We’re hastening our own extinction through climate change
Published 1:30 am Sunday, June 23, 2019
Many decades ago, Albert Camus made an obvious observation: “Man cannot do without beauty, and this is what our era pretends to want to disregard. It steels itself to attain the absolute and authority; it wants to transfigure the world before having exhausted it, to set it to rights before having understood it. Whatever it may say, our era is deserting this world.”
The modern and science-based truism is that humans heavily devalue the future and usually ignore or rationalize away unpleasantness. It seems to me to be some sort of deal with the devil of happiness.
Regardless of any valid excuse of how we are constructed, climate change is coming on like a freight train. Ocean acidification and warming already has destroyed half the coral reefs. Few know this and fewer care. The Cato Institute recently conducted a survey showing 68 percent of Americans wouldn’t pay $10 a month more for utilities to help. Any reasonable person at this point should expect little to be done and the scientific projections to continue or even accelerate. Scientists project ocean pH will drop to 7.8 within 70 years, eliminating salmon and making saving our orcas a waste of time.
Any ocean creature that calcifies — corals, oysters and clams — has no chance to succeed in those conditions. Ninety-five percent of all ocean species will vanish. I, as a marine aquarium enthusiast, even know this. Goodbye Dory and Nemo.
The Sixth Extinction will be far faster and far more complete than any previous geological catastrophe before the present Anthropocene, except the Yucatan meteor event that killed all large animals within minutes. So as some are just starting to pull their heads out of the proverbial sand, the first afterthought they should have is, “what has my intentional ignorance done?” But that would call for honest introspection and personal responsibility, something in quite low supply in homo sapien sapiens, the only moral and self-conscious creature the Earth has yet to evolve.
Rick Walker
Snohomish
