One of the significant questions we must ask ourselves at this time (though many decades ago would have been even better) is what should we save from Climate Change? (Of course, for ethical reasons we cannot ask ((even in the darkest regions of our mind)) who should we save from Climate Change? No matter how drastic Climate Change becomes, I cannot imagine a point at which we would seriously contemplate a “Lifeboat Ethics” situation, where we save some but not others.) We should save everyone from Climate Change, especially people in the future.

Before I talk about what we should save from Climate Change, we should acknowledge that to even pose such a question is to recognize there is now enough widespread awareness that Climate Change is occurring on a scale and time frame that makes this question possible. It would have been considered highly speculative to bring this question up twenty years ago but now people are acting on this:

Saving Scotland’s Heritage From the Rising Seas Off the north coast of Scotland, Orkney’s soft green landscapes hold a trove of things from everyday life before history was written. More than 3,000 archaeological sites — among them standing stone circles, Norse halls and a Neolithic tomb graffitied by Vikings — have endured for millenniums, scattered across the roughly 70 islands that make up the Orkney archipelago. At Skara Brae, one of Europe’s best-preserved Stone Age villages, kitchens built around 3180 B.C. are fitted with hearths and cupboards, bedsteads and doors that could be bolted shut. Today, in forays to remote spits of land, people are working to save some of these places for posterity from the climate changes accelerated by human activity. (September 25, 2018) The New York Times [more on Climate Change in our area]

We should also acknowledge that what can we save from Climate Change may be limited. For example. we should save our coastal cities, but there may come a point when trying to keep back the seas and raising up the streets are no longer viable. In the archaeological example above, it may be more useful to photograph and create a data bank of information rather than trying to save the site itself.

As we go further into the Climate Change Bottleneck, where our past environmental abuses get cooked on a warming planet, our choices as to what we save are going to be more and more limited. We are going to need guidelines so that rich, gated communities aren’t the only things on our priority list.

We should prioritize ecosystems and the key plants and creatures that keep these systems—lakes, rivers, grasslands, forests, wetlands, coral reefs, etc.—healthy because they are the organs of our life support system.

We should be addressing Climate Change now so that as the boundaries of the bottleneck—more wildfires, more extreme weather, higher sea level rise, and less resiliency due to loss of biodiversity—close in, we aren’t simply throwing overboard the weakest, the poorest, and the least appreciated. 

Humanity has acted quite horribly when societies collapse, but we don’t have to. We can plan and act sensibly now, before things get beyond our control.  

We have some hard choices to make and these choices should be made through ethics and science. The clock has long been ticking.


Time passes.