Climate Change Will Happen to You - Stolen Future, Broken Present: The Human Significance of Climate Change - page 12

So far I have emphasized how climate change will put nearly all eco-
systems into severe disarray and force a good portion of the Earth's spe-
cies into extinction. But for human beings, these biological realities are
only part of the picture. For us, such vast damage will also deplete the
pleasure we take in natural beauty—in the blossoming of a tree, the cry
of a bird, the subtle coloring of a fish, the scent of bark, the interweav-
ing of forms on a tangled bank. The devastation of Earth's living forms
is also a traumatic blow to the beauty of the common day, the poetry of
everyday life.
So what , someone might respond; we've always had extinction, and
we always will; there is nothing here to be upset about . But this time we're
not talking about one species giving up its habitat to another over many
decades or being pushed out under ordinary processes of natural selec-
tion. We're talking about a volatile combination of factors: wiping out
the ecological niche of many species; making complex biological inter-
relations vulnerable to unforeseen interactions; and puting entire eco-
systems under duress. In fact, extinction at this pace and at these numbers
deserves a stronger term; it is not just extinction, but the death or at least
decay of entire natural systems, if not of the Earth itself. Some previous
events in the planet's history caused a similar devastation—the impact of
meteors, for example—but do we really want to compete with meteors to
see which force can mess up the Earth the most?
All this is bad enough. But at the moment we are causing much more
than climate change. If you factor in everything else that advanced indus-
trial civilization is doing to our local and regional ecosystems, the situa-
tion becomes even more difficult. All kinds of familiar practices on which
we in the United States rely today—monoculture agriculture; the deple-
tion of water aquifers; the release of vast quantities of nitrogen into eco-
systems from fertilizer; large-scale farming of chickens, pigs, and cows,
creating unprecedented quantities of manure effluent; the destruction
of wetlands; the expansion of cities, suburbs, and exurbs; strip mining,
mountaintop coal mining, and oil drilling in formerly protected areas;
the release of untold quantities of plastics into the world's waterways
and oceans; overfishing; and the inadvertent importation of exotic spe-
cies, to name a few—already place our ecosystems under duress. To add