Buckminster Fuller's "spaceship earth" is in trouble. To the man who worried, correctly so, about nuclear destruction, and unbridled consumption, it would come as no surprise to be a proponent of "thinking like a planet." Buckminster wanted us to play the World Game: to be honest about earth's plight or we are nothing at all. We all win. We all lose. He had invented the Dymaxion map made of icosahedrons that unfolded to lay flat. "See, we're one world island and one world ocean, not many." He asked in 1967: "Does the universe need us any more?" The World's Fair Expo '67 introduced me to "Bucky"and his life work. I didn't know then at nine years old that I loved him, or his message. "Tiny Houses." He lived in a geodesic dome styled tent on his land his adult life long, when not in hotels three hundred nights a year covering his lecture and consulting route.
David Wallace-Wells wants us to be worried too, that in 2017 Napa's air quality index hit 486, on a day when Delhi's air quality index reached 999. Or that due to California's wildfires, the air in and around San Francisco in 2017 was worse than the same day in Beijing. Bernie Sanders was asked at a town hall meeting held by CNN, what book he was reading, at the same time I held my copy of The Uninhabitable Earth in hand. "It was scary," he said, and shrugged. If Vermont is the state that posits politicians with radical ideas, we also harbor environmentalists with unstoppable voices. Bill McKibben writes: "The decisions we make in 2075 won't matter." On page 138, of 231, Wallace-Wells tells his listeners: "If you made it this far, you are a brave reader."
So, what to do about three month old baby chicks with 225 pieces of plastic consuming ten percent of their body mass? Equivalent to a human carrying twenty to thirty pounds of plastic. Global plastic production is expected to triple by 2050; there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish. 2018 was the summer that 99 guests in a Greece seaside resort were killed by the second-deadliest wildfire in the twenty-first century. Dozens died in each other's arms descending stairs to the Aegean sea. The world's poorest live in marshes, swamps, and flood plains, and at the same time, a Santa Barbara toddler was swept away by a mudslide and carried over a mountainside to the sea.
We have entered the Anthropcene: the end of nature, where four percent of mammals are wild. If you, like me, believe a "back-up ecosystem" exists for the wealthy only, and that the idea of "Transhumanism," or the futuristic ability to "upload your brain to the cloud," is not a feasible solution, let alone an acceptable one—then vote your consciousness, and commit to "thinking like a planet."
There is no time left for "possibly, perhaps, conceivablys." It's bigger than whether to carry a plastic bag home, or not, or to drive a Tesla.
Since 2006, one recent study of the annual bee death die-off, states that we have lost seventy-five percent of flying insects, taking us closer to a world without pollinators. Cheerios and Quaker Oats contain Roundup—despite the label "natural." If 4 degrees warming is reached, we may reduce grain yield by fifty percent.
"If we don't act quickly, and on a global scale, then the problem will literally become insoluble." —Bill McKibben
As a baby boomer, the cosmology of my day included Enrico Fermi's paradox: If the universe is so big, then why haven't we encountered any other intelligent life in it? Wallace-Wells asks if climate might be the reason. No other planet is as suited to produce life as we know it. Fermi's "the Great Silence" is called "the great filter" by the iconoclastic economist Robin Hanson. His theory states that the filtering occurs when whole civilizations are enclosed by global warming like bugs in a net. Paleontologist Peter Ward, among those responsible for discovering that the planet's mass extinctions were caused by greenhouse gas, told David: "The filtering we've had in the past has been in these mass extinctions." The present mass extinction has only just begun, sustained by the Anthropic Principle—"our grandly narcissistic view of the cosmos."
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