What is the possible path through the global crisis of catastrophic climate change? I have looked at every possible path, from “green techno-optimism” to localized or globalized “transition” economies; to “deep adaptation.” My sense is that nothing will really change until human beings evolve in a fundamental way, learning to slow down and engage with the rhythms and limitations of nature, rather than always accelerating human civilization. But we cannot expect human beings to “evolve” fast enough to totally avoid this predicament. There is not enough time for this because human biological evolution takes millions of years, and human cultural evolution takes hundreds and thousands of years. We don’t have that kind of time because climate change is accelerating faster than the technological solutions we devise to avoid it.
But my reading of the history of human evolution is that any time there was a period of rapid human evolution, such as the development of new humanoid species, or Homo Sapiens with new capabilities, it was due to climate change. We have evolved as a species with the changes in the environment and the climate; from the Ice Age to the Holocene, from the Holocene to the Anthropocene. From forest to savannah, from savannah to mountain, from mountain to shoreline. Changes in the environment provoked changes in human physiology, brain capacity, language, skill and social organization.
We are not going to stop climate change. We can slow it down, perhaps, and mitigate climate change to some extent, but fundamentally, it is too late now and there is no way we can avoid climate change. We have solutions of all kinds, technological and cultural, but none of them will be implemented fast enough to stop the global tide of climate change as it interrupts the AMOC, melts polar ice caps, raises sea level, kills millions of species, causes catastrophic droughts, floods, fires and storms, and collapses civilizations.
That does not mean that I’m advocating that we should do nothing and just “accept” catastrophic climate change. Far from it, we should do everything we can, politically, culturally, technologically, to reduce the impacts of climate change and help our species to adapt to the barrage of chaotic conditions that we will face. This is the only way we can assure that human beings will deeply adapt and survive as a species. Indeed, we will have to adapt quickly and continuously, politically, socially and technologically, in order to maintain our ability to survive the chaotic environment. Our technological, political and social adaptations are the very means of our cultural evolution. The greater arc of our biological evolution will be influenced by our cultural adaptations. Moreover, without continuous adaptation, we simply will not survive as a species
We are not going to stop climate change. Climate change is going to stop us.
This is what I have come to understand as “deep adaptation.” Deep adaptation means that as the climate goes into chaotic states for extended periods of time, over hundreds and thousands of years, we will be forced to evolve to adapt to the environment. The catastrophic climate change of the 20th-21st centuries will prove to be the greatest driver of human evolution since the end of the Ice Age.
The only way out is through. We cannot hope to stop or avoid or engineer our way out of climate change. We can only do what we can to survive it. We simply have to accept that we are the cause these conditions, and that we will be forced to evolve, biologically and culturally, as we adapt to them. The only measure of whether we have done enough to evolve and adapt to climate change is not “did we save our civilization?” It is this: did we survive as a species? If we survive as a species and continue to reproduce our kind many thousands of generations into the future, then we have done “enough”. If we do not survive as a species, then we will have failed to evolve and adapt, and climate change will have ended our reign as the top predator species on the planet. Another species will take our place.
Dharmaecology 