Herman Melville, from Moby Dick
What did I bring home from my trip to the Guadalupe Mountains? First and foremost, I brought with me what is best about most of my travels—the memory of a place that I previously knew nothing about—a place that has now become a part of me. From now on, when I think of the Guadalupe Mountains, all of the images and knowledge of that place will “flash upon that inward eye”, as Wordsworth put it, and I will be the richer for having had the experience. That kind of wealth can never be taken away, and it can endure any economic recession.
If time can be defined as the ‘duration of change’, then the Guadalupe Mountains have also given me a rather unsettling new perspective on the nature of time. Although I was aware of the acceleration of global warming and climate change caused by our greenhouse gas emissions before I visited the Guadalupe Mountains, my experience there has brought this issue into focus in an interesting way. During my walk in the Park, I stood upon mountains that provide a document of dramatic changes that have occurred over eons of time. They were made during the Permian period by the life forms that also gave us our fossil fuels. The same mountains have provided a sky island in the desert that allowed species such as the madrone to endure the dramatic changes in the climate that have occurred over the last 10,000 years since the close of the last ice age. But the Guadalupe Mountains are only a small part of the larger document of nature that has recorded unmistakable evidence that the Earth and its climate have changed dramatically and will change in the future over vast stretches of time. We now know that the continents move, mountains are formed over millions of years, the climate changes from ice age to ice age in 100,000 year cycles, species become extinct while new ones evolve, and to paraphrase John Muir, the world that was once created continues to be created.
In contrast to the duration of the vast span of geological time, the duration of my lifespan on Earth is so brief that in my old way of thinking, these two measures of time don’t have anything to do with each other—at least not in any practical way. However, time is no longer moving so slowly now that we have opened Pandora’s Box with our drilling rigs and released vast amounts of carbon that previously lay buried deep beneath the surface for millions of years. In a sense, we are altering time by thrusting our environment headlong into changes that would normally occur over thousands of years. As a result, the normal cycle of climate change is being accelerated with potentially devastating consequences during my brief life span and that of my children and grandchildren. A few short years ago, it would have seemed absurd to ask questions like “Will the north polar ice cap disappear during my lifetime? Will global warming increase the occurrence of drought and lead to mass migrations and starvation? Will the level of the oceans rise and drive many people from their homes on low lying islands and coastal cities and villages? Will the loss of the polar ice cap or increasing levels of CO2 and methane trigger an abrupt and devastating jump in temperature occurring over only a few decades, such as those that have occurred at times in the previous climate cycles of past millennia?” Our experience today is so different from that of past generations when a person could be born and die of old age without any noticeable change in the climate.
How could we have been so blind-sided by this problem? Humans are not the only animals that blindly destroy their own habitat. For example, large populations of snow geese are destroying their arctic breeding habitat around Hudson Bay, and increasing numbers of elephants without natural predators are doing similar damage to their African habitats. The difference between humans and other animal species is that we are doing it on such a massive scale to the detriment of all other species from the mountain tops to the depths of the ocean. But strangely, our similarity to other animal species is that most humans tend to live “in the moment” with little thought that our activity might ultimately destroy our own habitat. Even today, we continue to live in the moment for various reasons. For some it is ignorance. For others it is denial for economic reasons. For others it is an ingrained skepticism of the findings of science and the opinions of intellectuals. Most of us simply react to what we can actually see and experience. For example, our parents built fallout shelters in the early 1960s after seeing the devastating explosions of nuclear weapons on television and hearing the frightening threats of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev and the news of the Cuban Missile Crisis. But today when confronted with the news that globe is warming, the response is often very passive, such as “Well, I guess we will enjoy the milder winters” or “There’s really not much that we can do about it anyway, and I’ll be dead and gone before it becomes a real crisis.” Although the human species has evolved to the point of being able to develop technologies that can destroy the environment of the entire world by a precipitating a nuclear winter or by accelerating global warming, it remains to be seen whether we have evolved enough to be able to prevent these things from happening.
And what if the worst does happen? Will the world come to an end if global warming continues unchecked and spirals out of control? Far from it! Natural selection will take its course, species will evolve and adapt as they have for millions of years, and life will flourish. But that bright forecast doesn’t help us answer the big question: What will happen in the near future to the many people who populate the Earth during these changing times? The painful answer may become clear only after we reach the point of no return.
I don’t know if I will ever return to the Guadalupe mountains. I would love to see the conifer forest in the high country and the beautiful madrones and Bigtooth maples before they are overcome by the ever-warming climate. But I feel driven to go and see many other things before they disappear. My next trip will probably be to Glacier National Park to see the glaciers before they shrink to nothing. Although the future seems dark and uncertain, I can see that the story of Pandora’s Box may have some comfort to offer. According to the ancients, after the box was opened and it released all of its ills, toils, and woes, one last thing remained in the bottom of the box. That thing was “hope”. My hope is that the superior intelligence of humans that made it possible to open Pandora’s Box in the first place, will be the thing that saves us from self-destruction. I hope that we have evolved to the point of possessing the intelligence and the will to stop destroying our own habitat. I hope that it’s not too late to repair the damage. I hope…
FINIS
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