Midterm

 

Earlier today I had a conversation with Bill Mckibben and Hope Jahren about how humanity had accelerated the environmental change for the planet, and this what we talked about was how humanity will overcome the coming economic crisis.  Mckibben began by saying that we were doomed, because “Politicians don’t want to deal with the issue of global warming” (Mckibben 50) to which I responded that while yes the current political elite doesn’t want to talk about how damaging the climate change is, but I also think that is because it has become so politized that nobody can do anything about without being partisan.  Mckibben’s counterpoint to my statement was that people are unable to deal with things that are far distant in the future “We evolved to deal with a snarling tiger emerging from behind a tree: we’re geared to short-term thinking because that is what allowed us to survive; whereas tomorrow was always a problem for tomorrow.” (Mckibben 66) I agree with Mckibben in that we have to evolve to deal with things more easily in the present, that does not mean though that we are not still evolving to better deal with far-off future crises.  Another part of the problem in my opinion and Mckibben agreed with me when I brought it up is our political elite itself.  The problem as I see is that politicians are too afraid of public opinion turning against them if they try a more substantial change to help the environment because it will directly affect the people who are voting them in.  In all, Mckibben thought we did not have a very good chance of surviving the coming climate crisis, but there is always the chance that we can.

           When I visited my good friend Hope Jahren we talked about how I thought that humanity could survive the coming climate disaster we were facing, however her thinking was more like Mckibbens in that Humanity did not have much chance to survive in the new world.  Jahren started by saying that even if we survived the landmasses disappearing beneath the ocean we still wouldn’t survive “The earth’s water is unevenly divided into salt versus fresh.  If you took all the water on our planet and shrank it down to fit in a bucket, that bucket would contain one gallon, thick with salt, of sloshing ocean.  The amount of fresh water, by comparison, would be three spoonfuls.” (Jahren 142) and that there would not enough freshwater to survive.

I of course disagreed with Jahren about this as humanity would find ways around this problem, though we might have to be creative to do so.  Also, she brought up the topic of how even if global warming does not kill us there is still the problem of how big the human population was and how much of humanity planet earth could support “And don’t forget that the total global population is still increasing as well; a pragmatic estimate is that we’ll break the ten-billion mark by 2100” (Jahren 23).  In this, I did agree with Jahren in that there were no pleasant solutions to this problem, though there are always the low-hanging solutions like eugenics.

Mckibben when I talked to him about this problem also expressed a good deal of anxiety towards this problem, but he thought that the problem of overpopulation would come to a head on its own and that there is no easy way to solve it.  Jahren has also hinted at how divided we are as a society “For example, I did not know that I was supposed to be ashamed of being from the Midwest until I moved to California.” (Jahren 27) which I think is the most important issue we face as a society, because until come together how will any of our current problems let alone one of them.