Active Hope. Joanna Macy
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is drying out so much in some parts of the world that crops are failing and wildfires are becoming more intense. In Brazil, the droughts in 2005 were considered a once-a-century event. Yet the droughts that followed in 2010 were even worse. In Washington State, there has been more forest loss from wildfires in the last ten years than in the previous three decades combined.22
At the same time, warmer winds carry more water from the oceans, causing other areas to suffer an increase in flooding and extreme rainfall events. Ronald Neilson, a professor of bioclimatology at Oregon State University, explains: “As the planet warms, more water is getting evaporated from the oceans and all that water has to come down somewhere as precipitation.”23
In Bangladesh, fourteen inches of rain fell in a single day in 2004, contributing to floods that left 10 million homeless and much of the crop yield destroyed. The floods in Pakistan in 2010 put a fifth of the country underwater, displacing 20 million people.
Most of the world’s major cities developed as ports bordering the sea or major rivers, and more than 630 million people live less than thirty-three feet above sea level. If the ice sheets in Greenland and West Antarctica continue melting, rising water levels will flood London, New York, Miami, Mumbai, Calcutta, Sydney, Shanghai, Jakarta, Tokyo, and many other major cities.24 Melting ice is also significant because land and sea surfaces absorb more of the sun’s warmth than ice cover does. This creates a vicious cycle (see Box 1.3), in which the more the ice melts, the less it reflects the sun’s heat and the warmer it gets, leading to further ice melting.
Forests play a protective role by absorbing carbon dioxide, but as woodlands are chopped down, we lose this crucial process. Tropical trees are additionally at risk because when warmer air dries out the soil beyond a certain point, the ground can no longer support large trees. A global temperature increase of 7.2°F (4°C) could be enough to kill much of the Amazon rain forest.25 If this happened, not only would we lose the forest’s cooling effect, but the greenhouse gases released from rotting or burning trees would further add to warming, setting off another vicious cycle. The term runaway climate change is used to describe this dangerous situation, in which the consequences of warming cause more warming to occur (see Box 1.3). Professor Kevin Anderson of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change warns of the catastrophe this could lead to:
For humanity, it’s a matter of life or death…it’s extremely unlikely that we wouldn’t have mass death at 4°C. If you have got a population of nine billion by 2050 and you hit 4°C, 5°C or 6°C, you might have half a billion people surviving.26
Box 1.3. Amplifying Loops in Runaway Climate Change
Social Division and War
At the moment, the poor of our world are bearing the brunt of the Great Unraveling. As oil prices have gone up, the cost of food has rocketed. Global food prices more than doubled between February 2001 and February 2011, pushing more and more people below the poverty line.27 In 2010 more than 900 million people suffered chronic hunger. Meanwhile, the richest 20 percent of our world’s population (that’s anyone able to spend more than $10 a day) receive three-quarters of the total income.28
While some argue that economic growth is needed to tackle poverty, wealth has flowed much more to the rich than to the poor as the global economy has grown. The number of millionaires and billionaires increases, while nearly half the world’s population still lives on less than $2.50 a day.29 Within affluent countries too, the gap between rich and poor has grown wider. Twenty-five years ago, the richest 1 percent in the United States earned 12 percent of the national income and owned 33 percent of the wealth. In 2011 they earned nearly a quarter of the income and owned 40 percent of the wealth.30 Studies show the more economically divided a society becomes, the more trust levels fall, crime increases, and communities fall apart.31
The UN Millennium Project estimates that extreme poverty and world hunger could be eliminated by 2025 for a cost of approximately $160 billion a year.32 The world’s military spending in 2010 was ten times that amount, with the US government spending almost as much as all the other countries in the world put together.33 The unraveling of our world comes, in part, from seeking security through battling enemies rather than addressing the threats presented by deepening inequalities, resource depletion, and climate change.
Mass Extinction of Species
With rising pollution, habitat destruction, and the disturbance wrought by climate change, the toll on wildlife has been enormous. A third of all amphibians, at least a fifth of all mammals, and an eighth of all bird species are now threatened with extinction. “The Global Biodiversity Outlook,” a UN report, concluded:
In effect, we are currently responsible for the sixth major extinction event in the history of Earth, and the greatest since the dinosaurs disappeared, 65 million years ago.34
Some species play critical roles in the healthy functioning of natural systems; we depend on them for our survival. Microscopic plankton in the oceans, for example, is the food that fish depend on; these plankton also produce much of the oxygen we breathe. When carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels is absorbed by the oceans, it makes the seawater more acidic, harming the plankton. The combination of ocean acidity and warming water has already led to a dramatic decline in the global population of plankton.35 If this decline continues, we don’t know at what point it will yield catastrophic consequences — such as the collapse of fish life or a substantial reduction in the oxygen available to us.
THE DOUBLE REALITY
The stories of Business as Usual and the Great Unraveling offer starkly contrasting accounts of the state of our world. They are two different realities coexisting in the same time and space. You probably know people who live in a different story than you. You may also be moving between stories yourself. It’s possible to spend part of a day in our own business-as-usual mode, making plans for a future we assume will be much like today. Then something triggers an awareness of the mess we’re in, and we recognize in our hearts and minds the crash that lies ahead.
For increasing numbers of people, the crash has come already: homes flooded after extreme rainfall, farms abandoned because of long-term drought, water supplies contaminated and undrinkable, jobs or savings lost. The mainstream reality of Business as Usual is increasingly becoming interrupted by the bad news of the Great Unraveling.
When we first become aware of the grimness of our situation, it can come as quite a shock. Most of these issues are squeezed out of mainstream media, their coverage confined to occasional documentaries or fringe publications. The gaze of the modern press, particularly in the Western world, is more focused on gossip about celebrities. We live, as Al Gore puts it, in a culture of distraction.36
When these issues do come up in conversation, they are often met by awkward silences. Two different views commonly block the flow of words. The first dismisses the problem as overblown. This is the voice of the first story that says it’s not really that bad. The second perspective fully