A humbling responsibility; a remarkable opportunity

There were hundreds who became heroes through their small actions or assigned duties, purely through association with the cause. By “hitching their wagon to something bigger” as Obama would put it, they too became bigger.

When you understand the dauntingly comprehensive task that is climate change, you will know what kind of a person you are. Is it all too hard, or is it just a chance to build your character?

This then is the story from an individualistic perspective; each of us is a king or queen and our kingdom needs a hero. Let us now journey deeper back in time, to discover what other scientific or philosophical concepts exist to support a positive take on climate change. It seems important to begin by contextualising this event within the greater human narrative. It is arguable that, if civilisation is a story then climate change is its climax. To understand that claim, we must go back to the birth of civilisation 5,000 years ago in Mesopotamia.

The Epic of Gilgamesh is the oldest story ever told. It speaks of the arrogant King Gilgamesh and his best friend Enkidu, living high off the lands and people of the ancient Middle East. Their realm, far from being the barren desert we recognise from the wars of today, was ringed by a forest stretching out to the ends of the Earth. In it lived a demon called Humbaba. Humbaba had never attacked humans but Gilgamesh decided to stop him before he got the chance.

Once he and Enkidu had slain the beast, Gilgamesh began to fell every tree, so that humankind would never again be threatened by the aimless whims of an uncontrollable wilderness. At last, only the two tallest trees in the forest - each enough, we can assume, to sink a tonne of carbon - were left standing. Enkidu, who had been sent by the Gods to quell Gilgamesh’s arrogance, warned his friend against their destruction. Gilgamesh felled them anyway, so Enkidu made the trees into doors for a temple in the city, hoping to appease the Gods for their crime. But nothing, and especially not this gesture, could assuage the divine rage now bearing down upon the pair.

The Gods laid a curse over all the lands that Gilgamesh ruled, to suffer drought, war and disunity for the rest of time. Now that does sound like the Middle East we know today. The last tonne of carbon that tips the scale on run-away climate change signals, for our global civilisation, the same deadly fate as those trees.

During the last Ice Age, around 18,000 years ago, the oceans froze at the poles leaving land exposed elsewhere. Humankind’s ancestors were able to walk from China to Australia, from France to Britain, or across the Bering Straight to America. As the Ice Age slowly ended, seas rose and sundered tribe from tribe. The climate reached a kind of equilibrium known affectionately to archaeologists as the Long Spring. In this new warmth, plants on the Middle Eastern plain hybridised to form farmable grain crops, which led some humans to settle there and domesticate wild sheep or goats. A civilisation sprang up, the descendants of which would one day learn to drill for oil fields beneath the wheat fields, turn spring into summer, and raise the sea higher still.

All cells function best at an ideal temperature, and as a result all living organisms perform homeostasis, a process by which they attempt to maintain a constant body heat. For humans the ideal average is 37ºC, allowing muscle cells to be at one temperature and stomach cells at another and so on. For the planet right now, the ideal temperature is 15ºC, allowing humans to be at 37ºC, fish to be at their ideal, and reptiles, birds and plants at theirs. For millennia life has inadvertently changed the planet’s temperature, making it hotter by breathing and decaying, or colder by sequestering carbon. Oil is the life that perished in stagnant seas on a younger, overheated planet, cooling it enough to make way for the diversity of organisms we know today. It is these homeostatic processes that, if we disrupt them, we will be left to perform for ourselves with technological super-projects.

When James Lovelock conceived of the Gaia hypothesis, he took pains to explain that the green movement was not about “saving the planet”; the planet would save itself by eliminating mankind. To do this, it would sacrifice its stable climate along with all the other species that rely on it, and return to a cycle of sweats and chills for a few million years, after which it may be lucky, enough stabilise again, and evolve the same diversity of life we know today. In a few billion more after that, the entire solar system will be sucked into the sun. Lovelock casts humankind as Gaia’s sentient organ, poignantly identifying our place among the geological processes: “at least she got to see herself before she died.” Being conscious, Homo sapiens have been able to observe the beauty and complexity of life on Earth, right at the point in history when, thanks to a stable climate, it was at its most diverse.

Some scientists argue that human consciousness is a scientific singularity, an event when a complex system forms a whole greater than the sum of its parts. It belongs to a lineage of singularities each made possible by its forbear: life, Gaia, consciousness. It began with life. Amino acids became DNA strands that became cells that became cells within cells until organisms emerged that could not exist without their myriad specialist elements within.

It was a new “social contract”, for those specialist elements could no longer exist without the organism they were a part of either. Life heaped upon life until the planet itself became self-regulating, with its living parts cycling through water, carbon and nitrogen at a pace ideal for them to remain alive.

The Earth System, Gaia, of which we are each a cell, allowed for a third singularity. Homo sapiens, over their 200,000 years (a relatively rapid evolution) became possessed of brains so complex that for the first time in the animal kingdom those synapses became self aware, a state we know as consciousness. Put very simply, what distinguishes consciousness from the wider animal experience is explicit knowledge of its own existence. Rather than relying on automated instinctual processes, the conscious organism can make choices about its own survival.