Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? by Bill McKibben.

3/5 rating. 256 pages.

Book #86 of 2020. Read December 18, 2020.

This being by Bill McKibben, I was expecting a book about climate change and its life-ending potential. That was only part of the wide array of quite philosophical discussions Bill brought up in this book.

While I had some questions about the overall thesis and path this book took – as it meandered through subjects that are related to the future of humanity, but seem somewhat far-flung – this is definitely one of the most thought-provoking books I’ve read this year. From discussions about the ethical dilemmas wrought upon not only biologists, but humanity as a whole by technologies like CRISPR, to Ayn Rand being the most important writer/philosopher of the twentieth century, I repeatedly had to stop and think about my positions and even adjust some.

While I didn’t absolutely love this book, it’s certainly worth a read if you have worries about humanity’s future. It probably will both lock those in and add to them, but also give you some hope that we can realize that “we” is not being used rhetorically when talking about humans. Homo sapiens are not solely, as so many conservatives and libertarians want to claim, a group of individuals. Altruism is built into our genetic code. Human solidarity has taken a huge hit in the era of Trump and “rugged individualism”, but the faster and more strongly we grasp that we go farther as a group, the better off we all will be – humans, the environment, and our fellow earthly inhabitants.

“Another name for human solidarity is love, and when I think about our world in its present form, that is what overwhelms me. The human love that works to feed the hungry and clothe the naked, the love that comes together in defense of sea turtles and sea ice and of all else around us that is good. The love that lets each of us see we’re not the most important thing on earth, and makes us okay with that. The love that welcomes us, imperfect, into the world and surrounds us when we die.”

Quotes:

“We’ve displaced most everything else: if you weigh the earth’s terrestrial vertebrates, humans account for 30 percent of their total mass, and our farm animals for another 67 percent, meaning wild animals (all the moose and cheetahs and wombats combined) total just 3 percent. In fact, there are half as many wild animals on the planet as there were in 1970, an awesome and mostly unnoticed silencing.”

“By most accounts, we’ve used more energy and resources during the last thirty-five years than in all of human history that came before.”

“Though we’ve taken the environmental idea semi-seriously, passing the laws that cleaned air and water, we’ve never taken it anywhere near as seriously as we’ve taken further growth.”

“I’m neither optimistic nor pessimistic, just realistic – enough to know engagement is our only chance.”

“Around the world, pollution kills 9 million people a year, far more than AIDS, malaria, TB, and warfare combined. In the worst years, a third of the deaths in China can be blamed on smog, and by 2030, it may claim 100 million victims worldwide.”

“In the thirty years I’ve been working on this crisis, we’ve seen all twenty of the hottest years ever recorded.”

“‘I’ve never been at a climate conference where people say “that happened slower than I thought it would,”‘ one polar expert observed in the spring of 2018.”

“The Po River Valley is Italy’s agricultural heartland, supplying 35 percent of its crops, but its average temperature is almost four degrees Fahrenheit higher than it was in 1960, and its rainfall has fallen by a fifth.”

“But late in 2017, a UN agency announced that after a decade of decline, the number of chronically malnourished human beings had started growing again, by 38 million, to a total of 815 million, ‘largely due to the proliferation of violent conflicts and climate-related shocks.’”

“A 2017 study in Australia, home to some of the world’s highest-tech farming, found that ‘wheat productivity has flatlined as a direct result of climate change.’ After tripling between 1900 and 1990, wheat yields had stagnated since, as temperatures increased a degree and rainfall declined by nearly a third.”

“By the middle of this century the ocean may contain more plastic than fish by weight, partly because we toss away so many bottles and partly because we take far more life from the ocean than it can reproduce.”

“To get a sense of how much heat the oceans absorb, consider this: without them, the temperature of the atmosphere would have gone up by 97 degrees Fahrenheit since 1955.”

“The Great Barrier Reef is the largest living structure on Earth, but it is roughly half as living as it was three years ago.”

“Throughout the Holocene – throughout, that is, recorded human history – the ocean’s pH was a steady 8.2. It has now dropped to 8.1, which doesn’t sound like much, until you remember that pH is a logarithmic scale. The oceans have seen their acidity increase by about 30 percent. At current emissions rates, the pH of the oceans will drop to 7.8 or 7.7 by century’s end, ‘well beyond what fish and other marine organisms can tolerate in the laboratory without very serious implications for health, reproduction, and mobility,’ according to the veteran oceanographer Eelco Rohling.”

“In 2015, in Bandar-e Mahshahr, in Iran, the heat index reached 165 degrees, the highest ever witnessed on the planet.”

“In 2017 the United Nations sent its special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights to tour America. After a two-week visit, this Australian expert concluded that ‘for one of the world’s wealthiest countries to have forty million people living in poverty, and over five million living in “Third World” conditions is cruel and inhuman.’”

“The average black family in America has household wealth of $1,700, and that’s been falling steadily.”

“American children are now far less likely than members of previous generations to earn more than their parents, a pretty basic change in how we perceive the world.”

“Basic human solidarity has, especially for the most powerful among us, been replaced by a very different idea.”

“But overlearning the lessons of the past is just as dangerous as ignoring them. If you can’t distinguish between national health insurance and indentured servitude, if Denmark reminds you of North Korea, then you damage the present in the name of the past. If you must resist the Clean Air Act because of your visceral fear that it might lead to so much government that your drugstore gets taken away, then the twentieth century has become not a teacher but an irrational barrier.”

“The mere act of joining in with others halves one’s risk of dying in the next year.”

“‘Study after study shows that good social relationships are the strongest, most consistent predictor there is of a happy life, even going so far as to call them a “necessary condition of happiness.”…This is a finding that cuts across race, age, gender, income and social class so overwhelmingly that it dwarfs any other factor,’ reports the journalist and cultural critic Ruth Whippman.”

“Self-interest was not the most admirable of our traits. Instead [Adam] Smith listed ‘humanity, justice, generosity, and publix spirit…the qualities most useful to others.’”

“[J]ust one hundred firms in the fossil fuel industry account for 70 percent of the planet’s emissions.”

“Believing that government doctors care about kids only in order to make more money, or that climate scientists pursue their work with profit in mind, is such a cynical view that it can be explained only as a reflection of life in the billionaire bubble. If greed warps your life, you assume it must warp everyone’s.”

“The Kansas congressman Mike Pompeo, who had taken more money from the Kochs than any other member of the House (and who is now secretary of state), sponsored legislation upon his arrival in Washington to kill tax credits for wind power, saying it should ‘compete on its own,’ which is particularly unfunny given the vast federal subsidies for fossil fuel.”

“This was the religion I grew up with: the power of human ideas to change the world.”

“We spend roughly ten hours a day looking at a screen and roughly seventeen minutes a day exercising – that is, using our bodies.”

“We may not know yet where we’re going, but we’ve already left where we’ve been.”

“The number of teens who get together with their friends every day dropped by 40 percent from 2010 to 2015, a curve that’s accelerating.”

“Three times as many teenagers killed themselves in 2015 as in 2007.”

“A world without death is a world without time, and that in turn is a world without meaning, at least human meaning.”

“Decisive progress on this path cannot be made without an increased awareness that all of us are part of one human family, united by bands of fraternity and solidarity.” – Pope Francis

“Ayn Rand has carried the CEOs, but not the rest of us. By and large, humans continue to believe in humanity.”

“Insisting that some horror is inevitable no matter what you do is the response of people who don’t want to be bothered trying to stop it, and I’ve heard it too often to take it entirely seriously.”

“There are about as many humans living without electricity today as there were the day before Thomas Edison lit his first bulb, and most of them are in Africa.”

“The latest studies, from labs such as Mark Jacobson’s at Stanford, make clear that every major nation on earth could be supplying 80 percent of its power from renewables by 2030, at prices far cheaper than paying the damage for climate change.”

“The manufacturing process for solar panels has become so efficient that the panels pay back the energy used to make them in less than four years. Since they last three decades, that means a quarter-century of pollution-free operation.”

“[Finnish and German] researchers found that by 2050, solar energy could provide 69 percent of our power and wind energy another 18 percent, with the rest coming mostly from hydroelectric dams. In the process, we’d create thirty-six million new jobs and the cost per megawatt hour would drop from the present eighty-two dollars to sixty-one dollars.”

“Energy transition is no longer a question of technical feasibility or economic viability, but of political will.” – Christian Breyer

“In 1846 [Henry Thoreau] left the cabin at Walden Pond, where he was making his later-celebrated sojourn, and took a walk into town. He bumped into Sam Staples, Concord’s constable and tax collector, who reminded him that he hadn’t paid the annual poll tax required of all males between the ages of twenty and seventy. True, said Thoreau, he hadn’t, because as an abolitionist, ‘I cannot for an instant recognize as my government that which is the slave’s government also.’ So, he was led off to jail, and there he spent the night. His friend Ralph Waldo Emerson is said to have visited and asked why he was there, only to be asked in return, ‘Why are you not?’”

“Even in what seems like the very clinical world of environmentalism, mounds of research and data aren’t ultimately decisive: the fight over climate change is ultimately not an argument about infrared absorption in the atmosphere, but about power and money and justice. Given that industry has most of that money and hence most of that power, it usually wins – unless, of course, a movement arises, one capable of changing hearts as well as minds.”

“Solar energy and nonviolence are technologies less of expansion than of repair, less of growth than of consolidation, less of disruption than of healing. They posit that we’ve grown powerful enough as a species, and that the job now is to make sure that that power is shared and controlled. They are, to use the first of several words that I wish we used more often, the technologies of maturity. They imagine a society interested more in economic and political maintenance and contentment than in exhilaration and extension.”

“Societies are measured not just by the things they build, but also by the things they can bring themselves to leave alone: whales, bright-plumed birds, mountains, children kept safe from Dickensian labor.”

“And, in living memory, it was John Maynard Keynes who hoped that ‘the day is not far off when the economic problem will take the back seat where it belongs, and the arena of the heart and the head will be occupied or reoccupied, by our real problems – the problems of life and human relations.”

“We’re the only creature who can decide not to do something we’re capable of doing. That’s our superpower, even if we exercise it too rarely.”

“Another name for human solidarity is love, and when I think about our world in its present form, that is what overwhelms me. The human love that works to feed the hungry and clothe the naked, the love that comes together in defense of sea turtles and sea ice and of all else around us that is good. The love that lets each of us see we’re not the most important thing on earth, and makes us okay with that. The love that welcomes us, imperfect, into the world and surrounds us when we die. Even – especially – in its twilight, the human game is graceful and compelling.”

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