The Meaning of Your Life

The U.S. is as cold as ICE when it comes to refugee resettlement. The Harumph administration is blocking access to immigrants and cutting the number of  refugee slots to the lowest since 1980. World population growth (about 70% since 1980) alone should justify an increasing allowance, but the trend has been downward since the beginning of Ronald Reagan's term. People still immigrate, but they do so illegally. It happens all over the world. Most refugees end up in city tenements, not in camps.

Hats off to sanctuary cities for being proactive in making room for immigrants. The choice to offer refuge is primarily humanitarian, but also involves security considerations, cultural impacts, and a little-discussed aspect that affects the chances of continued existence for all people everywhere -- the global human footprint.

In a harsh way, migration driven by climate change and its social and environmental repercussions can contribute to correcting the problems of overpopulation, global warming, and loss of biodiversity. The natural tendency for desperate people to relocate to cities leaves a smaller human footprint elsewhere. We should not hinder this tendency, but encourage it by offering succor to refugees in cities here and abroad. The more people we can get to leave the countryside, the better chance we have of nature battling back to make life sustainable on Earth.

The visionary Kim Stanley Robinson describes how this would work. I was particularly enamored of his consideration of drawing down atmospheric CO2:

Meanwhile, cities will always rely on landscapes much vaster than their own footprints. Agriculture will have to be made carbon neutral; indeed, it will be important to create some carbon-negative flows, drawing carbon out of the atmosphere and fixing it into the land, either permanently or temporarily; we can’t afford to be too picky about that now, because we will be safest if we can get the CO2 level in the atmosphere back down to 350 parts per million. All these working landscapes should exist alongside that so-called empty land (though really it’s only almost empty – empty of people – most of the time). (Emphasis mine)

This provision allows for a priestly class of carbon farmers to live and work outside the confines of a city. Yet, this idea goes far beyond even stopping global warming. Read the whole Robinson article so the title of this post can sink in. To explore the project to preserve half the planet, the Half-Earth Project has a data-rich interactive globe on their website. Whether our role is to help make cities livable for billions more or to make the wider world livable to the rest of life, we all have our work cut out for us.

Only War can Save Us Now

When Senator John McCain ridiculed Navy Secretary Ray Mabus by stating, “You are the Secretary of the Navy, not the Secretary of Energy,” over his efforts to shift the Navy to a "Green Fleet," I was  glad I hadn't voted for him for President. Mabus had the right idea about using the military to address the energy-cum-climate crisis, he just didn't take it far enough. In fact, the military can be excused for burning through our last drops of oil, as long as they do it for the sake of stopping egregious greenhouse gas pollution that could soon kill us all.

A Green friend of mine seemed a little perplexed when she heard that my background included diplomas from two war colleges. She asked, "what do you study at a war college?" to which I tritely replied, "how to make war.  A useful skill ... if you happen to find yourself in one." In terms of our current plight, the problem with war is not that it is the epitome of wasted energy, but that it is undertaken for the sake of feeding our energy addiction. Any power that threatens a fossil-fuel dependent economic paradigm is who we tend to fight.

We have come to the point that the only thing that will save the current crop of humans from widespread die-off is a rapid reorientation to reducing our collective carbon footprint and reversing whatever damage we can. Perhaps even more urgently, we need to exclude the built environment from squatting on the most sensitive ecological areas and half of the earth's landmass. Short of going to war, that all involves too much self-imposed hardship. Make a war out of it, and patriotic fervor overcomes that chariness.

No other human enterprise is as effective as war in eliciting heroic activity by vast numbers of participants. War is the only institution capable of commanding great numbers of people to willingly endure suffering for the sake of victory. All the Green solutions put forth for overcoming our climate crisis involve widespread physical hardship, which can only be self-imposed through a warring mentality. (Geoengineering solutions' appeal is their supposed avoidance of hardship, but they carry potentially catastrophic risk or are unsustainable.)

The war we need is not the pitiful "War on Climate Change" of past administrations. Almost nobody joins a war so ephemeral. War must have physical objectives and culminate in the breaking of an enemy's will. War can be fought in cyberspace, but it has its foundation in meatspace. It must be carried out militarily, not by a loose-knit gaggle of volunteers.

Game theory would probably help in planning the War Against Climate Pollution. Just as we had to do all the second guessing required to prevent a nuclear war and understand how to execute one, we should model actions, effects, and reactions of forcing other countries' hands in an effort to prevent runaway greenhouse gas emissions. Game theory would also show us how much fossil fueled power we could cede in winding down our own emissions as others relinquish theirs.

Diplomacy should lead in attempting to resolve causes of excess pollution. Information exchanges and economic arrangements should also be set up before resorting to military action. After sufficient warning, military actions, if necessary, should be initially strategic and carried out with cyber weapons to, for example, shut down production at a plant producing HFC's.  If the violations don't cease, kinetic attacks could be used. Bloodshed should be avoided as much as possible. Strong arming is the main approach.

Targeted infrastructure would include coal power plants, oil refineries, concrete plants, fertilizer factories,and other point sources of pollution. What we are interdicting here are actually weapons of mass destruction, when you consider how greenhouse gas emissions added to the current inventory may push temperatures past the level of human tolerance. We should avoid taking on countries having the ability to fight back in any serious way. Escalation is not what we want. It detracts from the real goal - stopping pollution.

However, such a self-righteous war on pollution from the U.S. will not last unless we begin taking a stand on reducing our own emissions. We have to stick to the Paris Agreement, ratified, rejected, or not. The military can stay strong for as long as needed to complete the mission, but they too will have to diminish once things settle down and other great powers dispense with their own ambitions. As the world burns, the folly of dominance and colonialism will become evident. There is no need to fear dominance by China or Russia. Any incursion on their parts would be short-lived as distance becomes more tyrannical with the elimination of U.S. oil exports and the end of global trade. Ultimately, the only way to win this war is to lose the same things we seek to deny others.

Once we have stopped reliance on fossil fuels, everyone can then carry on with their decidedly more physically demanding lives, sharing stories around the TLUD of how they fought and won in the war against the Polluters. Their young listeners will look to the day when they can match these deeds of glory by pushing out the Squatters.

Habitat for Non-Humanity

Where do we start in preserving biodiversity? Over half our world's lands have lost enough species to jeopardize the future of life on earth. Life includes plants that we cultivate. It should not surprise us, then, that agriculture, rather than urbanization, is the human activity behind most of the species losses.

Even as a gardener, I would like to eliminate some members of certain species, such as the groundhog who doesn't respect my fences or the deer who don't appreciate the beauty of my roses. Unlike the animal lovers who volunteer at my neighborhood's Orphaned Wildlife Rescue Center, I chase deer away and endeavor to kill varmints that steal the fruits of my labor. Perhaps they need to rescue orphaned wildlife because of the likes of me, but first they are going to have to rescue their organization against allegations of animal cruelty, e.g. attempting to save creatures that should have been euthanized.

If we let our hearts win out over or heads, saving mammals and other larger animals may be how we attempt to preserve wildlife. Yet, is it not natural to regard like creatures as competitors in the food chain, if not outright enemies to our species? The mistake we have made in horticulture is not only did we carry out armed conflict against nuisance mammals, but lesser phyla are treated with almost no care at all, save plants we wish to grow. Arthropods and microorganisms, for example, are so innumerable that industrial farmers don't mind applying pesticides that kill beneficial species more than the relatively few harmful ones.

Just as important as our poisoning of the environment is our elimination of natural habitat that supports biodiversity. Habitat is largely formed by physical structure, so insects become significantly more diverse in a canopied forest rather than a cultivated field. Likewise, soil biota flourishes in the fractally constructed caverns of a biochar particle. Nature enables wilderness to grow into rich structural forms at all trophic levels, providing habitats for a most diverse set of plants, animals, and fungi. Revered biologist E.O Wilson offers the prescription for our global biodiversity crisis that we should set aside half the planet as wilderness. He even tells us where we stand the best chances of success.

Photo by Pete Warner

Wilderness necessarily excludes development. We have many forests in Calvert County, Maryland that, if appropriately joined, could constitute wilderness to contribute to the half-Earth goal. Fostering more growth and development won't help. "Keeping Calvert Country" isn't about nostalgia. It's about supporting mankind's survival.