Imagine yourself as the upper hand in this image. You are in the act of passing on the planet to the next generation. Collectively, the world has been ours to care for and, like the generations before us, we are in the process of handing it off. We’d like to think we are leaving our children and grandchildren a better place to live in than the one we received. Let’s see how our generation is doing in one crucial area - our care of the atmosphere. We begin by widening the aperture a bit and considering our context from inside our own small solar system. 

A View from Saturn.

That white pixel of light set against the dark blue backdrop is our world - the earth: skies, oceans, lands as well as all the teaming life in each realm.  In the sea of space we are a miniscule island of wonder and beauty and delicately balanced systems.

Here is part of what Carl Sagan had to say about a photograph like this:

There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.”

― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

A View from the Moon.

This is the earth as seen from the moon. A blue sapphire set against an infinite backdrop.

Apollo 11 astronaut, Michael Collins, seeing the earth from the moon during his mission remarked:

If you look at the Earth as it is from the moon, first you find it's a tiny little thing once you locate it. You may look out all your spacecraft windows and not see it at all. But once you swing around and it comes into view, you're startled by how tiny it is. It's about the size of your thumbnail if you hold your arm out in front of you. And it's very, very bright, very, very shiny. The sunlight bounces off it. It's almost like a small headlight out there, blue and white, primarily the blue of the water, the white of the clouds. You do see some land, but your primary impression is a little blue and white marble and no sign of human beings, no sign of any habitation. The overriding impression I got was one, oddly enough, of fragility. I mean, I walked the surface of this planet all my life. I know it's rock solid. But from space, it appears to be very, very fragile. And if we think about that view, it's an accurate one. Our little planet here, with its very thin atmosphere, is a fragile entity. And it makes you want to really nurture it and protect it once you've seen it from outer space. (Interview 1988)

A Metaphorical View.

This little dot, leaving a time lapse streak across the sky, is the International Space Station. We could profitably think about our earth as a space station.

Billions of dollars and untold hours of stacked human intelligence and experience went into creating the small habitable space for a few humans to live and work in. Inside this little orbiting island of life, no astronaut would dream of carelessly altering the atmosphere, or dumping raw sewage, or tampering in any way with any of the delicately balanced systems. Their lives absolutely depend on knowing their little craft and living within its limits.

This is like life on the earth with one huge exception. If the space station has a problem, they can send for help - an upgrade, new equipment, etc. If the earth has a problem, there is no ‘Houston’ outside of spaceship earth to call for extra supplies or upgrades. If something goes dangerously out of balance on space station earth, like the crazed behavior of its inhabitants, we must urgently rethink what we are doing and change our behavior. We must understand and tend to the limitations of our craft. We can no longer pretend our little world is an infinite quarry and an infinite dump.

A Thin Blue Line.

These two thin blue lines help sustain life on our planet as we know it.

Our atmosphere is less than 1% of the earth’s diameter. To put this in perspective, think of the earth as the size of a basketball. Now, if you wrapped the basketball with thin plastic food wrap, that would be the relative thickness of our atmosphere! This critical blue layer is all that shields us from the inhospitable space that surrounds us in every direction. The temperature of space is minus 455 degrees fahrenheit; the moon, with some atmosphere, is minus 280 degrees fahrenheit at night and 260 degrees during the day. Our atmosphere, with a balance of C02 and other gasses, uses the sun’s energy to warm the planet and make it habitable for us. In interaction with plant life and ocean life, it also provides the air we breathe. Our atmosphere, among a plethora of other benefits, also shields us from many of the harmful effects of the sun’s rays.  

The ideal balance of the greenhouse gas C02 in our atmosphere has played a major role in creating the temperate environment that has allowed life as we know it to flourish on our little planet. For the last 800,000 years C02 levels have varied - never dipping below 180 parts per million (ppm) and never rising above 300 ppm. The upper range of this ancient pattern was broken in the 1950s and shattered in the 2000s. To put this in perspective, if the last 800,000 years were a single year, the entire year, all 365 days, would have C02 levels that bumped along in a consistent range but then in the last second of that year the C02 levels exploded. In the last fractions of that second we have hit 320, 340, 360, 380, 400, 410 ppm… and the C02 levels are still going up. This is a massive problem.

Economic fuel.

Here is what the skyrocketing CO2 levels look like.

Advanced economies currently depend on burning fossil fuels and releasing billions of metric tons of C02 into our atmosphere to fire up the Gross National Product. Burning fossil fuels is what powers our lifestyles. Advanced economies are based on burning. Look around you: your clothes, your cell phone, your silverware, your oven, your heater, your house, your car, your Amazon deliveries, air travel, space travel… all exist because we dig up and burn tons and tons of ancient C02 which had been sequestered in coal, natural gas and oil.

Our tiny spacecraft can absorb some of this activity within the biosphere but not anywhere close to the levels of consumption found in advanced economies. For instance, if every one of earth’s nearly 8 billion people consumed at the level of the average Bangladeshi, our little planet’s systems could easily sustain our population right now - there would be no global warming! However, if everyone consumed at the levels of an average US citizen, we would require more than four earths to sustain the water use, land use, minerals use and ability to sequester the CO2 output!

We only have one planet and just a few nations are using it up at an unsustainable rate. India’s level of consumption is sustainable; the world is not by a factor of 3; the United States average per person C02 output is exceeding sustainability by nine times! 

Cause and Effect.

The dramatic rise in human-caused C02 levels maps with the rise in global temperature. Every decade since the 1960s has been hotter than the preceding decade. And every year in the most recent decade, 2011-2020, has been hotter than all the recorded years before 2010! 

(You may wonder if normal non-human causes such as the earth’s orbit or the sun getting hotter might be the main cause of a warming planet. NASA did the calculation on this and graphed the effects of the leading natural and human causes. You can quickly view the data here.)

The kind of planet we would be leaving to our grandchildren, if we push global temperatures beyond 1.5 degrees Celsius, is not what any of us would want - and yet that is the path we are running down. As Americans, we are contributing to the problem way out of proportion to our population size. We are less than five percent of the world population, and yet we have contributed more than any other nation to the global rise in C02 levels! If we can thoughtlessly live beyond our means, we can thoughtfully start to live within them. However, the matter is urgent. The wealthy nations, and peoples of those nations, and you and I, must wake up and get to work. 

We are pushing hard on some climate tipping points that would amplify our greenhouse gas emissions:

• If the winter ice sheets don’t form in the Arctic, the Sun’s energy that would have been reflected back into space by the ice will be absorbed by the dark sea. This will warm the planet and more ice will melt and cause further warming.

• Another imminent example is the melting permafrost. There is twice as much carbon locked in the permafrost than in our atmosphere. This carbon will be released as the planet warms… and the warming will cause further release of carbon and further warming... and so it goes. 

In both these cases, this is not carbon we are directly releasing by digging up and burning fossil fuels. These are sleeping giants we don’t want to wake!

Let’s Do Something!

Global C02 levels may be starting to level off, but we are still releasing 40 billion tons of C02 per year. We only have 500 billion tons left to burn as we transition to a clean energy net zero future. That means we have used about 80% of the C02 budget and have just 20% left as a possible cushion. The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates that the world needs to cut its greenhouse emissions by 43 percent by 2030. America, a world leader in C02 output, needs to cut emissions by more than 50 percent by 2030! This will be the “easy” part of the journey, for we will then need to cut emissions to zero by 2050. Even if we manage this, the best estimate is that we may have just a 50 percent chance of avoiding catastrophic effects of a warmer planet. The world will still be hot and it will not have a chance of cooling off until we reach negative emissions. Even though we are heading toward a warmer planet and its worrisome consequences, everything we do now will make a difference. Our actions will make the planet more or less habitable for the next generations. 

We are going in the wrong direction, every day there is more news: Unprecedented droughts, unprecedented fires, unprecedented downpours, unprecedented heat waves, unprecedented tornados, unprecedented bomb cyclones... and so it goes. If you are reading this essay at any time in the 2020s, C02 levels will be higher than at this writing (9/11/2021: 413.98 ppm), new heat records will have been set, the oceans will be warmer, oceans will rise, corals will bleach, fish will die, forests will burn, species will become extinct, and so it goes. 

The question we face is whether wealthy-energy-intensive-carbon-burning economies, and the people who have been thriving in those economies, will see this crisis and undertake the radical change needed to help bring our fundamentally careless lifestyles within the bounds of the biosphere. Unless this happens, our current reckless trajectory will continue and we will leave a severely warmed and tragically depleted planet to our children and grandchildren. The loss is even more tragic for the people and children of poorer nations, who have had little or nothing to do with creating the problem we are facing! 

It would be all too easy to let climate change overwhelm us. Yes, it is a massive problem. Yes, we in the U.S. are a large part of the problem. And yes, there is no quick fix. But what if all of us start doing something now - even something small? Then we could build on that something, and then do something more.

Educating ourselves and making personal changes can propel us to add our voices to those urging corporate and governmental actions to create a more just and sustainable life on our common home. The pretty good guides provide a path to cut your own carbon footprint by more than 50 percent and begin to add your voice and body to movements aimed at pushing corporate and governmental change. We must all do what we can to care for our common home.

Let us spur one another on to love and good deeds. 

A Poem on Hope.

...Because we have not made our lives to fit
Our places, the forests are ruined, the fields eroded,
The streams polluted, the mountains overturned
....care toward other people, other creatures, in other places
As you would ask them for care toward your place and you.
No place at last is better than the world. The world
Is no better than its places. Its places at last
Are no better than their people while their people
Continue in them. When the people make
Dark the light within them, the world darkens.

-Wendell Berry