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Friday, 19 May 2023
Introducing
THE GATHERING, EARTH EDITION
Time is not on our side – we must join forces, now
Many years from now, our political fights will be a thing of a forgotten past. Our vanities. Our greed. Our excessive consumption. Our recklessness with other life we share the world with. Our solid myths that we were no fools for taking over an entire planet in less than a few hundred years while slaughtering everything in our path. Our even more solid myths that we are destined for greatness no matter what, and responsible for none of the darkness.
All of these, with the rest of humanity, will one day belong to times long buried in the great geological dig in the sky. It is on all of us to help make this inevitable moment of ultimate entropy happen in a future that is many thousands of years ahead of us.
But as I write this, it feels as though that moment of reckoning may come much, much earlier. Just this week, sobering headlines warned us that the real stuff is going to get even more real: we are likely to breach 1.5C climate threshold by 2027. Just four years from now, we might reach the point we were hoping to keep off until 2050. The tipping points that these developments bring to us will not be pretty.
Additionally, it is indeed an expression of our ultimate vanity to think that our efforts to reverse the effects of the climate crisis are about saving the planet Earth.
This planet has lived happily through many cataclysmic events so far – like five seminal extinctions (for the geeks among us, they are Ordovician-Silurian, Late Devonian, Permian-Triassic, Triassic-Jurassic and finally, the Cretaceous-Paleogene - aka dinosaurs’ end). There were also countless smaller events that were also devastating to life, like Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum (PET) that saw the average temperature grow between 5 and 8 degrees Celsius over a relatively short period of 200,000 years, some 56-million years ago.
There were Snowball Earth events, when the entire surface froze, twice, for about 10-million years each, between 710- and 640-million years ago.
There were gigantic floods that ripped the continental surface into shreds, almost as bad as the moving glaciers have.
The Earth was bombarded by asteroids (was even hit by a small planet that almost shattered it and caused the creation of the Moon), and showered by the ash from supervolcanoes which obscured the sun for many years at the time. The Earth was also doused by sulphur dioxide at times, and heated when carbon was going nuts. It got near-fully iced when the oxygen went wild and eerily quiet for some years after the dinosaurs died off.
Humanity got lucky to have lived through a rare cycle of near-perfect, quiet climate and relatively low volcanic activity.
And yet, planet Earth is perfectly fine with all of these periods of catastrophes and quiet. It does not complain. It just is.
But humanity is not fine with its own possible extinction. We are not fighting to save Earth, though it would be most wonderful to see its life flourish in its fullness once again around us. We are fighting to save us, humans, on Planet Earth.
A common misconception about humanity’s demise in the climate crisis is that it will play out akin to a scene from Armageddon. We are not going to receive a six weeks advance notification to tell us that the planet is going to explode. It will look very much like how it already looks: flash flooding, wildfires, bleaching coral, failing crops, rising sea levels and with that a social unrest that will make the riots of July 2021 look like a skirmish.
We only need to reflect on our most recent history as a nation to understand how humans will react when their homes are washed away or burnt down, when food scarcity forces prices to become a luxury and not a right, and when the water simply runs out.
Humans will fight to survive. It is quite literally built into our brains to do so. Anarchy will be the only constant. Migration to parts of the country not yet resembling ground zero will occur until they do. Cities all around the world will be submerged under water, and the quality of life we are so used to will become but a lost dream.
To fight that ultimate fight, we need to be smart, resourceful and indefatigable. We also need to be compassionate, strategic and measured while still being brave and determined. We need to work together, as communities, as countries and economies. We need to work as Team Humanity to gain a shot at having a chance of attempting this near-impossible feat of engineering our very future, this time for the good of every single one of us – a real First for our modern, selfish times.
The solutions do exist.
Daily Maverick’s contribution to this fight is Our Burning Planet, a 10-person strong team that devotes its full attention to these topics:
- Climate crisis
- Global heating
- Ecosystem damage and biodiversity loss
- Pollution, in all its forms
- Food insecurity
- Water insecurity,
- Energy transition and renewables
- Corruption
We’ve been at it for four years now and, for the first time, we are ready for our first big conference:
It will be a remarkable collection of talent - the people who really have something to say and know what they’re talking about.
Speakers include: Andre de Ruyter, Tendai Biti, Dr Imtiaz Sooliman, Katrina vanden Heuwel, Kate Handley, Bill Mckibben, Kumi Naidoo… we’ve got experts in agriculture, AI, economics and energy – people have dedicated their lives to understanding the problem and are ready to share their solutions.
In order to fight for our own survival, we need to do it together. If we want to help ourselves, it is the very same ourselves who must do the work. We cannot farm this out. We need to learn, understand, and get into action. This is the one modern fight we can’t outsource. This is about our survival, and it must be our work that goes into this.
Are you ready to fight for our common humanity? We all need to start somewhere. How about next Friday? DM
Tickets are available from Quicket here.
If you can’t make it to the CTICC on the day, you can register to watch the virtual event here.
For those of you able to attend in person, there are limited tickets from R75 available here. As a Maverick Insider, you get 50% off tickets to The Gathering: Earth Edition. To make use of this Insider benefit, use the promo code GATHERINGEARTHMI2023 at checkout.
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