This Changes Everything

relatively small change in one element of climate led to abrupt changes in the system as a whole

I thought of this advice when I left my hideout and traveled to the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas, one of the most exciting living laboratories for cutting-edge, agro-ecological farming methods. Wes Jackson, the founder and president of the center, says that he is trying to solve what he calls “the 10,000-year-old problem of agriculture.”29 That problem, in essence, is that ever since humans started planting seeds and tilling fields, they have been stripping the soil of its fertility.

Carrying a baby is one of the hardest physical tasks we can ask of ourselves, she pointed out, and if our bodies decline the task, it is often a sign that they are facing too many other demands—high-stress work that keeps us in a near constant state of “fight or flight,” perhaps, or the physical stress of having to metabolize toxins or allergens, or just the stresses of modern life (or some combination of all of the above)

Indeed vast amounts of money and cutting-edge technology are devoted to practices that actively interfere with the life cycle. We have a global agricultural model that has succeeded in making it illegal for farmers to engage in the age-old practice of saving seeds, the building blocks of life, so that new seeds have to be repurchased each year. And we have a global energy model that values fossil fuels over water, where all life begins and without which no life can survive.

And yet despite the many studies that have sought to document the impact of toxins on human health in Mossville, not one has looked closely at their impact on fertility.

All we have to do is not react as if this is a full-blown crisis. All we have to do is keep on denying how frightened we actually are. And then, bit by bit, we will have arrived at the place we most fear, the thing from which we have been averting our eyes. No additional effort required.

Living with this kind of cognitive dissonance is simply part of being alive in this jarring moment in history, when a crisis we have been studiously ignoring is hitting us in the face—and yet we are doubling down on the stuff that is causing the crisis in the first place.

The research project delved into the fact that when the British Parliament ruled to abolish slavery in its colonies in 1833, it pledged to compensate British slave owners for the loss of their human property—a backward form of reparations for the perpetrators of slavery, not its victims. This led to payouts adding up to £20 million—a figure that, according to The Independent, “represented a staggering 40 per cent of the Treasury’s annual spending budget and, in today’s terms, calculated as wage values, equates to around £16.5bn.”

The rich world, for the most part, pretty much ignores these calls, dismissing it all as ancient history, much as the U.S. government manages to disregard calls for slavery reparations from African Americans (though in the spring of 2014, the calls grew distinctly louder, thanks to breakthrough reporting by The Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates, which once again rekindled the debate).46

And yet financing a just transition in fast-developing economies has not been a priority of activists in the North.