This past week I had the good fortune to watch an extraordinary documentary film feature entitled Expedition To The End of the World. This film drew together several environmental concerns, and suggested to me a different way of comprehending the obtuseness of our current economic overlords. If capitalism is a religion (after all, it does have "-ism" as a part of the word), then our American intellectual nemesis, Science, may unintentionally be pointing the way to an acceptance of our inevitable warmer future. Science, it has been said, begins with wonder, so let us view with awe these processes that we have accelerated to unsafe speeds, and wonder at the no longer surprising results. Follow me if you will, please, below the swirling orange North Atlantic Gyre.
About an expedition to Greenland's eastern coast and fjords, with it's stark and beautiful landscapes, amazingly captured on film by principle cinematographer Torben Forsberg, this film depicts a sort of onboard panel discussion between artists, scientists, and mariners, about the future of a human species which can no longer adapt to the rapid speed of climate change.
The revelation for me almost came in hindsight, as I have always held a notion of scientists as rational and objectively detached observers. And indeed they are, and very much so in this film, to the extent that they proclaim on camera their neutrality in regards to whether we can save our species or not; at the least they appear to feign indifference. They even observe that is their job merely to observe the process, and not to philosophize about it.
This bemused detachment (my phrase for it) of more and more scientists, who call our attention to processes running amuck, only to have their warnings ignored or even censored, is actually becoming more and more evident in their writings. E.O. Wilson and others openly speculate on what other species will replace us, or at least fill our niche as the dominant species, after we're gone.
Life will continue without us, they say. Our economic growth has outpaced our ability to adapt to dwindling resources. CO2 levels will level off after a few thousand years of our absence. Other forms of life will arise.
So all of our art, literature and music will be gone, perhaps buried under new sand deserts, just as is the case with the tombs of Egypt, while the melted tundra of Greenland produces a new and verdant Eden. So the ignored prophets seem to be saying, as they gaze into the future from the Olympian perch of a science that our culture has grown to mistrust at our own peril.
Perhaps it will be the case that our response to this predicament will be like the proverbial frog put in lukewarm water and then slowly boiled to death. In the meantime, I feel comfortable in asserting that the scientists, even as they continue to be ignored by the politicians, whose stock in trade is to promise pie in the sky while lining their own pockets, will go on measuring the rise in sea level, quantifying the loss of biodiversity in the acidifying oceans, and monitoring the release of methane from the melting permafrost, all the while studying and writing on how the interconnecting processes actually work. They will marvel at the intricacy and inevitability of it all. They will no longer need to tell us that it is too late to adapt. We will already have figured that out for ourselves.