Thoreau's Legacy

Copyright © 2009 by the Union of Concerned Scientists. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Union of Concerned Scientists, Two Brattle Square, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02238. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Thoreau’s legacy : American stories about global warming / Richard Hayes, editor ; foreword by Barbara Kingsolver.

p. cm.

ISBN-13: 978-0-938987-06-2 (hardcover)

ISBN-10: 0-938987-06-2 (hardcover)

1. Global warming—Anecdotes. 2. Philosophy of nature. 3. Human ecology.
4. Thoreau, Henry David, 1817–1862. I. Hayes, Richard, 1968-

QC981.8.G56T54 2009

363.738´74—dc22 2009020646

The views expressed in this volume are those of the individual authors.

Printed on recycled paper with 30% post-consumer waste, using vegetable-
based inks.

Book design by Sabrina Bowers of Penguin Classics. Portland Tram photo © 2009 Gary Braasch. Daniel T. Blumstein photo courtesy of UCLA. Randall Curren photo courtesy of Glenna Curren.

Foreword:
Day Seventy-nine

Barbara Kingsolver

WE FIND OURSELVES IN A CHAPTER OF HISTORY I would entitle “Isolation and Efficiency, and How They Came Around to Bite Us in the Backside.” We’re ravaged by disagreements, bizarrely globalized, with the extravagant excesses of one culture washing up as famine or flood on the shores of another. Even the architecture of our planet—climate, oceans, migratory paths, things we believed were independent of human affairs—is collapsing under the weight of our efficient productivity. Twenty years ago, climate scientists first told Congress that carbon emissions were building toward a disastrous instability. Congress said, We need to think about that. Ten years later, the world’s nations wrote the Kyoto Protocol, a set of legally binding controls on our carbon emissions. The United States said, We still need to think about it. Now we watch as glaciers disappear, the lights of biodiversity go out, the oceans reverse their ancient order. A few degrees look so small on the thermometer. We are so good at measuring things and declaring them under control. How could our weather turn murderous, pummel our coasts, push new diseases like dengue fever onto our doorstep? It’s an emergency on a scale we’ve never known, and we’ve responded by following the rules we know: efficiency, isolation. We can’t slow productivity and consumption—that’s unthinkable. Can’t we just go home and put a really big lock on the door?

Not this time. Our paradigm has met its match. Now we can either shift away from a carbon-based economy or find another place to live. Imagine it: we raised our children on a lie. We gave them this world and promised they could keep it running on
a fossil substance
—dinosaur slime—and it’s running out. The geologists disagree only on how much is left, and the climate scientists now say they’re sorry, but that’s not even the point: we won’t have time to use it all. To stabilize the floods and firestorms, we’ll have to reduce our carbon emissions by 80 percent within a few decades
.

We’re still stuck on a strategy of bait and switch: okay, we’ll keep the cars but run them on ethanol made from corn! But … we use petroleum to grow the corn. Even if you like the idea of robbing the food bank to fill the tank, there is a math problem: it takes nearly a gallon (or more, by some accounts) of fossil fuel to render an equivalent gallon of corn gas. Think of Jules Verne’s novel in which the hero is racing Around the World in Eighty Days and finds himself, on day seventy-nine, stranded in mid-Atlantic on a steamship that has run out of coal. Phileas Fogg convinces the captain to pull up the decks and throw them into the boiler. “On the next day the masts, rafts, and spars were burned. The crew worked lustily, keeping up the fires. There was a perfect rage for demolition.” The captain remarked, “Fogg, you’ve got something of the Yankee about you.” Oh, novelists. They always manage to have the last word, even when they’re dead.  

How can we get from here to there without burning up our ship? That must be our central task now: to escape the wild rumpus of carbon-fuel dependency in the nick of time. We must make rules that were previously unthinkable, imposing limits on what we use and possess. We must radically reconsider the power relationship between humans and our habitat. In the words of my esteemed colleague and friend Wendell Berry, the new Emancipation Proclamation will not be for a specific race or species, but for life itself. We Americans are the 5 percent of humans who have made around 30 percent of all the greenhouse gases emitted since 1750. But our government has been reluctant to address the issue, for one reason: it might hurt our economy. For a lot of history, many nations said exactly the same thing about abolishing slavery: We can’t grant humanity to all people—it would hurt our cotton plantations, our sugar crop, our balance of trade. Until the daughters and sons of a new wisdom declared: We have to find another way. Enough of this shame.

Have we lost that kind of courage? Have we let economic growth become our undisputed master again? As we track the unfolding disruption of natural and global stabilities, young peopleare told to buy into business as usual: you need a job. Do what we did, preserve a profitable climate for manufacture and consumption at any cost. Even at the cost of the other climate, the one that was hospitable to life as we knew it.

In the awful moment when someone demands at gunpoint, “Your money or your life,” the answer is not supposed to be difficult. And in fact a lot of people are rethinking the money answer, looking behind the cash price to see what it costs us to mine and manufacture, to transport, to burn, to bury. What did it harm on its way here? Could I get it closer to home? In previous generations we rarely asked about the hidden costs; we put them on layaway. But the bill has come due. Some European countries are calculating the “climate cost” of consumer goods and adding it to the price. We’re examining the moralities of possession, inventing renewable technologies, recovering sustainable food systems. We’re even warming up to the idea that the wealthy nations have to help the poorer ones, for the sake of a reconstructed world. Generosity will grind some gears in the machine of Efficiency, but we can retool.

The arc of history is longer than human vision. It bends. We abolished slavery, we granted universal suffrage. We have done hard things before. Each time it took a terrible fight between people who could not imagine changing the rules and those who said, “We already did. We have made the world new.” The hardest part will be to convince ourselves of the possibilities and hang on. If we run out of hope at the end of the day, we’ll rise in the morning and put it on again with our shoes. Hope is the only reason we won’t burn what’s left of the ship and go down with it. If somebody says, “Your money or your life,” you can say, “Life.” And mean it.