Interesting essay in the New York Times recently by Dr. Erle C. Ellis called Science Alone Won’t Save the Earth. People Have to Do That: “We need to start talking about what kind of planet we want to live on.”

“The Anthropocene is not the end of our world. It's just the beginning. Collectively, we have the potential to create a much better planet than the one we are creating now. So let’s start talking about the better future we want, and less about the future we don’t. It’s about articulating values, and about sharing, fairly, the only planet we have with one another and the rest of life on earth. The planet we make will reflect the people we are. (August 11, 2018, The New York Times)

This article received a lot of comments—some hopeful, some not, some very thoughtful, some not so much, and some comments seemed to me to be spot on.

However, in my opinion, we needed to have started talking about what kind of planet we want to live on—some time ago. We can and should have that conversation now, except that science has explained quite clearly that there are now limits to the kind of planet we can have.

We cannot have a planet that won’t be having stronger hurricanes, won’t be having more wildfires, and won’t be having more torrential downpours. Each day we drag our feet and fail to address Climate Change on a scale and time frame that will matter, our choices for the planet we want are fewer. And science suggests we don’t have all the time in the world to get ‘conversing’ about Climate Change.

Science may not be the final word on solutions (especially ones that involve human behavior), but science can help humanity understand the limits, the bottlenecks, the when and where we must cut our losses.

As we go further into the Climate Change Bottleneck, where our past environmental abuses get cooked on a warming planet, there will be limits. There will be limits on development, population, and consumption. There will be limits on how much heat humanity can adapt to, especially working outside. [See “In India, Summer Heat May Soon Be Literally Unbearable,” (July 17, 2018, The New York Times)] There will be limits on how much more pollution we can put into our land, air, and water because all these features of our planet can only support life, our life, if certain restraints are kept.  

Limits is not a word humanity suffers gladly, but it would be prudent for us to plan for Climate Change, so we don’t bump up against the kind of boundaries that are non-negotiable under any circumstances.  


Time passes.