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Are We Missing the Big Picture on Climate Change?
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/07/magazine/are-we-missing-the-big-picture-on-climate-change.html
By Rebecca Solnit
The human hands in blue medical gloves spread out the swallow’s wings. The brown feathers jut out like spikes, their tips frizzled and scorched. These wings are no longer graceful fans capable of cupping and pushing off against the air. The left one is worse than the right, and the tail is a pitiful cluster of sticks. This is the wreckage of a bird, the ruin of it. The beauty of a rough-winged swallow is in its flight, the way its darting, swooping path carves arabesques through the skies. Not this bird.
Imagine that bird, small enough to hold in your hand and light enough that you would hardly feel its weight. And then imagine a place nearly five times the size of Central Park, filled with mirrors that rotate like flowers to face the sun, roughly 350,000 of them. Those mirrors face three central towers, each 459 feet tall — “150 feet taller than the Statue of Liberty,” as the February news release lauding the opening of the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System put it. Ivanpah, in the Mojave Desert of Southern California near the Nevada border, is the biggest solar thermal plant in the world. The mirrors focus the sun’s light on the central towers, generating heat to boil water and drive turbines with the steam. At full capacity these turbines should produce 392 megawatts of power, or enough electricity to power 140,000 homes.
Some waterfowl mistake that shining sea of mirrors for a real lake, so they try to land on it. But without water to launch themselves back into the air, they’re stranded, prey for coyotes or doomed to die of thirst or hunger. Other birds fly into Ivanpah, where, dazzled by glare, they collide with the mirrors or towers. Still others are scorched by the heat and fall to their deaths.
It’s this last form of avian death that became news. In August, The Atlantic described Ivanpah “incinerating” birds in flight; The Associated Press reported that wildlife investigators saw birds “ignite,” and that birds “burned and fell” every two minutes. Ivanpah’s corporate website noted that a death every two minutes would mean 100,000 dead birds a year, while only 321 dead and injured birds had been recovered. The actual number of deaths seems to be well above the power plant’s tally and far below the number reported by The Associated Press. But birds do die there, in many ways.
There’s a gospel song with the haunting refrain “His eye is on the sparrow,” sung by everyone from Sam Cooke to Lauryn Hill. It describes an all-seeing, compassionate God who watches over everything, the creatures small as well as great, the rough-winged swallows as well as the trumpeter swans, the voles as well as the bighorn sheep. Our human eyes miss so much. Most of us are better at specifics than generalities, at sudden events rather than ongoing patterns, at the fate of a single sparrow rather than a species or its habitat.
To grasp climate change, you have to think in terms of species and their future. To know how things have already changed, you have to remember how they used to be, and so you may not notice birds disappearing from the skies, or hotter weather or more extreme storms and forest fires. You need to look past the sparrow and see the whole system that allows — or allowed — the birds to flourish. The swallows, the chinook salmon, desert tortoises, manatees, moose and us. Addressing climate means fixing the way we produce energy. But maybe it also means addressing the problems with the way we produce stories.
Supporters of fossil fuel and deniers of climate change love to trade in stories like the one about Ivanpah, individual tales that make renewable energy seem counterproductive, perverse. Stories cannot so readily capture the far larger avian death toll from coal, gas and nuclear power generation. Benjamin Sovacool, an energy-policy expert, looked into the deaths of birds at wind farms (where the blades can chop them down) and concluded that per gigawatt hour, nuclear power plants kill more than twice as many birds and fossil-fuel plants kill more than 30 times as many. He noted that over the course of a year fossil-fuel plants in the United States actually kill about 24 million birds, compared to 46,000 by wind farms. His calculations factor in climate change as part of their deadly impact.
Over all, climate change tends to be reported as abstract explanations about general tendencies and possible outcomes. It’s a difficult subject to tell and to take in. The scientific side is complicated. Understanding it requires the ultimate in systems thinking: the cumulative effect of all of us burning coal and oil impacts things far away and yet to come. A lot of it is hard to see. If you didn’t pay attention to a species beforehand, you won’t have noticed its decline. There’s no direct, tangible way for you to know the ocean is 30 percent more acidic than it used to be, or that it is expected to rise several feet in this century and then keep rising.
For a while our eyes were on the photographs of oil-soaked pelicans, victims of the 2010 BP blowout in the Gulf of Mexico. The devastation of the region is no longer news, but scientists, who track data for long unnewsworthy swathes of time, have found that the spill has killed more than 600,000 birds. It is still killing sea turtles and bottlenose dolphins and contaminating the seafood in areas where human beings fish. You have to look past what can be photographed — individual cases, incidents in the past — at the broad patterns. A recent Audubon Society report on climate change concludes: “Of the 588 North American bird species Audubon studied, more than half are likely to be in trouble. Our models indicate that 314 species will lose more than 50 percent of their current climatic range by 2080. Of the 314 species at risk from global warming, 126 of them are classified as climate endangered. These birds are projected to lose more than 50 percent of their current range by 2050.”
That one death is a tragedy, a million deaths a statistic, is as true of animals as it is of human beings. It’s a lot harder to mourn a potential loss of an entire habitat — as is threatened now for birds like the chestnut-collared longspur — than it is to mourn a golden eagle struck down by a turbine blade, or a warbler scorched in a solar farm. The technology for wind and solar farms can still be improved, but they are among the few remedies we have to the biggest problem humanity has ever faced. All over the world, renewable energy is proliferating — even on the plains of West Texas, there are now wind turbines among the fracking wells. Wind and solar are not only problems but solutions to the deadliness of the fossil fuel industry, whether it’s through routine devastation, as with tar sands, or catastrophic accidents, as with the BP spill, or the sabotage of the whole planetary system by climate change.
Climate change is everything, a story and a calamity bigger than any other. It’s the whole planet for the whole foreseeable future, the entire atmosphere, all the oceans, the poles; it’s weather and crop failure and famine and tropical diseases heading north and desertification and the uncertain fate of a great majority of species on earth. The stories about individual birds can distract us from the slow-motion calamity that will eventually threaten every bird.
And so we should seek out new kinds of stories — stories that make us more alarmed about our conventional energy sources than the alternatives, that provide context, that show us the future as well as the past, that make us see past the death of a sparrow or a swallow to the systems of survival for whole species and the nature of the planet we leave to the future.