Sacred Headwaters #1: Uninhabitable Earth
An introduction to Sacred Headwaters, the climate crisis, and Project Drawdown
Welcome to Sacred Headwaters, a bi-weekly newsletter that aims to guide a co-learning process about the existential issues and planetary limitations facing humanity and about how we can reorient civilization in a way that will enable us to thrive for centuries to come.
The climate crisis is the foremost issue we’re facing, but as you’ll learn in the readings over the coming months, it’s just one of a number of issues with the way our current human civilization has integrated itself into the planetary system. Traditional western media outlets cover the climate crisis, but they tend to focus on alarmist headlines and give a reductionist view of both the problems and the solutions. The goal of this newsletter is to provide a deeper understanding of the issues, what’s at stake, and how we might approach mitigating them, up to and including restructuring our civilization to live within the bounds of the earth system. Each newsletter will include an annotated list of articles — targeting one or so hours of reading every two weeks (it’s a bit closer to two this week) — and a book recommendation. Feel free to bite off as much as you can chew. I hope these readings will help you understand and explore what a meaningful and sustainable life looks like and encourage discussion and dissemination of information about the ecological crises confronting humanity.
Many of the readings will be depressing. It’s easy to fall into a feeling of helplessness or nihilism. I’ll be doing my best to include pieces about proactive steps and hopeful opportunities in each newsletter. Humanity can survive these crises, but to understand how, we need to understand the stakes involved and the risks of both inaction and insufficient action.
What’s in a Name?
The Sacred Headwaters -- or Klabona -- is a region of northwest British Columbia in Canada; it is a vast wilderness, one of the most biodiverse regions in Canada, and the source of three of North America’s largest salmon-bearing rivers. It’s also under constant threat of industrial development, including, most recently, massive-scale open pit mining that puts the entire ecosystem at risk. The Sacred Headwaters is emblematic of the overarching challenge we are facing -- learning how to live within earth’s means as part of the earth system instead of separate from it, depleting it. It’s also a place where we can find lessons about how to do that. The First Nations have lived there for thousands of years, harvesting salmon and other natural resources in a sustainable cycle. Indigenous culture has much to teach us about what real sustainability looks like, and we need to open our minds to every learning opportunity if we’re going to continue inhabiting the earth for the foreseeable future.
Sacred Headwaters #1: Uninhabitable Earth
The Uninhabitable Earth, David Wallace-Wells, NY Magazine (1 hour)
In this article, Wallace-Wells explores the real-world impacts predicted by some of the worst model scenarios of climate change. Spoiler alert — they’re bad. The article (and his subsequent book) paints a grim but sadly plausible picture of a world that ultimately becomes completely inhospitable to human life. The article was received with some trepidation by the scientific community, not because of inaccuracies, but because of a long-standing fear that scaring the public too much would lead to inaction; the last two decades have shown that avoiding fear also leads to inaction. For some additional context, according to the UN Environment Programme’s latest report (published two years after Wallace-Wells’ article), we’re only marginally on track to limit warming to 3.2°C, and that’s assuming we begin to make progress now, an assumption that has proven false at every turn thus far.
Pay attention to how you feel as you read this article. Does it drive you to want to take action? To learn more? Does it make you more or less open to ambitious climate policy?
It’s easy to read this and give up, despair, or deny it in some way. But we are at a crossroads. We can either work to fundamentally change our civilization and rethink our relationship with the natural world (reducing GHG emissions along the way), or we can carry on, business-as-usual, until the scenarios he describes play out.
Summary for Policymakers of IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C approved by governments, Science Daily (10 minutes)
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a UN body, has documented the scientific consensus on climate change over the years which has generally yielded a very measured and conservative assessment of risk and required action. In recent years, this measured assessment has shifted as the outlook for humanity has worsened, and their 2018 Special Report on the impacts of 1.5 °C of warming makes clear the mere 20-30 year timeline for potentially catastrophic outcomes and the need for immediate and drastic action. Science Daily provides a good summary in the linked article and David Wallace-Wells does the same in a NY Mag article. For me, this timeline makes something clear that traditional media fail to communicate -- the potential impacts do not just apply to our children’s futures. They are impacting much of the world now and within 20-30 years, those impacts will be broadly catastrophic.
Project Drawdown (30 minutes)
Project Drawdown is one of the most comprehensive and non-reductive assessments of technocratic approaches to climate change mitigation. Chad Frischmann’s linked TED talk gives a good overview of their work and their website goes further, putting real numbers on a variety of issues and solutions. I highly recommend perusing both as they give an objective perspective on the real issues at play that is hard to find elsewhere. While I think there’s much more we have to do beyond these “solutions” to reach sustainability, the numbers and actions presented here give a semblance of hope that fighting the climate crisis really is possible. They also put some of the more popular mechanisms into context: for example, a carbon tax, while important, is not a silver bullet and must be part of a holistic package of approaches that span all aspects of modern society.
Book Recommendation: The Water Knife, Paolo Bacigalupi
The Water Knife is a fictional assessment of what will happen when the Colorado River system in the American southwest runs out of water. Southern California, Las Vegas, Phoenix, and much of the rest of the region depend on Colorado River water to survive, and climate modeling suggests that Colorado River flows will diminish 50% or more over the coming decades. The book is a fascinating exploration of a terrifyingly realistic situation. It’s a great read as fiction, and a sobering reality check on what the world may look like in just a couple decades.
Like what you see?
Sign up now so you don’t miss the next issue.
Sacred Headwaters relies on word of mouth to reach more people. Tell your friends!