For curious people looking for

solutions to the fundamental issues

faced by humankind

w w w . n e w p h i l o s o p h e r. c o m
 WELCOME TO THE ANTHROPOCENE

WE TOOK
COVID -19
S E R I O U S LY

NOW FOR
T H E C L I M AT E
CRISIS

OLIVER BURKEMAN TIM DEAN MARIANA ALESSANDRI

Apocaloptimism Pale orange dot X-risks and Existentialism
CLIMATE
 # 28
Editor
Zan Boag

Editorial Director
Antonia Case

Art Directors
Carlos Egan, Aida Novoa

Cover Design
“We seek with our human hands to create Genís Carreras
a second nature in the natural world.”
Editor-at-large
Cicero Nigel Warburton

Contributors
Mariana Alessandri, Matthew Beard, Marina

Climate Benjamin, Oliver Burkeman, Tom Chatfield, André

As we kicked off 2020, we industrious hu-
mans of the Anthropocene had successfully
completed a run of the five hottest years on
record. And nothing was going to stop us
making that ten out of ten. Despite knowing
full well that our actions were responsible for
increasing temperatures, we couldn't change
our ways. As former British Prime Minister
Tony Blair put it, “The blunt truth about the
politics of climate change is that no country
will want to sacrifice its economy.”
When COVID-19 rolled over the top of
the world’s best-laid plans for the new decade,
and country after country sacrificed its econo-
my, it became clear that the couldn’t was really
more like a wouldn’t. Yes we can; but no we
won’t. It seems that immediate personal fear is
far more persuasive than future collective fear.
But the climate crisis isn’t something that
will happen in the future. It is happening now,
and was happening long before COVID-19
materialised. My only hope is that rather than
falling back into our old ways, we can transfer
our freshly-acquired will to fight and willing-
ness to sacrifice from one crisis to the next.
Dao, Tim Dean, Jason deCaires Taylor, Michael
Ellis, Narda Lepes, Charley Lineweaver, Tom
McBride, Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore, Patrick
Stokes, James Thornton
Illustrators / Artists
Genís Carreras, Carlos Egan, Yeiyei Gómez,
Russel Herneman, Alvaro Hidalgo, Corey Mohler,
Aida Novoa, Jinrong Xie
Photographers
Jason deCaires Taylor, Library of Congress, NASA,
Yale Rosen, Wellcome Trust
Administration
Marnie Anderson, Claudio Faerman
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Views expressed by the authors are not those

Zan Boag
of the publisher. Reproduction in whole or in
Editor,
New Philosopher part is prohibited.
ISSN 2201-7151 Issue 28, #2/2020

3
Contents NewPhilosopher

Contents

3 Editor’s letter 81 Scenario 3

8 Contributors 82 The evidence

10 Scientific consensus 84 Making the world whole again ~ André Dao

12 News from nowhere 88 The meaning of... climate

18 A century of climate change 90 Ethical dilemmas ~ Matthew Beard

20 Apocaloptimism ~ Oliver Burkeman 92 Wild thinking ~ Zan Boag

24 The Dancer ~ Existential Comics 96 Six thinkers

28 The burnt country ~ Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore 98 Changing the atmosphere ~ Charley Lineweaver

31 Climate stats 104 When degree is shaked ~ William Shakespeare

32 Temperature anomalies 106 Stories of change ~ Michael Ellis

34 Breaking the world ~ Patrick Stokes 109 Heraclitus on talk radio ~ Tom McBride

38 Virus views 112 Writers' Award XXVIII: Climate

44 The pale orange dot ~ Tim Dean 114 A change in temperature ~ Svante Arrhenius

48 13 views on climate change 118 Our library

50 Our ultimate fragility ~ Jason deCaires Taylor 119 Documentaries

62 Seasons in the sun ~ Marina Benjamin 120 Around the web

66 Thoughts on... climate 122 Subscribe

68 Client Earth ~ James Thornton 126 X-risks and Existentialism ~ Mariana Alessandri

78 Our place in the world ~ Tom Chatfield 130 13 questions: Narda Lepes

4
 NewPhilosopher Contents

- 44 - - 20 - - 34 -
EVOLUTION CLIMATE CRISIS EXTINCTION
The pale orange dot Apocaloptimism Breaking the world
Tim Dean Oliver Burkeman Patrick Stokes

- 50 -
OCEAN

Climate
Our ultimate
fragility
Jason deCaires Taylor
- 28 -
FIRE
The burnt country
Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore

- 92 - - 78 - - 68 -
ENVIRONMENT THE FUTURE LAW
Wild thinking Our place in the world Client Earth
Zan Boag Tom Chatfield James Thornton

5
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Contributors
Contributors
Charley Lineweaver
Charley Lineweaver is the convenor
of ANU’s Planetary Science Insti-
tute and holds a joint appointment
as an associate professor in the Re-
search School of Earth Sciences. He
obtained a PhD in astrophysics from
UC Berkeley. Lineweaver has written
chapters for several books, including
Our Place in the Universe, and has
written for Scientific American, New-
ton Graphic Science Magazine, and The
Canberra Times on black holes, the or-
igin of the universe, time-warps, and
the Big Bang.
Oliver Burkeman
Oliver Burkeman is a writer based in
New York. He is the winner of the
Foreign Press Association’s Young
Journalist of the Year and was short-
listed for the Orwell Prize in 2006.
His books include HELP! How to
Become Slightly Happier and Get
a Bit More Done and The Antidote:
Happiness for People Who Can’t
Stand Positive Thinking – which ex-
plores the upsides of negativity, uncer-
tainty, failure, and imperfection.
Patrick Stokes
Patrick Stokes is a lecturer in philoso-
phy at Deakin University, Melbourne.
He specialises in 19th and 20th century
European philosophy, personal identity,
narrative selfhood, moral psychology,
and death and remembrance. A par-
ticular focus is bringing Kierkegaard
into dialogue with contemporary an-
alytic philosophy of personal identi-
ty and moral psychology. Stokes was
awarded the 2014 AAP media prize.
8
NewPhilosopher
James Thornton
James Thornton is the founding CEO
of ClientEarth, a Conservation Fellow
of the Zoological Society of London,
and Honorary Professor of Law at the
University of Bristol. The New States-
man named him as one of 10 peo-
ple who could change the world and
he has twice won Leader of the Year
at the UK Business Green Awards.
Thornton graduated from Yale, Phi
Beta Kappa, magna cum laude, with
departmental honours in philosophy.
He is the author of Immediate Harm
and The Feynman Challenge.
Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore
Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore lived in
China from 2009 to 2014 during which
time she worked as the associate editor
for Time Out Beijing, the art editor for
Time Out Shanghai, and as an op-ed
columnist for the International New
York Times, reporting from China for
the blog Latitude: Views From Around
the World. She writes for The Guard-
ian, The Economist, Financial Times,
The New York Times, Womankind, Wall
Street Journal, and Time magazine.
Marina Benjamin
Marina Benjamin is the former arts
editor of the New Statesman and dep-
uty arts editor of the Evening Stand-
ard. A memoirist best known for The
Middlepause, which offered a poetic
and philosophical take on midlife, her
latest memoir Insomnia was published
in 2018. Benjamin is a Consultant
Fellow for the Royal Literary Fund
and a creative writing tutor at Arvon.
Her other books include Last Days in
Babylon and Rocket Dreams.
Jason deCaires Taylor
Jason deCaires Taylor is a sculptor,
environmentalist, and photographer.
Taylor created the world’s first under-
water sculpture park in 2006 in the
West Indies, which was listed as one
of the Top 25 Wonders of the World
by National Geographic. Other major
projects include MUSA in Mexico,
Museo Atlántico in Spain, The Ris-
ing Tide in London, and Ocean At-
las in the Bahamas. He is a member
of The Royal Society of Sculptors and
in 2014 he was awarded The Global
Thinker by Foreign Policy.
Mariana Alessandri
Mariana Alessandri is Assistant Pro-
fessor of Continental Philosophy, Ex-
istentialism, Philosophy of Religion,
and Spanish-language Philosophy at
the University of Texas-Rio Grande
Valley. She has written for The New
York Times, Philosophy Today, Woman-
kind magazine, Times Higher Educa-
tion, Chronicle of Higher Education and
many academic journals. Her teaching
interests include Existentialism and
Mexican-American Philosophy.
Tim Dean
Tim Dean holds a doctorate in philos-
ophy in evolution and morality from
the University of New South Wales.
Previously the Editor of Cosmos and
Editor of Australian Life Scientist,
Dean is currently an Honorary Asso-
ciate in the Philosophy Department
at the University of Sydney. His work
has appeared in New Scientist, Popular
Scientist, Cosmos, and the ABC. In 2015
he was awarded the AAP Media Pro-
fessionals’ Award.

Zan Boag
Zan Boag is Editor of New Philosopher,
Editorial Director of the internation-
al magazine Womankind, and Director
of poet bookstore. In 2017 he won the
Australasian Association of Philoso-
phy Media Professionals Award and
was shortlisted for Editor of the Year
in the international Stack Awards.
Boag speaks regularly on philosophy,
technology, the media, and ethics,
and is the co-founder and host of the
monthly philosophical discussion se-
ries Bright Thinking. He is a Fellow of
the Royal Society of the Arts.
Tom Chatfield
Tom Chatfield is a British writer,
broadcaster, and tech philosopher. He
is the author of six books, including
Netymology, Live This Book!, and How
to Thrive in the Digital Age, and speaks
around the world on technology, the
arts, and media. Chatfield was launch
columnist for the BBC’s worldwide
technology site, BBC Future, is a Vis-
iting Associate at the Oxford Internet
Institute, and is a senior expert at the
Global Governance Institute.
Alvaro Hidalgo
Alvaro Hidalgo is a graphic designer
and illustrator who formerly worked
as an art director in design projects
and as a film editor and post-producer
in audiovisual projects. His illustra-
tion work uses a combination of tra-
ditional techniques and digital image
processing and Hidalgo’s award-win-
ning illustrations have graced the cov-
ers of Rolling Stone and Womankind,
and have appeared in The New Yorker,
Wired, Newsweek, and The Atlantic.
NewPhilosopher
Antonia Case
Antonia Case is the literary editor of
New Philosopher, the editor of Wom-
ankind magazine, and an award-win-
ning writer and journalist. Case was
selected as ‘philosopher in residence’
for the 2016 Brisbane Writers’ Fes-
tival and is currently writing a book
on personal identity and change. She
was the winner of the 2013 Australa-
sian Association of Philosophy Media
Professionals’ Award and in 2016 was
shortlisted for editor of the year in the
Stack Awards.
Matthew Beard
Matthew Beard is a moral philoso-
pher with an academic background in
applied and military ethics. He is an
Associate Lecturer at the University
of Notre Dame Australia and a Fellow
at The Ethics Centre, undertaking re-
search into ethical principles for tech-
nology. In 2016, he won the Austral-
asian Association of Philosophy prize.
He is a presenter on the ABC podcast
Short & Curly, an award-winning chil-
dren’s podcast.
Genís Carreras
Genís Carreras is the designer of
every cover of New Philosopher mag-
azine and the creator of Philographics:
Big Ideas in Simple Shapes. Carreras’s
work has been recognised in the AOI
World Illustration Awards, the Laus
Awards, and the Stocks Taylor Ben-
son Awards, and his work has been
featured in the books MIN: New Sim-
plicity in Graphic Design, Playing with
Type, Geometry Makes Me Happy, and
Geo/Graphics.
Contributors
André Dao
André Dao is a writer and editor
who is co-founder of Behind the Wire,
an oral history project document-
ing people’s experience of immigra-
tion detention, and a producer of the
Walkley-award winning podcast, The
Messenger. His work has appeared in
The Monthly, SBS True Stories, Mean-
jin, and Al Jazeera English. Formerly
the editor-in-chief of human rights
publication Right Now, Dao was a
finalist for the Australian Human
Rights Commission’s Young People’s
Medal in 2011.
Russel Herneman
Russel Herneman is an award-winning
cartoonist whose work has appeared
in The Times of London, Private Eye,
Prospect, The Spectator, and many oth-
ers. In 2018 he won Pocket Cartoon of
the Year 2018 in the Political Cartoon
Awards, European Newspaper Design
award for illustration, and Society of
News Design Award of excellence for
Illustration. He was an exhibitor at the
Society of Graphic Fine Art Draw 18
at Mennier Gallery, London.
Aida Novoa & Carlos Egan
Aida Novoa & Carlos Egan are the
art directors of New Philosopher and
Womankind magazine, as well as for
poet tea, which is produced by the
magazines’ publishers. Their work for
the publications has been recognised
by AIGA, the oldest and largest or-
ganisation for design in the United
States, as well as by Computer Arts
magazine, Desktop Mag, and Crea-
tive Journal.
9
 Scientific consensus NewPhilosopher

The following 198 scientific organisations hold the position that climate change has been caused by human action:

Association of Ec
osystem Resea
Australian Acade rch Centers
my of Science
Australian Burea
u of Meteorology
Australian Coral
Reef Society
s, Chile Australian Instit
h ile na de Ciencia ute of Marine Sc
Aca d e m ia C oa, Portugal Australian Instit ience
s C ie ncias de Lisb icana ute of Physics
Acade m ia d a
c ia s d e la R e pública Domin tu rales de Vene
zuela Australian Marin
e Sciences Assoc
ia d e C ie n ti ca s y Na iation
Academ as, Matemá atemala Australian Med
c a d e m ia d e Ciencias Físic F is ica s y N a turales de Gu Australian Meteo
ical Association
A icas,
Ciencias Med rological and O
Academia de a de C ncias,ie Mexico Bangladesh Aca
demy of Scienc
ceanographic So
ciety
M ex ic a n es
Acade m ia Bolivia Botanical Societ
N a c io n a l d e Ciencias de y of America
Academia cias del Peru Brazilian Acade
ia N a c ional de Cien u Sénégal
my of Sciences
Ac a d e m
S c ie n c e s e t Techniques d British Antarctic
Survey
s
Académie de nce Bulgarian Acade
ie d e s Sciences, Fra and Sciences
of Canada California Acade
my of Sciences
Académ H u m a n it ie s my of Sciences
f Arts,
Academies o Cameroon Acade
my of Sciences
A thens
Academy of bique Canadian Assoc
e m y o f S cie nce of Mozam Canadian Foun
iation of Physic
ists
Acad th Africa
cience of Sou veloping Worl
d (TWAS) dation for Climat
Academy of S e s fo r th e D e Canadian Geoph
ysical Union
e and Atmosph
eric Sciences
cienc
Academy of S ysia Canadian Meteo
S ciences Mala rological and O
Academy of M o ldova Canadian Societ ceanographic So
ciety
ciences of y of Soil Scienc
Academy of S es of th Cze e ch Republic Canadian Societ
y of Zoologists
e
S c ie n c of Iran
Academ y o f
th e Is la mic Republic Caribbean Acade
cienc e s o f , Egypt my of Sciences
Academy of S R e se a rc h a n d Technology Center for Intern
ational Forestry
views
cientific ealand
Academy of S o y a l S o c iety of New Z Chinese Academ
y of Sciences
Research
e R
Academy of th incei, Italy Colombian Aca
azionale dei L rth Systems
Science demy of Exact,
Accademia N a te a n d E a Commonwealth
Scientific and In
Physical and Nat
ural Sciences
for Clim
Africa Centre es (CSIRO) (Austral dustrial Researc
e my of Scienc ia) h Organization
African Acad n ces Consultative G
demy of Scie roup on Internat
Albanian Aca e n tal Research
Institute Croatian Acade
my of Arts and
ional Agricultura
l Research
E n vi ro n m Sc iences
Amazon trics Crop Science So
a n A c a demy of Pedia ciety of Americ
a
A m e ric ociation Cuban Academ
ri c a n A n th ro pological Ass c e ment of Scien
ce
Delegation of th
y of Sciences
Ame th e A d va n
ociation for (AASC) e Finnish Acade
American Ass o n o f S ta te Climatologists Ecological Soci
ety of America
mies of Science
and Letters
ociati rinarians
American Ass o n o f Wildlife Vete
Ecological Soci
ety of Australia
ss o c ia ti
American A ciety Environmental
ronomical So Protection Age
American Ast ty European Acade ncy
emical Socie my of Sciences
American Ch o f P reventive Me
dicine European Federa
tion of Geologist
and Arts
C o lle g e
American European Geosc s
heries Society iences Union
American Fis ion European Physic
ophysical Un al Society
American Ge of Biological
Sciences European Scienc
e Foundation
a n In st it u te
Americ cs Federation of A
itute of Physi merican Scient
American Inst ciety French Academ ists
e ri c a n M e te orological So Geological Soci
y of Sciences
Am
sical Society ety of America
American Phy ociation Geological Soci
lic Health Ass ety of Australia
American Pub ciation Geological Soci
e ri c a n Q u aternary Asso Georgian Acade
ety of London
A m iology
e ri c a n S o c ie ty for Microb my of Sciences
Am omy
iety of Agron
American Soc ngineers
iety of Civil E
American Soc Biologists
m e ri c a n S o c iety of Plant
A tion
e ri c a n S ta ti stical Associa
Am
10
 NewPhilosopher Scientific consensus

ina
tural Scientists Leopold
German Academy of Na
ts and Sciences
Ghana Academy of Ar
Academy
Indian National Science
of Sciences
Indonesian Academy gement
d Environmental Mana
Institute of Ecology an d Te chnology
gineering, Science an
Institute of Marine En nd
l Engineers New Zeala
Institute of Professiona UK
ical Engineers,
Institution of Mechan
InterAcademy Council s
of Research Universitie
International Alliance
ience Committee
International Arctic Sc arch
n for Great Lakes Rese
International Associatio Oklahoma Climatological Survey
for Science
International Council ies of Engineering and Te
chnological Organization of Biological Field Sta
tions
Co un cil of Ac ad em Pakistan Academy of Sciences
International
Sciences Society Palestine Academy for Science and
tiona l Re se arc h Ins titute for Climate and Pew Center on Global Climate Cha
Technology
Interna nge
r Quaternary Research
International Union fo sics
Polish Academy of Sciences
Geodesy and Geophy
International Union of ics
Romanian Academy
Pure and Applied Phys
International Union of Royal Academies for Science and
the Arts of Belgium
y of Sciences
Islamic World Academ Royal Academy of Exact, Physica
l and Natural Sciences of Spain
ces and Humanities
Israel Academy of Scien Royal Astronomical Society, UK
y of Sciences
Kenya National Academ Royal Danish Academy of Scienc
es and Letters
ience and Technology
Korean Academy of Sc Royal Irish Academy
iences and Arts
Kosovo Academy of Sc négal
Royal Meteorological Society (UK
)
s et Techniques du Sé
l’Académie des Science Royal Netherlands Academy of Art
s and Sciences
y of Sciences
Latin American Academ Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea
Research
iences
Latvian Academy of Sc Royal Scientific Society of Jordan
Sciences
Lithuanian Academy of ers, and Sciences
Royal Society of Canada
Academy of Arts, Lett
Madagascar National y
Royal Society of Chemistry, UK
Science and Technolog
Mauritius Academy of Ar ts
Royal Society of the United Kingdo
m
y of Sciences and
Montenegrin Academ ysical and Natural Scien
ces, Argentina Royal Swedish Academy of Scienc
es
ad em y of Ex ac t, Ph Russian Academy of Sciences
National Ac
Sciences of Armenia
National Academy of public Science and Technology, Austral
ia
na l Ac ad em y of Sc iences of the Kyrgyz Re Science Council of Japan
Natio
Sciences, Sri Lanka
National Academy of es of America
Scientific Committee on Antarctic
Research
Sciences, United Stat
National Academy of ion
Scientific Committee on Solar-T
errestrial Physics
and Space Administrat
National Aeronautics ac he rs
Scripps Institution of Oceanogra
phy
Geoscience Te
National Association of Serbian Academy of Sciences and
Arts
State Foresters
National Association of Slovak Academy of Sciences
mospheric Research
National Center for At Slovenian Academy of Sciences
and Arts
gineers Australia
National Council of En h, New Zealand Society for Ecological Restoratio
l Ins titut e of W at er & Atmospheric Researc Society for Industrial and Applied
n International
Nationa ration Mathematics
Atmospheric Administ
National Oceanic and Society of American Foresters
uncil
National Research Co Society of Biology (UK)
un dation
National Science Fo Society of Systematic Biologists
Natural England Soil Science Society of America
Research Council, UK
Natural Environment Sudan Academy of Sciences
ctions Alliance
Natural Science Colle Sudanese National Academy of
Science
ience Academies
Network of African Sc Tanzania Academy of Sciences
Sciences
New York Academy of The Wildlife Society (international
)
of Sciences
Nicaraguan Academy Turkish Academy of Sciences
Sciences
Nigerian Academy of Uganda National Academy of Sci
ences
of Sciences and Letters
Norwegian Academy Union of German Academies of Sci
ences and Humanities
United Nations Intergovernment
al Panel on Climate Change
University Corporation for Atmosp
heric Research
Woods Hole Oceanographic Inst
itution
Woods Hole Research Center
World Association of Zoos and Aqu
ariums
World Federation of Public Health
Associations
World Forestry Congress
World Health Organization
World Meteorological Organizat
ion
Zambia Academy of Sciences
Zimbabwe Academy of Sciences

11
News from nowhere NewPhilosopher

12
 NewPhilosopher
REVENGE
POLLUTION
“The only plots against us are within our own walls,—the dan-
ger is within,—the enemy is within. We must war with luxury,
with madness, with wickedness.”
–Cicero
ith the world on
pause due to COV-
ID-19, almost over-
night greenhouse gas emissions,
most notably NO2, dropped dramat-
ically. Having campaigned tirelessly
for change for decades, it seemed
that environmentalists had finally
got what they had been asking for,
albeit thanks to fear of a killer virus
rather than concerted action from
governments worldwide to tackle
the extinction event that is of our
own making.
This sudden shift offers hope that
change is indeed possible, but at the
same time poses a problem: will we
simply return to business as usual
at some stage in the near future; or,
worse still, double-down on emis-
sions in a desperate bid to ‘save the
economy’? “This bounce-back ef-
fect – which can sometimes reverse
any overall drop in emissions – is
[called] ‘revenge pollution’,” says Li
Shuo, senior climate policy advisor at
Greenpeace.
Two decades ago, the interna-
tional community agreed to stabilise
the concentration of CO2 and other
News from nowhere
greenhouse gases in the atmosphere,
however to date there has been lit-
tle action: in the past five year, levels
of carbon dioxide were 18 per cent
higher than the previous five years,
according to the World Meteorologi-
cal Organization (WMO).
And while the WMO welcomes
the COVID-19-induced drop in
CO2 emissions of six per cent, that’s
unfortunately only “short-term good
news”, said Professor Petteri Taalas,
WMO Secretary-General. Taalas
echoed Shuo's concern about revenge
pollution, saying that emissions are
likely to return to normal and cau-
tioning that “there might even be a
boost in emissions”.
Undoubtedly, COVID-19 has
shaken humans to the core, as we
fight against an unknown enemy
that is affecting our health, wealth,
and wellbeing. But as Taalas points
out, the climate crisis is of a differ-
ent magnitude, one that will lead to
“persistent health problems” and will
have a “massive impact on econom-
ics”. In this case we needn't look too
far for the cause of our ills: the ene-
my is within.
13
News from nowhere
Turning down the
thermostat
e like to simplify complex
systems down to everyday
scales. Take national econ-
omies, which politicians love to com-
pare to household budgets, giving us
the comforting illusion of control. The
everyday scale allows us to use common
sense, and say things like: don’t spend
more than you earn. The problem is
that a national economy is far more
complicated than any household. For
one thing, government spending is so
big it directly affects the economy as
a whole. But bringing in all that com-
plexity isn’t very comforting.
Another complex system that has
been scaled down is the global climate.
14
NewPhilosopher
The effects of such massive inter-
vention into the climate are unknown,
but possible consequences include de-
pletion of the ozone layer, reduction in
rainfall, and uneven distribution of any
cooling effect. Still, as academic Jere-
my Baskin has said in his recent book
on the subject, solar geoengineering
may be a “bad idea whose time has
come”. Why? At least in part because
of the scaling down of the climate to
a manageable, controllable  metaphor.
As Baskin points out, engineering the
climate is the logical endpoint of the
so-called Anthropocene, an epoch in
which the Earth, in all its complex and
rich glory, is reduced to an object of
human mastery.
Honeywell T-86 Round Thermostat, 1953
The US National Research Council,
for instance, said in a 2015 report that
“the climate system can be compared
to a heating system with two knobs,
either of which can be used to set the
global mean temperature”. Once again,
simplification creates an opening for
“We are the first
common sense (which, as we’ll see, isn’t
always very sensible). Here, common generation that can
sense says: if we can’t turn down the put an end to poverty
heating by lowering emissions, maybe and we are the last
we can turn the cooling knob up. The generation that can
cooling knob is the science fiction of put an end to climate
solar geoengineering, the basic idea of change.”
which is to release a million tonnes of
sulphate particles into the stratosphere Ban Ki-moon
every year to reflect back some sunlight.

Not new news
1965: “The part that remains in the
atmosphere may have a significant
effect on climate; carbon dioxide is
nearly transparent to visible light, but
it is a strong absorber and back radia-
tor of infrared radiation, particularly
in the wave lengths from 12 to 18
microns; consequently, an increase of
atmospheric carbon dioxide could act,
much like the glass in a greenhouse, to
raise the temperature of the lower air.”
Restoring the Quality of Our Environ-
ment, a report by U.S. President Lyndon
B. Johnson’s Science Advisory Committee
1968: “If the Earth’s temperature
increases significantly, a number of
events might be expected to occur, in-
cluding the melting of the Antarctic
ice cap, a rise in sea levels, warming of
the oceans, and an increase in photo-
synthesis. [..] Revelle makes the point
“Oh no! It’s War, Famine, Death, Pestilence, and Climate Change.”
NewPhilosopher
that man is now engaged in a vast
geophysical experiment with his en-
vironment, the earth. Significant tem-
perature changes are almost certain to
occur by the year 2000 and these could
bring about climatic changes.”
Study by the Stanford Research Institute
for the American Petroleum Institute
1979: “It appears plausible that an in-
creased amount of carbon dioxide in
the atmosphere can contribute to a
gradual warming of the lower atmo-
sphere, especially at higher latitudes....
It is possible that some effects on a re-
gional and global scale may be detect-
able before the end of this century and
become significant before the middle
of the next century.”
The World Climate Conference of the
World Meteorological Organization
News from nowhere
1979: When it is assumed that the
CO2 content of the atmosphere is
doubled and statistical thermal equi-
librium is achieved, the more realistic
of the modelling efforts predict a glob-
al surface warming of between 2°C and
3.5°C, with greater increases at high
latitudes. … we have tried but have
been unable to find any overlooked or
underestimated physical effects that
could reduce the currently estimated
global warmings due to a doubling of
atmospheric CO2 to negligible pro-
portions or reverse them altogether.
United States National Research Council
15
News from nowhere
The
aridity
line
In his 2015 book The Conflict
Shoreline, Israeli architect Eyal Weiz-
man follows the so-called “aridity line”,
the shifting boundary between de-
sert and non-desert that runs through
North Africa and the Middle East. On
one side of the aridity line, the average
annual rainfall is at least 200 milli-
metres per year. That is considered
to be the minimum amount of water
needed to grow cereal crops on a large
scale without using irrigation. On the
other side of the aridity line is de-
sert, which means failing crops, water
scarcity, and conflict. The aridity line
runs, for example, through the Syrian
town of Daraa, where Syria’s worst
drought on record helped fuel the
Syrian uprising in 2011. Even more
If we still can
“The danger is that global
warming may become self-sus-
taining, if it has not done so al-
ready. The melting of the Arctic
and Antarctic ice caps reduces
the fraction of solar energy re-
flected back into space, and so
increases the temperature fur-
ther. Climate change may kill
off the Amazon and other rain
forests, and so eliminate once
one of the main ways in which
16
NewPhilosopher
strikingly, Weizman found that when
he mapped western drone strikes in
the region, “many of these attacks
– from South Waziristan through
northern Yemen, Somalia, Mali, Iraq,
Gaza and Libya – are directly on or
close to the 200 mm aridity line.”
Naomi Klein, in a memori-
al lecture for the late Edward Said,
thought that Weizman’s work illus-
trated the  “brutal landscape of the
climate crisis”. Often, when we think
of climate change, we think of over-
whelming natural forces: sea levels
rising, coral reefs bleaching, forests
turning to desert. But the confluence
between the aridity line and mili-
tary violence shows another, openly
bloody side to the crisis. As global
warming intensifies, the aridity line
will continue to move through for-
merly rich agricultural land. A brief
look through history – from the an-
cient to the contemporary – shows
time and again that hunger drives
revolutions. Civil unrest, in turn,
Namib desert, photo by NASA
is more often than not violently re-
pressed.
In her lecture, Klein said that we
should pay attention to where this cy-
cle of food insecurity, rebellion and re-
pression – all driven by climate change
– tends to play out. Her point was that
Edward Said, who coined the term
Orientalism to describe the way east-
ern lives are all too often reduced and
devalued by the west, wouldn’t be sur-
prised to see where the aridity line runs.
carbon dioxide is removed from
the atmosphere. The rise in sea
temperature may trigger the
release of large quantities of
carbon dioxide, trapped as hy-
drides on the ocean floor. Both
these phenomena would in-
crease the greenhouse effect,
and so global warming fur-
ther. We have to reverse glob-
al warming urgently, if we still
can.”
Stephen Hawking
 NewPhilosopher

“There is broad agreement within the scientific

community that amplification of the Earth’s nat-
ural greenhouse effect by the build-up of various
gases introduced by human activity has the po-
tential to produce dramatic changes in climate.
Only by taking action now can we ensure that fu-
ture generations will not be put at risk.”
Statement by 49 Nobel Prize winners and 700 members of the National Academy of Sciences, 1990.

17
A century of climate change NewPhilosopher

In 1896 Svante Arrhenius built

A century of
a CO2 climate model; 99 years
later the IPCC noted that CO2
remained the most important

climate change
contributor to climate change.

1896: the oceans, with Revelle writ- 1979:

Svante Arrhenius builds a
climate model showing the in-
fluence of atmospheric carbon
dioxide (CO2).
1899:
Thomas Chrowder Chamberlin
wrote about how changes in
climate could result from
changes in the concentration
of atmospheric carbon diox-
ide in An Attempt to Frame
a Working Hypothesis of the
Cause of Glacial Periods on
an Atmospheric Basis.
1930:
Milutin Milankovitch writes
“Mathematical Climatology
and the Astronomical Theory
of Climate Changes” to out-
line the Earth’s climate cy-
cles, particularly the Ice
Ages.
1938:
Guy Stewart Callendar pres-
ents evidence that both tem-
perature and the CO2 level
in the atmosphere had been
rising over the past half-
century.
1957:
Hans E. Suess and Revelle ex-
amines the uptake of CO2 by
ing that “human beings are now
carrying out a large scale
geophysical experiment”.
1960:
Charles Keeling develops a
curve (called the Keeling
Curve) to track rising at-
mospheric CO2 concentration.
The CO2 concentration in 1960
is 315 parts per million.
1965:
A report titled “Restoring
the Quality of Our Environ-
ment” by the US Science Ad-
visory Committee warns of
the harmful effect of fossil
fuel emissions.
1972:
Meteorologist John Sawyer
publishes the study Man-
made Carbon Dioxide and the
“Greenhouse” Effect in which
he accurately predicts the
rate of global warming from
1972-2000 (0.6 C).
1974:
US chemists Mario Molina and
Sherwood Rowland publish an
article in Nature outlin-
ing the threats to the ozone
layer from chlorofluorocarbon
(CFC) gases.
World Climate Conference of
the World Meteorological Or-
ganization conclude that “it
appears plausible that an
increased amount of carbon
dioxide in the atmosphere
can contribute to a gradual
warming of the lower atmo-
sphere”.
1987:
Montreal Protocol, an inter-
national treaty to protect
the ozone layer, is signed.
1988:
At the World Conference on
the Changing Atmosphere: Im-
plications for Global Secu-
rity, hundreds of scientists
declared that by 2005 the
world would be well-advised
to push its emissions some
20% below the 1988 level.
1990:
First Intergovernmental Pan-
el on Climate Change report
is published, noting the pat-
tern of warming in the past
and that warming is the fu-
ture is likely.
1992:
UN Framework Convention on
Climate Change in Rio is

18
 NewPhilosopher A century of climate change

Source: climate.nasa.gov

opened for signature at the

2001: 2014:
Earth Summit, with the aim
The Third Intergovernmental The Fifth Intergovernmental
to “stabilise greenhouse gas
Panel on Climate Change re- Panel on Climate Change report
concentrations in the atmo-
port is published, stating is published, stating that
sphere at a level that would
that warming due to green- there is a clear human influ-
prevent dangerous anthropo-
house gas emissions is “very ence on the climate and that
genic interference with the
likely” and that emissions warming of the atmosphere and
climate system”.
of greenhouse gases and ocean system is unequivocal.
aerosols due to human activ-
ities continue to alter the
1995: atmosphere in ways that are 2015:
The Second Intergovernmental
expected to affect the cli- The Paris Agreement on cli-
Panel on Climate Change re-
mate. mate change mitigation, the
port is published, stating
replacement for the Kyoto Pro-
that “carbon dioxide remains
tocol, is adopted by most of
the most important contribu-
2006: the world (200 countries), in-
tor to anthropogenic forcing
China overtakes the USA as cluding the USA.
of climate change; projec-
the largest emitter in the
tions of future global mean
world.
temperature change and sea
2017:
level rise confirm the poten-
US President Donald Trump an-
tial for human activities to
2007: nounces that the USA is go-
alter the Earth's climate to
The Fourth Intergovernmental ing to withdraw from the Paris
an extent unprecedented in
Panel on Climate Change re- Agreement, stating that “The
human history”.
port is published, stating Paris accord will undermine
that “most of the observed (the U.S.) economy”.
increase in global average
1997: temperatures since the mid-
Kyoto Protocol, which aims
20th century is very likely 2020:
to limit greenhouse gas emis-
due to the observed increase USA set to withdraw from the
sions, is created. The larg-
in anthropogenic greenhouse Paris Agreement in November
est emitter in the world (USA)
gas concentrations”. 2020.
doesn’t sign on.

19
Apocaloptimism NewPhilosopher

Illustration by Yeyei Gomez

20

by Oliver Burkeman
Apocaloptimism
A few years ago, the American
novelist Ben Dolnick described an
epiphany he underwent after he be-
gan regularly taking ice-cold showers.
He wasn’t expecting to like the experi-
ence – and, sure enough, he didn’t. But
a more profound alteration took place:
he found himself relating differently to
the very notion of liking and disliking
things. “At almost every moment of the
day,” Dolnick wrote in The New York
Times, “I am accompanied by a pair of
petulant, melodramatic children in my
mind’s back seat. These children, Liking
and Disliking, exert a distressing degree
of control over just about everything I
do.” Yet his shower experiment proved
that when he ignored the screaming
objections, Disliking soon piped down,
and Dolnick could relax as the water
hit his body: “Those urgent pleas, those
desperate warnings, turned out to have
been a passing squall.” He was cold, but
he was fine. And he’d confirmed the
truth of an insight with roots in ancient
philosophy: that to be overly influenced
NewPhilosopher
by one’s likes and dislikes is a kind of
psychological enslavement. Dolnick’s
preferences now exerted a looser grip
on his behaviour. During the rest of the
day, he felt less constrained by the need
to do what he liked and avoid what he
disliked – which left him freer to focus
on doing what mattered instead.
Perhaps it seems perverse to draw
wisdom about the climate from Dol-
nick’s exertions in the bathroom (other
than the fact that freezing showers are
presumably a good way to conserve wa-
ter, since there’s little temptation to lin-
ger). But I think we can. The argument
goes like this: when it comes to engag-
ing with the present emergency, we face
an inadequate menu of attitudes. There’s
denial, which plainly won’t do; and de-
spair, which leads to passivity. There’s
also dread, the attempt to scare ourselves
and our leaders into a better response –
but I’m inclined to agree with the en-
vironmental technologist Matt Frost
that “it is time to acknowledge that cat-
astrophism has failed to bring about [a]
global political breakthrough… we have
reached diminishing returns on dread.”
Finally, there’s the seemingly prefera-
ble option of hope, in a social, political
or technological transformation that
might pull us back from the brink. But
like all the others, hope comes with a
catch: it yokes the possibility of action
to the likes and dislikes of the person
doing the acting.
Apocaloptimism
The denialist, after all, pretends
that nothing’s wrong precisely in or-
der not to have to confront a scenario
he dislikes, while the despairer is una-
ble to act because he’s convinced that
a scenario he dislikes is unavoidable,
or has already arrived. Dread, on the
other hand, is the attempt to motivate
people by threatening them with the
prospect that a scenario they’d deeply
dislike might come to pass, while hope
depends on maintaining the belief that
such an outcome can be avoided. Obvi-
ously, “dislike” is putting things far too
mildly, when we’re talking of ecological
catastrophe. But thinking in such terms
raises the intriguing possibility that,
like Dolnick in the shower, we might
be able to adopt a different attitude –
one in which facing the reality of our
situation, and engaging vigorously with
it, would be less entangled with our
preferences, less dependent on whether
or not things are unfolding as we’d like.
As a label for such a stance, we
could borrow the term “apocalop-
timism”, defined as the attitude of
someone “who knows it’s all going to
shit, but still thinks it will turn out
OK.” This is an oxymoron, of course.
But it’s a potentially useful one, in
that it short-circuits the whole ques-
tion of whether or not we like what’s
happening, instead redirecting atten-
tion back to what’s happening,  and
how we’re called upon to respond.
21
Apocaloptimism
The apocaloptimist might take rue-
ful comfort in the observation of the
psychotherapist Bruce Tift that the
glass is never really “half full” or “half
empty”. On the contrary, it’s always
entirely full, of some combination of
water and air – just not necessarily
the combination we happen to prefer.
And this realisation is liberating.
The apocaloptimist can volunteer
to help clean up a polluted canal, or
rebuild homes damaged by a natu-
ral disaster, without first demanding
to know whether she’s “making any
difference”, in an ultimate or plan-
et-wide sense, but simply because it
needs doing. She need not pick a side
in disputes about tactics – between,
say, the civil disobedience of Extinc-
tion Rebellion, versus research into
bioengineering solutions – because
she can follow where her skills and
energies lead her, freed from the need
to feel confident that she’s chosen the
best path, because she knows that’s
unknowable. The environmental ac-
tivist Derrick Jensen vividly captures
“Clearly a case of Seasonal Affective Disorder.”
22
NewPhilosopher
the bracing sense of possibility that
can result from moving past this in-
ternal demand for hope: “One of the
good things about everything being so
fucked up,” he has written, “is that no
matter where you look there is good
work to be done.”
There’s a specifically temporal
shift to be made here, too – a change
of perspective in which we surren-
der the expectation that we might
get to find out, within the span of
our own lifetimes, whether our ef-
forts were worth it, or whether hu-
manity will make it. The idea that
such rapid feedback ought to be the
norm is probably a mindset peculiar
to our technologically accelerated age.
Whenever I pass York Minster, the
vast cathedral in my northern English
hometown that took around 250 years
to build, I’m reminded that most of
the stonemasons who worked on it
couldn’t reasonably have expected to
see it completed. Yet I doubt it would
have occurred to them that their work
lacked meaning as a consequence.
And while it surely helped that they
felt they were labouring for the glory
of God, we secular types could stand
to learn a lesson: that our care for the
planet and its inhabitants need not be
dependent on any thought of seeing
our efforts through to completion.
But apocaloptimism shouldn’t be
mistaken for a kind of saintly, hair-
shirt selflessness, requiring you to ig-
nore your own desires altogether. That’s
probably impossible, and in any case
I’m not sure it’s desirable: I care about
the climate at least in part because I
care, in a selfishly particular way, about
the future of my young son, not just the
future of humanity in general. Rather
than jettisoning his likes and dislikes
altogether, the apocaloptimist merely
refuses to let them tyrannise him quite
so much. Whereupon he discovers that,
if facing up to reality doesn’t exactly
make for a happier experience of being
human, it certainly makes for a realer
one. The paradox is that loosening the
grip of one’s preferences, it turns out, is
a preferable way to live.
 NewPhilosopher

“THE DECADE THAT JUST ENDED IS CLEARLY THE

WARMEST DECADE ON RECORD. EVERY DECADE
SINCE THE 1960S CLEARLY HAS BEEN WARMER
THAN THE ONE BEFORE.”
Gavin Schmidt, NASA GISS Director

Globally, 2019’s average temperature was second only to

that of 2016 and continued the planet’s long-term warming
trend: the past five years have been the warmest of the last
140 years. This past year was 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit (0.98
degrees Celsius) warmer than the 1951 to 1980 mean. “We
crossed over into more than 2 degrees Fahrenheit warming
territory in 2015 and we are unlikely to go back. This shows
that what’s happening is persistent, not a fluke due to some
weather phenomenon: we know that the long-term trends
are being driven by the increasing levels of greenhouse gas-
es in the atmosphere,” Schmidt said.
Source: NASA

23
 Existential Comics NewPhilosopher

The Dancer

24
NewPhilosopher Existential Comics

25
26
Author/illustrator: Corey Mohler, Existential Comics. For more comics visit existentialcomics.com
Existential Comics
NewPhilosopher
 NewPhilosopher

“The world will not be destroyed by those who

do evil, but by those who watch them without
doing anything.”
Albert Einstein

Gacko power plant, Bosnia and Herzegovina

27
The burnt country NewPhilosopher

28 Illustration by Aida Novoa & Carlos Egan

 NewPhilosopher
by Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore
The burnt
country
think extreme weather events, large-
scale ecological destruction, and mass
human displacement. To Australia –
nicknamed “the lucky country” for its
natural resources, endless sunny days,
beauty, and prosperity – that realisa-
tion has come as a blow.
“Seeing one of the richest societies
When friends asked me why I left in the world rendered close to helpless
my job as a reporter in Beijing to move as fire swept across the country was
to Sydney,  I would always point up- shocking,” notes Leo Barasi, author of
wards. The Climate Majority: Apathy and Ac-
“The sky,” I’d say. tion in an Age of Nationalism. “And it’s
In a country like China where so- another sign for people in high-emit-
called unpolluted “blue sky days” are ting countries that climate change
rare, clean air, as I saw it, was a luxury. won’t just come for the polar bears if
Over the last six months, howev- emissions don’t fall fast.”
er, that luxury has vanished. Smoke Here, on one of the driest conti-
from the worst bushfire season in re- nents on earth, bushfires serve a pur-
corded history has bled into the skies pose: to clear away the old for the new.
of Canberra, Melbourne and Sydney. Yet this season’s fires were extreme. By
From my studio window overlooking January, they had destroyed 8.4 mil-
Sydney Harbour, I can usually see lion hectares across the country. It is
pretty bobbing sailing boats; for days estimated that half a billion animals
at a time this summer they have been have perished. According to UK-
reduced to blurred stains barely visible based website, Carbon Brief, the Aus-
through a dirty hazy fog.    tralian fires have released more CO2
Worse, I felt the hazardous pollu- into the air than the annual emissions
tion – as in Beijing – burning my eyes, of over 100 countries combined; and
my lungs and, I suspected, my heart. Canberra, the nation’s capital, became
As the world turned its eyes to for a time the most polluted city on
Australia, the fires appeared to be a earth due to bushfire smoke.
prescient warning of what might hap- As David Bowman, a professor of
pen in a post-climate change world: environmental-change biology at the
The burnt country
University of Tasmania, told The At-
lantic: “This is our Gallipoli; this is our
bushfire Gallipoli.”
Yet if there is one upside to such
apocalyptic scenes, it must be, surely,
that this is the wake-up call needed to
spur on real change. The question is:
will it? 
Australia has built its wealth on
coal, which remains the country’s sec-
ond-largest export after iron ore. Its
role in global emissions is far from
stellar.  Australia puts out just under
five per cent of global emissions, de-
spite the fact it only accounts for 0.3
per cent of the global population. The
economic cost of moving away from
fossil fuels is not one, so far, the gov-
ernment has been willing to shoulder. 
“While Australians have heard for
a decade about the cost of policies to
reduce climate change they are about
to discover that the costs of not re-
ducing climate change are even high-
er still,” the chief economist of policy
think tank The Australia Institute, Dr
Richard Denniss, says, adding: “If one
degree of warming gives us weather
like this, the three degrees of warning
that the government says we are one
track for will likely make our major
cities far less liveable and attractive.”
Despite this, many psychologists
believe that climate change apathy –
29
The burnt country
a sense that individuals alone cannot
make a difference, so why bother – is
one of the largest problems facing
mass action towards climate change.
Simone Brookes, conservation man-
ager at the Emirates One & Only
Wolgan Valley resort, a nature retreat
badly affected by the fires which has
only just reopened, told me: “A lot of
people are overwhelmed. As a result,
they feel powerless.”
Feeling powerless, ultimately,
makes people lose motivation – as
does the suspicion that they are acting
alone, while others around them con-
tinue to greedily consume, regardless
of the larger cost. And there is some
truth to the fear that individual actions
won’t, despite the best intentions, end
up mattering.
“Most people concerned about
climate change have very little if any
idea what they can do to combat cli-
mate change,” says Dr. Mark Trexler,
founder of climate change website The
Climatographers.
Ask the average person what they
are doing to combat climate change
“I still say it’s not getting hotter.”
30
NewPhilosopher
and they will say recycling or con-
serving water or reducing their carbon
footprint and buying carbon offsets.
“Neither of which will meaning-
fully impact climate change,” says
Trexler. “They’re not necessarily bad
things to do (assuming people are
buying real offsets – a huge assump-
tion), but they simply can’t scale to
impact climate change.”
Indeed, one of the largest barriers
preventing any large-scale attempts to
mitigate climate changes are human
being’s own brains. Our brains have
evolved for millennia to satiate im-
mediate needs such as finding shelter,
a mate and food, as well as avoiding
danger. As such, we are designed to
focus on the present – and we tend to
view climate change as a far off risk
to be dealt with by future generations.
Other biases not working in our
favour include optimism bias (the
belief that things will get better) and
“patternicity” (the tendency to find
patterns in meaningless noise).
“We’re so busy arguing about
whether last year was warmer than the
year before that we don’t talk about
where we’re ultimately headed under a
2, 3, or 4 degree scenario,” argues Trex-
lar. “If you buy into climate science, it
doesn’t really matter whether last year
was the warmest year ever, what mat-
ters is that the whole system is shift-
ing in ways that will create all kinds of
problems since the last 10,000 years of
human evolution have occurred within
a basically unchanging global climate.”
Yet, taking individual responsibili-
ty – as a person on the street or a gov-
ernment leader – means facing some
hard truths. As Nsikan Akpan wrote
in an article for PBS last year: “No
one wants to believe their daily activ-
ities are responsible for a global disas-
ter that has already turned millions of
people into climate refugees and killed
scores of others.”
Denniss, for one, believes that the
government in Australia can – and
should – make real changes to avoid
another bushfire season like the one
we have just had.
“They could invest more heavily
in renewable energy, batteries, public
transport and energy efficiency. They
could stop approving new coal mines
and gas wells. They could introduce a
levy on carbon pollution, or on fossil
fuel production, and use the proceeds
to fund bout the transition and prepa-
rations we need to make,” he says. 
“Or they could keep telling them-
selves what a great job they are doing
and blame environmentalists for the
bushfires. My money is on option two.”
With experts such as Trexler in-
sisting that “we’ve barely started to see
the physical impacts of climate change
that will manifest in the coming dec-
ades”, what we do next matters.
For me, drumming that message
home this summer, was a photograph
on the front page of The Independent
newspaper. In it, a vast, towering col-
umn of smoke rises above the con-
tinent. “This is what a climate crisis
looks like,” ran the headline.
 NewPhilosopher Climate stats

The 2018 Climate Change Perfor- In 2013, the Intergovernmental

Climate
mance Index, which ranks coun-
tries based on their efforts to pre-
vent dangerous climate change,
kept places 1 to 3 unoccupied.
The organisers maintained that
no country has yet done enough
to prevent the impacts of climate
change to warrant placing them
in the top three.
The average temperature of the
Earth’s surface has increased by
about 0.8C (1.4F) in the last 100
years. About 0.6C (1.0F) of this
warming occurred in the last
three decades alone.
In 1751, around 11 million tonnes
of carbon dioxide was produced
worldwide. In 2015, some 36.2 bil-
lion metric tons of carbon dioxide
was emitted globally.
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
ruled that there is at least a 95%
chance that human-emitted
greenhouse gasses are respon-
sible for more than half of global
temperature increase since 1951.
According to a report from the
American Public Health Associa-
tion and ecoAmerica, up to 54%
of adults and 45% of children
suffer depression after a natural
disaster.
The concentration of CO2 in the
atmosphere is now higher than
at any time in at least 800,000
years.
The furthest reported distance
record has been confirmed as a
lightning bolt over Oklahoma in
June 2007, which covered a hori-
zontal distance of 321 km.

In 2016, China was the biggest

emitter of carbon dioxide, ac-
According to NASA, the 10 warm-
counting for around 28.21% of
est years in the 140-year record
global CO2 emissions that year.
all have occurred since 2005, with
the six warmest years being the
six most recent years.
Hurricane Katrina was the cost-
liest and one of the five deadli-
est hurricanes in the history of
the United States. At least 1,836
people lost their lives and it was
responsible for $81.2 billion in
damage.

31
 NewPhilosopher

MONTHLY GLOBAL SURFACE AIR

TEMPERATURE ANOMALIES (ºC)
RELATIVE TO
1981-2010

32
 NewPhilosopher

MONTHLY EUROPEAN SURFACE AIR

TEMPERATURE ANOMALIES (ºC)
RELATIVE TO
1981-2010

Source: Copernicus Climate Change Service

33
Breaking the world
by Patrick Stokes
Thomas Jefferson, third president
of the United States, was rather ob-
sessed with mammoths.
Teeth and bones from the mam-
moth, or ‘incognitum’ as it was often
known, had turned up several times in
the North American fossil record. (In
fact these animals were mastodons,
not mammoths, but at the time both
were believed to be the same species).
Jefferson seized on their elephantine
heft to defend against the charge,
made by leading naturalist Georg-
es-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon,
that New World animals were weak
and degenerate. The fearsome incog-
nitum, with molars the size of human
fist, would easily see off such Europe-
an snobbery. In a 1780 list of North
American animals, Jefferson listed the
mammoth as the largest of all, bigger
than the buffalo or polar bear.
The problem for Jefferson was that
while mammoth bones kept turning
34
NewPhilosopher
Breaking
the world
up, live mammoths did not. So where
were they?
To us, the answer seems painfully
obvious: the mammoth was long ex-
tinct. But as Mark V. Barrow Jr. notes
in his book Nature’s Ghosts, Jefferson
refused to even countenance the idea
of extinction. In his writings Jefferson
sternly denied there were any exam-
ples in the “œconomy of nature” of
“her having formed any link in her
great work so weak as to be broken.”
This was not a fringe view; in fact,
it was biological orthodoxy. A centu-
ry before, the Irish physician Thom-
as Molyneux had insisted that while
some fossilised animals had disap-
peared locally, they must still be alive
in some remote part of the world: the
denial that no species was “so utterly
extinct, as to be lost entirely out of the
World” was “grounded on so good a
Principle of Providence taking Care in
general of all its Animal Productions,
that it deserves our Assent.”
This is surprising. Perhaps it was
still possible for figures like Jefferson
to believe that cryptic woolly elephants
were lurking somewhere in the vast
interior of the continent – but sure-
ly such educated and curious people
knew about other cases of extinction?
What about the famed dodo, wiped
out within a century of humans arriv-
ing in Mauritius?
In fact, even the extinction of the
dodo wasn’t yet accepted. Dodos had
clearly become very rare, but the reali-
sation that none were left at all flew in
the face of how Europeans understood
nature itself.
For any one species to cease to ex-
ist ran up against deep assumptions
that all species sat within a defined,
immutable hierarchy: the ‘great chain
of being.’ In the great chain, every sin-
gle link has its divinely mandated spot,
carefully gradated from God at the
top to angels to humans, then down
through nonhuman animals, plants,
and ultimately things like rocks.
On this view, species are what phi-
losophers would call ‘natural kinds,’
distinct and unchanging categories,
much like chemicals are. Carbon di-
oxide is carbon dioxide, and a dodo
is a dodo, no matter what happens.
Moreover, each discrete species had
its own rank that it was meant to oc-
cupy relative to other creatures. The
idea that some species could be miss-
ing therefore offended the belief that
creation was divinely ordered, perfect,
and complete.
 NewPhilosopher Breaking the world

Illustration by Aida Novoa & Carlos Egan

35
Breaking the world
This was also of course a political
idea. Just as dogs outranked mice and
lions outranked dogs, so too kings out-
ranked nobles and nobles outranked
peasants. Jefferson didn’t buy that po-
litical vision (even if his slave-owner-
ship gives the lie to his rhetoric about
human equality), and theologically he
was more deist than theist. But he was
still invested in the great chain as a bi-
ological idea.
It wasn’t until 1796 that the French
naturalist Georges Cuvier demon-
strated that mammoths weren’t mod-
ern elephants but a distinct species
that had died out at some point in the
past. This wasn’t universally accepted,
however. Jefferson continued to insist
“Is it too late to join Extinction Rebellion?”
36
NewPhilosopher
there had to be mammoths out there
somewhere. In 1803, Jefferson commis-
sioned the Lewis and Clark expedition
– hoping, among other things, that it
would encounter live mastodons.
The thought that species were
contingent, and so could cease to ex-
ist, was too horrible to contemplate.
Extinction would be bad enough for
mammoths and dodos, but for us hu-
mans, just admitting species could go
extinct would be worse. Extinction
doesn’t just threaten the idea that we
are special relative to all other animals.
It threatens the sense that things are
the way they should be, and that our
existence is therefore intended, or-
dained – and assured.
We have a fairly recent name for
this sort of attitude: puddle thinking.
In 2001 the British author and hu-
mourist Douglas Adams died, sudden-
ly and far too young. Biologist Richard
Dawkins gave a eulogy in which he
recalled a parable Adams, a keen envi-
ronmentalist, had offered; the parable
was later published in Adams’ posthu-
mous book The Salmon of Doubt.
Imagine that one morning a pud-
dle suddenly becomes conscious. As it
looks around at its world, the puddle
starts to notice that the little dip in
the ground it’s sitting in fits its watery
body very well indeed – in fact, the
hole fits its every contour absolutely
perfectly!
Well now, thinks the puddle, this
cannot be coincidence. The hole can’t
just fit every single part of my body by
accident. This hole in the ground must
have been designed to fit me!
And so the puddle, now convinced
that the world has been designed for
him and with his comfort in mind,
and so is clearly  meant  to have the
puddle in it, doesn’t really worry too
much as the Sun comes up and he
starts to evaporate.

“I think,” said Adams, “this may be
something we need to be on the watch
out for.”
It’s easy to laugh at this pud-
dlecentric view of the universe. How
could the puddle be so silly, so self-im-
portant, as to fail to realise he is the
shape he is because of the hole he was
formed in, and not vice versa?
But consider how long it took
for humans to reach the same reali-
sation. (Even Cuvier rejected evolu-
tion, though his work on extinction
ultimately paved the way for its ac-
ceptance). The anthropocentric view
that stopped generations of scientists
conceding that some species just aren’t
alive anymore still exerts a powerful
force on human thinking. Like the
puddle, we’re just a bit too comfortable
in our cozy little hole, snugly assum-
ing that because the planet has kept us
alive and made us rich, it’s meant to do
so and won’t ever stop.
Accepting the natural world is
breakable took us centuries. Accept-
ing we ourselves could break it took
even longer. Even today, when we
understand better than ever just what
humans are doing to the atmosphere
NewPhilosopher Breaking the world
and just how many thousands of
species we’ve already obliterated, it’s
Accepting the
hard to shake the little voice that says natural world is
everything will turn out OK because
we’re meant to be OK, somehow. But breakable took
the laws of physics don’t, in fact, care
if we live or die.
us centuries.
Jefferson, it seems, struggled with Accepting we
this until the end. In an 1823 letter
to John Adams he finally admitted
ourselves could
that “certain races of animals are be- break it took
come extinct.” Yet he also insisted that
providence was somehow still holding even longer.
the natural world together. After all,
he reasoned, “were there no restor-
ing power, all existences might extin-
guish successively, one by one, until all
should be reduced to a shapeless cha-
os.” And that would be unthinkable.
37
 NewPhilosopher

V I D-
O
19
C

VIRUS
VIEWS
NO2 concentration over Italy, March 2019, photo: ESA

38
 NewPhilosopher
As the COVID-19 crisis unfold-
“Our challenge ed, we published submissions about
from our readers on NewPhiloso-
now might be pher.com in the hope that it could
how to extricate help us all make sense of what was
happening, and as a historical re-
ourselves from cord of how it made us feel. Here
an emotional are your thoughts, from around the
world – you can read each full piece
mire.” via the links, as well as many more
submissions from readers here.
Paraphrasing Saint Paul, words
without love are like a clanging bell.
Yet Dionysian emotions are more
NO2 concentration over Italy, March 2020, photo: ESA
disturbing than beatific if not chan-
nelled through reason; if not giv-
en context and meaning. Just as we
might have been lost in an Apolloni-
an world of routine and functionality
before this current storm, our chal-
lenge now might be how to extricate
ourselves from an emotional mire.
Read more.
Stephanie Panayi, Melbourne, Aus-
tralia.
Despite the unconventional cir-
cumstances, we are dealing with
boredom in the most conventional
39

of ways. We find solace in social me-
dia, video games, and TV shows. We
search for something new and inter-
esting, forgetting that, as Svendsen
comments in his Philosophy of Bore-
dom, “'interesting' always has a brief
shelf-life, and really no other func-
tion than to be consumed, in order
that boredom can be kept at arm’s
length”. Read more.
Mariana Gaitán Rojas and Filip
Vostal, Prague, Czech Republic.
Let us always bear in mind that
every crisis is an opportunity. An
NO2 concentration over Spain, March 2019, photo: ESA
40
NewPhilosopher
opportunity to think, to get to know
and evaluate ourselves and those
around us better. An opportunity
to mature, to grow into adulthood,
to make a practical contribution, to
move from theory to practice, to care
for, respect and trust fellow humans,
science and institutions, and to un-
derstand how fragile, vulnerable and
valuable life is. Read more.
Alkis Gounaris and Konstantinos
Gravas, Athens, Greece.
Tomorrow, when the world is
back on track, I might notice none of
 NewPhilosopher
this has any relevance to anything at
“The unwanted all. But the world isn’t back on track.
I had news last week that an old col-
terrifying re- league – old as in my age, old as in
minder of the we were friends, way back in 1959
– has died of the virus. She leaves an
frailty of being elderly husband and four adult chil-
human. The si- dren and numerous grandchildren.
She was adored. I am thinking of
lence of death.” their grief, their sadness, their pain.
Their loneliness. The unwanted terri-
fying reminder of the frailty of being
human. The silence of death. I tried
to capture that in words. Read more.
Erica Greenop, Sydney, Australia.
NO2 concentration over Spain, March 2020, photo: ESA
We are nameless characters living
in the backdrop of a dystopic novel.
Facemasks, and self-quarantining. We
are all trying to glean meaning, or de-
rive virtue from this ludicrous event in
our lives. Many of us claim that this
virus is a lesson, or an indictment of
a way of life. Depending on which vi-
rus origin story you believe, that may
be true. But absent such a clear origin,
can any meaning be derived out of this
absurd contingency? My mind drifts
to human history, our own origins, and
our place in nature. Read more.
Colby Prout, Nevada, USA.
41

It’s very easy right now to live up
to Seneca’s maxim: “we suffer more in
imagination than reality”. And yet, as
we collectively try to get through this
in the best possible way, one word
that comes to mind is “enough”. De-
fining, and cultivating, what “enough”
means for us. From enough infor-
mation (as opposed to 24/7 news or
tweets), because that’s how we stay
sane. To enough supplies (as opposed
to mindless hoarding), because that’s
how we stay thoughtful. To enough
support (as opposed to the law of the
jungle), because that’s how we ensure
not only that we survive, but find
ways to thrive. Read more.
Rob Estreitinho, London, UK.
NO2 concentration over France, March 2019, photo: ESA
42
NewPhilosopher
While social distancing is benefi-
cial in safeguarding the majority, such
practices may dissolve into ‘social iso-
lation’, holding captive one of human-
ity’s most prized possessions – human
touch. Virtual interactions brought
about by advances in technology are
good measures for restricting viral
transmissions but these interventions
lack the same offerings as physical in-
teractions – hands to hold, warm hugs
to embrace and a peace of mind whilst
sitting next to others on public trans-
port! The reduced human connection
poses threats especially to the mental
wellbeing of those who are not tech-
nologically savvy. Read more.
Pauline Yap, South Australia.
 NewPhilosopher

“As we collectively try to get through this in the

best possible way, one word that comes to mind
is ‘enough’.”

V I D-
O

19
C
NO2 concentration over France, March 2020, photo: ESA

43
 The pale orange dot NewPhilosopher

THE PALE ORANGE DOT

Illustration by Aida Novoa & Carlos Egan

44

By Tim Dean
Look up and you see the colour
that defines our world. At least, our
world today. It’s a blue that blankets
us from birth to death. It’s even visi-
ble from space. In February 1990, the
Voyager 1 space probe, six billion kilo-
metres away in the outskirts of our
solar system, turned its camera back
towards home and captured a fleeting
blue speck barely a few pixels wide.
“That’s here,” Carl Sagan wrote of
the spec in 1994. “That’s home. That’s
us. On it everyone you love, everyone
NewPhilosopher
you know, everyone you ever heard
of, every human being who ever was,
lived out their lives.” That’s the Pale
Blue Dot.
That blue is so ubiquitous, so
constant, so reliable, that it’s hard to
conceive of the sky being any oth-
er colour. In fact, when NASA re-
ceived the very first colour images
from the surface of Mars from the
Viking 1 lander in 1976, its techni-
cians believed there had been a cali-
bration error because the land and
The pale orange dot
sky appeared too red. So they intu-
itively colour-corrected the sky to a
more familiar light blue, bringing it
in line with our terrestrial expecta-
tions, meanwhile rendering the entire
Martian landscape in an unearthly
Earthly hue. It was only later they
realised they had projected their ex-
pectations of a blue sky onto an alien
planet, and restored it to its correct
red-pink colour. This correction was
received with boos from the atten-
dant press, who preferred the more
45
The pale orange dot
familiar coloration of the incorrectly
calibrated original.
That might be forgivable, in a way.
We crave familiarity. Yet our world
wasn’t always familiar. It wasn’t
always the Pale Blue Dot. For
thousands of millions of years after
its formation, our sky was a hazy
orange, not dissimilar to what we
see on Saturn’s sixth moon, Titan,
today. For much of its past, Earth
was the Pale Orange Dot.
Yet, were you to travel back in
time around 2.5 billion years to
witness such a sky, you’d best come
prepared with breathing apparatus.
This is because the gas that will one
day make the sky blue is the same gas
that gives us life: oxygen. Earth’s early
atmosphere had only negligible traces
of oxygen, which were knocked out of
water molecules when they collided
with a speeding photon of ultraviolet
light from the Sun. Remember, with-
out oxygen in the atmosphere, there
was no ozone layer, which means that
UV light bombarded our world. So if
you did travel back in time, you’d also
need some SPF 1,000+.
Our presumption about the ubiq-
uity of the blue sky speaks to our
inherent arrogance as a species. We
define the world in terms of human
experience and tastes. We shape the
world to our liking, even to our det-
riment. Some scientists have named
our current epoch the Anthropocene
– from the Greek anthro meaning
“human” – in honour (or dishonour)
of the fact that our impact on our host
world will be visible in the geological
record long after we have turned to
sediment.
46
NewPhilosopher
Part of the motivation for declaring
the Anthropocene is to acknowledge
and take responsibility for the disrup-
tion we are causing to the biosphere
It’s believed that up
to 99 per cent of life
went extinct due to
the respiration of
those cyanobacteria.
that sustains us. It’s a cautionary ges-
ture to encourage us to realise that, in
our arrogance, what we assume to be
permanent and unchanging is really
in constant flux. That the world hasn’t
always been this way, it hasn’t always
been so amenable to our flourishing.
And if the delicate balance is disrupt-
ed, it may not be familiar for long.
Indeed, the creatures that turned
the skies blue all those billions of years
ago can serve as a reminder of the im-
pact that life can have on this world.
Life emerged on this planet remarka-
bly quickly after it coalesced from the
primordial dust cloud. Barely had the
molten surface cooled from the col-
lision with a Mars-sized neighbour,
shattering the crust and spitting out
the Moon, than oceans formed on the
surface of the Earth. And somewhere
in those murky waters, life began.
The earliest forms of life did what
all life forms still do: turn one chem-
ical into another, stealing enough en-
ergy in the process to construct more
copies of themselves. In this case, they
were likely single-celled microorgan-
isms that clung to the sides of hydro-
thermal vents that belched sulphur,
methane, iron and other minerals into
the water, some of which became food.
These organisms weren’t sophisti-
cated. Their metabolisms were
able to eke out just enough ener-
gy to survive and reproduce. But
slowly, over the course of hun-
dreds of millions of years, they
evolved and spread throughout
the oceans. The structures they
built can still be seen today in the
form of the stromatolites that dot
the Pilbara in Western Australia.
At this time, the sky was a hazy or-
ange, shrouded by methane clouds and
thick with carbon dioxide. The only
thing that prevented a runaway green-
house effect that could turn Earth into
a molten hellscape like Venus, was
the fact that the early Sun was only
around 70 per cent as bright as it is to-
day. Fortunately, the greenhouse effect
was sufficient to trap enough heat to
keep conditions amenable to life.
After a billion or so years passed,
a new form of life emerged, one that
evolved a clever trick. Instead of being
bound to deriving energy only from
the chemicals around it, these cyano-
bacteria were able to use light from the
Sun to turn abundant carbon dioxide
and water into energy. They invented
photosynthesis. But in the process,
they also produced waste in the form
of a highly toxic chemical: oxygen.
Oxygen is explosively dangerous
stuff. It even has its own hazard sym-
bol. This is because oxygen is so greedy
for electrons that it will drag the less
tightly bound electrons off other at-
oms in a reaction that gives off a great

deal of energy. The catastrophic bush-
fires that recently afflicted Australia
can be seen as a giant series of exo-
thermic redox chemical reactions be-
tween oxygen and the carbon in trees.
For the first tens of millions of
years, the waste oxygen was sucked
up by other elements, such as free hy-
drogen or iron. In fact, over this time
the oceans turned red as the suspend-
ed iron in the water turned to rust.
But these oxygen sinks eventually
became saturated, and the leftover
oxygen started to accumulate in the
atmosphere, clearing away the meth-
ane clouds. Clearer skies allowed the
Sun’s blue light to be scattered in
every direction by the oxygen and
nitrogen in the atmosphere, leaving
the red light to pass straight through.
The daytime sky turned blue and the
sunsets turned sanguine.
“We’d like to upgrade from ‘Quite Guilty’ to ‘Thoroughly Ashamed’.”
NewPhilosopher
These cyanobacteria forever
changed the colour of the sky and the
course of life on this planet. But most
of the earlier life forms perished in
the presence of toxic oxygen. And the
clearing of the methane clouds re-
duced the greenhouse effect, cooling
the planet to levels nearly inhospita-
ble to life. It’s believed that up to 99
per cent of life went extinct due to
the respiration of those cyanobacteria
two billion years ago. That’s why this
period is sometimes known as the
Oxygen Catastrophe.
But there was no turning back.
For another several hundred million
years, cyanobacteria barely clung to
life as the Sun slowly brightened,
warming the world and enabling new
species to emerge that could harness
the free oxygen to great effect. Life
passed through other milestones,
The pale orange dot
including developing cooperative
multicellular organisms, sexual re-
production and, eventually, aerobic
respiration, which boldly used oxy-
gen to fuel even greater activity – like
moving around.
We, and almost all the other life
forms on the Earth today, are the ul-
timate progeny of these precocious
photosynthesising microorganisms
that emerged over two billion years
ago. They made a world in which we
were to thrive while they declined.
So too, as our industrial respiration
changes the atmosphere yet again,
we may well make a world in which
other species will thrive, but may we
decline. Life is not a passive partic-
ipant on this planetary stage. It can
even change the colour of the drapes
and murder the players. But an empty
stage has no story to tell.
47
13 views on climate change NewPhilosopher

13 views on climate
change
#1, 2009: Statement on Climate
Change from 18 Scientific
Associations
“Observations throughout the world
make it clear that climate change
is occurring, and rigorous scientific
research demonstrates that the
greenhouse gases emitted by human
activities are the primary driver.”

#2, 2016: American Chemical Society

“The Earth’s climate is changing in
response to increasing concentrations
of greenhouse gases (GHGs) and
particulate matter in the atmosphere,
largely as the result of human
activities.”

#3, 2019: American Meteorological

Society
“Research has found a human influence
on the climate of the past several
decades ... The IPCC (2013), USGCRP
(2017), and USGCRP (2018) indicate
that it is extremely likely that human
influence has been the dominant cause
of the observed warming since the
mid-20th century.”

#4, 2015: American Physical Society

“Earth’s changing climate is a critical
issue and poses the risk of significant
environmental, social and economic
disruptions around the globe.
While natural sources of climate
variability are significant, multiple
lines of evidence indicate that human
influences have had an increasingly
dominant effect on global climate
warming observed since the mid-
twentieth century.”

48 Illustration by Aida Novoa & Carlos Egan


#5, 2015: The Geological Society of
America
“The Geological Society of America
(GSA) concurs with assessments by
the National Academies of Science
(2005), the National Research
Council (2011), the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC,
2013) and the U.S. Global Change
Research Program (Melillo et al.,
2014) that global climate has
warmed in response to increasing
concentrations of carbon dioxide
(CO2) and other greenhouse
gases ... Human activities (mainly
greenhouse-gas emissions) are the
dominant cause of the rapid warming
since the middle 1900s.”
#6, 2019: American Medical
Association
“Our AMA ... supports the findings
of the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change’s fourth assessment
report and concurs with the
scientific consensus that the Earth
is undergoing adverse global climate
change and that anthropogenic
contributions are significant.”
#7, 2019: American Geophysical
Union
“Based on extensive scientific
evidence, it is extremely likely
that human activities, especially
emissions of greenhouse gases, are
the dominant cause of the observed
warming since the mid-20th century.
There is no alternative explanation
supported by convincing evidence.”
#8, 2014: American Association for
the Advancement of Science
“Based on well-established evidence,
about 97% of climate scientists
have concluded that human-caused
climate change is happening.”
NewPhilosopher 13 views on climate change
#10, 2019: U.S. National Academy
of Sciences
“Scientists have known for some
time, from multiple lines of
evidence, that humans are changing
Earth’s climate, primarily through
greenhouse gas emissions. The
evidence on the impacts of climate
change is also clear and growing. The
atmosphere and the Earth’s oceans
are warming, the magnitude and
frequency of certain extreme events
are increasing, and sea level is rising
along our coasts.”
#11, 2018: U.S. Global Change
Research Program (US government
departments)
“Earth’s climate is now changing
faster than at any point in the history
of modern civilisation, primarily as a
result of human activities.”
#12, 2013: Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change
“Warming of the climate system is
unequivocal, and since the 1950s,
#9, 2010: International Academies:
many of the observed changes are
Joint Statement (the world’s most
unprecedented over decades to
prestigious scientific bodies)
millennia. The atmosphere and ocean
“Climate change is real. There
have warmed, the amounts of snow
will always be uncertainty in
and ice have diminished, and sea
understanding a system as complex
level has risen.” ... “Human influence
as the world’s climate. However
on the climate system is clear, and
there is now strong evidence
recent anthropogenic emissions of
that significant global warming
greenhouse gases are the highest in
is occurring. The evidence comes
history. Recent climate changes have
from direct measurements of
had widespread impacts on human
rising surface air temperatures and
and natural systems.”
subsurface ocean temperatures and
from phenomena such as increases in
#13, 2013: Donald Trump
average global sea levels, retreating
“Global warming is a total, and very
glaciers, and changes to many
expensive, hoax!”
physical and biological systems. It
is likely that most of the warming in
recent decades can be attributed to
human activities.”
49
Our ultimate fragility NewPhilosopher

Our ultimate fragility

Interviewee/Photographer: Jason deCaires Taylor
Interviewer: Zan Boag

50
 Our ultimate fragility

ZB: You’re dealing on such a grand scale here that’s

there’s almost no limit to the size of the project you could
potentially undertake. Is that a little bit daunting – do
you get overwhelmed by the vastness of the ocean?
JdC: You can’t comprehend the scale of working
in the ocean – it’s like being asked to produce an
installation in the desert. It’s so big, and that’s partly
what dictated the direction of my work, from mak-
ing small sculpture parks to making huge museums
with thousands of sculptures. To have any sort of im-
pact in that space you’ve really got to be ambitious.
We did a project in Mexico where I made hundreds
of works, hundreds of figures and we had them all
in the studio – it filled the studio, they filled the car
park, they filled the street. We couldn’t move. We
walked in and thought, god, it looks so impressive.
Then we put them in the sea, in this huge flat stretch
of sand and there they just became a tiny speck. I
could swim around it in four minutes.

Viewing much of your art requires viewers to get

wet and off stable ground. In a way, they are immersed
in the art – it is not just something to be viewed, but also
experienced. How do you think this change of environ-
ment affects the way viewers experience art?
Massively, of course. It’s one of the main motiva-
tions for it, why I first contemplated it. I was a diver
and an artist and I realised what an amazing space it
was. There are so many different things that happen
– there are physical things that happen, the colour
is different, refraction is different, light has to pene-
trate the surface of the water, which is obviously ev-
er-changing. The deeper you are, the more the colour
is distorted, and things appear larger underwater to
the human eye. But most importantly, you’re in this
liquid medium, you’re suspended, and I think that –
there’s a couple of things. One, it affords you the op-
portunity to look at things from completely different
angles, totally different perspectives, get really close,
move around, fly over the top of it. It also affects you
mentally; it puts you in a very different place. It puts
you in a more contemplative place, slightly detached
from the reality of the world; more open-minded.

In an interview, quoting Jacques Cousteau and his

influence on you, you said that he believes that we have
Banker, Mexico, by Jason deCaires Taylor to protect what we love – and that this is the root idea of

51
Our ultimate fragility NewPhilosopher

Inertia, Mexico, by Jason deCaires Taylor

your work, that you are in essence “trying to make people love
the ocean”. With much of most people’s lives spent in urban en-
vironments and online, do you think that it is difficult to make
people love the ocean?
Certainly. It’s definitely a challenge and it’s something
I try to address in my work. A recent sculpture that I did
in Australia, the Ocean Siren, that’s a piece that changes
colour – it’s a coastal piece – but it changes colour in re-
sponse to water temperatures. As the water around The
Great Barrier Reef changes temperature and the risk of
coral bleaching becomes greater, the sculpture changes
colour to issue a warning, or a stark prognosis. That’s really
trying to take an event that’s happening hundreds of kilo-
metres out to see and bring it to an urban environment, to
provide live conditions that are happening in the water to
people who are very divorced from that situation.
In The Rising Tide, your sculptures were able to be viewed
in full up to two hours either side of low tide. Could explain
the symbolism of this artwork?

52

I try to make the works mul-
ti-level, but many are very obvious
and fairly easy to read. That particular
piece is the Four Horsemen of the
Apocalypse and the horses have been
converted into oil drilling machines
– nodding donkeys, as they’re often
known – and it features two business-
men and two children on the horses.
It was very much about who’s driving
our future and where we are going.
There seems to be this great standoff
between corporate interests and where
the future lies for our planet. Placing
the pieces in this environment, with
eight metres of tide that rose up and
completely covered them, it was a
statement about our ultimate fragili-
ty to the cycles of the planet and the
consequences of ignoring that.
Your artwork The Raft of Lampe-
dusa, with a nod to The Raft of the Medu-
sa, comments on the plight of immigrants
coming from Africa to Europe. What in-
spired you to create this particular piece?
That sculpture was part of a larger
series of works off the coast of Lan-
zerote, in Spain. We did 12 different
installations there and I very much
wanted to recount local stories and
connect the museum to its place, to
its people. This was a very important
story that I thought needed to be
told. Just on that island, the summer
There’s a way of looking at us being
absorbed back into the sea, or back
into the landscape, that makes you
face your own mortality.
NewPhilosopher
I was there, there were three or four
boats that washed up on shore without
people inside. So it was very pertinent
to the place. For that installation, I
tracked down quite a few of the immi-
grants who had come over from West-
ern Africa, who had settled in Spain
and the Canary Islands, and they be-
came the models for those sculptures.
So a lot of it was about telling their
story. The painting – The Raft of Me-
dusa – was about a French frigate that
sunk very close to that area of Africa
and the painting was about how the
commanders of the ship abandoned
their crew and let them drown or
fend for themselves. I thought that
was very much a metaphor for what is
happening now, where the authorities
are abandoning our duty to care for
these people. They should try to solve
the root of the problem and not see
it as something threatening, but rather
something that needs to be treated in
a humane way.
There is obviously an increased
awareness of the issues surrounding cli-
mate change, yet our behaviour is much
the same. What are some of the reasons
why we’re not making the changes neces-
sary to combat climate change?
I think we are all realising that the
capitalist system just does not work
Our ultimate fragility
for the planet. It’s impossible for our
systems of government to be attached
to this model of constant growth
and constant consumption. There is
definitely an end point. As popula-
tions are increasing, there’s only one
place where that can head. Systemic
change is what’s needed and for me,
our governments have been corrupted
by corporate interests. I don’t think
they make decisions about what’s best
for people or for the planet, they just
make decisions based on what keeps
them elected and that ultimately is
going to end in catastrophe.
The question is: do governments ulti-
mately hold the power?
I don’t think they do. Not when
you have media moguls who control
70 per cent of the titles of a country,
and you have a mega-companies that
have annual turnovers that are bigger
than the GDP of some countries. The
power has shifted dramatically due to
many different factors – globalisation
being one of them. When these com-
panies have such a hold over political
parties, it’s very difficult to change
and I think we’re heading for a pe-
riod of severe social disruption and
some form of collapse at some point.
This maybe will provide the impetus
to make widespread change. I’m not
53
Our ultimate fragility NewPhilosopher

54
 Our ultimate fragility

The Raft of Lampedusa, Lanzarote, Spain, by Jason deCaires Taylor

Our ultimate fragility NewPhilosopher

56
 Our ultimate fragility

The Coral Greenhouse, MOUA, Great Barrier Reef, Australia, by Jason deCaires Taylor
Our ultimate fragility NewPhilosopher

Vicissitudes, Grenada, by Jason deCaires Taylor

58

entirely putting the responsibility
on them – there are certainly choic-
es that individuals can make, and
individuals still have a lot of power
to change the way they consume or
the way they live. But there is a little
bit of a con where the onus is put on
the individual – it’s really important
that regulation catches up in all ar-
eas of society that prevents you from
building a house that is not renewa-
ble, prevents you from buying a car
that causes pollution – the regulation
has to be there and people will adapt.
Change has to come from the top and
it has to be fast, unfortunately.
Although ultimately the ocean will
claim your art, it will persist for gen-
erations and will be viewed by those
who are not yet born when you and I
are no longer here. Has this knowledge
Silent Evolution, Mexico, by Jason deCaires Taylor
NewPhilosopher
that your art will outlast you made you
contemplate your own finitude?
I certainly think about it as a way
of documenting what is happening
here and now. The sculptures are
made from traditional materials –
stone or concrete, quite monumental,
and I feel like I am creating a diary of
what’s happening at the moment, in
a way so that future generations will
know and understand that we knew
what was going on and we tried to
say what was going on, but maybe
ultimately we didn’t succeed – or we
might have succeeded, who knows.
There’s a way of looking at us being
absorbed back into the sea, or back
into the landscape, that makes you
face your own mortality and I think it
makes you think that ultimately, the
planet won’t die; we’ll die. And the
planet will go on.
Our ultimate fragility
You say that your art is like leaving
a message for future generations – how
do you think they will view us and how
we have treated the only known inhab-
itable place in the Universe?
There’s going to be a furious
backlash, and I think that is already
happening, we can already see it with
the massive divide that we’re seeing
between the older generation and
the younger generation. They’re real-
ising now that the system has been
rigged and the system isn’t working
for them. I think that brings with it
a lot of positivity but also at some
point, probably soon, they are go-
ing to clash very strongly. There’s
certainly a great awareness that my
generation, the Baby Boomer gener-
ation, had some very good times that
were short-sighted and they’re being
looked upon very negatively.
59
Our ultimate fragility NewPhilosopher

The Rising Tide, London, by Jason deCaires Taylor

The Rising Tide, London, by Jason deCaires Taylor

60
 NewPhilosopher Our ultimate fragility

Systemic change is what’s needed

and for me, our governments have
been corrupted by corporate
interests.

Silent Evolution, Mexico, by Jason deCaires Taylor

61
Seasons in the sun
by Marina Benjamin
The Sun has always reigned as a
god in my world. Heedless of health
warnings, I long for the penetrative
heat of its rays on my skin, the bur-
nish and ripeness and Southern hem-
ispheric tang it bestows on daily life,
and the brilliant light – both literally
and figuratively nourishing – that so
many painters have been driven to
chase, moving to Cornwall, to Arles, to
Tahiti, the better to trap it on canvas.
Perhaps my old soul was Aztec – or
else devoted to Ra, the ancient Egyp-
tian overlord of Heliopolis.
At the cheesy end of my solar ob-
session, I have seen Danny Boyle’s
2007 sci-fi thriller Sunshine many
times over, never tiring of his fictional
astronauts’ nail-biting mission to reig-
nite a dying Sun – a mission that one
62
NewPhilosopher
Seasons in
the sun
crazed character in the movie, in the
grip of a psychotic form of sunstroke,
wishes to derail. Slave to the kami-
kaze urge to fly into the heart of the
solar furnace, he has a body to prove
it: skin crackled to a crisp; lidless eyes,
peeled back; face and body, charred
and flayed like an anatomical model. I
think of his deformed madness some-
times when I wonder about my own
irrational addiction to summer, the
season (as I see it) of expansiveness
and fulfilment, but tinged with a reck-
less allure. We are told not to look into
the Sun because the looking will blind
us, but the intrusive thought is always
there, goading us to stare regardless, as
if by proving ourselves equal to its too-
bright glare we might somehow exalt
ourselves.
Besides, nothing escapes the
Sun’s magic touch. It is transforma-
tive. Rough urban landscapes glisten.
Stone cities like Edinburgh, Antwerp
or Rome acquire the sheen of a Jerusa-
lem: in summer, they are golden. There
is a bodily dimension to consider as
well, as the Sun turns us into Vitamin
D factories, enhancing our mood and
gifting our skins a pleasing warmth – a
visible glow. On a summer’s morning,
as bright yellow fingers of light poke
into our bedrooms around the cur-
tain’s edge, how many of us will leap
out of bed, jolted awake, electrically
charged for the day ahead?
We are affected profoundly by the
climate, and by climate changes large
and small.The human body reacts swift-
ly to alterations in humidity, atmos-
pheric pressure, cloud cover or wind,
just as it reacts to light and dark. Blood
pressure is higher in winter, when low-
er temperatures cause our blood vessels
to narrow; and lower in summer when
our vessels dilate, making us flush, and
contributing to that feeling of relaxa-
tion and wellbeing the season induces.
We are sensitive to shifts in barometric
pressure, too. Which is why people can
sense when a storm is coming: the de-
pression is something they feel in the
air-filled tubes of their sinuses, or in
their joints, which can become pain-
ful. Low barometric pressures can also
cause headaches and difficulty hearing.
 NewPhilosopher Seasons in the sun

Illustration by Aida Novoa & Carlos Egan 63

Seasons in the sun
In 2011, Japanese researchers published
findings in the Journal of Internal Med-
icine demonstrating a direct link be-
tween patients suffering migraines and
a sensitivity to atmospheric pressure.
But it is the emotional response to
climatic change that is more complex
and troubling. With the diminish-
ment of sunlight that attends the ap-
proach of winter, thousands of people
in climates cold and warm (up to 9.9%
of the population in Alaska, but
as high as 1.4% in Miami) expe-
rience the depressive mood disor-
der known as SAD, or Seasonal
Affective Disorder. With a raft
of symptoms that include leth-
argy, weight gain, a tendency to
over-sleep and listlessness, SAD
engenders a kind of waking hi-
bernation. In acute cases, sufferers
report feeling worthless, hopeless,
and sometimes, suicidal: they have
trouble concentrating, trouble sleep-
ing, and a flat-lining libido.
To the extent that SAD affects
me personally, I am prey to feelings of
intense anxiety at summer’s end, as I
start to dread the onset of my seasonal
depression. I know very well that there
are treatments I might seek out: light
lamps, melatonin supplements, CBT.
But so far I’ve resisted them, perhaps
because despite acknowledging that
we have animal natures, primitive
responses to the climate that are be-
yond our control (and equally evasive
of conscious awareness), I still incline
towards philosophical explanations.
64
NewPhilosopher
Recently I came across the term
solastalgia. Coined by the Australian
environmental philosopher Glenn Al-
brecht, the neologism combines solace,
desolation  and  algia, (from the Greek
for pain) to give shape to the distress
of seeing a familiar environment ruth-
lessly transfigured by drought, fire
or flood. Solastalgia, in other words,
names the stress and helpless anomie
induced by environmental change.
I am prey to feelings
of intense anxiety
at summer’s end, as
I start to dread the
onset of SAD.
In a paper published in Austral-
asian Psychiatry in 2007, Albrecht
clarified the coinage. “As opposed
to nostalgia – the melancholia or
homesickness experienced by indi-
vidual when separated from a loved
home – solastalgia is the distress that
is produced by environmental change
impacting on people while they are
directly connected to their home en-
vironment.” It is a homesickness you
feel without ever leaving home. SAD,
it seems to me, qualifies as solastal-
gia on a small scale – its apt acro-
nym denoting a lament for the loss
of summer light once autumn’s shade
arrives. But the environmental crisis
we face now, as a planet, scales up our
eco-anxieties to new levels.
The mental toll of our environ-
mental degradation is only now im-
pinging on our collective conscious-
ness. Papers have been published
about suicides among farmers made
destitute by crop-searing heat, and
about the mental health problems
among Americans who have fallen
victim to uncontrollable fires and dev-
astating storms. In 2017, the APA
approved ‘eco-anxiety’ as a clin-
ically valid diagnosis. All of it is
a form of mourning, the grief we
associate with SAD, writ global.
Among teenagers inspired by
the urgent exhortations of Greta
Thunberg, that grief and anger is
virulent and palpable. The spring-
time of their young lives ought, by
rights, to be a time of growth and
soaring potential. But today’s youth
are instead being forced to reckon
with a contraction of their horizons
and a planet-sized shrinking of tem-
perateness and life-supporting quality
that may never end. For the young,
there’s a very real possibility that, for
them, summer – the high season of
their lives – might never arrive.
The irony is that all the while our
Earth grows warmer, the Sun’s light,
increasingly obscured by particulate
pollution, grows ever dimmer. As the
myths of old might have it, the Sun
will be ferried away on the barge of
a solar deity, never again to brighten
our days.
 NewPhilosopher Seasons in the sun

“O! that that earth, which kept the world in awe,

Should patch a wall to expel the winter’s flaw!”
Hamlet, Act 5, Scene 1,
by William Shakespeare

65
Thoughts on... climate
CLIMATE
“How could I look my grandchildren
in the eye and say I knew what
was happening to the world and
did nothing?”
– David Attenborough
“There is no debate here, just scien-
tists and non-scientists. And since the
subject is science, the non-scientists
don’t get a vote.”
– Bill Maher
“The main challenges of our times
are the rise in inequality and global
warming.”
– Thomas Piketty
“Men argue. Nature acts.”
– Voltaire
66
NewPhilosopher
“A change in the weather is sufficient
to create the world and oneself anew.”
– Marcel Proust
It’s past time to open our eyes and
shift to a more sensible approach to
living on this small, precious planet.
– David Suzuki
“I have a feeling that climate change
may be an issue as severe as a war.”
– James Lovelock
“Those least responsible for climate
change are worst affected by it.”
– Vandana Shiva
“The blunt truth about the politics of
climate change is that no country will
want to sacrifice its economy.”
– Tony Blair
“People need reminding that the
climate crisis is no longer a
future problem.”
– Katharine Viner
“With degrees of warming, as with
world wars or recurrences of cancer,
you don’t want to see even one.”
– David Wallace-Wells
“We have forgotten how to be good
guests, how to walk lightly on the
earth as its other creatures do.”
– Barbara Ward
“If you want to understand opposition
to climate action, follow the money.”
– Paul Krugman
 NewPhilosopher Thoughts on... climate

“Humanity is called to recognise the

need for changes of lifestyle, produc-
tion and consumption, in order to
combat this warming.”
– Pope Francis

“LOOK DEEP “Climate change is the defining issue

INTO NATURE, of our time – and we are at a defining

moment. We face a direct existential
threat.”

AND THEN
– António Guterres

“It’s real ... And the great irony and

YOU WILL UN- tragedy of our time, is a lot of the

general public thinks scientists are
still arguing.”

DERSTAND – James Balog

EVERYTHING
“You don’t listen to the science be-
cause you are only interested in solu-
tions that will enable you to carry on
like before.”

BETTER.” – Greta Thunberg

Albert Einstein “The Earth’s climate system is an or-

nery beast which overreacts even to
small nudges.”
– Wallace Smith Broecker

“Small steps will no longer do. The

biggest steps need to be taken by
those with the biggest boots.”
– Sauli Niinisto, President of Finland

67
Client Earth
Interviewee: James Thornton
Interviewer: Zan Boag
ClientEarth is an environmental
law charity that you founded 12 years
ago, now with offices in London, Brus-
sels, Warsaw, Berlin, and Beijing. On
the website, it states that you “use the law
to hold governments and other compa-
nies to account over climate change, na-
ture loss, and pollution”. What prompted
you to start Client Earth and how do
you hold governments and companies to
account?
We’re set up as a group of interna-
tional lawyers, formed as a charity, and
in place of a traditional client we have
the Earth and everyone who lives on
it – so you, and all your readers are our
clients, and we try to act on behalf of
everyone who lives on it. I had done
a lot of work in the United States in
68
NewPhilosopher
Client Earth
the interest of the public and to save
the environment which was started
around by a couple of different organ-
isations in the US. I started doing that
work with one of those in 1979 and set
up an office in Los Angeles to do such
work. Then I became essentially an ex-
ile from the US due to the fact that my
partner, now husband, wasn’t allowed
to stay in the United States. So, I left
the United States – the human rights
lawyers were better in Europe than
in the United States at that point. I
looked around and I saw that in the
European setting, the environmental
groups weren’t using law in a strategic
way, in a way that I had been doing it
in the US. There wasn’t any non-prof-
it environmental law firm working at
the European level, so there seemed
to be a wonderful opportunity to con-
tribute to the whole European envi-
ronmental community. And that’s the
way it started. And the basis of it, and
what keeps me going, is my own Zen
practice because it’s the why do I care
each day. You’ll be familiar with the
Bodhisattva vow, which is to save all
sentient beings, and I take that in my
work in a very literal-minded way. My
work as an environmental lawyer and
the head of a charity is indeed to try
and save all sentient beings.
It’s a pretty good ‘why’ that you have
there.
[Laughs] It’s a good brief. Given
that climate change is real and very
pressing, if your client is the Earth and
to be focused on it in this way gives
you the energy you need to keep doing
the work.
And energy is what’s required – it’s
such a ferocious battle that needs to be
fought. I imagine that you’re working on
a number of interesting cases. Could you
run through one of the cases you’re work-
ing on at the moment that looks promis-
ing from your point of view?
Let me sketch out the litigation
that we’re doing in the European con-
text. It has about 50 cases going on
against coal in one way or another,
and there are also about 50 cases on air
quality, to get diesel out of the market
and drive the transport fleet towards
being electrified. One interesting case,
which has just been completed so I
know that it’s a success, was against
a coal-fired power station with a very
 Illustration by Alvaro Hidalgo
NewPhilosopher
Client Earth

69
Client Earth
novel approach. So, we’ve prevented
the building of 38 coal-fired power
stations in Europe since we started 12
years ago. One of our goals is to ensure
that there are no new coal-fired pow-
er stations built in Europe. And we’ve
succeeded – there haven’t been, we’ve
stopped all of the new ones. But in Po-
land, the government was very keen on
building what it was calling “the last
new coal-fired power station” in Po-
land. Which was a sort of back-hand-
ed compliment to us. So, we said, OK,
we’re going to take a novel approach.
We’d been using environmental law
but this time we said, let’s step aside
and use a purely business approach,
a purely company law approach. We
commissioned an economic study by
an independent company saying that
this new coal-fired power station was
going to be uneconomic because the
cost of renewable energy was falling
very rapidly and it would beat, in the
market, this new coal-fired power
station. So that it was simply a bad
investment. So, we said “great”, we
bought shares in the company, went
to the meeting where decision had
“To my grandchildren I leave
my SUV, my ski hut, and 400 PPM of CO2.”
70
NewPhilosopher
to be made, and we voted against, we
voted our 30 euros worth of shares,
and it helped that we brought 40 per
cent of the shareholders with us. But
the government had a slight majori-
ty, and it went ahead. We personally
sued the officers and directors of the
company and we alleged that they
had violated their standard corporate
duty of care to their shareholders by
knowingly making a bad investment
in coal. And what happened, and this
is Poland, quite conservative in many
ways, the business newspaper, which
years earlier had denounced us, ran a
series of articles about this case and
it never even mentioned that we were
environmentalists in any way. Which
was fascinating. What they said was
that investors question future of coal.
And that’s how it was discussed – it
was discussed very seriously as a pure-
ly business thing. And then, the best
news is that we hired the best secu-
rities litigator in Poland; we won the
case against the officers and directors.
And here’s the punchline: the next day,
the stock price went up almost four per
cent. Isn’t that great? The market was
with us. That was a beautiful moment.
In terms of litigation, and nobody
knows it yet, it is what China is doing.
So, I started working in China in 2014
to advise the Chinese Supreme Court
in writing a law to allow citizens and
prosecutors to bring cases. Citizens
against companies; prosecutors against
the government. And then they invit-
ed us to start training judges to decide
environmental cases – we’ve trained at
least 1,000 judges by now. And they
set up environmental courts, quite un-
like anything in most of the world. We
trained the judges, and the prosecutors
came to us and said, “In that law that
you helped write, we got the right to
sue the government on behalf of the
people for environmental issues if they
weren’t doing their job. But we’ve nev-
er sued the government – we’ve never
had the right to sue the government
before. You sue governments all the
time and you seem to win. Could you
train us to sue the government?” What
a remarkable question. So, we did start
to train them, bringing in experts from
all over the world, and then 2018 was
the first full year of their new activities

Plan B is to take
the oil and gas
and use it as
feedstock for
plastics, and yet
more plastics.
in bringing environmental cases as the
federal prosecutors. So, the following
January, January 2019, we sat down
with them and said, how many cases
did you initiate in 2018? And the an-
swer was: 48,000. Extraordinary.
Do you find that you face more bar-
riers trying to change legislation in the
UK, or the US, or in European countries?
What’s interesting is that in Chi-
na there have been no barriers because
the government from top to bottom is
aligned to make as much progress on
the environment as soon as possible.
When they invite you to help them
do something, it really happens. And
they’re really keen to make change.
In terms of being global leader on the
environment – the United States used
to be one – at the moment it’s China,
and what they’re doing is very excit-
ing. So, 2018 there were 50,000 cas-
es, almost, 2019, same, around 50,000
cases, and many of those, something
like 70 per cent, were actually against
governmental entities that weren’t
their job of enforcing the law. So, what
they’re doing very effectively is to say
what is the fastest way we can create
the rule of law for the environment
in China so that everybody, whether
they’re a government official in some
province, or a company, knows that
they have to comply with the law. And
NewPhilosopher
businesspeople in the west tell me that
they see the changes already, after only
a couple of years. The attitude is very
much changing, very rapidly. In the
west, companies know that they have
to comply with whatever the law is –
they don’t always, but generally you
know that there’s a likelihood that
you’re going to get caught and pros-
ecuted, so people tend to comply, but
in China that wasn’t the case, but is
rapidly becoming the case. In a sense,
I love the cases that we bring, but the
cases that are most important are the
100,000 that we didn’t bring in China.
You say that in the west, generally
companies comply with legislation, how-
ever is it an issue that changing legisla-
tion is a very difficult thing to do?
Yes. The way I often think about
it is that if we enforced all the envi-
ronmental laws currently existing,
would you stop pollution, would you
stop plastics turning up in the ocean,
would you stop climate change, and
the answer at the moment is ‘no’, even
if you enforced them all perfectly. And
they’re not enforced perfectly. What
you really need is environmental law
2.0, and it is difficult to get things
through. An example is that the EU
is trying to do a pretty good climate
change law and we’ll see if the new
commission gets it through. But that’s
the question: will it get it through?
And it is pretty difficult. Companies
often threaten to leave and move
somewhere else – I’ll move from Bel-
gium to Indonesia if you tighten the
law. It more of a threat than a reali-
ty because to a large degree compa-
nies are able to do lots of damaging
things to the environment under the
existing law. Here’s a European case
involving climate and plastics. The oil
and gas industry knows pretty well
now that society will have to start
using less oil and gas, in the coming
decade and further decades. But they
have no intention of selling less oil
Client Earth
and gas, so their own consultants have
publicly described what they call their
Plan B. Plan B is to take the oil and
gas and use it as feedstock, which is it,
for plastics, and yet more plastics, and
yet more plastics. If society is smart
enough to stop using oil and gas, oil
and gas companies are keen to start
seeing the production of hugely more
plastics. This is a terrible strategy for
saving civilisation. The movement in
that direction has already started. For
example, there’s the biggest plastics
manufacturer in Europe, one of them
anyway, it’s called Ineos, and they ta-
bled plans for a huge expansion of
their plastics facility on the border be-
tween Belgium and the Netherlands.
Because, here you see, even if you
stop all the coal-fired power stations,
if you have all these plastics facilities
increasing in scale then each of them
produces as much emissions as a big
coal-fired power station and then they
also produce plastics, which is a trag-
edy in itself.
Is the problem here because of the
profit motive that is inherent in the way
companies are set up that it must make
more profit each year otherwise the heads
of the company will be removed. Is the
problem here that companies are driven
by profit first and foremost and whatever
happens, whether it is good or bad for the
environment, is irrelevant?
Yes, to the question that whether
it is good or bad for the environment
is irrelevant, but that’s what the law
can change. I think the profit motive,
at least for a while, could help us a lot
in driving innovation. If we are going
to save civilisation then we’ll need to
reinvent the way we do everything.
We need to reinvent transport, we
need to reinvent how we create energy
– we need energy systems – we need
to reinvent agriculture, and so on. All
of these things will take enormous in-
vestment and that has to come mostly
from the private sector and for those
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Client Earth NewPhilosopher
people who are willing to put their
The good news, life on the line to say build renewable
I should say, is energy systems, rewarding them with
profit is fine. I’d say to your very deep
that economics question, let’s examine whether we
can do without a profit motivation at
is finally on the some point when we’re more mature
side of the en- as a civilisation because we have been
wise enough to redesign our energy
vironment, and systems, redesign our transport and
the future of so on. The main issue at the moment
is that there are many big incumbent
people’s health industries focused on the wrong ac-
tivities. They weren’t intentionally set
and all that – re- up to do bad things; we discovered it
newable energy along the way. But the problem is that
they have so much power that it is very
is now cheaper difficult to dislodge them. Incumbent
industries, say, in the energy sector, are
than coal-gener- still burning coal in Europe. They don’t
ated energy. want to stop burning coal at all, hence
us suing them. But who is going to
change them? That’s the question. The
good news, I should say, is that eco-
nomics is finally on the side of the en-
vironment, and the future of people’s
health and all that – renewable energy
is now cheaper than coal-generat-
ed energy. But you have to make the
transition and the transition is a huge
change and the incumbent industries
are like huge dragons sitting in the
middle of the river. They don’t intend
to move and governments are unlikely
to move them because they’re deeply
intertwined with governments, you
see that in Australia certainly, and the
new industries that want to produce
renewable energy in a clean and lovely
way, aren’t set up to attack the dragons
because they’re smaller. Who’s going
to do it? That’s where citizens come
in, a Zen monk with a sword attacks
dragons and the hope is to clear them
out of the way so that the people who
want to do the right thing have access
to markets, have access to capital, have
access to people.
If corporations – in their current
design, and with their current direc-
tions – are producing these results
72
that will be catastrophic, how do
you change them? That has to be by
changing the rules. It isn’t enough to
say that companies will lose their so-
cial contract because people will vote
with their money and go somewhere
else. That’s fine, and it’s a good idea,
but it goes much, much deeper than
that. You have to change the rules.
And there are some rules you can
change. For example, you could say,
and we will be trying to get this to
happen, you could say that all compa-
nies listed on the London Stock Ex-
change, for example, if you’re going to
be listed there you need to come up
with a business plan that shows that
you can become carbon neutral or car-
bon positive in everything that you do
and all the uses of your product by a
certain date, just tell us: 2050 or 2040,
something like that. And then, that
you must actually act on that plan. You
have a curve, and you have to reduce
your emissions along that curve in a
way that will match what the scientists
say we have to do, and the law says that
you have to hit that curve, you have to
reduce, reduce, reduce. And govern-
ments are talking about doing that on
a national basis, but it doesn’t involve
companies at the moment. When the
EU is saying that all European coun-
tries will reduce their emissions by this
amount, they’re looking at 2050 and
have come up with a plan to do it, so
far nothing is binding companies. If
the companies were actually told that
they need to do this, then they would
in fact do it.
What do think of the way individu-
als are made to feel bad about their choic-
es? Of course, individuals have a role to
play in what they choose to consume, but
does putting the onus on individuals, in a
way, let companies and governments off
the hook?
Your question is a very important
one. And it’s important for all of us
to become aware of these things, and

indeed to modify our behaviour. And
there are easy things you can do: you
can eat a lot less meat, for example,
it’s enormously helpful; you can not
waste food – I was looking at num-
bers the other day in Britain that the
normal household throws away 25 per
cent of its food as waste. That’s easy
to change, and those would make sig-
nificant and important differences, but
nowhere near enough. What I think
those things are important in doing
is, first of all, making some kind of
contribution, making people under-
stand that there is something they can
do, but real change has to come from
governments and companies. Really
governments, because companies, as
we were just discussing, the companies
that need to make changes the most,
won’t make them voluntarily – they
need to be told what to do. What can
people do about that? Well, vote for
the people who will do the right thing.
The children of the world should get
organised and demand change, oth-
erwise politicians will tend to drift
NewPhilosopher
along and do whatever they do. And
politicians in Australia at the moment,
who slightly won the last election, are
clearly captive of the coal industry –
that needs to change, and people can
change that. The people in power in
Australia at the moment are unlikely
to change their own minds… but it
was very close – it was like the Brexit
election in the UK. It was a very close
election. People who vote, who could
vote, need to do so, whether you’re kids
or retirees, you need to make sure that
politicians understand that you really
care about whether they vote one way
or the other on these issues. So, there’s
a lot that people can do, and it’s very
empowering that you can do some-
thing, not only at home but also po-
litically. That gets you over the despair,
the depression, that is a natural part of
understanding the difficulties. Once
you understand the difficulties facing
civilisation, once you have the infor-
mation and you’re open to it, a natural
response is to feel bad. That’s an in-
telligent response because the news is
Coal worker's pneumoconiosis, photo by Yale Rosen
Client Earth
not good news. The question is, how to
go beyond that and beyond the anger
that comes from that and find a posi-
tive step to take.
Despite the despair that many do feel
and the fact that the crisis is increasing in
magnitude, there is a lot of hope in that
people are getting together, people are dis-
cussing this more – it is on the table for
politicians and for companies. Despite the
fact people are rallying more around this
issue and looking for solutions, I imagine
that you get quite a lot of resistance. There
must be some individuals and companies
that aren’t too pleased about the work
you’re doing. What sort of resistance are
you getting, and where are you finding
the most resistance to the changes you’re
trying to implement?
In court, you’re fighting, so there’s
resistance there, but if you pick your
battles carefully then you win. Those
are, in a way, set-piece battles and we
generally win cases. In legislatures there
is a whole array of forces that you en-
counter. In Brussels, for example, there
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Client Earth NewPhilosopher
are something like 15,000 corporate
You need to re- lobbyists. There are a couple of hun-
write the rules of dred environmentalists, and we are the
only group of lawyers working with
economics, the the environmentalists. There is a tre-
mendous force on one side, and then
thought systems you have to make arguments when
of economics, so you’re discussing legislation, reason
economics and investment in the fu-
they don’t direct ture. And to a surprising degree, you
you towards de- can make progress. You might expect
that we get a lot of physical threats,
structive activi- and happily we don’t. In Poland, in the
beginning, when we started by suing
ties, but only to- 14 new projects that were coal-fired
wards activities power stations, then we were in fact
shut down by the secret police – our
that harmonise office was shut down by the secret
police a couple of times, they went
with global Earth and investigated us and talked to all
systems. the other environmentalists that they
could find and they kept asking them:
“Who do these people actually work
for? Are they foreign agents?” And
there were threats around that time.
But what’s interesting at the mo-
ment is that a number of companies
are beginning to ask for advice, and
that is a shift. So, we set up a team
of corporate lawyers, and it’s the only
such team in the world, and we’re say-
ing what corporate regulations should
look like. For example, the risk of cli-
mate change for pension funds. And
what has been happening is that we
did change the pension fund rules
after some years of work lobbying for
that, and the pension fund rules re-
quire that you take into account the
risk of climate change in the stocks
and bonds that you buy. That’s good.
And then pension funds came to us
and said, “What does all this mean?”
What started happening is that we
were advising them – companies and
pension funds, the smart ones, were
saying “we see the changes coming…
can you give us advice on how we can
change quickly so that you don’t come
after us.” And I’m very happy to give
people lessons on how not to be sued
74
by us because that is really efficient. If
they’re smart enough to see the writing
on the wall, then we can help them.
Let’s say, you’re installed as ultimate
legislative ruler of the Earth – you deter-
mine the rule of law, what companies can
and can’t do, how individuals can and
cannot behave. What are the first laws
you’d write for companies? And the first
ones for individuals?
First, I’d invite a lot of kids to join
me. But seriously, I was talking before
about environmental law 2.0 and that’s
the next stage, but what you’re asking
is what the fundamental shift has to
be – and it’s a wonderful question that
very few people ask. My deep feeling
about this is that you need to, in a seri-
ous way, change the rules of the game.
If you design the rules of the game in a
way that conduct which is deleterious
will no longer be on anyone’s screen
– it just won’t be an option. And that
needs to be in the way we generate en-
ergy, so that generating energy from
coal just isn’t possible. And instead we
generate renewables, we use hydro-
gen for storage. Australia, for exam-
ple, could become the world leader if
it cancelled coal projects, built a huge
amount of renewable and it used a
lot of renewable energy to separate
the hydrogen from sea water and
then sold the hydrogen as ammonia
to Asia instead of selling coal. So, if
change the rules of the game then
that would become more attractive.
For energy systems you need to say,
“How do you build an ecological civ-
ilisation?” so that energy systems are
not destructive in any way. For agri-
culture – how do you build an ecolog-
ical civilisation so that agriculture not
only delivers food that is cleaner and
healthier, but that agriculture also
sequesters carbon, agriculture helps
biodiversity; how do you do that?
And you need to do it with indus-
trial policy, you need to rewrite the
rules of the game so that nobody can

burn coal, so that you use hydrogen to
make cement – it would be perfectly
clean, and you need to make cement,
and that would be a perfectly clean
way to do it, but you need to rewrite
the rules for industrial policy. Trans-
port: the same. You need to rewrite
the rules of economics, the thought
systems of economics, so they don’t
direct you towards destructive activ-
ities, but only towards activities that
harmonise with global Earth systems.
For law, you need to redesign the legal
system so that all these things I’m talk-
ing about are captured in the right sort
of rules which we can enforce, citizens
can enforce – everyone is empowered
to do that. If you do all these things,
you’ll end up designing an ecological
civilisation. It has been a dream of
mine for a very long time, and one the
remarkable things about going to Chi-
na and working there was after a few
meetings with high officials, I started
hearing of the idea of an ecological civ-
ilisation. I thought, stop, what do you
mean? I said, I admire the skill of the
Communist Party in coming up with
slogans, is this just a slogan? And that
got a laugh, then they said, no, we re-
ally believe it. And they’ve divided
the world into eight different divi-
sions, along the lines that I’ve been
talking about, and they’ve thrown
hundreds of their best people at it.
And they invited me to join the panel
on rewriting the Chinese legal sys-
tem, which I advised them on. And
this, I take enormous encouragement
from this because they really are tak-
ing this seriously – this a direction
NewPhilosopher
from the top – to reconceive things.
The world doesn’t stop, things are still
going on, but in the meantime rede-
sign everything in a way that is prac-
tical and can be tried in the internal
Chinese system, and maybe export-
ed. And that’s so far beyond what’s
going on in Australia, or France, or
Germany, or the United States. It’s
an intellectual creative beacon of very
pragmatic hope for me. What I’m
hoping is that instead of having to be
the ruler of the world to do this, what
we’re seeing is that one country is
throwing hundreds of its best people
at this, inviting hundreds of foreign
experts to join, and developing some-
thing that then could potentially be
open-sourced and greatly speed up
the transition that we need to do.
Legislative change takes time, but
time is exactly what we’re short on when
it comes to the changes that are necessary
to combat climate change, pollution, and
the general environmental destruction
that our species is currently inflicting on
the Earth. The changes that are necessary
need to be made on a global scale, and as
big as China may be, we need changes
everywhere. What sort of time frame are
you working towards when it comes to
implementing these changes you think are
necessary, and do we have enough time?
I’m working on a ten-year time
frame, which I’ve frequently stated,
based on some good science that we
need to make some significant chang-
es in the next ten years. Can we do it?
Yes, I think we can do it because of
several factors. One is that economics
Client Earth
really is on the side of people and the
planet now: renewable energy really is
cheaper. When I was a young person I
would stand up and say that we need
renewable energy, and people would
say, “well, you’re a nice, idealistic young
person, but the economics won’t allow
it.” Now it’s really different – the eco-
nomics does allow for clean energy
because it’s cheaper than dirty energy.
But, back to the timescale – econom-
ics, the markets alone will not deliver
fast enough because of this problem
of the incumbents sitting in the river.
Therefore the second thing you need is
for citizens like us to rise up, use legal
tools, and slay the incumbents so that
the market can actually deliver. And
third, I would say that something that
also gives me hope, is that this is re-
ally all about consciousness. It struck
me recently that environmental prob-
lems are mental problems – no more
than that. They’re problems of how we
think, how we behave; only that. If we
can have a revolution of conscious-
ness, about how we think about these
things, then it becomes possible to
transform very quickly.
Indeed, but despite all this we do
face a major barrier: those who think
that there’s no reason to change their
behaviour, or who couldn’t be bothered
to change because it’s inconvenient for
them. What do you have to say to those
who don’t think that there’s any reason to
change our behaviour or that we face any
pressing environmental concerns?
I say, wake up and listen to chil-
dren and what they are telling us.
75
 NewPhilosopher

Photo: West of Valles Marineris lies a checkerboard named Noctis Labyrin-

thus, which formed when the Martian crust stretched and fractured.
2001 Mars Odyssey, NASA.

76
NewPhilosopher

77
Our place in the world NewPhilosopher

Illustration by Yeyei Gomez

78

by Tom Chatfield
Our place in the world
A climate is, etymologically, a
mixture of two fields that frequent-
ly coincided in the ancient world:
geometry and astronomy. The word
originates in the ancient Greek verb
klinein, “to lean”, which yielded the
term klima for a “slope” or “zone”. In
the sixth century BC, Pythagoras’s
disciple Parmenides suggested that
the Earth (which he believed to be
spherical) could be divided into five
distinct klimata based upon its sur-
face’s slope in relation to the sun.
The two polar zones were deemed
too frigid for life, and the equatorial
zone too torrid, leaving a habitable
temperate zone on either side of the
equator. Aristotle subsequently con-
cluded that the southern temperate
zone might be inhabited, but that no
Greek could ever explore it: the equa-
tor’s impassable heat was in the way.
By the time of the great mathe-
matician, geographer and astronomer
Ptolemy of Alexandria, seven centu-
ries after Parmenides, things had be-
come more precise. Ptolemy divided
NewPhilosopher
the world into twenty-one equidistant
parallels between Greenland and the
equator, calculating the duration of
the longest day in each of the central
seven. The uninhabitable extremes,
south of Arabia and north of Britain,
were ignored.
Ptolemy’s was a refinement rather
than a rejection of Parmenides’s scheme
– and this was more-or less how things
remained for the next sixteen hundred
years. Climate was synonymous with
latitude, and latitude with climate.
While the weather ceaselessly changed,
and seasons came and went, a region’s
climate was as permanent and predes-
tined as the divisions cartographers
drew upon maps.
As European powers colonised
much of the world between the 16th
and 18th centuries, far from being
discarded, the classical view of cli-
mate became a convenient form
of geographical determinism. “The
intermediate climates have always
been esteemed, both in ancient and
modern times, to be the most favour-
able to human nature,” the English
physician William Falconer wrote in
1781, approvingly invoking Aristotle.
He continued in this vein for some
time: “…the inhabitants of temperate
climates, of Europe especially, have
far excelled the rest of the world in
almost every article of literature… in
Our place in the world
the more sober sciences, if I may be
allowed the expression, the superiori-
ty is still more visible… moral philos-
ophy, likewise.”
This kind of cosy prejudice was all
very well (at least from a European
perspective) when pronounced from
an English study. But it was becoming
less easy to maintain against science’s
capacity to measure the world not only
geometrically, but in terms of actual
conditions across space and time. In
December 1816, for example, a letter
was published in the Baltimore jour-
nal The Portico lamenting that year’s
atrocious weather conditions – and
the need to take a serious scientific in-
terest in the factors behind them.
“Amidst the variety of speculations
which are to be found in our daily or
monthly publications,” an anonymous
contributor wrote under the pen-
name Observator, “it may be consid-
ered a matter of surprise, that few or
none should be dedicated to the in-
vestigation of the phenomena of cli-
mate, not only as applied to our part,
but also the eastern proportion of the
northern hemisphere…. It is general-
ly admitted, that within the memory
of man, there has been no summer so
short or so inclement as the last…. In
Europe snow has fallen in July, and we
have had no months of the year with-
out frost in these United States.”
79
Our place in the world
For all the so-
phistication of
modern models,
climate itself
remains an ab-
straction.
What might lie behind these
anomalies? “The superstitious,” the
author continued, “have sought for
the source of last summer’s cold, in the
spots on the sun’s disk, while others,
not exploring the true reason, fear a
final deterioration of our climate, that
will make it hardly more desirable
than that of Lapland.” He, however,
ventured a less terrible explanation:
the temporary growth of “great bodies
of Arctic ice… chilling the air and the
whole Atlantic Ocean.”
The letter’s author was entire-
ly correct to describe the summer of
1816 as devastatingly cold and wet
across the northern hemisphere, and
to attribute this to an event of massive
climatic impact. But something more
distant even than Arctic ice lay behind
it: a cataclysm that had taken place
one year and ten thousand miles away.
On 5th April 1815, a 14,000-foot
volcano called Mount Tambora erupt-
ed on the island of Sumbawa, in what
was then the Dutch East Indes and is
now Indonesia. It was, and remains,
the most powerful volcanic eruption
80
NewPhilosopher
in recorded human history.  Tambora
sent gas and smoke soaring 25 miles
into the air, ejecting an estimated ten
billion tonnes of rock. The island was
devastated by lava, pyroclastic flows,
toxic gases and fires, while a rain of
coarse ash spread for a thousand miles.
Tens of thousands of people died in
the vicinity, many from starvation and
disease. Yet it was the fine ash and sul-
phur dioxide expelled into the upper
atmosphere that would have the most
devastating long-term effect.
As these gradually spread across
the planet, their presence in the strato-
sphere began to reduce the strength of
incoming sunlight. By the next year, in
the northern hemisphere, it’s estimated
that global temperatures had cooled by
between half and one degree Celsius,
an effect enhanced by the eruption’s
coincidence with a more general cool-
ing trend. Crops failed, nonstop rains
fell, frosts formed where none had
been seen before. The Year Without A
Summer, as 1816 became known, var-
iously helped precipitate famine, hard-
ship and civil unrest across Europe,
Asia, and North America.
It was also one of the last truly
global natural disasters to elude scien-
tific notice. The Portico’s correspondent
was asking the right questions, but
the communication and measurement
tools required precisely to address
them didn’t yet exist. They would soon.
As thermometers and wind speed and
rainfall gauges became portable and
popular, meteorology began its birth
– backed by technologies such as the
telegraph which, for the first time,
allowed larger weather patterns to be
recorded as they unfolded.
Indeed, the very existence of
weather fronts and their unfolding
whorls was unknown (and unknowa-
ble) to ages whose information could
travel no faster than a galloping horse.
Through almost all of human histo-
ry, weather was a local phenomenon,
its only known patterns regional and
seasonal. Now, new instruments and
instantaneous electronic communica-
tions began to reveal a series of grand
interlocking systems. When Mount
Krakatoa erupted in Indonesia in
1883 – an eruption ten times less vi-
olent than Tambora’s – the event was
reported in Europe on the same day. It
would take a century for the effects of
ash clouds on global temperatures to
be fully investigated; but knowledge of
the planetary environment was accu-
mulating at an ever-faster rate.
What do we mean when we talk
about the climate, today? We’ve
moved so thoroughly from abstraction
to empiricism that it’s difficult even to
imagine earlier worldviews. Yet cli-
mate is as atavistic a battleground as
ever: a place where evidence meets ex-
istential dread, and reasoned analysis
butts its head against experience. This
is perhaps because, for all the sophis-
tication of modern models, climate
itself remains an abstraction: a busi-
ness of patterns and possibilities. The
weather is what’s real: it’s what we see
and feel, celebrate and lament, endure
or perish by. And – if history is any
guide – it’s also something whose les-
sons are only learned belatedly.
 NewPhilosopher
SCENARIO 3
In 2020, despite past pledges, the inter-
national support for the Paris Agreement
starts to wane. In the years that follow,
CO2 emissions are reduced at the local and
national level but efforts are limited and
not always successful. …
Global warming of 1.5°C is reached by
2030 but no major changes in policies oc-
cur. Starting with an intense El Niño–La
Niña phase in the 2030s, several cata-
strophic years occur while global warming
starts to approach 2°C. There are major
heatwaves on all continents, with dead-
ly consequences in tropical regions and
Asian megacities, especially for those ill-
equipped for protecting themselves and
their communities from the effects of ex-
treme temperatures. Droughts occur in
regions bordering the Mediterranean Sea,
central North America, the Amazon region
and southern Australia, some of which are
due to natural variability and others to en-
hanced greenhouse gas forcing. Intense
flooding occurs in high-latitude and trop-
ical regions, in particular in Asia, following
increases in heavy precipitation events.
Major ecosystems (coral reefs, wetlands,
forests) are destroyed over that period,
with massive disruption to local liveli-
hoods. An unprecedented drought leads
Scenario 3 [one possible storyline among worst-case scenarios], from Global Warming of 1.5°C, 2018, an IPCC Special
Report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels and related global greenhouse gas emis-
sion pathways, in the context of strengthening the global response to the threat of climate change, sustainable de-
velopment, and efforts to eradicate poverty.
to large impacts on the Amazon rainforest,
which is also affected by deforestation. A
hurricane with intense rainfall and asso-
ciated with high storm surges destroys a
large part of Miami. A two-year drought in
the Great Plains in the USA and a concomi-
tant drought in eastern Europe and Russia
decrease global crop production, resulting
in major increases in food prices and erod-
ing food security. Poverty levels increase
to a very large scale, and the risk and inci-
dence of starvation increase considerably
as food stores dwindle in most countries;
human health suffers.
There are high levels of public unrest and
political destabilisation due to the in-
creasing climatic pressures, resulting in
some countries becoming dysfunctional.
The main countries responsible for the CO2
emissions design rapidly conceived mit-
igation plans and try to install plants for
carbon capture and storage, in some cases
without sufficient prior testing. Massive in-
vestments in renewable energy often hap-
pen too late and are uncoordinated; energy
prices soar as a result of the high demand
and lack of infrastructure. … Global and re-
gional temperatures continue to increase
strongly while mitigation solutions are be-
ing developed and implemented.
81
Climate change NewPhilosopher

THE EVIDENCE The current warming trend is of particular significance because most of
it is extremely likely (greater than 95 per cent probability) to be the result
of human activity since the mid-20th century and proceeding at a rate that
is unprecedented over decades to millennia.
Earth-orbiting satellites and other technological advances have enabled
scientists to see the big picture, collecting many different types of informa-
tion about our planet and its climate on a global scale. This body of data,
collected over many years, reveals the signals of a changing climate.
The heat-trapping nature of carbon dioxide and other gases was
demonstrated in the mid-19th century. Their ability to affect the transfer
of infrared energy through the atmosphere is the scientific basis of many
instruments flown by NASA. There is no question that increased levels of
Source: NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory greenhouse gases must cause the Earth to warm in response.

Monthly mean CO2 concentration

Mauna Loa 1958 – 2019

Seasonal variation
CO2 Fraction in dry air (µmol/mol)
Departure from yearly average
CO2 Fraction in dry air (µmol/mol)

Month

Data: R.F. Keeling, S.J. Walker, S.C. Piper and A. F. Bollenbacher

Scripps CO2 Program

82
 NewPhilosopher
GLOBAL
TEMPERATURE
RISE:
The planet's average surface temperature has risen
about 1.62 degrees Fahrenheit (0.9 degrees Celsius)
since the late 19th century, a change driven largely
by increased carbon dioxide and other human-
made emissions into the atmosphere. Most of the
warming occurred in the past 35 years, with the five
warmest years on record taking place since 2010.
SHRINKING
ICE
SHEETS:
The Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets have de-
creased in mass. Data from NASA's Gravity Re-
covery and Climate Experiment show Greenland
lost an average of 286 billion tons of ice per year
between 1993 and 2016, while Antarctica lost
about 127 billion tons of ice per year during the
same time period. The rate of Antarctica ice mass
loss has tripled in the last decade.
EXTREME
EVENTS:
The number of record high temperature events in
the United States has been increasing, while the
number of record low temperature events has been
decreasing, since 1950. The U.S. has also witnessed
increasing numbers of intense rainfall events
Climate change
WARMING
OCEANS:
The oceans have absorbed much of this increased
heat, with the top 700 metres (about 2,300 feet) of
ocean showing warming of more than 0.4 degrees
Fahrenheit since 1969.
SEA
LEVEL
RISE:
Global sea level rose about 8 inches in the last cen-
tury. The rate in the last two decades, however, is
nearly double that of the last century and is accel-
erating slightly every year.
OCEAN
ACIDIFICATION:
Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution,
the acidity of surface ocean waters has increased
by about 30 per cent. This increase is the result of
humans emitting more carbon dioxide into the at-
mosphere and hence more being absorbed into the
oceans. The amount of carbon dioxide absorbed by
the upper layer of the oceans is increasing by about
2 billion tons per year.
83
Making the world whole again NewPhilosopher

84 Illustration by Aida Novoa & Carlos Egan


by André Dao
Making the world
whole again
A long time ago, between 5,000
and 3,000 years ago – pre-history, as
they say – the world’s first great sea-
farers, the Austronesian peoples, be-
gan their great seaborne expansion
from South East Asia into the Indian
and Pacific Oceans. Among the far-
flung islands they landed on – as far as
Madagascar in the west, and Hawaii
in the east – was the Tarawa atoll, a
collection of tiny islands surrounding
a lagoon in the middle of the Pacific
Ocean. Since that first settlement,
the culture of the atoll has also been
influenced by Polynesian culture, via
Samoa and Tonga, and Melanesian
culture, via Fiji.
One of the stories told on the
atoll is a creation myth: before time
began, Nareau the Creator – the Spi-
der Lord – walked alone through Te
Bo ma Te Maki, the darkness and the
cleaving. When the darkness and the
cleaving began merging to form sub-
stance, Nareau wove the first beings,
the other gods. So that humankind
would not be separate from him, the
NewPhilosopher
creator ordered his son to kill him, and
to make the earth out of his body, the
sun from his right eye, and the moon
from his left. His brain was scattered
across the sky and became the stars.
The sky became known as karawa, the
ocean was called marawa. And the
earth, which was made from the Spi-
der Lord’s body, was Tarawa.
Today, Tarawa is sinking back into
the sea. Or, to be more accurate, it is
sinking beneath sea levels that are
rising due to human-caused climate
change. According to current projec-
tions, Tarawa – along with the other
31 atolls which make up the Repub-
lic of Kiribati – will be wiped from
the map by 2100. Actually, rising sea
levels will leave Tarawa uninhabitable
well before the end of the century.
Coastal erosion and increased flood-
ing are pushing people from outlying
islands to South Tarawa, which is now
one of the most densely-populated ar-
eas in the world. The overcrowding is
straining natural resources, especially
drinkable water. Salt deposits left by
flooding seawater make growing crops
harder every year, and the salt contam-
inates what drinking water is left too.
The atoll might be unliveable as soon
as 25 or even 15 years from now.
Who is responsible for this catas-
trophe? The answer is pretty obvious:
the rich. But that obvious answer is
Making the world whole again
all too often obscured by phrases like
“man-made” climate change, which
imply that responsibility lies with hu-
manity in general. According to Ox-
fam, the world’s richest 10 per cent
account for 49 per cent of consump-
tion-based emissions. If we look at it
historically, The Guardian has reported
that on a per capita basis, the United
States and countries in Western Eu-
rope are responsible for the most his-
torical emissions. Even looking at re-
sponsibility through nation-states can
be misleading. Not every US citizen
bears the same responsibility for the
US’s outsized emissions footprint. In-
stead, it’s the fossil-fuel extracting and
burning activities of specific groups of
individuals – otherwise known as cor-
porations – that are responsible.
Now we know who is responsible.
But how should we measure their re-
sponsibility? That is the question legal
systems around the world are faced
with today. One answer is to look at
how law treats other forms of wrong-
doing. Here we see that law often
speaks in lofty but mysterious phrases.
One such phrase, common to Anglo-
American jurisdictions, is that the
victim of a legal wrong is “to be made
whole”. The idea is that legal remedies
should put the victim back in the po-
sition they were in before the wrong-
doing. So if, for example, I wrongfully
85
Making the world whole again NewPhilosopher

dispossess you of your collection of
mint-condition The Beatles vinyl re-
cords, the law will make me return the
records to you. And if I’ve damaged
them before they can be returned?
The law will try to make you as good as
whole – with money. In other words, I
will have to pay you a sum of money
that represents the monetary value of
the lost records, plus a sum of money
to compensate you for any emotional
damage incurred.
In theory, this might be how re-
sponsibility for climate change would
be measured. The inhabitants of Tar-
awa are to be made whole again. But
calculations for non-economic loss are
notoriously difficult, even in compara-
tively simple cases involving individu-
als. Magnify those difficulties to the
scale of loss caused by climate change
and they start to look insurmountable.
What sum of money would compen-
sate you for the loss of your home-
land? For the loss of stories connected
to that homeland, like the story of Na-
reau the Creator?
Apart from the difficulty of calcu-
lating the amount of compensation, the
necessity of translating loss into dollars
distorts law’s perception of harm. We
can see this distortion in one of the
first lawsuits against a fossil fuel com-
pany over climate change. In 2015,
the New York Attorney General sued
ExxonMobil, one of the world’s largest
oil and gas companies, over revelations
that the company had long known
about the threat fossil fuels posed.
Four years later, the judge found
entirely in ExxonMobil’s favour. It
wasn’t, stressed Justice Ostrager, be-
cause he didn’t believe that the com-
pany was a major contributor to cli-
mate change. Rather, he dismissed the
lawsuit because the actual case wasn’t
about the damage caused by climate
change, but whether or not Exxon-
Mobil misled its investors about the
risks of climate change to its own prof-
itability. By that measure, the judge
found that no investor had been mis-
led. The point, for our purposes, is that
the legal action came in the form of
a securities fraud lawsuit because that
was the form of responsibility readily
applicable to a corporation – a form of
responsibility that is all about protect-
ing investors from losses that are al-
ready understood to be monetary. No
need for translation there.
Are there any other forms of le-
gal responsibility we could turn to?
Rather than thinking of responsibil-
ity as compensation, we could also
think about responsibility as care. To
put it simply, those who are most re-
sponsible for climate change should
be responsible for looking after those
most affected. That means not only
stopping ongoing climate change by
getting to zero emissions, but caring
for the people for whom zero carbon
targets in 2050 will be too late – like
the inhabitants of Tarawa. In concrete
terms, Anote Tong, a former president
of Kiribati, put it this way: the people
of Kiribati must be ensured a viable
pathway to “migrate with dignity”.
Responsibility in this sense was
recently tested in a case before the
UN’s Human Rights Committee.
Ioane Teitiota, a Kiribati citizen,
witnessed first-hand the effects of
climate change on Tarawa, where he
lived with his wife in a traditional
village. Their wells became salinised,
and crops became increasingly diffi-
cult to grow. He and his wife saw in
the news that there “would be no fu-
ture for life in their country”. Want-
ing to have children, they moved to
New Zealand, where they sought,
and were denied, asylum.
Before the Human Rights Com-
mittee, Teitiota argued that New

To put it simply, those who are most

responsible for climate change
should be responsible for looking
after those most affected.

86
 NewPhilosopher
Zealand would violate his right to life
if it deported him back to a country
with no future. The committee’s de-
cision was a mixed bag. On the one
hand, it acknowledged that the risk
of an entire country being submerged
under water is so extreme that return-
ing someone to such a country could
be incompatible with their right to
life. On the other hand, the commit-
tee said that the timeframe for the
impending disaster on Tawara – be-
tween 10 and 15 years – was insuffi-
ciently imminent to prevent Teitiota
from being deported.
The problem here, and with legal
responses to climate change in gener-
Making the world whole again
al, is one of slow violence. Rob Nixon,
the professor of English and environ-
mental studies who coined the term,
described slow violence as violence
that “occurs gradually and out of sight,
a violence of delayed destruction that
is dispersed across time and space, an
attritional violence that is typically not
viewed as violence at all”. The tragedy
of Tarawa is that its slow sinking into
the sea isn’t seen for  what it is – the
violent and irreversible destruction of
a society that has lived on the atoll for
thousands of years. And until the law
learns to see slow violence for what it
is, its efforts to hold those responsible
to account will continue to fail.
87
The meaning of climate NewPhilosopher

88
 NewPhilosopher The meaning of climate

Climate

/ˈklīmit/

noun:
1. The weather conditions prevailing in an area in general or over a long period.
2. A region with particular prevailing weather conditions.
3. The prevailing trend of public opinion or of another aspect of public life.

Origin:
Late Middle English from Old French climat or late Latin clima, climat-, from Greek klima ‘slope,
zone’, from klinein ‘to slope’. The term originally denoted a zone of the Earth between two lines of
latitude, then any region of the Earth, and later, a region considered with reference to its atmos-
pheric conditions.

89
Ethical children
Ethical
children
Questions from
and answers for children,
by Matthew Beard
If we know it’s a bad thing, why don’t
we stop climate change?
The trickiest part of this question
is the word ‘we’. Lots of us believe that
climate change is real and that’s is a
bad thing (that is probably going to get
worse). But not everybody thinks that
way. There are still people who deny
the existence or seriousness of climate
change, even despite the evidence. Un-
fortunately, some of these people are
very powerful and very wealthy.
It might be nice if the world was
a perfect democracy, where every per-
son had the same ability to influence
what happened. In reality, sometimes
a small group of people have much
more influence than they should.
Some people have had much more
impact than others in causing climate
change, and now some people are hav-
ing more impact in getting in the way
of addressing it.
What that means is that each of
us needs to think differently about
90
NewPhilosopher
how we work to stop climate change.
We need to unite. Each of us work-
ing alone – doing things like recycling,
avoiding plastic or being more sus-
tainable – is good, but it won’t go far
enough. We need to give ourselves one
big, loud voice that’s as powerful as the
people getting in the way. That means
writing to politicians, showing up to
protests and getting other people to
do the same.
Alone, none of us is as powerful as
some of the big climate deniers. But
together, we can be noisy enough to
overcome them.  would crack across the horizon. The
What happens if everything on Earth
dies – does the Earth die too?
There’s a famous short story – some
people say it’s the shortest story ever
written. It goes like this: “For sale: baby
shoes, never worn.”
Lots of people read this story as be-
ing a story about a baby who died. The
shoes are being sold because there is no
Illustration by Aida Novoa & Carlos Egan
baby to put them on anymore. When
the baby died, the idea of the shoes
died with it.
We might think that an Earth
without any life on it is a bit like
those baby shoes. It’s tempting to
think that because everything that
lives on Earth is dead, the planet
itself is dead too. But I’m not sure
that’s true.
Without anything living here, the
Earth would still soar through space,
waves would continue to crash against
cliffs, rivers would run and lightning
planet would be full of sound, colour,
order and chaos.
I think it would be better if there
was life around to enjoy the Earth.
Just like it would be better if there was
a baby foot to put the shoe onto. But
even without life, the shoe is beauti-
ful, as is the Earth, and both can serve
as a reminder that something very
special – life – has been lost.

I like to think that I care for the envi-
ronment and for the future of the planet,
and I’m concerned by the potential effects
of climate change and environmental de-
struction – bushfires, drought, rising sea
levels, food shortages, etc. I try to buy local
food and recycled packaging, I steer clear
of anything in plastic, and rarely fly an-
ywhere. Yet not all my actions are in the
best interests of future generations: I have
two vehicles (one of them diesel) that my
partner and I use constantly, I heat my in-
efficiently-designed house using log fires, I
conveniently ignore the fact that most of
my clothes are shipped from the other side
of the world, and I eat meat. However I
don’t feel like can change any of these aspects
of my life: having just one car would make
it all but impossible to ferry our children
around, I can’t afford to upgrade heating
or buy more expensive local clothes, and a
meat-free diet leaves me feeling flat. But
even if I were to make these changes, I am
certain that it would make no difference
to the fate of the planet. The same is true
of those around me – it seems to be a case
of the tragedy of the commons. Why should
concerned citizens change their behaviour
in small ways if it will make no difference
at all? Meanwhile large companies con-
tinue to destroy and pollute…
As a child, I was taught the Se-
renity Prayer: “grant me the courage
to accept the things I cannot change”.
It’s a wonderful distillation of some-
thing essential about the human con-
dition. We find ourselves thrown into
NewPhilosopher
a world that is not of our making or
choosing and thrown into moral con-
nections and relationships that confer
on us obligations, responsibilities and
sometimes, inescapable guilt.
For many of us, the lifestyles that
we live are built to adapt to a system
that we are rapidly discovering is fun-
damentally unjust and unsustainable.
Our fit-for-purpose lives make sense
within an unfit-for-purpose system.
And now, in a moment where pivotal
change is necessary, many people are
trying to change their lives whilst the
system stubbornly insists on staying
the same.
The result of this is usually a lot
of sacrifice on the part of individu-
al people and families. We make our
lives better aligned to our values and
the longevity of the planet but do so
at the cost of how well-optimised our
lifestyle is to the economic and social
systems we’ve been thrown into.
Realising this can remind us of the
value of acceptance: we cannot change
the system by changing our behaviour,
so perhaps we need to find other ways
of changing the system and, in the
meanwhile, accept and find ways to
make sense of our complicity.
Perhaps. But to do this alone
would be an incomplete moral re-
sponse. After all, as many reading this
would know, I’ve offered an incom-
plete citing of the Serenity Prayer. The
full version continues “… grant me the
Ethical dilemma
Ethical
dilemma
by Matthew Beard
courage to change what I can, and the
wisdom to know the difference.”
Accepting our inevitable connec-
tion to the current state of affairs is
only an appropriate moral response
once we’re confident we’ve dealt with
what can be changed. It seems to me
as though there are parts of your life
you’re treating as fixed that might ac-
tually be quite flexible. For instance,
do your children have the ability to use
public transport? How much ferrying
do they really need? What options are
there for carpooling?
There’s a difference between some-
thing being impossible to change and it
being hard or inconvenient to change.
When we hit the former, we need to
accept the reality of our life, warts and
all. When it’s the latter, we shouldn’t
throw our hands up and surrender. We
should fight to make our life and our
world one we’d be proud to live in, and
to have played a role in building.
What’s more, whilst the serenity
prayer approach offers a quiet dignity
in the face of unshakeable challenges,
it’s by no means the only approach.
Perhaps your actions won’t make a
difference one way or another in the
grand scheme of things. It doesn’t fol-
low that you should lend the strength
of your arm to ecological collapse.
There may be dignity in acceptance,
but it can also be found in continu-
ing to fight, strive and howl in protest,
even when facing impossible odds.
91
Wild thinking NewPhilosopher

Illustration by Aida Novoa & Carlos Egan

92

by Zan Boag
Wild thinking
Our classes were often conduct-
ed in low light, a blurry, soft-spoken
figure gesticulating from the front.
“Don’t just flick on a light switch,” ex-
horted Frank Fisher. “Think about the
process involved in generating the en-
ergy for that light – all the way from
the coal-fired power plant to this light
switch – and ask yourself, ‘Do you re-
ally need that extra bit of light?’” His
suggestion to combat the involuntary
switching on of lights when entering
a room: place them at knee height
(although when he said this, I could
always picture a cracked switchboard
and scuff marks circling the knee-
height light switch).
Peripatetic classes, lectures in the
bush, light-free tutorials: the aim of
all these activities was to shift our
perspective, to make us view the world
from a different angle – to make our
thinking “wild”, as he liked to say.This
mild-mannered professor of environ-
mental science wanted to make his
students “wild thinkers”; a group of
NewPhilosopher
people who would help transform the
way our society was structured.
It’s most likely an understatement
to say that Frank would be disappoint-
ed with the direction the world has
taken in the twenty years since I sat
in his classroom. 2019 was Australia’s
hottest and driest year on record, with
the annual national mean maximum
temperature 2.09 °C above average
and rainfall 40 per cent below average.
Bushfires raged across the country,
burning 186,000 square kilometres of
land and killing one billion animals.
In 2014 Australia’s Carbon Tax was
repealed. In 2018, the current Prime
Minister held aloft – in parliament, no
less – a lump of coal like a trophy; and
that was before he was elected. Else-
where in the world, it’s little better.
The world is losing an area of forest
the size of the UK each year. The last
six years are the six hottest years on
record globally. According to the UN,
there are “46,000 pieces of plastic” per
square mile of ocean, a phenomenon
which finds its apotheosis in the Great
Pacific Garbage Patch, which boasts
some 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic.
Frank would probably also be dis-
appointed by my reference to what is
wrong with the current state of the
world. “Identifying what is wrong
is easy,” he would say. “It’s not hard
to identify that something is lacking,
Wild thinking
or even what that something is that
it lacks. Pinpointing how to fix the
problem is more difficult, and while
important, without action it is ineffec-
tive.” It’s not that he didn’t value the
‘what’ and the ‘how’, it’s just that he
thought we needed to put more em-
phasis on action; on doing. We know
that the tap is leaking – we’re annoyed
by the dripping and we’re upset by the
waste. But rather than simply pointing
and complaining, we must start trying
to fix the tap.
There’s a phenomenon that is
referred to as environmental condi-
tioning, which is, according to the
OECD, “the modification of the en-
vironment of one or more organisms
by their activities, including reaction
and co-action (liberation of oxy-
gen, for example, by water plants in
an aquarium)”. By releasing massive
amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere,
humans in the 20th century are cer-
tainly engaging in their own form of
environmental conditioning. But it
is another form of conditioning that
I think is at the heart of our current
malaise, one in which we are passive
rather than active participants. While
we may be conditioning the environ-
ment, we are also becoming conditioned
to the current environment – adapt-
ing to the state of affairs that sees ris-
ing temperatures and polluted rivers,
93
Wild thinking
failing crops and cleared rainforests.
We are becoming conditioned to the
devastation and destruction around
us; unmoved the effects of climate
change; insensitive to the legacy we
leave for future generations. By be-
coming accustomed to this new envi-
ronment, we do nothing. Genetically,
humans have adapted to cope with
various environmental conditions.
Excess layers of fat to deal with the
cold, sweating to deal with the heat.
Are we adapting psychologically to
deal with climate change by becom-
ing numb to its effects? Is it inconve-
nient to look at the causes front on,
to implement the solutions that we
know to be necessary?
When I say ‘we’, I refer mostly to
those over 50; those who may not be
around to feel the full force of Nature’s
response to our tinkering with the
Earth’s systems. Younger generations
seem to have a more visceral response
94
NewPhilosopher
to the inaction that permeates all lev-
els of society, from individuals to gov-
ernments to corporations. And that
is who Frank Fisher was talking to in
our classes: he was trying to exhort a
group of 20-somethings to unearth
and embrace the wild thinker within,
as he was certain that it was only wild
thinking that could save us.
Twenty years after those darkened
classes, Frank is no longer with us, ul-
timately dying from a brain tumour in
2012. His spirit remains in the ideas
and energy he passed on to his stu-
dents, including me: I still take pause
before flicking a light switch, thinking
of him when I feel my way through a
dark room in the evening for a glass of
water. And when I see gridlock in city
traffic, I am reminded how he cam-
paigned – unsuccessfully – for Mel-
bourne to have free public transport.
An idea that seems obvious, yet some-
how unachievable all at once.
I’m not doing Frank any justice
by mentioning light switches and
buses; his ideas ran much deeper
than this. What he really taught
me, and countless other students
I imagine, was how to look within
myself and unearth my wildest
thoughts, and, importantly, to turn
them into action. “Just that you do
the right thing,” Marcus Aurelius
writes in Meditations. “The rest
doesn’t matter. Cold or warm. Tired
or well rested. Despised or hon-
oured. Dying... or busy with other
assignments.” Just as Aurelius ad-
vised, Frank showed through his
five-decade battle with Crohn’s dis-
ease and his relentless fight against
environmental destruction that we
must not find excuses for inaction.
Instead, we must do all that is in our
power to effect positive change in
the world – no matter how cold or
tired or busy we might be.
 NewPhilosopher

“Man is everywhere a disturbing agent. Wherever

he plants his foot, the harmonies of nature are
turned to discords.”
– George Perkins Marsh

Yan'an East Road Interchange, Shanghai, China

95
Six thinkers
Climate
The Physicist
Stephen Hawking
1942 – 2018
Human demands
“One can see from space how the
human race has changed the Earth.
Nearly all of the available land has
been cleared of forest and is now used
for agriculture or urban development.
The polar icecaps are shrinking and
the desert areas are increasing. At
night, the Earth is no longer dark, but
large areas are lit up. All of this is evi-
dence that human exploitation of the
planet is reaching a critical limit. But
human demands and expectations are
ever-increasing. We cannot continue
to pollute the atmosphere, poison the
ocean and exhaust the land. There
isn’t any more available.”
96
NewPhilosopher
The Diplomat
Kofi Annan
1938 – 2018
Your threat
“Depending on where you live,
your threat is much different from
the other person. If you ask a New
Yorker today, because of the way the
press plays it, he will say terrorism
is his biggest fear. But for somebody
living on a small island state, then it
is climate change, the rise of the sea
level, for his whole island may be
washed away. If I go to southern Af-
rica, they tell me it is HIV/AIDS and
somewhere in Asia it is poverty. This
is also why you will find it difficult to
find agreements, because if you want
someone to be concerned about your
threat, then you should be concerned
about his.”
The Leader
Chief Seattle
1786 – 1866
Respect the land
“You must teach the children that
the ground beneath their feet is the
ashes of your grandfathers. So that
they will respect the land, tell your
children that the earth is rich with
the lives of our kin. Teach your chil-
dren what we have taught our chil-
dren, that the earth is our mother.
Whatever befalls the earth, befalls the
sons of the earth. If men spit upon the
ground, they spit upon themselves.
… This we know, the earth does not
belong to man, man belongs to the
earth. This we know. All things are
connected like the blood which unites
one family. All things are connected.
Whatever befalls the earth, befalls the
sons of the earth. Man did not weave
the web of life, he is merely a strand
in it. Whatever he does to the web, he
does to himself.”

The Linguist
Noam Chomsky
1928 –
Exponential growth
“Global warming proceeds on its
inexorable course. During this mil-
lennium, every single year, with one
exception, has been hotter than the
last one. There are recent scientific
papers, James Hansen and others,
which indicate that the pace of global
warming, which has been increas-
ing since about 1980, may be sharply
escalating and may be moving from
linear growth to exponential growth,
which means doubling every couple
of decades. We’re already approach-
ing the conditions of 125,000 years
ago, when the sea level was about
roughly 25 feet higher than it is today,
with the melting, the rapid melting,
of the Antarctic, huge ice fields. We
might – that point might be reached.
The consequences of that are almost
unimaginable. I mean, I won’t even
try to depict them, but you can figure
out quickly what that means.”
NewPhilosopher
What does climate change mean to humans?
Here are six thinkers’ views on the climate.
The Activist
Naomi Klein
1970 –
Stop looking away
“Slavery wasn’t a crisis for British
and American elites until abolition-
ism turned it into one. Racial dis-
crimination wasn’t a crisis until the
civil rights movement turned it into
one. Sex discrimination wasn’t a cri-
sis until feminism turned it into one.
Apartheid wasn’t a crisis until the an-
ti-apartheid movement turned it into
one. In the very same way, if enough
of us stop looking away and decide
that climate change is a crisis worthy
of Marshall Plan levels of response,
then it will become one, and the po-
litical class will have to respond, both
by making resources available and by
bending the free market rules that
have proven so pliable when elite in-
terests are in peril.”
Six thinkers
The Ethicist
Kieran Setiya
1976 –
Weaker than a child
“Making our ethics more explicit,
being self-conscious about our princi-
ples and premises, improves our mor-
al thinking. This is particularly true
when the questions are ones of public
policy, when they operate at scales
that defy intuitive judgement, and
when they threaten our complacent
desire to maintain the status quo. The
problem of climate change is chal-
lenging in all these ways. It is unique,
or unusual, in that it leads rapidly
beyond the usual terrain of political
theory to questions more abstract and
existential. Why should we care about
the survival of humanity? The answer
makes a difference to our assessment
of catastrophic risks. How should we
think about decisions that affect the
identity of future individuals? If we
do not act on climate change, people
born 50 or 100 years from now will
lead impoverished lives.”
97
Changing the Earth’s atmosphere
Interviewee:
Charley Lineweaver
Interviewer: Tim Dean
Most people are probably familiar
with just one atmosphere: our own. How
does Earth’s atmosphere compare to the
other planets that we know about?
There’s no place in our solar system
today where we could land and then
say: ‘Oh, this is nice. We can breathe.’
There’s no oxygen on the Moon.
There’s no oxygen on Mars. There’s no
oxygen on Venus, Saturn, Uranus, etc.
98
NewPhilosopher
Changing
the Earth’s
atmosphere
The other planets are not suitable for
aerobic respirers like us. There’s an ef-
fort that might be made to terraform
Mars to get some oxygen in the atmos-
phere there, but that will take a long,
long time, and lots of effort. For the
near future, let’s say 1,000 years or so,
if you’re going to live on Mars, you’re
going to have to live inside a cave or a
capsule or a spacesuit of some kind be-
cause the atmosphere of Mars is CO2
and we can’t breathe that. Exoplanets
are a whole other story that is getting
increasingly beautiful and complex.
We’ve found thousands and thou-
sands of new planets. A small fraction
of them are what you might call wet
rocky planets in the habitable zones
of their host stars. One thing that de-
termines a planet’s atmosphere is its
surface temperature. It’s not enough
to be at the right temperature, you
need an atmosphere. Take the Moon,
for example. It’s in the ‘habitable zone’
of the Sun, but it has no atmosphere.
Therefore, there’s no water. Therefore,
we’re not interested in it in terms of
habitability. But if you made the Moon
bigger and bigger, it would become
harder for gases like CO2, hydrogen,
nitrogen, oxygen, or H2O, to escape.
As planets get more and more mas-
sive, they tend to have atmospheres.
For example, Mars is about one tenth
the mass of the Earth. Therefore, Mars
cannot hold on to its atmosphere very
well, because gravity is what holds an
atmosphere on to a planet. However,
if Mars were maybe twice as massive
as it is today, it would have a thicker
atmosphere, and it would maybe have
held onto the water that it started out
with. Similarly, Venus. If it had not had
such a large atmosphere – if it hadn’t
been so close to the Sun – it might not
have gone through a runaway green-
house effect, which was probably the
reason it lost its water. The atmos-
 NewPhilosopher Changing the Earth’s atmosphere

Illustration by Alvaro Hidalgo 99

Changing the Earth’s atmosphere NewPhilosopher

The atmospheres of exoplanets depend

on how far the exoplanets are from their
host star and on whether they are massive
enough to hold on to an atmosphere.

pheres of exoplanets depend on how
far the exoplanets are from their host
stars and on whether they are massive
enough to hold on to an atmosphere.
If a planet is too massive, its atmos-
phere will be gigantic, like the atmos-
pheres of Uranus, Neptune, Jupiter,
and Saturn. There is a sweet spot that
some colleagues have called the ‘cos-
mic shoreline’ between rocks with no
atmospheres, and rocks with gigantic
hydrogen atmospheres. In between
there’s a strip that you might call
rocks with modest atmospheres. And
that’s the sweet spot in the distribu-
tion of exoplanets that we’re looking
at very carefully – trying to figure out
what the patterns are. The highest
mass planets have hydrogen atmos-
pheres. As planet masses get small-
er, they probably have thick water
atmospheres. Even lower mass and
you start to have atmospheres like we
have on Venus, Mars, and Earth. And
if you get even less massive – and cold
– you have atmospheres made out of
nitrogen and argon, like Pluto’s. Small
planets far away from their host stars
can be so cold that their gases are easy
to hold on to. So, there’s a kind of a
trade-off. High masses and cold tem-
peratures allow a planet to hold on to
its atmosphere, while low masses and
high temperatures make it easier for
the atmosphere to escape. The atmos-
pheres of exoplanets depend on how
far the exoplanets are from their host
star and on whether they are massive
enough to hold on to an atmosphere.
Those are the two variables you need
to keep in mind when you’re thinking
about rocky planets with atmospheres:

100
 NewPhilosopher
mass and temperature. We’re trying
Life has played to figure out what the details of this
a very important trade-off are among the exoplanets
we’re detecting.
part in changing
Let me ask about one planet that we
the Earth’s at- do know quite a lot about, which is Ve-
mosphere. nus. Venus has a lot of physical similar-
ities to Earth. But Venus’s atmosphere
is very different from ours. It’s much
more dense and the surface temperature
is over 460 degrees Celsius. How did it
diverge so much? Was it once more like
Earth’s atmosphere?
Yes, the data suggests that Venus
was like Earth about four billion years
ago, maybe even three billion years ago,
maybe even more recently. Some peo-
ple think there might have been life on
Venus. Earth is at 1 AU [astronomical
unit, the distance from the Earth to the
Sun]. Venus is at 0.7 AU. When you
calculate how much sunlight Venus
receives, you take the inverse square of
that distance, which means that Venus
gets about twice as much sunlight as
Earth. On the other hand, Venus has
clouds that are very reflective, so its
albedo is very high. And so Venus re-
flects a lot more of sunlight than Earth
does. But Venus’s atmosphere is also
very thick and full of CO2, which is a
strong greenhouse gas. It had a runa-
way greenhouse effect, which is why
Changing the Earth’s atmosphere
Venus is so different from the Earth.
It’s something that we might be-
come more familiar with if we keep
on burning fossil fuels, increasing the
CO2, and thus produce a runaway
greenhouse on Earth.
What would Earth’s atmosphere look
like if life had not evolved here?
That’s a difficult question. Life has
played a very important part in chang-
ing the Earth’s atmosphere. For ex-
ample, 2.3 billion years ago there was
the Great Oxygenation Event, and
the oxygen levels went from almost
zero to around one per cent. That’s a
large increase. And then somewhere
just before the Cambrian it went up
again. And so the oxygen content that
everybody thinks is very important –
because that’s what you’re breathing
right now – has changed enormously.
Also, I’m looking at a bunch of clouds
right now. And the trees out there,
they’re doing what’s called evapotran-
spiration. They’re taking lots of water
from the soil and putting it into the
air, and that turns into clouds. So, let’s
think about the Earth with life and
without life. Let’s say that the water
content is the same. I’ve heard some
people who study this say there might
be twice as many clouds in the atmos-
phere because of life compared to a
101
Changing the Earth’s atmosphere
Humans are
changing this
natural variation.
So, for example,
right now the sea
levels would be
going down, but
because we’re
emitting so much
CO2, they’re go-
ing up.
planet without life. That’s important
because low clouds reflect sunlight.
They cool the Earth. But high clouds
have the opposite effect. H2O vapour
acts as a greenhouse gas. So the effect
of clouds is incredibly complicated and
the people who are trying to make cli-
mate predictions are always wrestling
with these two contradictory influenc-
es of H2O in the atmospheres.
What about the future of Earth’s at-
mosphere? Because changes happen very
slowly, relative to human lifespan, we
tend to feel as though things like the at-
mosphere are relatively stable. But we
know that they do and will change. What
can we expect from the future of Earth’s
atmosphere in the near term over maybe
102
NewPhilosopher
hundreds or thousands of years, and then
the very long term over millions of years?
We know that the Sun will turn
into a red giant and engulf the Earth
or make it unbearably hot in about six
billion years. We are very sure of that.
On the other hand, the luminosity of
the Sun continuously increases. That
will have the effect in about half a
billion or a billion years of remov-
ing the water from Earth. Losing the
water on Earth is something that is
really bad if you’re a life form. And
so it looks like a billion years would
be how long we have before the in-
creasing luminosity of the Sun dries
out the surface of the Earth. People
say that’s a long time. Well it’s short
cosmologically, but it’s very long in
terms of a human lifetime. It seems to
be the case that the CO2 content of
the Earth has been decreasing over a
billion-year timescale; you may have
heard of C3 or C4 photosynthesis.
C4 is better at grabbing CO2 out of
the atmosphere. And this is a way
in which some plants have adapted
over the last 100 million years or so
to a decreasing level of CO2. It may
be that some kind of Gaian regula-
tion is going on: the biosphere may
be trying to keep the temperature in
a regime comfortable for life by de-
creasing CO2. As CO2 goes down,
the greenhouse effect decreases,
cooling the atmosphere. Meanwhile,
the luminosity of the Sun is going
up, and so they compensate for each
other and therefore the temperature
stays about right for life. That’s one
idea. Some people think that’s balo-
ney and other people think it makes
sense. So, it’s a hard thing to test.
But in the long term, CO2 is going
down except for the fact that we are
burning all these fossil fuels. We can’t
keep on doing this for very long. I’m
not sure how long people will contin-
ue to burn fossil fuels, maybe 50 or
100 years, or maybe 1,000 years. But
that’s a blip. That’s nothing compared
to the billion-year timescales that
I’ve been talking about. Over the past
billion years, the biosphere may have
reduced the amount of CO2, to keep
the Earth cool despite the increasing
luminosity of the Sun.
If we do continue to pump enough
greenhouse gases into our atmosphere to
reach a tipping point and start a runa-
way greenhouse effect, what would that
do to our atmosphere?
The most optimistic thing I can say
about that is look at the past million
years on Earth. Look at the ice cores
from Antarctica or Greenland and see
how the temperature has varied, and
what caused that variation. And keep
in mind that for most of Earth’s his-
tory, we have not had polar ice caps.
Having polar ice caps is what you get
when you are in a glacial period and
it’s cold. Now, that doesn’t mean that
humans are not having an effect. It’s
just that the natural variability over,
for example, the last hundred million
years is gigantic. For example, the sea
level goes up and down by hundreds
of metres. And this is a very natural
thing that has nothing to do with hu-
mans. On the other hand, we know
that humans are changing this natural
variation. For example, right now sea
levels would probably be going down,
but because we’re emitting so much
CO2, they’re going up. If you look at
the variability over 100 million years,
so far humanity has changed the tem-
perature or the sea level maybe 10% or
less of what you would expect to see
over the hundred-million-year time-
scale. So, for example, during the Pal-
aeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum
56 million years ago it was 8 degrees
warmer than it is now on average.
That’s a lot. But the problem with what
humanity is doing is we’re changing
things on a much faster timescale.
That’s the issue. That is unprecedent-
ed, as far as I can see. People should
recognise that the Earth has changed
 NewPhilosopher Changing the Earth’s atmosphere

enormously on long timescales. In the ing to it in the next decade or three.

last million years or so you see these And so you might think it doesn’t mat-
glacial and interglacial periods, and ice ter what humans do. Nature does that
ages coming and going, the polar ice itself. It’s not that warming has never
caps increasing and decreasing in size. happened before. It has. What is new is
Those things are natural. But they’re the rate at which it is changing. That’s
natural if they’re taking 100,000 years, crucial for biology, because if change
not 100. happens slowly, biology can adapt. If
change happens quickly, species can’t
How has the research you have done, adapt quickly enough to keep up. And
and the thinking along cosmological so you run into problems associated
timescales, changed the way that you with the wonderful things that species
look at our own planet and what we’re do for each other. The biosphere is all
doing to it? connected and there’s a nice network
Well, it’s kind of like living in a that compensates and buffers things.
neighbourhood and then getting a But if you turn the temperature up,
map of the neighbourhood, and then turn the thermostat up by one hun-
getting a map of the country, and then dred degrees, then life will die except
getting a map of the Earth, and get- for some bacteria, and then things will
ting a map of the solar system. It gives be enormously changed. It all depends
you a perspective from further away. on the rate of change, not necessarily
It gives you an overview that almost the amount of change.
makes you feel that you’re no longer a
part of it, or that your part of it is tiny
and less significant. I guess it makes Dr Charley Lineweaver is Senior
you a little bit more humble. I think. I Fellow at the Planetary Science Institute
hope. That’s the feeling I get about the at the Australian National University.
Earth from studying other planets. The
idea that there are many billions and
billions of other planets like Earth out
there, well, what does that say about
humanity on Earth? A lot of people
think human-like intelligence is a
convergent feature of evolution. There-
fore, we should expect all kinds of
technological aliens out there. But we
haven’t heard from any. I think one of
the most important things to keep in
mind is that the timescale is really im-
portant. When you talk about what’s
happening in the atmosphere, are you
talking about day-to-day, or a season-
al timescale or a decadal timescale?
Or a 1,000-year, 10,000-year, hun-
dred-thousand-year, a million-year,
ten-million-year timescale? These are
hugely different. When you talk about
the differences that have happened to
Earth’s atmosphere over the last hun-
dred million years, they are enormous
compared to anything that we are do-

103
When degree is shaked NewPhilosopher

104 Illustration by Aida Novoa & Carlos Egan

 NewPhilosopher When degree is shaked

When degree
is shaked

By William Shakespeare

When the planets

In evil mixture to disorder wander,
What plagues and what portents, what mutiny,
What raging of the sea, shaking of earth,
Commotion in the winds, frights, changes, horrors,
Divert and crack, rend and deracinate
The unity and married calm of states
Quite from their fixure? O, when degree is shaked,
Which is the ladder of all high designs,
The enterprise is sick. How could communities,
Degrees in schools, and brotherhoods in cities,
Peaceful commerce from dividable shores,
The primogenity and due of birth,
Prerogative of age, crowns, scepters, laurels,
But by degree, stand in authentic place?
Take but degree away, untune that string,
And hark what discord follows. Each thing meets
In mere oppugnancy. The bounded waters
Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores
And make a sop of all this solid globe.

From Troilus and Cressida

105
Writers’ Award XXVI: Change NewPhilosopher

Here we present the winners of New Philosopher Writers’ Award XXVI: Change. Once
more, we received a record number of entries from around the world, from Milan
to Texas to Canberra to London. In first place is writer Michael Ellis for Stories of
change and in second place is Beloit College Emeritus Professor of English Tom
McBride for Heracl itus on tal k radio.

Stories of change
by Michael Ellis

When all is said and done, how do
we not know but that our own un-
reason may be better than anoth-
er’s truth?
W.B. Yeats, The Celtic Twilight
You may have heard the one-thou-
sand-year-old parable of the blind six
and the elephant. Imagine yourself as
blind and inclined to learn what an
elephant looks like. You approach the
beast, with five others, and each of you
try to see it by touching different parts
of the animal. You feel satisfied that
you’ve found the truth about the ele-
phant’s appearance – a distinct mental
image. ‘The creature looks like a snake,’
you cry touching the trunk. ‘No, it
looks like a tree,’ you hear someone
remark about the knee. ‘It looks like a
rope,’ calls another, regarding the tail.
But who is right? The parable pro-
claims, ‘though each is partly in the
right, all are in the wrong.’
There’s a good chance you can im-
agine situations where you feel that you
could declare, ‘but I know I’m right.’
Right? This parable imagines what lat-
er came to be known as the Rashomon
effect – the phenomenon of recalling
the same event differently. The Rasho-
mon effect stems from Akira Kuro-
sawa’s 1950s ground-breaking film
Rashomon, which depicts the death of
a samurai told three times from differ-
ing perspectives. First is the bandit’s
version, who claims to have beaten the
samurai in a duel after seducing the
samurai’s wife. The wife’s account is
that, after being assaulted by the ban-
dit, she fainted with dagger in hand,
awaking to find her husband stabbed
and killed. Last, through a medium,
the samurai alleges that his treacher-
ous wife forced him to stab himself
with her dagger. Each story offers an
alternative slant on proceedings, and
each story loosens the viewer’s grasp
of the truth. The truth is not the only
thing disrupted by the Rashomon ef-
fect; it also asks us to reflect on how
storytelling changes us. And how we
are just one perspective among others.
But herein lies the troubling as-
pect of being an individual in an ever-
changing social world. Do our nar-
rative identities change when other
people tell their stories? Sarah Polley’s
film Stories We Tell offers insight into
the way narrative identity warps under
the weight of competing perspectives.
The film excavates layers of memory
within a family unit in an attempt to

106

WINNER
Writers’ Award XXVI:
Change
uncover the truth at the core of her
family’s story. Their stories, often re-
vealing and deeply personal, portray
the fallibility of memory. Their con-
flicting memories constitute the com-
pelling way narratives build our iden-
tity, helping to make sense of our place
in the world.
In Stories We Tell, Sarah Polley is
unsettled by the constant questioning
and mystery surrounding the identity
of her biological father. Her siblings
tease her about not looking like Mi-
chael – her siblings’ biological father
and the man who raised Sarah. Mi-
chael even jokes with Sarah, asking
‘who do you think your father is this
week?’ Sarah searches for her bio-
logical father, as rumours lead her to
Montreal where her mother starred in
a play. Harry, the director of the play,
is shown to be Sarah’s biological fa-
ther. This revelation, though a relief to
Sarah, complicates the story she tells
about her identity and underlines how
our stories are constantly changing.
Later in the film, Harry confesses
his trepidation surrounding his attend-
ance at Diane’s funeral. He remembers
NewPhilosopher
vividly his encounter with Michael; it
remained burned into his memory and
into his life’s story. But Michael had
forgotten that Harry was ever present
at Diane’s wake. For Harry, the day
was filled with uncertainty and regret
for attending the burial and impos-
ing on the family that he was not yet
a part. For Michael, the day centred
around his family’s grief, without re-
gard for Harry’s presence. Yet when
Michael discovers that Harry was at
the funeral and his closeness to Diane,
the narrative of that day is forced to
yield and change, considering Harry’s
perspective on proceedings and Mi-
chael’s relation to him.
Clearly this is complicated by the
tenuous truth of eyewitness testimony.
Memory has been shown to be falli-
ble; if one accounts their story mul-
tiple times, then the story can evolve
and change beyond any resemblance
of its humble beginnings. The in-
terpretation of witnessing a fatal car
crash, for example, can differ widely
from witness to witness. Personal in-
terpretation of such an event depends
on learnt socio-cultural values and
Writers’ Award XXVI: Change
norms, which take a lifetime to devel-
op. Memories, of course, are not like
replaying a videotape; rather they are
an expression of how we see the world,
encoded with our values and a product
of our innate potential to create mean-
ing. And this potential toward mean-
ing can be corrupted and distorted by
the stories and perspectives of others.
We have all experienced this type of
misshaped truth, playing games as
children of whispered messages to one
another. Our stories garble with each
mumbled message; the truth a muddle
of multiple viewpoints.
Each of our life stories can be re-
imagined and changed through our
continual retelling. And each of our
stories are manipulated endlessly by
others, sending ripples through our
lives. We change our individual nar-
ratives through others’ differing per-
spectives on them, like light refract-
ing through a prism and bending in
infinite directions. The narrative that
Sarah weaves, for instance – that Mi-
chael is her biological father and her
siblings blood relations – requires her
to unbind her grip and reprise a new
107
Writers’ Award XXVI: Change
Bl ind monks examining an elephant, Hanabusa Itchō, 1652–1724.
story, allowing for Harry’s perspective
to become integral to her life. Our
narrative identities become pliable
when bent and stretched by storytell-
ing.
Yet our life narratives must hang
together as a cohesive and coherent
thread. In fact, Scottish philosopher
Alasdair MacIntyre argues for the
“narrative unity of a human life” in
which an individual’s life is seen as a
connected story and not an accumu-
lation of discreet events. MacIntyre
believes this establishes the possibili-
ty for a properly civil and moral life.
Without our ability to bind together
all our discreet events, our identities
108
NewPhilosopher
would be a jumble of incoherent rever-
ies that wouldn’t tether us to the social
world in which most of these events
take place. As our narrative identities
hang together throughout our lives,
they are reshaped and changed by the
imposing force of competing stories;
our lives become a civic playground
where we gossip and grow; we exist
among a site of narrative chatter that
helps determine how we see ourselves
and where we stand in others’ stories.
Of course, this is all very anti-Car-
tesian. Descartes elevation of the “I”
as the original truth, beyond the vast
illusion of the external world, severs
the cogito as a free-floating entity, un-
tethered to the consequences of the
social world. In this vision of reality,
we would be free from criticism and
critique. But we would be caught in
a solipsistic limbo unable, however
long we sat thinking, to know our-
selves without the opaque mirror
held to us by other people’s stories.
We would be stuck unchanged and
unknown. Indeed, we uncover our
personhood through our interactions
with other people. We are one among
others. So, whether you see a snake,
a tree or a rope, the person you think
you are relies on what others see and
often what they tell. Even if that is
constantly changing.

RUNNER-UP
Writers’ Award XXVI:
Change
Heraclitus on talk radio
Whatever the philosophical merits
of the subject, I have a made a little on
the side talking about change. That’s
because over two decades ago I got
involved in a project called the Mind-
set List, an annual inventory of what
has always or never been true during
the lifetimes of entering college stu-
dents. Wire-rimmed glasses no longer
meant John Lennon but Harry Potter.
LBJ is no longer Lyndon Johnson but
LeBron James. Funds of information
change, and professors had better
learn to adapt when they teach their
charges, who grow younger each year.
The Mindset List became popular and
brought its authors, such as me, to in-
terviews and appearances on national
and international media. Time maga-
zine once called the term “now part of
the American lexicon”.
We Mindset List authors have
been on lots of talk shows, where the
public calls in to say, over and over
NewPhilosopher
by Tom McBride
again, that the Annual List makes
them feel old and out of it. They can-
not believe that so much has changed
“since these college kids were born
eighteen years ago”. They will chuckle
about it, but one can tell that they feel
a bit insulted and hurt. Change can be
hard even when it’s gradual and soft.
I find myself wanting to refer them
to Heraclitus. Some of them may
know his most famous fragmentary
apothegm, that one never steps into
the same river twice – I once heard it
quoted in the original ancient Greek
and got a rush at the fluid rhythms of
the syllables. Heraclitus was a clev-
er stylist. If I had referred these dis-
mayed call-in listeners to Heraclitus,
I might have said, “This fellow from
ancient Greek civilisation, Heraclitus,
said change is incessant, so we all have
to get used to it.”
That would have been a fine ra-
dio retort, but I would hardly have
Writers’ Award XXVI: Change
exhausted the nuance of what Her-
aclitus thought, since he was much
interested in permanence as he was
in change. He’s sometimes opposed
by Parmenides, who thought change
was an illusion, whereas Heraclitus
thought change happened all the time
and was real. Well, apparently Hera-
clitus did think change was real, but
in deeming it constant he was also
saying it was fixed. The river is always
fluid, but its flow is always fixed. It is
the very pan-persistence of change
that gives our being its grounding.
He was among those who objected
as Homer and Hesiod called the gods
drunken fighters and fickle lovers. No:
A god presides over the permanence
of change, the fixity of fluidity. If only
we could see things from a god-like
perch, we would not be so distressed
by change. But that requires us to stop
thinking about gods as rapists and
bullies, wanton and wild. The river
109
Writers’ Award XXVI: Change
is always changing, and we are always
changing between steps into it. But
that’s just it: we are always changing.
Heraclitus said elsewhere that the
bow and arrow seem two but are re-
ally one. Shooting it entails both life
and death. Opposites unite, but that’s,
again, is just the point: they are oppo-
sites but always caught up in the same
cycle of life and death. Spatially they
are diverse and changing, but tempo-
rally they are the unmodified same:
animation and mortality at once.
Gerard Manly Hopkins, one of the
most interesting of poets from a phil-
osophical perspective, and the most
novel of Victorian poets, once wrote
a dazzling poem called That Nature is
A Heraclitean Fire, and an elemental
110
NewPhilosopher
Democritus and Heracl itus, Richard
Gaywood, ca. 1630-1680, The Met
fire burns and goes out and flames
again. It nourishes us via the sun and
burns us in a fever. This is suggested,
though never quite stated, in Hop-
kins’ ear- and eye-ravishing lines,
chocked with shimmering neologisms
of spectacular change (“yester-tem-
pest”, “air-built”) and shifting clouds
and ooze and dust and the dark and
pulsating void of blinding sun and,
over time, the absence of Christ, who
is welcomed abruptly near the end of
the poem as He whose trumpet blows
away the relentless chaos of change
without end.
For Father Hopkins, a Jesuit, the
permanence of change was no comfort.
Only the resurrection of Christ, “who
was what I am now”, can offer solace.
It’s as though, for Heraclitus fans,
Hopkins ruined his brilliant display of
Heraclitean fire, of great philosophi-
cal interest, with theology. The title of
the poem adds, “And the Comfort of
the Resurrection.” But then Heracli-
tus was not writing or thinking for a
Christian audience hundreds of years
off, nor, it seems, were the callers into
shows on the Mindset List comforted
by their priests.
Even if change is the one tempo-
ral constant we have, it can seem pro-
found – which must have been what
drew Heraclitus’ attention to it in
the first place. This aspect of change
is illustrated with wit in a poem by
another philosophically arresting
writer (one of the most so, according

RUNNER-UP
Writers’ Award XXVI:
Change
to Simon Critchley), the American
Wallace Stevens. In Anecdote of the Jar,
Stevens wrote a little verse about an
impenetrable wilderness in Tennessee
and the placement of a single home-
made jar in that overgrown mélange
of fecund flora. The poem is apparently
about change: the wilderness sudden-
ly gathered round the homely jar as
though to worship it, “like nothing else
of bird or bush in Tennessee.” Precip-
itous change, right? A single rounded
artefact changes our perception of the
wilderness? You could almost put it on
the Mindset List: “A home-fired jar
has always tamed a wilderness in Ten-
nessee.” Change, right? Wow!
Wrong. The poem is not about
change but about fire. It too shows us
the empire of a Heraclitean fire. The
sun beams upon the wilderness and
lets it grow incorrigible, undomes-
ticated, and thick. But another fire
shapes the jar. Chaos and order: it’s all
fire. Both the seeming and the seminal
role of fire, which Heraclitus thought
the primordial element of all there is,
offers a logical stay-ness as a sponsor
for the sudden transformation of aes-
thetic vision, in which a single artefact
shapes perception of an unbridled
NewPhilosopher
wilderness. It’s just that we have to see
the change from a god-like Olympus.
Fire creates the silicon that runs dig-
ital devices, on which more and more
consumer products are sold, which in
their making and discarding heat the
planet, likely too much. Change and
fire – all the way down.
However much he may have
flinched from the worldview of the
pagan Heraclitus in one of his po-
ems, Hopkins also the perfect poem,
I think, about what Heraclitus was
trying to get at. It’s called “Spring and
fall.” Once more Hopkins shows not
only his innovative word-smithery
and metre but also his sense of Her-
aclitean change through a young girl’s
(Margaret’s) eyes as she contemplates
the baleful falling of the leaves (“gold-
en grove’s unleaving”). In a poem
that takes less than a minute to read,
Hopkins merges the blight of the fall-
ing leaves with “the blight that man
was born for./It is Margaret that you
mourn for.” The world’s ablaze with
change – Hopkins, mostly via sound,
makes the dying leaves spectacular-
ly poignant – and we and Margaret
weeps that it cannot stay spring for-
ever. Yet we are more stable than we
Writers’ Award XXVI: Change
know, as the fiery cycles of modifi-
cation are our immovable lot. Young
Margaret is like those talk show callers
who mourn that today’s young people
have no appreciation of the Cold War.
As with Margaret, are grieving for
themselves. A more god-like vision
would reveal to them the Heraclitean
system and offer them comfort: they
are not alone. Hopkins, a devout be-
liever, does not give little Margaret the
comfort of the Resurrection that will
put a stop to all this unity of nourish-
ing and burning up, in which concep-
tion is a death sentence, but he may
hope, in a way, that she will come to
see it as the way things are—she is not
being singled out, and this might be
her, and our, comfort, sans the solu-
tion of Christ, who makes philosophy
unnecessary for anyone who signs up
with Him.
When I do interviews about the
Mindset List and hear those callers
lamenting generational change, I wish
I could put Heraclitus himself on the
air. He might well say that I’ve got
him all wrong. But if he had a good
translator, he’d be a hit on the radio,
and I think he’d say that change is the
law and as the law it is unchanging.
111
Word length up to 1500 words,
the winner receives $1000 and will
have their work published in the
next edition of New Philosopher
magazine.

Award XXVII: family.

Closes 10 June 2020

Award XXVIII: climate.

Closes 10 September 2020
Email your piece to
news@newphilosopher.com

For full details visit

www.newphilosopher.com/articles/prize
Open to subscribers only.
Brought to you by the New Philosopher team, Womankind magazine is available in
digital format worldwide.
A change in temperature NewPhilosopher

A change
in temperature

Atmosphere simulation at global scale based on Geodesic grid, by Jinrong Xie

Excerpt from Philosophical Magazine 41,

237-276 (1896), by Svante Arrhenius

114

by Svante Arrhenius
A great deal has been written on
the influence of the absorption of the
atmosphere upon the climate. Tyndall
in particular has pointed out the enor-
mous importance of this question. To
him it was chiefly the diurnal and an-
nual variation of the temperature that
were lessened by this circumstance.
Another side of the question, that has
long attracted the attention of physi-
cists, is this: Is the mean temperature
of the ground in any way influenced
by the presence of heat-absorbing
gases in the atmosphere? Fourier
maintained that the atmosphere acts
like the glass of a hot-house, because
it lets through the light rays of the
sun but retains the dark rays from
the ground. This idea was elaborated
by Pouillet; and Langley was by some
of his researches led to the view, that
“the temperature of the earth under
direct sunshine, even though our at-
mosphere were present as now, would
probably fall to -200°C., if that at-
mosphere did not possess the qual-
ity of selective absorption”. This view,
NewPhilosopher
which was founded on too wide a
use of Newton’s law of cooling, must
be abandoned, as Langley himself in
a later memoir showed that the full
moon, which certainly does not pos-
sess any sensible heat-absorbing at-
mosphere, has a “mean effective tem-
perature” of about 45°C.
The air retains heat (light or dark)
in two different ways. On the one
hand, the heat suffers a selective dif-
fusion on its passage through the air;
on the other hand, some of the at-
mospheric gases absorb considerable
quantities of heat. These two actions
are very different. ...
The selective absorption of the
atmosphere is, according to the re-
searches of Tyndall, Lecher and
Pernter, Röntgen, Heine, Langley,
Ångström, Paschen, and others, of
a wholly different kind. It is not ex-
erted by the chief mass of the air, but
in a high degree by aqueous vapour
and carbonic acid, which are present
in the air in small quantities. Further,
this absorption is not continuous over
the whole spectrum, but nearly insen-
sible in the light part of it, and chiefly
limited to the long-waved part, where
it manifests itself in very well-defined
absorption-bands, which fall off rap-
idly on both sides. The influence of
this absorption is comparatively small
on the heat from the sun, but must be
A change in temperature
of great importance in the transmis-
sion of rays from the earth. Tyndall
held the opinion that the water-va-
pour has the greatest influence, whilst
other authors, for instance Lecher and
Pernter, are inclined to think that the
carbonic acid plays the more impor-
tant part. The researches of Paschen
show that these gases are both very
effective, so that probably sometimes
the one, sometimes the other, may
have the greater effect according to
the circumstances.
...
We may now inquire how great
must the variation of the carbonic acid
in the atmosphere be to cause a given
change of the temperature. The an-
swer may be found by interpolation in
Table VII [not included here]. To fa-
cilitate such an inquiry, we may make
a simple observation. If the quantity of
carbonic acid decreases from 1 to 0.67,
the fall of temperature is nearly the
same as the increase of temperature
if this quantity augments to 1.5. And
to get a new increase of this order of
magnitude (3°.4), it will be necessary
to alter the quantity of carbonic acid
till it reaches a value nearly midway
between 2 and 2.5. Thus if the quan-
tity of carbonic acid increases in geo-
metric progression, the augmentation
of the temperature will increase nearly
in arithmetic progression. This rule –
115
A change in temperature
which naturally holds good only in the
part investigated – will be useful for
the following summary estimations.
...
I should certainly not have under-
taken these tedious calculations if an
extraordinary interest had not been
connected with them. In the Physical
Society of Stockholm there have been
occasionally very lively discussions on
the probable causes of the Ice Age;
and these discussions have, in my
opinion, led to the conclusion that
there exists as yet no satisfactory
hypothesis that could explain how
the climatic conditions for an ice
age could be realised in so short
a time as that which has elapsed
from the days of the glacial epoch.
The common view hitherto has
been that the earth has cooled in
the lapse of time; and if one did not
know that the reverse has been the
case, one would certainly assert that
this cooling must go on continuously.
Conversations with my friend and
colleague Professor Högbom, togeth-
er with the discussions above referred
to, led me to make a preliminary esti-
mate of the probable effect of a varia-
tion of the atmospheric carbonic acid
on the belief that one might in this
way probably find an explanation for
temperature variations of 5°-10°C., I
worked out the calculation more in
detail, and lay it now before the public
and the critics.
From geological researches the
fact is well established that in Ter-
116
NewPhilosopher
tiary times there existed a vegetation
and an animal life in the temperate
and arctic zones that must have been
conditioned by a much higher tem-
perature than the present in the same
regions. The temperature in the arctic
zones appears to have exceeded the
present temperature by about 8 or 9
degrees. To this genial time the ice age
succeeded, and this was one or more
times interrupted by interglacial peri-
Is the mean temper-
ature of the ground
... influenced by the
presence of heat-ab-
sorbing gases?
ods with a climate of about the same
character as the present, sometimes
even milder. When the ice age had its
greatest extent, the countries that now
enjoy the highest civilisation were cov-
ered with ice. This was the case with
Ireland, Britain (except a small part in
the south), Holland, Denmark, Swe-
den and Norway, Russia (to Kiev, Orel,
and Nijni-Novgorod), Germany and
Austria (to the Harz, Erz-Gebirge,
Dresden, and Cracow). At the same
time an ice-cap from the Alps cov-
ered Switzerland, parts of France, Ba-
varia south of the Danube, the Tyrol,
Styria, and other Austrian countries,
and descended into the northern part
of Italy. Simultaneously, too, North
America was covered with ice on the
west coast to the 47th parallel, on the
east coast to the 40th, and in the cen-
tral part to the 37th (confluence of the
Mississippi and Ohio rivers). In the
most different parts of the world, too,
we have found traces of a great ice age,
as in the Caucasus, Asia Minor, Syria,
the Himalayas, India, Thian Shan, Al-
tai, Atlas, on Mount Kenia and Kili-
mandjaro (both very near to the equa-
tor), in South Africa, Australia,
New Zealand, Kerguelen, Falk-
land Islands, Patagonia and other
parts of South America. The ge-
ologists in general are inclined to
think that these glaciations were
simultaneous on the whole earth;
and this most natural view would
probably have been generally ac-
cepted, if the theory of Croll,
which demands a genial age on
the Southern Hemisphere at the same
time as an ice age on the Northern and
vice versa, had not influenced opinion.
By measurements of the displacement
of the snow-line we arrive at the re-
sult, – and this is very concordant for
different places – that the temperature
at that time must have been 4°-5°C.
lower than at present. The last glacia-
tion must have taken place in rather
recent times, geologically speak-
ing, so that the human race certainly
had appeared at that period. Certain
American geologists hold the opin-
ion that since the close of the ice age
only some 7000 to 10,000 years have
elapsed, but this most probably is
greatly underestimated.
 NewPhilosopher A change in temperature

One may now ask, How much less (about 15 per cent) than in the
must the carbonic acid vary accord- Northern hemisphere. The ocean cur-
ing to our figures, in order that the rents, too, must there, as in the present
temperature should attain the same time, have effaced the differences in
values as in the Tertiary and Ice ages temperature at different latitudes to
respectively? A simple calculation a greater extent than in the Northern
shows that the temperature in the hemisphere. This effect also results
arctic regions would rise about 8° to from the greater nebulosity in the arc-
9°C., if the carbonic acid increased tic zones than in the neighbourhood
to 2.5 or 3 times its present value. In of the equator.
order to get the temperature of the
ice age between the 40th and 50th Svante August Arrhenius was a
parallels, the carbonic acid in the air Swedish scientist who received the Nobel
should sink to 0.62-0.55 of its pres- Prize for Chemistry in 1903. Arrhenius
ent value (lowering of temperature was the first to use basic principles of
4°-5°C.). The demands of the geolo- physical chemistry to estimate the extent
gists, that at the genial epochs the to which increases in atmospheric carbon
climate should be more uniform than dioxide are responsible for the Earth’s in-
now, accords very well with our the- creasing surface temperature.
ory. The geographical annual and di-
urnal ranges of temperature would be
partly smoothed away, if the quantity
of carbonic acid was augmented. The
reverse would be the case (at least to a
latitude of 50 from the equator), if the
carbonic acid diminished in amount.
But in both these cases I incline to
think that the secondary action due
to the regress or the progress of the
snow-covering would play the most
important role. The theory demands
also that, roughly speaking, the whole
earth should have undergone about
the same variations of temperature,
so that according to it genial or gla-
cial epochs must have occurred si-
multaneously on the whole earth.
Because of the greater nebulosity of
the Southern hemisphere, the varia-
tions must there have been a little

117
Our library
Our library
Field Notes from a
Catastrophe
Elizabeth Kolbert
Warning signs
In the same way that global warming
has gradually ceased to be merely a
theory, so, too, its impacts are no longer
just hypothetical. Nearly every major
glacier in the world is shrinking; those
in Glacier National Park are retreat-
ing so quickly it has been estimated
that they will vanish entirely by 2030.
The oceans are becoming not just
warmer but more acidic; the differ-
ence between daytime and nighttime
temperatures is diminishing; animals
are shifting their ranges poleward; and
plants are blooming days, and in some
cases weeks, earlier than they used
to. These are the warning signs that
the Charney panel cautioned against
waiting for, and while in many parts of
the globe they are still subtle enough
to be overlooked, in others they can
no longer be ignored.
118
NewPhilosopher
The Uninhabitable
Earth
David Wallace-Wells
A sliver of life
The Earth has experienced five mass
extinctions before the one we are living
through now… Unless you are a teen-
ager, you probably read in your high
school textbooks that these extinctions
were the result of asteroids. In fact, all
but the one that killed the dinosaurs
involved climate change produced
by greenhouse gas. The most notori-
ous was 250 million years ago; it be-
gan when carbon dioxide warmed the
planet by five degrees Celsius, acceler-
ated when that warming triggered the
release of methane, another greenhouse
gas, and ended with all but a sliver of
life on Earth dead. We are currently
adding carbon to the atmosphere at a
considerably faster rate; by most esti-
mates, at least ten times faster.
The Plague
Albert Camus
Ultimate indignity
By the force of things, this last rem-
nant of decorum went by the board,
and men and women were flung into
the death-pits indiscriminately. Hap-
pily, this ultimate indignity synchro-
nised with the plague’s last ravages. …
So long as the epidemic lasted, there
was never any lack of men for these
duties. The critical moment came just
before the outbreak touched the high-
water mark, and the doctor had good
reason for feeling anxious. There was
then a real shortage of man-power
both for the higher posts and for the
rough work.
 NewPhilosopher Our library

Food for thought from the New

Philosopher library. We discover
books that can change the way
you view the world.

A Treatise of Human Losing Earth The Psychopath

Nature Test

David Hume Nathaniel Rich Jon Ronson

Pleasures of the senses Better understood Danger to society

Men are also vain of the temperature
of the climate, in which they were
born; of the fertility of their native
soil; of the goodness of the wines,
fruits or victuals, produced by it; of
the softness or force of their language;
with other particulars of that kind.
These objects have plainly a reference
to the pleasures of the senses, and are
originally considered as agreeable to
the feeling, taste or hearing. How is it
possible they could ever become ob-
jects of pride, except by means of that
transition above-explained?
Nearly everything we understand
about global warming was understood
in 1979. It was, if anything, better un-
derstood. Today, almost nine out of ten
Americans do not know that scientists
agree, well beyond the threshold of
consensus, that human beings have
altered the global climate through the
indiscriminate burning of fossil fuels.
But by 1979 the main points were
already settled beyond debate, and at-
tention turned from basic principles to
a refinement of the predicted conse-
quences. Unlike string theory and ge-
netic engineering, the “greenhouse ef-
fect” – a metaphor dating to the early
twentieth century – was ancient his-
tory, described in any intro-to-biology
textbook.
“How did they diagnose you?” I asked.
“They give you a psychopath test,”
said Tony. “The Robert Hare Check-
list. They assess you for 20 personal-
ity traits. Superficial charm. Proneness
to boredom. Lack of empathy. Lack
of remorse. Grandiose sense of self-
worth. That sort of thing.
“For each one they score you a 0, 1
or 2. If your total score is 30 or more
out of 40, you’re a psychopath. That’s
it. You’re doomed. You’re labelled a
psychopath for life. They say you can’t
change. You can’t be treated. You’re
a danger to society. And then you’re
stuck somewhere like this.”

119
Documentaries NewPhilosopher

Documentaries
To view the documentaries below and many others, visit
newphilosopher.com/videos/

Siberia: The Philosophy of

The Melting Permafrost Climate Change

newphilosopher.com/videos/siberia newphilosopher.com/videos/phil-climate-change/

Russian geophysicist
Sergei Zimov together
with his son Nikita want
to prevent the permafrost
from thawing due to
climate change. The ice in
Siberia contains microbes
that once thawed could
tilt the world climate
beyond our control.
“It’s real. The changes
are happening. They’re
very visible, they’re
photographable, they’re
measureable. There’s
no significant scientific
dispute about that. And
the great irony and tragedy
of our time, is a lot of
the general public thinks
scientists are still arguing
about that. Science is not
arguing about it.”
– James Balog

120

Around the web
A climate of mind
Anyone who cares about climate
change has to be tired of the vitriolic
tirades that masquerade as public de-
bate over that issue. Climate change
has become a rhetorical contest akin
to a sports match, with each side seek-
ing total victory – often through the
cynical manipulation of fear, distrust,
and intolerance. No wonder the public
is confused.
https://ssir.org/books/reviews/entry/a_
climate_of_mind
Devil’s dictionary
PLAGUE: n. In ancient times a
general punishment of the innocent
for admonition of their ruler, as in
the familiar instance of Pharaoh the
Immune. The plague as we of to-day
have the happiness to know it is merely
Nature’s fortuitous manifestation of
her purposeless objectionableness.
@TrueSciPhi
“How astonishing, when the
lights of health go down,
the undiscovered countries
that are then disclosed,
what wastes and deserts of
the soul a slight attack of
influenza brings into view...”
Virginia Woolf
Follow New Philosopher on social media
NewPhilosopher
Global warming and
violent behaviour
Mary Claire King, as much as any
individual scholar, has changed how
we think about what it means to be
human. She did so using genetics as
a lens through which to see what was
otherwise invisible.. It was King who
first identified a key gene in breast can-
cer. It was King who helped to identity
the missing dead in Argentina in the
1980s. It would also be King who, in
1975, first compare the genetic simi-
larity of humans and chimpanzees. It
was known chimpanzees and humans
were similar, kin, but just how similar?
https://www.psychologicalscience.org/
observer/global-warming-and-violent-
behavior
Climate & mental health
When people think about cli-
mate change, they probably think first
about its effects on the environment,
and possibly on their physical health.
But climate change also takes a sig-
nificant toll on mental health, accord-
ing to a new report released by the
Around the web
New Philosopher is on
Tw i tt er a n d Fa c ebo ok - jo in us !
Video: Vanishing
We’re entering the Earth’s sixth
era of extinction – and it’s the
first time humans are to blame.
This video introduces you to the
key species, and the people who
are trying to prevent them from
vanishing.
newphilosopher.com/videos/
vanishing/
American Psychological Association
and ecoAmerica. Climate change-in-
duced severe weather and other natu-
ral disasters have the most immediate
effects on mental health in the form of
the trauma and shock due to personal
injuries, loss of a loved one, damage
to or loss of personal property or even
the loss of livelihood, according to the
report. Terror, anger, shock and other
intense negative emotions that can
dominate people’s initial response may
eventually subside, only to be replaced
by post-traumatic stress disorder.
https://www.apa.org/news/press/
releases/2017/03/climate-mental-
health
121
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125
X-risks and Existentialism NewPhilosopher

126 Illustration by Aida Novoa & Carlos Egan


by Mariana Alessandri
X-risks and
Existentialism
In Fear and Trembling, Søren Ki-
erkegaard’s pseudonymous author Jo-
hannes de Silentio admonished men
who wanted to “go further” than faith,
because they failed to realise that faith
was a task for a lifetime. These rash
individuals, whom he disparagingly
called “assistant professors”, didn’t un-
derstand the first thing about faith if
they planned to go beyond it. Today,
assistant professors and Silicon Valley
techies promise that one day we’ll sur-
pass humanity by becoming transhu-
man. When we merge with super-in-
telligent AI, we’ll finally conquer our
limitations, eradicate our suffering,
and vanquish death. Oxford philoso-
pher Nick Bostrom even argues that
when we are enhanced by AI, we’ll be
better equipped to promote the exis-
tential value of life. Transhuman 2.0s
will be more effective than us measly
human 1.0s at spreading the ideas of
world-historical-individuals like Pla-
to, Nietzsche, Martin Luther King, Jr.,
NewPhilosopher
and presumably even Kierkegaard. As
transhumans, Bostrom thinks we will
do life better, that is, if we don’t kill
ourselves first.
Before 1945, the only existential
danger to humanity was comets, ac-
cording to Existential Risk (X-risk)
scholars. Shortly afterwards, we made
the hydrogen bomb, raising the num-
ber of threats against humanity from
one to two. 75 years later we face 23
X-risks, according to Bostrom, and
most are our own doing. That’s a dan-
gerously sharp increase in the number
of threats not just to my life but yours.
One man-made X-risk is climate
change. Another is our robots going
Oedipal on us. We seem to be speed-
ing up our extinction, not reducing its
likelihood.
There is something that feels fat-
ed about the race to kill ourselves –
I suspect that we’re engineering our
doom, although perhaps behind our
own backs. I’m not talking about
Nick Land’s flavour of acceleration-
ism, where we intentionally cut to
the worst case-scenario to see what
comes next. I mean something more
idiotic and common, like when a fac-
tory directs their toxic drain-pipe to
a nearby lake. We’ve been designing
X-risks and Existentialism
our end and calling it progress for
decades now, until someone labelled
it global warming.
The transhumanist fix for global
warming – the problem of humans’
excessive control over nature – is more
control over nature. Technological
pessimist Phillip Verdoux thinks we
are too deep in the problem to quit
now. So, while he admits that we get
ourselves into jams like these – glob-
al warming, vicious robots, and other
X-risks – by doubling-down on tech-
nology, he thinks we can only save our-
selves by turning to it: befriending it.
The idea is that we’ll just make things
worse if we start pushing hackers un-
derground; at least above ground they
can be regulated.
If the pessimist’s turn to technology
surprises us, the techno-optimists’ en-
thusiasm for it shouldn’t. They believe
we’re wasting the little time we have
left to save ourselves before Boston
sinks into the Atlantic. The problem for
these transhumanists isn’t that we have
manipulated nature; it’s that we haven’t
done it enough. They propose that we
aggressively fund technology and sci-
ence to beat the Earth’s overheating.
Technogaians constitute a contentious
type of environmentalist capable of
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X-risks and Existentialism
joining libertarians and democrats on
the issue of clean tech. By encouraging
AI, genetic engineering, and bio-hack-
ing, they think we can reverse global
warming, feed everyone, find cures to
diseases, and possibly also live forever.
Gennady Stolyarov, chairman of the
Transhumanist party, made a list of
technological solutions to combat cli-
mate change that includes self-driving
cars and GMOs. He supports
US Republican 2020 presidential
candidate Zoltan Istvan, who also
believes that by funding tech we
can beat the Earth’s collapse and,
in the process, become superior
versions of ourselves.
Didn’t social media in 2019
guarantee that the definition of in-
sanity most often attributed (prob-
ably incorrectly) to Albert Einstein
would forever be seared into our brains?
If we recall that in the last 75 years we’ve
aggressively multiplied our X-risks, and
yet we insist on doing more of what got
us here, then we’ve gone bananas. Hu-
bris had already been discredited by the
time it became a sin, and yet it nicely
names why we keep trying to take our-
selves out, only to throw up a hasty Hail
Mary in the eleventh hour. It’s nicer to
call it curiosity.
Instead of assistant professors, let’s
imagine transhumanists as Pandoras,
except that instead of the Gods order-
ing them not to open their box of ills,
the warning comes from Luddites: a
handful of philosophers and religious
geezers who still believe in outdat-
ed concepts like hubris. Naturally,
the transhumanists wave them off,
sign on to the project of vanquish-
ing death, and get to work bio- and
nano-hacking their way to immortal-
ity. In contrast to the Homeric and
Biblical literature that paints curios-
ity as a woman, these Pandoras are
128
NewPhilosopher
overwhelmingly male, and many come
from Silicon Valley. Curious men
striving to overcome limitation is not a
new story, and not even a new deadly
story, when you consider colonialism’s
obsession with discovery and expan-
sion. But in addition to killing or en-
slaving those people over there and
greedily extracting from the planet its
shiniest and tastiest treats, now we’re
Perhaps boredom
best explains the
increase in X-risks;
that, or an old-fash-
ioned fear of death.
cannibalising ourselves. Perhaps Pan-
dora wasn’t propelled by curiosity (or
hubris) after all, but by self-loathing.
Nietzsche accused the priest-
ly class of promoting weakness and
shaming strength, in short, of hating
humanity. The Ray Kurzweils of tran-
shumanism also seem to hate human-
ity (though they sometimes lean on
Nietzsche’s Superman for credibility)
by targeting for removal everything
that makes us us, what tech critic and
lay philosopher Evgeny Morozov
calls features of humanity, not bugs.
My list captures our least photogenic
– but all too human – side: pain, suf-
fering, sadness, inefficiency, mistakes,
aporias, frailty, hesitation, doubt, con-
fusion, fragility, and of course, death.
When we vanquish death we’ll no
longer fear it, the logic goes, and dit-
to for suffering and limitation. But
death, suffering, and limitation are
three of the most existentially rec-
ognisable features of humanity, not
to mention fear, angst, care, sadness,
loneliness, despair, and grief. Try-
ing to eradicate these “weaknesses”
sounds like toxic masculinity’s been
given security clearance and a park-
ing spot. When we eliminate our un-
sightly existential features, what of us
will remain?
In 1850, Arthur Schopenhauer
wrote that humans would wage war on
each other out of boredom if suffering
were eradicated. Perhaps bore-
dom best explains the increase in
X-risks; that, or an old-fashioned
fear of death. Martin Heidegger
located the uniqueness of human
existence in its ability to care about
itself and worry about its own ex-
tinction. Almost everything we do
counts for him as “fleeing from
death,” which makes the transhu-
manists’ flight from death two-
fold and ironic: they’ll hasten death
out of disguised terror.
23 X-risks cause us more anxiety
than one did, so if Kierkegaard was
right that anxiety makes us human,
then we’re headed into a still more
human future, not a transhuman one.
And we’ll never get further than hu-
manity as long as we bungle human-
ity as badly as Kierkegaard’s assistant
professors bungled faith. We need a
new existentialism to help us see that
a human being with no existential
features simply isn’t one. Just as Ki-
erkegaard’s assistant professors were
surprised that they couldn’t get be-
yond faith, I predict that transhuman-
ists will be surprised that they can’t get
beyond being human without losing
their humanity – that Bostrom’s idea
of broadcasting the juiciest bits of hu-
manity out of a Turing-approved voice
box will fail to catch. In the end, there
is no transhuman; there’s only human
life and human death, which, like
faith, is a task for a lifetime.
 NewPhilosopher

“The saddest aspect of life right now is that

science gathers knowledge faster than society
gathers wisdom.”
Isaac Asimov

Striding Thoth, the god of writing, accounting, and all things intellectual; 332-30 BCE, The Met.

129
13 questions NewPhilosopher

What is your demon?

13 questions: Trying to solve problems that are too big for me. But I will keep trying,
I guess.

Which thinker has had the greatest influence on your life?

Yuval Harari and Byung-chul Han: one spoke to how I interpret the
world today, adding new perspectives, and the other to the inner side,
how I feel about it all.

What do you doubt most?

News. I trust some people in that field, but just a few.

If you could change one thing about the world, what would that be?
I would like us to be wiser as a species.

What is happiness?
It sounds silly, but not being divided, with your body here, your head or
your heart anywhere else, brief moments when I am there as a whole in
one place, happy. Then always something happens…

What does it mean to be human?

In Buenos Aires right now we are about to enter stage 2 of the
pandemic, so I guess we will put that definition to the test.

Narda What illusion do you suffer from?

Greatness, of course. I really think we can fix our food system and that
I can help a little bit.

Lepes If you could choose, what would you have for your last meal?
Oh, I really know this one; easy. The best of each. In season, the best
in the world of every fruit and vegetable. Wild strawberry from Italy,
soft and sweet pineapple from the north of Brazil, tomatoes from
Santorini…

The question you’d most like to ask others?

Do you cook? If not... why not?

What is your motto?

Do. Always do.

In conversation with Zan Boag What is a good death?

Narda Lepes is an Argentinian TV
producer, chef, and author.
That’s very difficult because a sudden, quiet one, with no pain, is better
for the one dying, but rips apart the ones who are left behind. And
when the ones who will keep living have time to prepare, you suffer. So
I guess a balance between those two.

What do people accuse you of?

Being too direct, and forward, that some sense as a bit rude.

What is the meaning of life?

Illustration by Aida Novoa & Carlos Egan Not much, I think.

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CLIMATE