These pictures are from a demonstration at London's British Broadcasting Corporation headquarters organized by Extinction Rebellion which I attended. XR is a grassroots group with two million members globally and growing. XR 'gets' climate change, unafraid to confront the harsh truth that the Earth is perilously close to uninhabitablity.
The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) gives us 12 years to make the drastic turn-arounds needed if we are not to suffer even more catastrophic social disruptions (like migration as in California's recent wildfires and war as in Syria where non-arable land displacement has driven conflict (cartoon here). Most sobering: the possibility of species extinction is real; humankind has been on this old Earth for a fraction of a second in the scheme of things. Our very continuity is an open question.
See the New York Times article on what it might mean for us to go extinct.
Emerging Voices wants to start a conversation around our species threatening climate conditions. We invite you to be in touch with your ideas.
Rose Levinson, December 2018
As a paleontologist by training, Rose, you know I take the long view. Home sapiens will survive, unless it doesn't. Species have responded to environmental change for billions of years on this planet. The fossil record is replete with the evidence of ages past; many of those periods being named, by the way, after parts of Britain where the record was first discerned (eg, the Devonian). Some ancient species are still with us (sharks, cycads), others long gone (trilobites, lepidodendron).
What's interesting from this perspective is that, unlike those species that have gone before us (pardon pun), we homo-saps bring sentience to the arena and, unlike other arguably sentient species with which we coexist (such as many cetaceans), we also…