When we look up at the stars a key thing we see reflected back is our sense of being part of the only known example of “life”. This is why we obsess over aliens and the Fermi paradox. Even false alarms of bacteria-level life get us excited. Oumuamua got us properly worked up.
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As individuals we can feel an individual version of mutual recognition with almost any creature that we can respond to and that responds to us. Cats and dogs of course, but even trees and slugs. Even if that sense of mutuality is an “eww” or pang at cutting down an ancient tree.
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THIS is what at risk. Life may go on even in the worse 50% of climate change outcomes, but the Gaia instinct might die. The world will end in the sense of an idea of ourselves reflected back when we look up. Even if we retain a gritty, anthropcene kind of cyber-paleo modernity.
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What might end is the capacity to feel the kind of incredibly poignant loneliness that took Hubble, Pioneer 11, shipping containers, and a double helix to deliver to us. It might be the most precious emotion we’ve constructed for our minds to experience. Better than religion.
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Our ability to feel this feeling might be perhaps the peak experience of being human if the worse climate futures play out. We might live on, but on a dispiriting subhuman journey. Or we beat the crisis and go on to experience way more on our many frontiers of the spirit.
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You may not share this sensibility. But ask yourself: do you possibly not feel this because you’ve short-circuited your capacity to feel it by putting your “soul”, for lack of a better word, in an illusory place where it cannot die, but doesn’t truly live either?
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This is ultimately what many of us are thinking/feeling when we talk about climate. We’re not secretly trying to shove Big Government down the world’s throat. We’re trying to prevent the soul-death of the world as we know it. Harsh as 90% collapse might be, soul death is worse.
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End of conversation
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Can you not care about mass extinction even if you remain selfishly concerned only with your immediate kin? Given we depend on ecosystems and biodiversity to sustain ourselves?
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