The Present Through the Lens of the Future – Part 1 – Climate Change

Imagine it is 500 years in the future and there is a student whatever-the-equivalent of ‘reading’ whatever-is-the-equivalent of a ‘book’ of history^*Given that ‘history is written by the victors’ and the narrative recorded in the ‘book’ will thus depend on the path society has taken, we are necessarily predicting the future when we seek to answer the question.  But absurd idealizations of objectivity aside, how might the present moment be viewed? about our present. What will be considered the grand challenge of our time^*One boundary condition is necessarily that there is someone to ask the question, thus some degree of ‘victory condition’ must have been met (from an existential perspective).  So in answering the question, perhaps it is impossible to avoid the bias of our own perspective on what must be true if we are indeed going to survive.?

The contenders:

• Climate Change
• Finite Resources
• A World Without Growth
• Evolving Our Values
• Expanding ‘I’
• Coping with Acceleration
• Digital Life
• Polarization vs. Homogeneity

Climate Change

An obvious front runner, and a personal focus of mine.^*ultimately, I work on climate because I want to feel agency in an arena satisfying my particular proclivities and in a way that aligns with the narrative I want to be able to tell about my life

Requiring simultaneous globally-aligned action on the axes of technology, finance, policy, and culture certainly seems tough enough to make climate change a prime contender for the title of ‘grand challenge.’

But why do we suffer from the potential ravishes of climate change in the first place? It surely isn’t something we chose (in the sense that we wouldn’t have wished for a negative externality associated with industrialization). It’s a consequence of the emergent propensity of human civilization to demand evermore energy and things, while simultaneously exerting dominion over the biosphere, coming up against the finitude of an ecosystem.

Is there anything objectively wrong with using a resource to benefit the quality of life of a population? I won’t deign to guess at your moral framework, but it probably isn’t too much of a stretch to assert that some combination of intention and consequence comprise the moral calculus of our actions. If our intentions were not morally bankrupt, then it is in the consequences of them that we find ourselves at ethical risk.^*Don’t worry too much about this though – the concept of ethics on this planet probably dies with us too And, indeed, we find ourselves presently unable (or unwilling) to change course, of taking appropriate action, despite a preponderance of evidence that we must. This does not make our historical choices to serve human progress unethical (or unsound), but our present knowledge of the potential travesty-in-waiting of our own making means that we can no longer claim ignorance to the choice that we are making.

Climate is not the only consequence of human action that bears moral and existential risk. And it’s not the only travesty that we fail to address despite our culpability. However, it is indeed the most threatening and most global bellwether of our condition. As such, perhaps climate change is not the grand challenge of our time, but indeed a symptom of some deeper crucible our species must face.