Last week I went to the ninth annual California Water Data Summit. Besides being a great opportunity to reconnect with old friends and see how far that movement has progressed, the event provides great energy and a nice reminder of why I do the work I do.
At the reception one evening, I was chatting with a colleague about the climate crisis and how our plucky little loose confederation of water data collaborators can make a small dent in that mountain. We do well to remember the simple truth that we're on this pale blue dot for but a blip and owe it to future generations to leave the place better than we found it.
See below for a letter I wrote in the thick of the Covid pandemic reflecting how to reconcile those imperatives with the realities of life on our home planet. I aim to write out more of the ideas and opportunities coming out of the water data summit in the days ahead. Thanks for reading.
An open letter to my great grandkids’ great grandkids, written from 34.42 N, 118.42 W on this 542nd day of the plague years
A dozen years ago, I took a road trip with my parents along the California Sierras, what they once called Gold Country and what for you may yet again be the shore of an inland sea. We stopped by to see my Great Uncle Fred, a mountain of a man. He was the type of person whose eyes sparkled with wit and who took pleasure in crafting a good rhyme to bring a little zest into the day. Fred broke free from family expectations of a white collar professional path to grow his own almond farm and pioneer his own way.
A few weeks back, I met a new Fred, my cousin’s kid who was scarcely a dozen days old. There’s something magical about a newborn baby. They’re such simple creatures, and yet their entire existence sparkles with the future. Seeing my new nephew and reflecting on his life ahead, remind me of an old piece of family folklore.
When we drove down the Sierras, we stopped by Hetch Hetchy dam, and my mom shared a story that stuck in my mind like an acorn seed in its cup. The Hetch Hetchy valley welled with fresh snowmelt reflecting back the mountains above, a towering sight that overshadowed the hidden depths in the water below. My mom had written a letter from a grandmother to her granddaughter trying to explain what was lost when the Hetch Hetchy Valley flooded. When the dam was first built, Hetch Hetchy was known as a rival to Yosemite Valley, one of the most magical natural wonders that exists anywhere in the world. Yet even with ample adjective and analogy, how can words ever truly do justice to such a place? Even memories fade and decay, like the towering trees rotting under the weight of so much water.
The world you, the great-grand children of the great-grand children of my little nephew Fred will inhabit seems more obscured than the lost Hetch Hetchy Valley floor. Seven generations is a long time, yet the oddities of our current moment make glimpsing what life might be like in a few years seem incredibly uncertain -- like trying to see the surface of Hetch Hetchy reservoir being battered by a thunderstorm. Let alone several centuries or however long human lifespans stretch seven generations in the future to come.
Perhaps the biotechnology revolution that gave us mRNA vaccines will help cure cancer and let us live young as centenarians. Or perhaps increasing access to such and similar tools will unleash untold horrors of our own creation. Biologically engineered plagues and the often forgotten but still very much present reality of nuclear warfare threaten an abrupt armageddon. Or perhaps the sixth extinction will accelerate and the slow burning climate crisis will precipitate mass human migration that sparks new wars and upheaval on the scale of the Bronze age collapse in the mediterranean. Who knows!
Today the world endures the second year of an unprecedented pandemic -- or at least one unlike anything in modern memory and one with unique rhythms to modern technological life. The virus ripples across our lives like rain on a reservoir. Five hundred or so days ago we scurried to grab every scrap of toilet paper we could find. A simple trip to the grocery store embodied a Mad Max style mania. Now dozens of ships wait outside major harbors as people buy more and more online. Home prices rise and rise while seemingly more and more of our neighbors live on the streets. Invisible even to a microscope, an epidemic of loneliness and alienation plagues our land. When all the accoutrements of modernity are stripped away, the truth is that only those we love -- and who love us in turn -- provide the will to survive.
Early in my life, Great Uncle Fred hosted a massive family reunion. Complete with cousins of cousins my parents had never met before, what felt like hundreds of people were in attendance. We gathered in Fred’s almond grove. Really it was a rather fitting place. A family grove makes more sense than a single tree, with many trunks sprouting from a tangled root network obscured under the ground. In California’s vast interconnected water systems, it is only through dams like the one at Hetch Hetchy reservoir that the vast fields encompassing the entirety of the Central Valley are possible.
Those invisible spaces, out of sight and too often out of mind, bind our past into how we create the future -- just like how water flowing underground nourishes forests that otherwise would not be able to exist. Roots run deep. My best understanding of the family history, so much lost to myth and memory, is that our part of the family stems from a British emigre. They sailed directly to California en route to Nevada to make their pile in the silver rush. Missing their chance, they turned back and settled near Santa Maria.
My ancestors lived in such an impossibly different world, something I struggle today to imagine. Sure I could and have read the history of the era or first hand letters of those early settlers of American California. Yet the rhythm of day to day life seems so alien. A man might be and many frequently were shot over a dispute over some shiny rocks. The state legislature actually passed a law to prevent mining firms from prohibiting workers from leaving to try to “make their pile” elsewhere -- the basis for California’s ban on non compete clauses today.
It is humbling to consider the massive transformations in our way of life from that era and also how little ripples like those gold rush era laws still affect Silicon Valley today. And yet those years were only as far back as my grandparents’ grandparents -- four generations. How much further is it to peer across seven generations! My grandparents experienced World War Two and the all out effort to fight the forces of fascism. Their grandparents knew nothing of heavier than air flight -- let alone the threat of armageddon raised by the atom bomb. My generation will likely live to see a human land on Mars.
Looking ahead seven generations, sadly the only thing that people these days seem to say with any certainty is that your generation will revile us. For our dithering. For the financial, environmental and moral debts we have left unpaid and imposed upon you without your consent.
You might wonder. Why not change our ways if we are so certain our actions pave the path to calamity?
The simple yet sad truth is that by the time you are alive, we will be long dead. We live in a world where gratification is instant, just a click away. The day-to-day lives of nearly everyone in my country are in temperature controlled caves of wood, cement and steel. Massive yet subtle changes occurring over decades lie far beyond the comprehension of that lived experience.
The scale of climatic change juxtaposed to the day to day life of an American early in the twenty first century reminds me of those visitors who drive up to the rim of the Grand Canyon, lick their ice cream cone a few times, snap a photo, and call it a day. The magnitude of the cliffs, side canyons, mesas and then the gorge that the mighty Colorado river is currently carving, so exceed anything that one might experience in a city, that the scale of the situation simply does not register. So they lick their ice cream cone and walk away.
A few weeks ago, I had the incredible opportunity to raft down the Upper Half of the Grand Canyon, completing a trip I began down the Lower Half with my dad and brother eight years earlier. For someone from Southern California and a family steeped in the world of water -- my dad, brother, his wife, and my mom all worked in the industry -- rafting down the river that makes our modern way of life in the West possible is a pilgrimage in every sense of the word.
Down in the canyon, every aspect of life changes. Aridity is all encompassing. The only way to condition the air is to wrap a wet cloth around yourself and let evaporation cool a thin envelope around your body. Forget to drink water for just a few hours and the headaches begin. The air sucks water out of your skin constantly, even when you aren’t sweating. Uninterrupted, the depletion of your body’s water reserves will lead to growing dizziness, disturbing dreams, dry urine and ultimately death.
Living in cities, in our tightly calibrated caves of steel, we avoid that reality. Our climate is controlled. The earth’s weather and the global climate emphatically are not. Yet our day to day lives operate in an environment tightly regimented through air conditioning and physical barriers that separate us from the larger world. Rafting down the Colorado river offers us a glimpse of the world as it actually is.
That type of expedition into the uncontrollable environment reminds us how much work goes into things we take for granted like maintaining our body’s homeostasis. Just keeping a water balance and an internal temperature of 98.6 is an unforgiving endeavor in the desert. The dry air can dessicate and cook your body. Meanwhile the cold snowmelt flowing downriver refreshes until it gives you the chills.
In cities, we live in a narrow band of human experience, never encountering the simple physical reality that surrounds us. Homeostasis is a given in our manufactured caves, an equilibrium disturbed perhaps most often when we gorge ourselves on too much food or drink. Is it any surprise that we have no appreciation for the forces upending the equilibrium of the earth’s biosphere?
We take for granted our internal equilibrium, the near continual maintenance of 98.6 degrees, only noticing when we get sick or our body has to fight to maintain homeostasis in the face of harsh external conditions. Temperature is our bodies first line of defense against pathogens.
Heat resistant proteins are more expensive for bacteria and fungi to produce so it makes ecological sense for our body to invest in warm blood. Compare that to say reptiles which will sun cook their body into a fever to fight off a fungal infection. It’s an open question what a warmer world will mean for that immunological defense.
Will more heat resistant bacteria and/or fungi evolve to adapt to the changing environment? That simple biology highlights the truth that while the ultimate effects of GHG accumulation are unknown, the clear truth is that we can no longer take homeostasis for granted. Today there are already examples of fungal infections that aren’t supposed to happen in areas ranging from South Korea to Pakistan to India.
Coming out of the Grand Canyon, we hiked through the geologic layers we had rafted the week before. Traversing those massive mountains of rock, so far beyond what any of us experience in urban life, provides a hint of how deep time runs there. Billions of years of tectonic upheaval and erosion from wind and water carved this near mile deep fissure into the face of the earth. A simple side canyon took many multiples of a human lifespan to develop, generations and generations beyond our experience on this planet.
Hiking up, out of the canyon, we often paused to look at the layers like the Kaibab where the rock houses many brachiopod fossils. A few miles up the river that was a short walk from the water. Now it was thousands of feet up. Those creatures reigned over the earth for countless generations -- millenia upon millenia in the Paleozoic. Until they didn’t. Each of the previous five mass extinction events involved abrupt climate change, a recording of ecological niches that overthrow the established order. The pace of change of the current transformation of the earth’s atmosphere outstrips any of those previous five.
As we neared the rim, the world changed. The rock layers proceeded just the same. The path led us up in the neat and tidy manner one comes to expect from the Park Service. The number of humans, however, dramatically increased. Moreover, the nature of the humans on the trail transformed. Big backpacks laden for a long hike were exchanged for big plastic water bottles. After being immersed in the backcountry, my mind did not register that a mom walking down the path was speaking into a little black box of glass and steel. Not to the humans in front of them.
That culture was so alien to life in the elements, where saying hi to strangers isn’t a courtesy so much as a good precautionary practice. Remember this is a landscape that has killed Boston marathon-level athletes who ran out of water. Relatedly, there is a very real and very tragic phenomenon whereby someone will see a beautiful picture on their glass box and venture to the location without understanding what’s involved. Or realizing the danger that rapidly changing weather conditions pose, particularly in an exposed gorgeous mountain top.
That dynamic makes me wonder how well we will adapt to climate change. Some homo sapiens are confident our technology will save us from the fate of previous species on earth that saw climactic scale upheaval. All five previous mass extinctions saw massive upheaval in the ecological pecking order. There is no certainty that we too will not go the way of the dinosaur.
Technology makes a great servant but a poor master. Anecdotes about instagram explorers venturing off unwittingly to dangerous mountain peaks, or the sad sight of someone walking in circles staring at google maps, belie a simple truth. Advanced technology can in fact be an anchor dragging us down as we work to adapt to new circumstances. The survival rate of stranded Age of Discovery European explorers was exceptionally poor.
Today we face terra incognita somewhat similar to those early explorers, not venturing beyond the spatial map of the earth but a temporal unknown of what the future world will look like. Humans a millenia ago may not have known what lay across the ocean but they could say with much greater certainty what the future world would look like. Largely the same as the one they’d lived in all their life. That’s not true for us today.
Their experience with the unknown across the physical world should humble us as we look ahead seven generations. The first Europeans to see the Grand Canyon thought the Colorado River was only six feet across, so alien was the scale of the place.
Looking out at what climate change means for my family, I can’t help but shake the feeling that for all the sophisticated math and modeling, our vantage point of the future earth is not too dissimilar from those first Europeans looking out and seeing a six foot wide muddy creek that in reality formed a raging river orders of magnitude wider.
Modeling the future climate is a tremendously difficult task, with great inherent uncertainty! The oceans are a poorly understood yet critical heat and carbon sink. Our best understanding of climate scale feedback loops suggests that uncertainty should be an argument for greater action to make the planet habitable for future generations. Of course in these stormy times, the world is turned upside down like a river raft spun sideways and flipped over a wave train.
In a flipped raft and thrust underwater, you’re supposed to find your way to the edge of and then out from under the raft. You’re supposed to put your feet downriver and time your breaths in between waves so you don’t gulp down a mouthful of whitewater and in the Colorado, silt. Forced underwater, hopefully such rules have been ingrained into your muscle memory as every fiber of your body yearns to once again breath free. Rafting today, one has access to tools that float your body above less dense whitewater so you can actually breath. Without those flotation devices, your body is too dense to rise above the air infused whitewater. Unlike our ancestors, we also have access to inflatable rafts that bounce off of rather than break upon rocks like wooden boats of yore. Still one can never forget that it is ultimately the river that’s in charge. All we can do is take the best path possible through the churn.
Similarly, while we have technology that previous species didn’t develop, ultimately we are dependent just the same on this spaceship we call Earth. Perhaps iPhones, aviation, skyscrapers and all the rest of our modern technologies will enable us to adapt. But perhaps those tools will be immaterial in the face of widespread crop failure, mass migration of billions and pathogens breaching our 98.6 first line of immunological defense. The future is uncertain but we can be confident that the earth’s equilibrium has been upended. The urgent question is what path will let us best navigate the unknown ahead.
Part of the challenge in finding that path is that, just like the massive walls of the grand canyon, the scale of the problem dwarfs our capacity for individual action. It’s all too easy to feel powerless and resigned to the status quo, even if it means punting problems onto future generations. Today we can choose as individuals to make choices like eating less meat, driving an electric car and flying less. Yet those choices operate largely in a world that subsidizes incredibly carbon intensive behavior. Only around thirteen percent of the world economy operates with a price on carbon. [As of 2020 -- here is a nice interactive update from the World Bank]
The Colorado River we rafted and Sierra snowmelt feeding reservoirs like Hetch Hetchy dam historically supplied about half of Southern California’s water supply, with the remaining coming from local sources like groundwater and recycled water. Growing up in a water household, every drop counted. I can still feel the visceral invocation to keep showers under two minutes. Across more and more of the region, residents are allotted a water budget -- a reasonable amount to use for their local climate and household size. That provides everyone the freedom to use the water they need, and recognizes the real cost by charging a higher price if they choose to go beyond their budget.
I wonder why we do not implement a similar budget based approach for carbon. There have already been rigorous efforts to calculate the household carbon budget everyone on earth needs to meet in order to avoid the worst of climate change. Attaching a higher price to excessive carbon use is not as technically easy as water use which is easily quantifiable with a water meter. Nor is it as institutionally simple as carbon pervades the economy and is not sold as a single commodity by a single monopoly institution. Many of the challenges of international diplomatic efforts to build consensus for global decarbonization flow from those simple yet deep measurement and governance challenges.
From the perspective of seven generations from now, the fact that global coordination occurs primarily through negotiation across nation states must seem rather odd. Not all the countries in the United Nations today are excessively legitimate! A growing array of cities, companies and others have committed to decarbonize yet vast swathes of the globe lie outside the reach of such agreements. Nothing in those patchwork agreements truly matches the global scale of the challenge to decarbonize.
Looking back from the future, one might wonder why we, the humans living on this earth themselves, do not come to an agreement. Countries, cities, companies… all those are a step removed from the actual people making choices.
When I was a kid in the 90’s, people would talk about how the internet was creating a new global village. That phrase reminds me of my Great Uncle Fred’s gathering in the almond groves. Looking back and talking to my family, there weren’t actually physically hundreds of people there. Sometimes the world feels impossibly big when you’re small.
Yet sometimes also children can see the truth that adults have closed their eyes to. There truly were stories of hundreds of our greater family floating through the forest that day. Those invisible roots are no less real, just as groundwater is no less critical for life than a surface stream. Just as our fates are no less intertwined as a species despite the lines we draw on a map splitting us apart.
The sixth mass extinction is a global event. Decarbonization will require humanity-wide action at a global scale. Over the past several decades we have tried to dance around that reality, dithering and delaying. It’s time to recognize the simple truth staring us in the face. The first step to taking any collective action, at any scale, is to take seriously the idea that together you form a group.
Why not take a random subset of humanity, say a thousand people from every corner of the globe, and give them the time, space and resources necessary to thoughtfully consider the path humanity might chart through these turbulent times? Any proposals agreed to could be put for a global vote. Yes the results would not be binding. Neither was COP 26 or any of the previous twenty five United Nations Climate Change Conferences.
A global vote could provide the moral authority for putting a price on carbon and ostracizing bad actors. It could help snap us out of our complacency with the status quo and systems that simply outsource carbon emissions to other countries. Any potential downside pales against the risks of inaction.
Perhaps the Panglossian optimists are right and climate change this time will be different from the previous five mass extinctions. But perhaps not. Cynics will say that any sort of experiment in global direct democracy is hopelessly naive. I would humbly posit that it is more naive to leave the sustainability of the human species to chance and not do everything we can to ensure this planet we call earth is still conducive to human life in seven generations.
Such is the nature of hope when you’re thrust underwater. It comes not from the head or heart. It comes from every fiber of your body yearning to breathe free, to be able to reach out and hug your family once again.
Such also is the nature of hope as humanity is slowly submerged into a world upended by climate change and thrown out of the homeostatic-esque equilibrium we take for granted. It comes from the will to survive, to do everything you can so that in seven generations the human story lives on.
Further reading: if you enjoyed this post, I'd recommend picking up a copy of Timefulness: How thinking like a Geologist can save the world.
