Climate change is also an unparalleled opportunity for cooperation between peoples

If it is true that Nature does not need man, man certainly needs Nature.Maintaining biodiversity is crucial to our well-being and survival.The free ecosystem services that the environment guarantees us (such as the pollination of plants, the stability of the soil, the refraction of solar radiation by ice, just to name a few) cannot be replaced by artificial plants.

Today we are heading towards the sixth mass extinction and man is the main cause:it is the meteorite that is destroying the diversity and abundance of living species and the ecosystems they inhabit.Charles Darwin, noble father of the theory of evolution, was among the first thinkers to accept the reality of extinctions as a fundamental feature of the history of life on Earth, a non-trivial consideration in an era in which creationist and essentialist conceptions of life dominated ( according to which living beings are immutable).

Mass extinctions by convention are those in which 75% or more of the planet's living species disappear.In the history of life on Earth there have been five catastrophic ones, the Big Five, and today a sixth is taking place which presents some characteristics of the previous ones.A recurring element in all of them, including the latest one underway, is climate change.

The evolutionary history of our species and the entire genus Homo it is closely linked to the climate.The waves of exit from Africa towards the colonization of the globe, which began around 2 million years ago, were punctuated by climatic oscillations that pushed hominins to migrate to seek more advantageous areas for settlement.Inside and outside Africa we have also always stood out for our strong ability to modify the surrounding environment to our advantage, extracting natural resources until they are exhausted, and then moving to more fertile areas.

The process has an evolutionary name:it is called "niche construction" and Darwin himself was the first to grasp its importance, so much so that in his last years he published a volume dedicated to earth worms and their ability to alter the acidity of the soil to adapt it to the own survival needs.Man has taken this process to extremes, to the point of abusing it.

Starting at least 10,000 years ago, this adaptive strategy became systematic, methodical, with the birth of agriculture, livestock farming and a less nomadic and more sedentary civilization.These practices have further evolved on a cultural profile and have been structured into institutions, which have also evolved hand in hand with demographic growth and the complexification of social relations.

If before we passed down the information to build good stone tools from one generation to the next, at least from the Neolithic onwards we began to pass down the information to build our cultural niche and to continue to shape the surrounding environment to our liking.Starting from the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century, the process of niche construction was accompanied by what from an evolutionary point of view was an unparalleled success:a demographic expansion that from around 1 billion has brought us to 8 billion inhabitants in a couple of centuries.However, the costs of our success have been equally astonishing.

It had never happened in the history of the Earth that a single species was the main cause of a sudden climate change (compared to the geological times with which it would otherwise occur) and of a mass extinction comparable to the five largest ever occurred.After having taken advantage of the factors that caused the catastrophe itself, man finally comes to suffer its effects.

Every year The Lancet, one of the most authoritative medical-scientific journals in the world, publishes a report showing how children born in the 1920s will directly feel the effects of man-made climate change on their health:in terms of greater exposure to the risk of incurring diseases whose spread is favored by rising temperatures, an increase in extreme meteorological events that cause floods, droughts and famines.

As a species we have been great at cooperating on a global scale to bring about climate change, but we don't seem so good at cooperating to limit its devastating effects now.In evolutionary terms Homo sapiens has entered what ecologists call an “evolutionary trap”.We are unable to stop the progress of unsustainable exploitation of natural resources that has allowed us to prosper for centuries and millennia, but which is now proving to be the doom of our civilization.

The dynamics are well known in natural environments that have been perturbed by artificial agents.A frog for example, the Cuban tree frog, has evolved the ability to prey on insects such as fireflies that give off light signals.This adaptation allowed it to survive in an environment where this kind of resource was available.The human presence, however, has altered the habitat of that amphibian which, following its predatory instinct which has refined over generations, today finds itself trying to swallow the Christmas lights that decorate gardens and balconies.

The tree frog is doing nothing but continuing to adopt the behavior that has guaranteed its evolutionary success, but which now, in changed environmental conditions, may become the cause of its downfall.What was an adaptation has become a maladaptation. If the amphibian is not able to "notice the mistake" it will be destined to not get enough food and stop its evolutionary progress.

To correct a predatory instinct that is the result of years and years of evolution, however, it takes a long time.Anthropic disturbance of natural habitats, on the other hand, occurs very quickly and wild species do not have the time, either physiological or evolutionary, to readapt.This is also why the fate of many of them is seriously threatened.

Other species have fallen into these kinds of evolutionary traps.This is the case of a beetle that lives in Australia:the male of Julodimorpha bakewelli attempts to mate with beer bottles that it mistakes for females of its own species.Various species of fish and birds, however, seeing something glistening in the water, ingest it, filling their stomachs with plastic.

The ecological-evolutionary dynamics that we as a species are also facing Homo sapiens is not substantially different, with the difference that we have no external agents to blame:the cause of our evil is only ourselves.

For generations we have passed down the knowledge that has allowed us to make the exploitation of resources an increasingly sophisticated set of practices, arriving at what we can consider true cultural adaptations.Together with a degree of cooperation and sociability that is unparalleled in the natural world, this has been the secret of our success:evolutionary first, economic and demographic second.

After the Bronze and Iron Ages, the extraction and use of fossil fuels marked what some call the Oil Age, which has guaranteed prosperity to our species in more recent centuries.However, we have become culturally dependent on this resource and we cannot escape this dependence.Rationally we know we should stop, but we can't.We don't listen to the warnings we give ourselves and, if we discover a new hydrocarbon deposit, instead of leaving it where it is, we plan how to dry it up.Environmental conditions have changed, we ourselves have changed them, and continuing to do what we have done in recent centuries is now a maladaptation.

We must change course, but correcting this error which has deep evolutionary roots, both biological and cultural, is not at all easy.Our cognitive system is used to reasoning about the "here and now", in jargon it is called "short-termism":knows how to solve problems limited in time and space and finds it difficult to deal with intergenerational problems.Climate change is an object whose boundaries we do not see, whose origins we struggle to understand, which requires specialized scientific explanations to be understood and addressed.Our psychology spontaneously tends to reject information that does not conform to previous knowledge and beliefs (this is called "confirmation bias") and we tend to weigh differently evidence that clashes with our beliefs.

Precisely on these natural tendencies of our mind are distorted narratives that attempt to diminish the importance of climate change or its human origin.To the cognitive dimension of our spontaneous psychological inclinations, in fact, is added the cultural dimension of the conflict of interests of the large oil companies entrenched in defending, with every means (communicative, political and economic), the huge profits which they accumulate and which in 2022, the year of the energy crisis in which prices skyrocketed, reached record values.

The five largest in the world (Exxon, Chevron, Shell, BP and TotalEnergies) totaled almost 200 billion dollars in that year alone.The Italian Eni reported more than 13 billion euros (over 14 billion dollars), 9 more than in 2021.

These and other companies are not investing enough in the sustainable conversion of their successful business model.They neither know nor want to adapt to a changed environment, which they themselves have overturned.The well-being of a few today is the malaise of many.

“Capitalism will not complete the energy transition, nor will the Big Oil,” wrote Derek Brower, former energy editor of the Financial Times in his latest newsletter Energy Source, at the end of June 2023.

“There is too much to do, and given the urgency and need to find the right solution, it is not a task that your favorite manager specializing in a sustainable finance portfolio or the guys from the Big tech. The scale of infrastructure that needs to be upgraded, demolished and replaced is almost beyond our comprehension.Governments, and not investment funds like Black Rock, will have to finance the transition in developing countries:It's amazing that this idea is still debated.[…] Why expect that ExxonMobil or Saudi Aramco will lead (or even survive) a change in their business model based on the extraction and sale of fossil fuels?And do you really want them to?In the United States, Joe Biden's administration has implored drillers to pump more oil, not less;to liquefy more gas for export, not less.Share prices of Shell and BP have risen since they said they will slow their exit from oil.If we want oil companies to stop selling fossil fuels we should consume less of them and we should vote for governments that make them more expensive, not less.[…] Either we ignore the consensus of the world's best scientists and accept an increasingly deteriorating climate or we upend a trillion-dollar energy system built up over decades.”

Humanity has never before faced a challenge of the scale of global warming and the ecological transition it requires to counter it:we need to reinvent the fundamental gears on which our society runs and, with them, our habits.In addition to overcoming our individual psychological resistance, we must review the cornerstones of our social organization which, in that game of transfer of information, knowledge and practices from one generation to another which is our History, can be called cultural adaptations in evolutionary terms. .

We must redirect our collective ingenuity towards technological innovations aimed at mitigating climate change, introduce new social rules that limit, for example, land consumption to adapt to the inevitable effects of higher temperatures, delegate decision-making power to even supranational bodies that are truly capable of governing the ecological transition.

Guided by validated knowledge, we must redirect our cultural evolution.If on the one hand climate change is an object that our cognitive system struggles to domesticate, on the other hand it is also an unparalleled opportunity for cooperation between peoples.If we look at our evolutionary history, in fact, we were indeed formidable cooperators, but for a long time we were only with those we considered members of our circle.Different social groups, however, entered into conflict with each other to grab resources.Even after the advent of trade, with which we began to cooperate on a larger scale even between distant peoples, competition and conflicts with those we consider enemies have remained a distinctive trait of our species.

Today all humanity finds itself fighting a monster that we ourselves created.Climate change is the common and real enemy against which we should all unite, for which we should all cooperate.However, many still don't see it, or pretend not to see it.

The war metaphor must always be adopted with care, but it is also the one chosen by the climatologist Michael Mann, in his 2021 book Climate War, according to which the enemies of the climate war are all those who act in defense of selfish interests to delay the ecological transition, polluting public debate and sowing doubts about the reality of climate change or its anthropogenic origins.

Climatologist Michael Mann:“We have been given this amazing gift:the Earth.We have an ethical duty not to destroy it for future generations"

The philosopher and Earth scientist Naomi Oreskes, together with her colleague Eric Conway, had called them 10 years earlier “merchants of doubts”.Between the ranks of this army, which Mann and others have been fighting for over 40 years, today we must beware not so much of climate deniers, who are now a small minority, but above all of inactionists, i.e. those who adopt communication and lobbying to maintain it status quo, which coincides with the interests of companies whose business is centered on fossil fuels.They are the ones who prevent us from defusing the evolutionary trap in which we find ourselves stuck.

It is essential to no longer give space to climate deniers:our response to a Valigia Blu reader on the article by the four Italian physicists withdrawn by the publishing house

The climate war is fought in many ways and in many places, with diplomacy, with activism, with laws, with individual behavior, but also with good information, to reach as many people as possible and make them participate in the epochal challenge that we all have to face together.

It is indeed a war to be fought, but a completely atypical one, because climate change makes no distinction between political colors or particular interests.We only win if everyone wins, if all societies change and commit to reducing emissions, protecting ecosystems and the services they provide to us and future generations.

The agreement reached at COP28 and our future

The mineral resources necessary for the energy transition they are not distributed equally in all countries and each will need those kept underground by someone else.This is why international cooperation is an essential ingredient in the ecological transition.The climate war is therefore a war for peace, the opportunity to get in tune with the needs of distant peoples, such as those of the oceanic islands threatened by rising seas, those of the inhabitants of Central Asia thirsty by the water crisis , those of the indigenous populations who live in contact with 80% of the planet's biodiversity, those of all those climate migrants who will have to leave their now inhospitable land.

It is an opportunity to act together to improve the conditions of everyone, those who are here and those who will come.It's time to build the climate we want.

*Chapter of the book “The climate we want – every tenth of a degree counts” by the editorial staff of The Bo Live, available in bookstores and online.

Preview image via The Bo Live