An interesting and worth reading article by Roy Scranton in NYT. He visited Baghdad as a private in the Army and saw the total destruction of the beautiful ancient city by the ” shock & awe”. When he returned home, he saw similar destruction done by Katrina and Sandy and now the Typhoon in Philippine. National Security experts in USA say that the extreme weather is more danger to our national security than terrorism,Chinese hackers and North Korean nuclear missiles. The period we are living in now has been named ” Anthroprocene”. ( F.Sheikh)
Some excerpts;
“This March, Admiral Samuel J. Locklear III, the commander of the United States Pacific Command, told security and foreign policy specialists in Cambridge, Mass., that global climate change was the greatest threat the United States faced — more dangerous than terrorism, Chinese hackers and North Korean nuclear missiles. Upheaval from increased temperatures, rising seas and radical destabilization “is probably the most likely thing that is going to happen…” he said, “that will cripple the security environment, probably more likely than the other scenarios we all often talk about.’’
“There’s a word for this new era we live in: the Anthropocene. This term, taken up by geologists, pondered by intellectuals and discussed in the pages of publications such as The Economist and the The New York Times, represents the idea that we have entered a new epoch in Earth’s geological history, one characterized by the arrival of the human species as a geological force. The Nobel-Prize-winning chemist Paul Crutzen coined the term in 2002, and it has steadily gained acceptance as evidence has increasingly mounted that the changes wrought by global warming will affect not just the world’s climate and biological diversity, but its very geology — and not just for a few centuries, but for millenniums. The geophysicist David Archer’s 2009 book, “The Long Thaw: How Humans are Changing the Next 100,000 Years of Earth’s Climate,” lays out a clear and concise argument for how huge concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and melting ice will radically transform the planet, beyond freak storms and warmer summers, beyond any foreseeable future.”
“But the biggest problems the Anthropocene poses are precisely those that have always been at the root of humanistic and philosophical questioning: “What does it mean to be human?” and “What does it mean to live?” In the epoch of the Anthropocene, the question of individual mortality — “What does my life mean in the face of death?” — is universalized and framed in scales that boggle the imagination. What does human existence mean against 100,000 years of climate change? What does one life mean in the face of species death or the collapse of global civilization? How do we make meaningful choices in the shadow of our inevitable end?”
These questions have no logical or empirical answers. They are philosophical problems par excellence. Many thinkers, including Cicero, Montaigne, Karl Jaspers, and The Stone’s own Simon Critchley, have argued that studying philosophy is learning how to die. If that’s true, then we have entered humanity’s most philosophical age — for this is precisely the problem of the Anthropocene. The rub is that now we have to learn how to die not as individuals, but as a civilization. Click link for full article;
The current epoch in geological history of the planet is called Cenozoic and it started 65 million years ago. The last 65 million years have witnessed countless climatic changes. None of those changes were caused by humans, simply because modern humans had not come into existence until two hundred thousand years ago. This assumption is based on the record of fossils and biogenic substances from periods before 50 000 years ago and the human artifacts found relating to 50,000 years ago. Those changes were caused by Nature itself. Human societies have gotten hooked on man-made (as opposed to Nature made) comforts, sought at the expense of ecological balance. Humans have started contributing to the damage of ecology, in exchange for air-conditioning, aerosol sprays, fossil fuels and plastics that are not bio-degradable, and deforestation yielding short term comforts and long term devastation. The damage to ecology has been a bad habit. The redeeming feature is that societies have over-looked lots of bad habits, albeit not for ever. Societies have woken up and placed appropriate embargoes in place to put an end to lots of bad habits e.g.quarantine of contagiously sick, declaration of ingredients on food labels, expiry dates on foods and medicine labels….its a pretty long list of embargoes. Besides, humans are very resilient. They are self-destructive in short term, but quite self-preserving in the long term. They do come around….always have. Don’t they ?
Great perspective. As Cenozoic is 65 million years old, but real devastating effect on environment by human species is less than a century old and does not have a historical precedent.Lot of it is unknown. Anthropcene challenge will require the co-operation of all nations, but short sighted self-economic interests are in the way of any co-operation.
This level of co-operation was not necessary in previous challenges faced by Human species.
Fayyaz
It is indeed remarkable what man has been able to achieve in a short burst of his existence. The size of human population has grown exponentially from 1 billion in 1800 to 3 billion in 1960 to 7.125 billion today and is estimated to reach 9 billion by 2030. The planet is not equipped for such numbers even at the subsistence level. The push to maintain higher levels of consumption is driving the growth engine ever faster. The challenge to the environment is unprecedented both in scale and speed. And the changes will exact higher tolls in climatic events and other quality of life issues before the various nations would be forced to come together in effective transnational action.