Unless we stop emitting greenhouse gases wholesale now, humans will within a couple hundred years be living in a climate the Earth hasn’t seen since the Pliocene, three million years ago, when oceans were 75 feet higher.
Once the methane hydrates under the oceans and permafrost begin to melt, we may soon find ourselves living in a hothouse climate closer to that of the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, approximately 56 million years ago, when the planet was ice-free and tropical at the poles. We face the imminent collapse of the agricultural, shipping, and energy networks upon which the global economy depends, a large-scale die-off in the biosphere that’s already well under way, and our own possible extinction as a species.
If Homo sapiens survives the next millennium, it will be survival in a world unrecognizably different from the one we have known for the last 200,000 years.
In order for us to adapt to this strange new world, we’re going to need more than scientific reports and military policy. We’re going to need new ideas. We’re going to need new myths and new stories, a new conceptual understanding of reality, and a new relationship to the deep polyglot traditions of human culture that carbon-based capitalism has vitiated through commodification and assimilation. Over and against capitalism, we will need a new way of thinking our collective existence. We need a new vision of who “we” are. We need a new humanism—a newly philosophical humanism, undergirded by renewed attention to the humanities.
Scranton, Roy. Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization (City Lights Open Media) (pp. 18-19). City Lights Publishers. 2015, Kindle edition.
