it’s first World Climate Summit, producing a report it described as “the most profound and comprehensive review of climate in relation to mankind yet published.” It’s first paper, under a discussion of “the impacts that are of the most relevance to the subject of climate,” placed “the transformation of the land surface of the planet by forest clearance, the ploughing up of the steppes and great plains, land reclamation, etc.” at the top of the list.

This double reduction, the reduction of all climate to CO2, went on to profoundly shape the thinking and discourse of the newly emerging climate movement, with some pretty dramatic results. By its title, The Death of Environmentalism gives the impression that the authors, Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shallenberger, encountered something dying and wrote about it. But that is not right. Their point was to kill it. “We have become convinced that modern environmentalism, with all of its unexamined assumptions, outdated concepts and exhausted strategies, must die so that something new can live.” They “dropped” their essay at the annual meeting of the Environmental Grantmakers Association just to show they meant it.

That “something new” appears to be more of an industrial project than what we would normally think of as environmental, which I guess is the point. The new job of environmentalism was to lead the country toward the carbon-free economy. What environmentalism really needed was an industrial policy.

There’s more that can be said of this essay. It’s ten thousand words long and there are many points raised, a few I agree with. But the question needs to be asked: would this perspective hold up if the land-change leg had made it across the bridge? For once you see the living half of climate, the soil fungi, water cycles, plant transpiration and climatic regulation, you see that the work of environmentalism—protecting living things and ecosystems—has been climate work all along.

The Death of Environmentalism isn’t the only example of what Charles Eisenstein calls “carbon fundamentalism.” It’s everywhere. Even whales are being reduced to carbon quantities. Carbon has become a kind of currency, reducing living things and places to tradeable quantities for the so-called carbon-free economy. In July, 2018, Robinson Meyers wrote a piece in the Atlantic Monthly essentially calling on us to stop hugging trees and start hugging power lines. They’re the true green saviors, he argued, up “against the forces of the dark—in this case NIMBYs, old-school environmentalists, and utility lawyers.” Missing is any awareness that the land being cleared for transmission lines is actively regulating the climates where they exist. Missing is the awareness that climate-regulating ecosystems have already been sliced and diced to the point of collapse. Do we really need a new wave of slicing, dicing, cutting, digging, building? If we push Mother Earth over the brink, who’s going to regulate the climate? These questions don’t get asked because they don’t fit in the reduction.

In April of 2023, Mother Jones devoted an entire issue to the theme, Electrify Everything, with a landing-page cover photo of Mount Rushmore, the austere faces of the forefathers covered in solar panels like bad acne, with windmills sprouting out of their heads. In it, “green” energy champion Bill McKibbin argued that progressives must learn to love what he calls the “green building boom.” Fronting his piece is an image of a woman standing in the iron bucket of a giant trench digger, lovingly hugging it. Do you see what I mean that scientific reductionism has leapt the bounds of science and entered our psyches? Indeed, it is all but undermining the human relationship with the rest of the planet, which was on shaky grounds to begin.

This reductionism isn’t new of course. We’ve been reducing life to human purpose for centuries, even millennia. We shouldn’t be too surprised that the physical science basis would lead to a technical solutions paradigm, that the climate crisis would be reduced to yet another argument for industrial “progress.” It’s our modus operandi. Rather than truly advancing, developing a more sophisticated and restrained relationship with the living planet we depend on, we’ve merely doubled down on the old mechanical mindset.

As troubling as I find this approach to climate, I don’t wish to vilify its protagonists. I saw Ted Nordhaus interviewed by Andrew Revkin, and though I have a much different perspective, I could see they are decent people and at times felt in alignment with them. For instance, at one point Ted Nordhaus mentioned he felt humans may be able to survive a 3 C rise in global temps, but worried that other species wouldn’t. I appreciated that. One of Andrew Revkin’s pet subjects is local preparedness, something I also advocate. The local is not only where politics often works best but where we encounter the living side of climate, in the landscapes around where we live.

Interestingly enough, Revkin concluded the interview noting, with genuine humility, that things have gotten pretty complicated and we need to “embrace complexity.” That struck me because it echoes the title of the Embracing Nature’s Complexity conference I wrote about in May, where scientists and science-communicators gathered to explore ways that this other side of climate, the living side, can be conveyed to the broader public. And this is the key thing to keep in mind. The climate story isn’t fully told yet. The land leg, though left behind, is still very much alive, and is being brought forward by some very intelligent and committed people. Sooner or later, we’ll all have to embrace nature’s complexity, and though Revkin probably had other things in mind, I find the confluence in language hopeful.

The climate crisis is real, and we’ll need both legs beneath us if we are going to find a way out of the box canyon we’ve marched ourselves into. We think the answers are in our heads, our equations, our models, our technology. But its what’s under out feet where we should look, that out of which we emerged. This Earth is a living thing, that is its primarily reality. Take life out of any system and it immediately collapses to redundancy and repetition, the complexity lost. So, yes, life is complexity. It is also beauty, resilience, stability, memory, relationship and our best hope of healing the climate.

Breath by breath it reminds us. It’s time we listen.

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