By Heather Gates

The BP spill has sparked much thought and conversation. It has also, at times, sparked in me a physical reaction. As I go through my day, I can be interrupted with a “jolt of BP,” finding myself horrified anew, as if learning of the spill for the first time. Ka-thunk, ka-thunk, I hear my heart. My muscles tense, and sometimes my eyes well: I could cry sweet crude. After nearly three months, the magnitude and recklessness of the event and its expanding consequences still stun and haunt me.

I felt similar physical shocks after my father passed away several years ago. Now, as then, I want the world to turn off all devices, like the absurd directives in Auden’s poem “Funeral Blues.” “Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone/Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone…” Clearly we should all be sharing our grief over this devastation. It’s so enormous that “nothing now can ever come to any good.” Where’s our outrage? Why aren’t people protesting and marching in the streets?

Perhaps we’re too busy driving down them.

Our finite planet. Unlimited economic growth is not sustainable on a finite planet because we have finite resources.

“Look no further than BP’s disaster in the Gulf of Mexico to see the consequence of trying to live beyond our environmental means,” said Andrew Simms, policy director of the New Economics Foundation. “We can no more have infinite economic growth than a bird currently fishing off the Louisiana coast can come up squeaky clean.”  

“Our challenge is not only to break our fossil fuel addiction, but to engineer our economy into equilibrium with the biosphere in order that we may survive and thrive lastingly.”  

Continues Simms, “…we are disillusioned by the mainstream response to the crisis we are facing. It’s time for a new economics of sustainability, where the goal is better lives, not more stuff.”  

A snippet of wisdom. Michael Bugeja of Iowa State University wrote, “Conscience acts on simple truths. It does not debate whether climate change is fact or fiction; it intuits that burning so much fossil fuel is harmful to health and hemisphere.”

Eaarth: Making Life on a Tough New Planet, the new book from Bill McKibben, is necessary reading. McKibben was the first to write about climate change for a general audience with The End of Nature (1989). In it, he warned about the consequences of not addressing climate change rapidly.

His warnings went unheeded; we didn’t make rapid change. Now the predicted consequences have come true. Hence the need to “rename” our planet: it’s profoundly different. As McKibben recently said, “Our inability to imagine that we are capable of changing things on that scale is one of the reasons that we are so bad at taking real action… It seems impossible to us that we could have grown large enough to be changing the world, but we have.”

McKibben breaks down this complex subject well. He starts by sharing documented effects of the one-degree rise in global average temperature that has already occurred, such as: Warmer air holds more moisture. Our atmosphere, now holding five percent more moisture, is making already dry places drier and wet places wetter. What was a long-term drought in Australia is now the “new normal” and California’s wildfire season is seventy-eight days longer than in the 70s and 80s; fires burn four times as long.

The Arctic is melting at an alarming rate, thawing tundra is releasing methane (a greenhouse gas twenty times more potent than CO2), the tropics have expanded by more than two degrees latitude both north and south, and the Mountain Pine Beatle has decimated thirty-three million acres of Rocky Mountain forests (because unusually warm winters allow beetle eggs to hatch and spread). Oceans are thirty percent more acidic, threatening coral reefs with permanent extinction (and thereby losing the valuable habitats they provide). Weather is increasingly erratic and unpredictable, and natural feedback mechanisms accelerate the process.

Writes McKibben, “One barrel of oil yields as much energy as 25,000 hours of human manual labor – more than a decade of human labor per barrel. The average American uses twenty-five barrels each year, which is like finding 300 years of free labor annually.” In planning for a future with less or little oil, these are significant numbers. Among other things, they show the need for solutions that take into account that humans will be doing more of the lifting.

In the second half of the book, McKibben shares his vision for the future and proposes exchanging growth for stability, consumption for thrift, bigness for smallness, and complexity for following natural systems. He argues that our hope depends on scaling back, and on building small societies that can hunker down, focus on the essentials, and be supportive and collaborative.

It isn’t up to us whether the world is changing: it already is. But we do have a choice about the degree to which it changes—we can lessen our impacts greatly, some, or not at all—and we also have a choice in how we adapt to this altered “Eaarth.” Will we be smart enough to listen? Smart enough to adjust?

I ask that each of us take immediate and bold actions, simultaneously reducing our fossil fuel use and advocating for laws and policies that cap carbon, raise the taxes on fossil fuels, and use that revenue to invest in creating a stable future.

Can’t do it? We have to, because the cost of not acting is much, much greater. We have to take bold steps because the climate change boogey man isn’t merely rumored to be in the neighborhood. He’s here. He’s at your back door, and he’s turning the key.