By: David Miron-Wapner

“Welcome to the Age of Humans, a new chapter of Earth’s history….

Welcome to the end of the natural world as a realm that is somehow meaningfully distinct from humanity, thanks in large part to the worldwide carbon pollution that you and I have unwittingly helped to create and that will affect our descendants for many thousands of years, far longer than most of us yet realize.”

So begins the prologue of “Deep Future – The Next 100,000 Years of Life on Earth” by paleoecologist  Curt Stager. Proceeding from a profound understanding of Earth’s past climate, we are taken on a long journey back in time to similar warming events laying a foundation for predictions about conditions our descendants will surely face because our actions today are “so large, powerful and long-lived.” It’s not hard to imagine why – since the advent of the Industrial Revolution we have used up nearly half of the fossil resources that took the earth 300 million years to create from ancient sunlight.

Most of the predictions suggest a world substantially less hospitable to humanity, let alone the rest of the animal kingdom. Having passed the tipping point on climate, it is now really only a question of how much we disrupt our planet’s life support systems. If fossil fuel consumption will be swiftly curtailed, we may avoid the worst in the short term and reduce longer term threats; or as appears more likely from trends in China and India, fossil fuel will be the primary energy source for electricity and transportation for many years to come. By comparing the pace of our current warming to the distant past, we can see that how much we allow temperature to rise in this century will determine just how long our current willfully negligent behavior continues to affect the lives of unseen generations to come.

Among the most vexing problems of climate change is its very invisibility. Even a super storm like Sandy that caused so much devastation on the US East coast is only an isolated weather event and cannot be directly linked to the broader issue of slow-moving, accumulating temperature rise. However, climate scientists warn that though overall temperature variation may be gradual, local and regional weather events will tend toward the extreme.

Stager’s glimpse into the Deep Future of life on earth helps us truly apprehend the enormity of modern industrialized global economy’s ability to alter the earth’s life sustaining systems. It is sobering to know that in the name of progress and economic development we are committing grave offenses in relation to countless innocent unborn generations.

What are we to do with our new found guilt in relation to our descendants? Do what justice demands. First, accept personal responsibility and undertake changes in personal behavior, whether becoming more ardent recyclers, composters and urban gardeners and most importantly more discriminating consumers. Next, we can participate in building community resilience and solidarity, essential capacities for surviving the increasingly powerful disruptions to come as climate change bites ever harder in the coming decades. We must demand that our leaders act now to limit carbon emissions and enable a swift transition to sustainable energy systems that are widely distributed, sophisticated, smart and based largely on renewable sources.