The Ruins to Come - Stolen Future, Broken Present: The Human Significance of Climate Change - page 89

course of things. But for a species to die is another mater altogether. An
individual's death arises from the same process as its birth, its participa-
tion in reproduction, its maintaining a certain adaptive behavior within
a particular ecological niche. Similarly, in the context of the biosphere's
dynamic life, the passing of a species arises from the same process as its
emergence, its flourishing, and its participation in the relationships of
symbiosis or competition. Its extinction its within the patern of a won-
derfully complex but coherent interaction. What we face, however, is not
extinction of this kind, but the murder of species, ecosystems, oceans—
purely as a result of the biologically unnecessary indulgence of our spe-
cies. This is not death, nor even extinction, but a destructive intervention
into the web of life.
Climate change, in short, does far more than mortality could ever do:
it harms the lifeworld that sustains our species, and in consequence dam-
ages the societies in which our deaths have meaning, the cultural context
for our own aspirations and achievements. It imposes an extra level of
difficulty on each species, each society, each life—one that none previ-
ously had to bear. As a result, all will face something more than mortality,
something altogether unanticipated and more strange.
This bizarre future differs from mortality in yet another way. Two
centuries ago, in one passage of his elegy to John Keats, Adonais , Percy
Bysshe Shelley wrote that when nature revives in the spring and the dead
do not return, we are reminded that the circle of the year differs sharply
from the shape of an individual human life. Spring cannot bring back the
dead; ultimately, then, it cannot console us but instead revives our grief.
He concludes this portion of the poem with these lines: “As long as skies
are blue, and fields are green / Evening must usher night, night urge the
morrow, / Month follow month with woe, and year wake year to sor-
r o w.” 104 For the speaker of these words, human beings pass while nature
endures. Today, however, we face virtually the opposite emotion. Under
climate change, you, or I, or a friend may live on beyond the death of a
local forest, the silencing of a nearby stream, or the browning of a neigh-
boring green. The years will return, no doubt, and night will still urge the
morrow, but whether nature will revive is another question. Where we
once thought we would die and nature endure, we may instead survive