It’s understandable that many discussions about the climate crisis focus on existential threats. Claims about human extinction combine the terrifying prospect of mass death with the terrible prospect of a future without humans.
And it’s not just the loss of future lives that should concern us. As Samuel Scheffler has argued, living a meaningful life now depends on humanity’s existence after you’re gone.
Consider his “doomsday” scenario: you know that an asteroid will wipe out all life on Earth 30 days after you die. Though the asteroid will arrive after your normal lifespan has ended, it would still have a grave impact on you.
Your knowledge of humanity’s impending demise undermines the importance of much of what contributes to your life’s meaning. If no one’s going to be alive, what does it matter if you achieve social justice or find a better vaccine?
The more it seems like a doomsday scenario, the more climate change threatens to undermine our efforts to find meaning in our lives. But to focus only on the ways in which global warming threatens to wipe out humanity is to take too narrow a view of the climate crisis.
Even if human beings survive, much of what we care about may not. And whatever meaning in life is, exactly, it surely involves engaging with things that matter to us.
Consider a scenario in which global warming makes it unsafe to spend time outside during the day. This would make all manner of worthwhile pursuits impossible: sunset walks, lunchtime picnics, outdoor sports, sunbathing, birdwatching, and so on.
How would you react to this?
You might react much the same way Scheffler expects you would after learning about the asteroid. You might cease to engage with life as you do now, cease to be motivated to do things you love, cease to see the point. Perhaps you would even experience the “profound dismay” Scheffler predicts.
But even if you’re sure of no more beloved sunset walks on the beach, you may react in other ways.
In addition to being more realistic than Scheffler’s asteroid, our scenario doesn’t involve human extinction. Indeed, part of what’s troubling about it is that people would be forced to cope. And there are a variety of ways we might do that.
Suppose you’re certain about the impending disappearance of things you value. Rather than losing your grip on what’s worthwhile, you may experience a shift in values. As Susan Wolf argues in response to Scheffler’s doomsday scenario, after your initial shock you might snap out of it and reengage with different pursuits that still strike you as worthwhile. To adapt her point for our purposes, outdoor enthusiasts may come to value caring for each other in their grief at having lost the ability to do what they love.
Another possibility is that, instead of giving up on what you love, you double down on it. Head outside more regularly while you still can. Take extra care to document your outdoor activities in more detail. If we’re not facing a scenario in which humanity is extinct, then it makes sense to try and preserve a record of what we find worthwhile to pass on to future generations. At least they can bask in the glow of past sunset strolls on the beach.
An even more hopeful prospect is that you consider it likely, but not certain, that you’ll lose what you care about. So, you work hard to protect it. In the belief that it’s not too late to make individual and policy choices that retard or reverse current warming trends, you become a climate activist. After all, valuing something involves being motivated to do what’s necessary to keep it around, for yourself and for future generations.
The upshot of this thought experiment is that preserving humanity in the face of global warming doesn’t guarantee us what we truly want. To survive in a future devoid of what’s important to us is to duck extinction only to flirt with despair.
Avoiding the horror of mass human casualties is a worthwhile goal. So is avoiding the horrifying fate of a meaningless existence.
Benjamin Mitchell-Yellin
Benjamin Mitchell-Yellin is associate professor of philosophy at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, TX.
Can I suggest a companion article?
How Nuclear Weapons Threaten Meaning in Life
To tie the two threats together we should consider that the use nuclear weapons could very well be the end game of a failure to manage climate change.
Long before human extinction, we’re going to see geo-political instability.
No major world power is going to simply lie down and die as it’s ability to serve it’s population, and thus stay in power, is threatened by climate change driven threats like mass migration, agriculture failures, cascading natural calamities and so on. All these pressures will destabilize the global power structures and bring nation states in to conflict with one another in ways that are impossible to predict today.
Climate change and nuclear weapons are not two different issues. Both of these threats arise from the same source, our outdated “more is better” relationship with knowledge.
If we could wave a magic wand and get rid of both climate change and nuclear weapons today, an ever accelerating knowledge explosion will continue to generate new existential threats tomorrow. As just one example, the migration of genetic engineering technologies like CRISPR out of the professional class and in to the broader public, where effective governance of such game changing technologies will become impossible.
The fate of modern civilization at least, and perhaps humanity as well, will be decided by how we manage our relationship with knowledge in this century. This century is already 20% over, we don’t have unlimited time to bring our attention to the deciding factor. Who could possibly be a better group of people to focus on that fundamental relationship with knowledge than philosophers?