Words&Dirt

“In time, coyote may give rise to a dozen new canids. Collembola might found whole new orders of invertebrates, with lifeways beyond our imagining. And if some sort of upright ape is among the array, it might not bear much resemblance to those who pulled the plug, pushed the plunger, pulled the trigger on the chamber that, oops! really was loaded.

Our moral sense is really the collective genetic and social experience of what’s good for us and what isn’t. Just like any other species, we are subject to natural selection of the most advantageous traits for the species in the long run. And that can change: love without issue, anathema once, has become heroic and adaptive. Evolution never before encountered self-interest such as ours, empowered by such powerful tools for planetary alteration: the ability of the individual animal or group to frustrate the good of the whole. To my mind, the greatest reason for bringing an ethical response to bear on annealing the damaged climate is to give evolution a fair shake in the next iteration.

Our moral imperative to turn down the heat is merely our mandate from nature to adapt––to survive. But fat chance we’ve got, now. For this species, and the many others we are dragging down with us, it is late in the game. Cap-and-trade is unlikely to do the job, especially if economic and population growth remain the order of the day. With luck, the smart and humble adherents of the small and the local may survive to have another go after the larger collapse, may even thrive under the uncomfortable and inconvenient conditions to come. But I doubt very much that the culture we know will long persist, absent truly radical changes in the way it works. We are the maladaptive ape, at twilight. Evolution will mock our tardy rage.”

––Moral Ground: Ethical Action for a Planet in Peril, “Evening Falls on the Maladaptive Ape,” by Robert Michael Pyle, pg. 128

“‘There can be only one magician in England.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean that two of any thing is a most uncomfortable number. One may do as he pleases. Six may get along well enough. But two must always struggle for mastery. Two must always watch each other. The eyes of all the world will be on two, uncertain which of them to follow.'”

––Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, by Susanna Clarke, pg. 542