The CO2 Campaign:
Has allowed the rise of complex conscious life…
You may have heard it said that the planet will continue no matter what we do. Life will continue to exist.
And that’s quite true, as far as it logically goes, which isn’t very far. Because it matters very much to us what kind of life will exist going forward.
The most fragile life of all is large complex species with brains. They require very special, very stable conditions in order to evolve and to continue existing. We are among those species and depend on them” species which have long lives, live very close to the carrying capacity of their environment, reproduce slowly, have extended childhoods, and live a long time as individuals. For much of the history of life, such species haven’t existed, and they do not make it past the big mass extinctions. All large terrestrial life today, and all large brains on the planet, evolved from survivors of the KT extinction which were no larger than a rat.
In other words, the very phenomenon of conscious self-awareness has evolved since the last mass extinction. If there were conscious, aware creatures before that time, they did not survive.
But that could easily be lost
Humans evolved during a period of intermittent ice ages. While “ice ages” sound scary, they represent one of the best situations for large complex life. Certainly, a lot of northern and far souther real estate was covered by advancing glaciers where none exist today, but in the mid-latitudes and equatorial regions, conditions were perfect for abundant large life. We have recently been in an “interglacial” period of unusual warming, during which all of recorded human history has occurred, but which has still been dominated by significant polar ice caps, cold, oxygenated seas, and mountain glaciation.
Yet CO2 has a powerful effect on a planet’s seas and atmosphere, and has many times in the past caused extinctions. Most of those have been due to massive outgassing of CO2 by volcanic activity. This time, it’s our species which is releasing the sequestered carbon of ancient seas and forests. We do it to provide a higher standard of living, yet that’s inherently very temporary. But a couple hundred years of that will change the nature of the planet for millions of years.
And the speed of changes matters. The faster things change, the more it throws the advantage to the smallest, fastest-reproducing species like insects, and away from large creatures with brains. We’re currently pumping CO2 into the air faster than it has ever happened in earth’s history, by a factor of at least ten times. The oceans are acidifying 10-100x faster than in past mass extinctions. The past of CO2 injected into the atmosphere is far outpacing those ancient volcanoes.
Evolution takes a long time. If we once again create conditions in which only small, scrappy species survive, it will mean that the incredible ecosystems we evolved alongside will be no more. Assuming that we’ll be an exception is, perhaps, not the best plan.
It’s time to take a stand for Life.
It can sound almost ridiculous. Trying to save large complex life on earth. Yet that’s exactly what’s at stake, you’ve just not heard it stated that way before.
Conservation and environmental organizations have been taken to task by some for focusing on “charismatic megafauna” like whales, dolphins, orangutans, tigers, and other such species. While we agree – and our work will show – that we take an ecosystem approach, there is something qualitatively special about large complex life.
For large complex life has what we value, and should value: they are the species large enough to help sustain us, inspire us, help define us. Species of complex behavior and mind. Species which have problem-solving ability, consciousness, and even self-awareness. These are very fragile qualities and attributes which did not, so far as we know, exist before the last mass extinction, and may well not occur again if the 6th extinction continues during this century.
Consciousness and self-aware mind could be lost from the earth forever. The stakes are no lower than that, and we need to face up to it.
CO2 doesn’t just mean “maybe global warming,” as trendy as that phrasing is. It means planetary heating deriving from basic physics. It means ocean acidification from basic chemistry. And there’s a long history of planetary extinctions when its levels get too high.
Current “climate campaigns” focus on things like the loss of beachfront property from sea-level rise, which is trivial in comparison to the real effects: a human dieoff to a drastically lower planetary carrying capacity. The loss of rainforests and of nearly all large land and sea animals to rapid habitat change.
And we’re going to have to give up fossil fuels anyway, because the remaining oil will be essentially unrecoverable within 40 years, and coal within perhaps a hundred. A living world of complex species is a high price to pay for a few more decades of smokestacks.
Join us.
You know our work. It has dramatized issues and engaged the world when other tactics haven’t.
Our carbon campaign isn’t about easy compromises, because those aren’t getting it done. We need to face some major cutbacks in the metabolic basic of human society, or create a world which hasn’t existed for 55 million years. A world in which large terrestrial species don’t survive.
The USA’s oldest and original Greenpeace, proudly unaffiliated with Greenpeace USA