Sublime

Global ecological breakdown is being driven almost entirely by excess growth in high-income countries, and in particular by excess accumulation among the very rich, while the consequences hurt the global South, and the poor, disproportionately.34 Ultimately, this is a crisis of inequality as much as anything else.

On top of nuclear war, in the coming decades humankind will face a new existential threat that hardly registered on political radars in 1964: ecological collapse. Humans are destabilizing the global biosphere on multiple fronts. We are taking more and more resources out of the environment while pumping back into it enormous quantities of waste and

Any news I might bring has already been brought. Thousands of scientific papers. Millions of newspaper column inches. Anyone who cares to pay attention already knows that we’ve broken Nature, and the world we know will soon end. This park, for one, is done for. This city I love, home to almost nine million, and one of humankind’s most extraordinary

This distinction was brought home to me by collapse theorist, sci-fi novelist, and, former Archdruid of North America, John Michael Greer.20 “A controlled, creative transition to sustainability might have been possible,” Greer argues, “if the promising beginnings of the 1970s had been followed up in the ’80s and ’90s.” But our politicians and CEOs

If this plays out, the West Antarctic ice sheet alone could add another metre or more to sea-level rise, in our lifetime. If the same thing happens to Greenland, it would be worse still. The world’s coastal cities would be submerged so fast there would be little time for adaptation.

“I’ve got a chronic concern about pandemics, for example. And the odds are that sometime in our lifetime there’s gonna be something like the Spanish flu that wipes out a lot of people… if we’re not taking care.

Scientists are still trying to puzzle out what caused the wild temperature swings first glimpsed in the Camp Century core. One hypothesis is that they are related to a loss of sea ice in the Arctic, which is worrisome, given that global warming is causing a loss of sea ice in the Arctic. But even putting aside the possibility of a human-induced D–O

The fact that US hurricanes now present a fatality risk no greater than lightning illustrates how their toll has been reduced by satellites, advanced public warnings, and evacuations. At the same time, there are reasons for concern, as both the annual worldwide frequency of natural disasters and their economic cost have been increasing. We can say

“The melting of the Antarctic ice cap would raise sea level by four hundred feet,” the report noted. Even if the process took a thousand years to play out, the oceans would “rise about four feet every ten years,” or “forty feet per century.”