By Sally Chappell

Guest Columnist

While speculation swirls surrounding the origin of COVID-19, there is no doubt about the origin of our present climate crisis: it’s us.  

There is no one of us better able to describe how the crisis happened and the responsible parties than Bill McKibben in his latest book, Falter: Has the human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?  McKibben has stuck with the issue of climate change for 30 years having written the first book for the general public about global warming, The End of Nature, in 1989. He synthesizes the topic of climate change and its as yet lack of remedial intervention with dubious advances in technology that are happening quickly and without crucial examination. How did we get where we are, and what can we do about it?  

He authored Enough in 2003 describing emerging technology capable of altering the human genome and pleading for its halt. Of all the forms of murder committed since the beginning human history — suicide, homicide, infanticide, genocide — we are now poised unwittingly to exterminate ourselves through germline genetic alterations, runaway robotics and artificial general intelligence. Humanity has become a geologic force with the power to render the earth unlivable by present standards.  

We can also alter humanity in a Frankensteinian way.  McKibben names the people with aspirations to make “designer babies” and robots that could take control of humanity. As a minority noisily balks at the science of the climate change, another extremely slim minority of scientists and their patrons quietly go about their work in laboratories unbeknownst to an inattentive majority of us. How you ask, can they do this? McKibben’s answer: by us letting it happen. 

As the window of opportunity to address the climate crisis narrows after 30 years of warning (and warming), COVID-19 is showing us just how quickly we can change our habits when it comes to life and death on an individual basis. It is our strong sense of individualism in much of the developed world that McKibben fingers as the cause of our woes, with Ayn Rand as the fundamental instigator of right wing, antigovernment, anti-society thinking. The extraordinarily powerful and wealthy are not willing to accept the limits of biology and physics. Their ambitions do not represent progress but rather hubris. McKibben argues that if we allow scientists and Silicon Valley technocrat, billionaire libertarians to engineer human change while allowing fossil fuel executives and their funders to commit treason against the planet, we, the people, will commence an age in human history unrecognizable to all of us and not wanted by the majority of us.  Democracy is undergoing its greatest stress test.  

McKibben’s eloquent argument is a conservative one.  We need to replace the paradigm of economic growth with repair. We live in a beautiful world, and our species is an integral part of it. We are special in that we have the power of choice. Much of our technological progress has been welcome, and perhaps our next leap forward as a species could come about through a combination of solar panels, a technology that already exists, and nonviolence, a movement begun by Jesus and in modern times applied by such people as Henry David Thoreau, Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Nelson Mandela. Solar panels and nonviolence — those two items give Bill McKibben hope that there is an outside chance that we will turn away from the road never traveled by humanity.  Attending to his message requires a social response every bit as profound as our response to COVID-19.

Sally Chappell is a resident of Bridgton.