In the subtitle to his new book, Falter, Bill McKibben asks, “Has the human game begun to play itself out?” The “game” in this case is human civilization, and McKibben begins by examining the shrinking size of the game board — the areas of the planet that support human life. Having expanded our habitat throughout human history, we are now seeing it contract because of climate change and facing the possibility that the game will come to an end.
One of the great privileges of living in the affluent parts of the modern world is that we’ve been able to forget that the natural world even exists. In our lifetimes, and the lifetimes of our parents, it’s served mostly as a backdrop. A subdivision is named for what used to be there: Fox Ridge. A suburb is designed to hide the natural world: where, amid the curving streets, are the creeks? A great city seems to produce wealth out of thin air. This is illusion, of course, but powerful illusion. I didn’t start to see through it until, as a young New Yorker reporter, I spent a year tracing every pipe and cable that entered and exited my Greenwich Village apartment, following the water mains and the electric lines and the sewers to their ultimate sources and destinations. In the process, I came to understand the remarkable physicality even of New York: the vast water tunnels built at unimaginable expense and danger and effort, the supply lines that stretched to the hydro dams of Canada’s Hudson Bay and the oil wells of the Amazon basin.
Given that it all works so smoothly, we can be forgiven for ignoring the natural world most of the time. It is safely underground or in the walls or out of sight, at the power plant or the waste-treatment station. But that smooth operation, that humming efficiency, is beginning to buckle under the pressure of a changing climate. Hurricane Sandy came ashore in New York City, channeling the energy from a record-hot Atlantic Seaboard and riding the raised level of the sea — and suddenly FDR Drive was awash in whitecaps and the South Ferry subway entrance was a cascade of salt water pouring onto the tracks below. Napa explodes in fire; Cape Town, parched by drought, rations drinking water.
Let’s put aside, for the moment, the thought of mass extinction. Cataclysm on a geological scale is clearly possible; you can make an argument that the game is up. But even if that is our eventual due, life will first look and feel different. Life as we know it won’t suddenly end, but it will be crimped; in many places, it already is. To use our metaphor, the size of the board on which we’re playing the game is going to get considerably smaller, and this may be the single most remarkable fact of our time on earth.
That shrinkage is, in itself, novel. For all of human history we’ve been playing out the opposite story. We seem to have begun in Africa and then spread out, slowly at first and then much faster. For North Americans, the chief architects of the modern game, this expansion is close enough chronologically to be our national story. Many of us descend from Europeans who, fed up with the crowded conditions and religious strictures of the Old World, came to a new one. Upon arrival, they slaughtered or pushed aside the people already inhabiting this continent, and then imported boatloads of human chattel to do much of the work of building the “New World.” Those basic and tragic facts haven’t stopped us from deciding that the wealth created here was a sign of moral superiority: we Americans believe that we were particularly innovative and entrepreneurial and brave. In fact, however, our achievement was less the result of noble character, or even of the constant willingness to oppress others, than it was a pure windfall. Those who settled North America vastly expanded the board on which Europeans were playing the game, and this new section was beyond compare.
As the great environmental historian Donald Worster points out, Columbus was looking for a new route to Asian wealth: silks, spices, and so on. What he found was so much better: “an unexpected abundance of space, land, soil, forests, minerals, and waters, an abundance that was almost free for the taking.” It was almost as if the Europeans had landed on a new planet — not one of the gaseous, hostile, barren planets of our solar system, but a planet like Europe or Asia, except mostly intact and undegraded. “Somewhere within its borders [the United States] offered almost everything that people wanted: the world’s greatest expanse of prime soils; a supply of fresh water that seemed limitless (until one got to the western deserts); a forest cover that surpassed in quality, diversity, and utility that of any other nation; a vast renewable resource of furs and fish; and almost every mineral known to man,” Worster observes. Imagine, say, the impact of the invention of the Internet on modern economic life, and then multiply it by many times. “The discovery of America, and that of a passage to the East Indies by the Cape of Good Hope, are the two greatest and most important events recorded in the history of mankind,” wrote Adam Smith. They brought “dreadful misfortunes” to the native inhabitants of those places, but by enlarging the game board, those new colonies raised “the mercantile system to a degree of splendor and glory which it could never otherwise have attained to.”
Eventually, of course, North Americans managed to fill up much of the new continent, but that didn’t stop our expansion. By the 1890s, when Frederick Jackson Turner was declaring the frontier closed, another new continent was opening up, this one underground. Humans everywhere were quickly learning to burn fossil fuels, and so once again our range was expanding. Part of that expansion was literal: instead of being confined to the few villages where a horse or your feet could carry you, everyone was able to move about, a liberation from geography that changed everything, right down to whom you might marry. And cheap power led, at the turn of the century, to air-conditioning, which in turn meant that places once so hot as to be marginal were now “the Sun Belt.” But the biggest part of this new expansion was economic: everyone in the Western world now had access to, in essence, slaves who would do absurd amounts of manual work. A barrel of oil, currently about sixty dollars, provides energy equivalent to about twenty-three thousand hours of human labor. The great economist John Maynard Keynes once calculated that from “two thousand years before Christ down to the beginning of the eighteenth century, there was really no great change in the standard of living of the average man in the civilized centers of the earth. Ups and downs, certainly visitations of plague, famine, and war, golden intervals but no progressive violent change.” What changed that was coal, and then oil and gas. All of a sudden, the standard of living was doubling every twenty or thirty years.
These were onetime gains. There are no new continents to be discovered, and even if enthusiasts chirp excitedly on about someday mining asteroids, that is a step down from discovering the vast forests of Appalachia. (Movie astronaut Matt Damon sort of managed to grow potatoes on Mars, but only because his own dung provided the necessary nutrients. That’s not quite as good as Iowa topsoil.) We are, of course, discovering new kinds of energy. The solar panel, in particular, is a variety of miracle, but a different kind of miracle from fossil fuel, which was so dense with power, so easy to transport. Our world has been broadening for centuries, and that broadening is, to a large degree, what we think of as normal and ordinary: if the economy doesn’t grow larger each year, we now suffer as a result, because our systems, and our expectations, have become dependent on that growth. We play the game on a much larger board than our ancestors, and we play it with much more power.
But thanks to global warming, that broadening is now coming to an end, and a period of contraction is setting in. Instead of new continents to inhabit, our space is beginning to shrink. Our earth is large, but it is finite, and we’re beginning to lose parts of it.
Sheer heat — heat alone, the most obvious effect of climate change — has begun to narrow the margins of our inhabitation. Nine of the ten deadliest heat waves in human history have happened since 2000. Even places that define cool, like the Pacific Northwest, now see stretches where the heat soars into the triple digits, and 70 percent of the homes in Portland are now air-conditioned. But in Portland, a hideous heat wave means that the city opens pet-friendly “cooling centers” stocked with board games. In India, by contrast, the average rise in temperature of a single degree Fahrenheit since 1960 has increased the chance of mass heat-related deaths by 150 percent. Those heat waves are unbearably savage. In the summer of 2016, temperatures in a city in Kuwait peaked at slightly above 129 degrees Fahrenheit for a couple of days in July, the highest reliably recorded temperatures ever measured on planet Earth. (I just checked the oven in my kitchen, and you can set it at 130 degrees.) But as hot as those places were, it was a dry, desert heat. The same heat wave, nearer the shore of the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman, combined triple-digit temperatures with soaring humidity levels to produce a heat index over 140 degrees Fahrenheit. In 2015, in Bandar-e Mahshahr, in Iran, the heat index reached 165 degrees. . . .
About a decade ago, Australian and American researchers set out to determine the maximum survivable combination of heat and humidity. They concluded that a “wet-bulb temperature” of 35 degrees Celsius sets the limit — that is, when temperatures pass 35 degrees Celsius (95 degrees Fahrenheit) and the humidity is above 90 percent, “the body can’t cool itself and humans can only survive for a few hours, the exact length of time being determined by individual physiology.” That’s because evaporation off the skin slows down in the humidity; you can’t cool yourself by sweating. “Not even the fittest of humans can survive, even in well-ventilated shaded conditions, when the wet-bulb temperature stays above 35,” said one of the scientists. They went on to conclude that about 1.5 billion people, a fifth of humanity, live in a crescent-shaped area at high risk of such temperatures as the planet warms. That includes some of the world’s most densely populated regions, in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, as well as those Middle Eastern cities along the sea. In these places, extreme heat waves that now happen once every twenty-five years will become “annual events with temperatures close to the threshold for several weeks each year, which could lead to famine and mass migration.” Because, of course, these are precisely the places where most of the population works outdoors. In 2018, new research made it clear that the North China Plain, with 400 million residents, fell squarely in the red zone. “This is going to be the hottest spot for deadly heat waves in the future,” one MIT professor explained. “Continuation of current global emissions may limit the habitability of the most populous region of the most populous country on earth.”
So: the world we’ve known is quickly being replaced by a new one, and this planet is effectively closer to the sun. As a result, by the 2070s tropical regions that now get one day of truly oppressive heat a year can expect 100 to 250 days. By 2100, the most recent study notes, “even under the most optimistic predictions for emissions reductions, experts say almost half the world’s population will be exposed to potentially deadly heat for twenty days a year.” “Lots of people would crumble well before you reach” these maximum readings, one of the analysts explained. “They’d run into terrible problems.” The result, he added, would be “transformative for all areas of human endeavor — economy, agriculture, military, recreation.” Already, increased heat and humidity have cut the amount of work people can do outdoors by 10 percent, and that effect should double by midcentury. A new report on Florida farmworkers found “more and more people that have dehydration” as a result of rising temperatures. Undocumented migrants are “especially vulnerable, as they are less likely to demand rest, shade, or water for fear of retaliation.” In many places, it will simply be too muggy for humans to do the work of humans.
The summer of 2018 was the hottest ever measured across large stretches of this planet. Africa recorded its highest temperature ever in June, the Korean peninsula in July, and Europe in August; in America, Death Valley produced the hottest month ever seen on our continent. The world saw the warmest night in history, when the mercury in one Omani city stayed above 109 degrees Fahrenheit till morning. In Algeria, a New York Times reporter found employees at a petroleum plant simply walking off the job as the temperature neared 124 degrees. “We couldn’t keep up,” said one worker. “It was impossible to do the work. It was hell.” In Nawabshah, Pakistan, the heat set a new local record, 122 degrees Fahrenheit, and “shops didn’t bother to open. Taxi drivers kept off the street to avoid the blazing sun.” In Montreal, where a heat wave had killed seventy-seven people, a homeless man described his life: he moved two or three blocks at a time, from one air-conditioned mall to the next, waiting to be turned out. “We need more water fountains in the park,” he told reporters for The Guardian, who also interviewed a student in Cairo, where the temperature was a mere 104 degrees. His extended family had saved up to buy one air-conditioning unit for the living room, and “now that’s where everyone spends their day — preparing food, watching TV, playing or studying.” In other words, their world had shriveled to a single room. When a city gets that hot, as one reporter put it, “the pavements are empty, the parks quiet, entire neighborhoods appear uninhabited. Nobody with a choice ventures outside.”
And as with the heat, so with the oceans. Their rise is driving people away from the places we’ve always inhabited. The same Asian peasant farmers having to cope with hideous heat in the fields are also watching as salt water wrecks those soils — tens of thousands now evacuate Vietnam’s sublimely fertile Mekong Delta annually. You don’t have to search to find the scary details, given that most coastal communities have at least begun to study the possible impacts. In one week at the end of 2017, without making any special effort, I came across stories from Louisiana, where government officials were already finalizing a plan to move thousands of people from rising seas (“Not everybody is going to be able to live where they are now and continue their way of life,” said one state official); from Hawaii, where a new study was predicting that, over the next few decades, thirty-eight miles of coastal roads would be chronically flooded and impassable, “jeopardizing critical access to many communities”; from Jakarta, Indonesia’s megacity, where a rising Java Sea earlier that month had briefly turned “streets into rivers and brought this vast area of nearly 30 million residents to a virtual halt”; and from Boston, where a simple nor’easter in the first days of 2018 managed to flood some of the city’s priciest neighborhoods, floating dumpsters and sedans through the Financial District. “If anyone wants to question global warming, just see where the flood zones are,” Boston’s mayor said. “Some of those zones did not flood thirty years ago.”
If you trace out the area that’s ten meters above current sea levels, it covers only 2 percent of the earth’s land area, so the game board won’t shrink enormously from sea-level rise. But that 2 percent of the surface contains 10 percent of the people, and generates 10 percent of the gross world product. And it’s not defensible, not most of it — no one is going to pay to build a seawall around the Bengali coast; or to defend Accra, the capital of Ghana, which already floods during storms. “On the outskirts of Lomé, the capital of Togo, rows of destroyed buildings line the beaches,” Jeff Goodell reports. Anyone want to estimate how much money the world is likely to spend defending the capital of Togo?
“Like it or not, we will retreat from most of the world’s nonurban shorelines in the not very distant future,” the Duke University sea-level-rise expert Orrin Pilkey wrote in 2016. “Our retreat options can be characterized as either difficult or catastrophic. We can plan now and retreat in a strategic and calculated fashion, or we can worry about it later and retreat in tactical disarray in response to devastating storms. In other words, we can walk away methodically, or we can flee in panic.”
As some people flee more water (in the form of humidity or of sea-level rise), others will be moving because there’s too little. Remember: wet areas get wetter as the planet warms, but arid areas get even more droughty. In late 2017 a study estimated that by 2050, even if the world manages to hit the Paris climate target of “only” a 2-degree Celsius rise in temperature, a quarter of the earth would experience serious drought and desertification. “Our research predicts that aridification would emerge over about 20 to 30 percent of the world land surface,” said the study’s lead author. Another study from the same year found that as hotter days led to more evaporation, corn and soybean yields across the U.S. Grain Belt could fall by 22 to 49 percent. Extensive irrigation could help — except that we’ve already overpumped the aquifers that lie beneath most of the world’s breadbaskets. Some Americans can still remember what drought-driven dislocation looks like: Okies piled into rattling pickups streaming out of the Dust Bowl and into California’s pastures of plenty (and one Harvard researcher recently predicted that America’s climate migration will be twice the size of that Depression-era exodus). But now, as we’ve seen, even reliable escape routes are blocked. California’s snowpack keeps dwindling as hot, dry years pile up; the state faces a drop of as much as 70 or 80 percent in its water supply.
Even in those places where you’d expect the field of play to be expanding, we’re seeing the opposite. Warmer temperatures should make the Arctic into the new Kansas, right? Here’s how Rex Tillerson cheerfully put it, back when he was the CEO of Exxon: “Changes to weather patterns that move crop production areas around — we’ll adapt to that.” Except Iowa is Iowa not just because of the temperature. There’s also that topsoil, none of which you find once you move north; instead, the ground there is underlain with ice. And as that permafrost melts, it spews more carbon into the atmosphere — no small matter, given that permafrost makes up one-fifth of the Northern Hemisphere. But that thawing layer also cracks roads, tilts houses, and even uproots trees to create what scientists call “drunken forests.” Economic losses from a warming Arctic could approach $90 trillion over the course of the century, far outweighing the gains from easier shipping lanes, according to ninety scientists who released a joint report in 2017.
You get a sense of why by looking at particular places: Churchill, Manitoba, say, on the edge of Hudson Bay. A single rail line connects it to the lower world, but in the spring of 2017, record floods washed away much of the track. The company that owns the rail line says it can’t justify the price of fixing it, “particularly in a warming climate,” The New York Times reports. To cancel its contract, the company declared what lawyers call a “force majeure,” an unforeseen event beyond its responsibility. “To fix things in this era of climate change, well, it’s fixed, but you don’t count on it being the fix forever,” an engineer for the company explained. “Things are changing that we can’t arrest or change or govern.” Even construction of a new research center to study the effects of climate change ceased when the train shut down.
If you have enough money you can ward off anything for a while. The Canadian government reopened the rail line in the summer of 2018 at the cost of $117 million — about $130,000 per resident of Churchill. But next time? According to The New York Times, Churchill “claims a mythic place in the Canadian psyche,” up there at the end of the rail line. And so do many of the other places that we may abandon before too long. Fort Sumter? The Kennedy Space Center? Mar-a-Lago? It’s worth noting that the city in Kuwait with the increasingly impossible temperatures sits close to where biblical scholars place the Garden of Eden. In 2018, Scottish archaeologists reported that thousands of prehistoric sites — stone circles, Norse halls, Neolithic tombs — were at risk from rising seas. Each tide washes away artifacts — washes away our history.
Lots of people already hesitate to walk across a grassy meadow because hot weather has spread ticks bearing Lyme disease. On plenty of beaches, people now sit stranded on the sand because jellyfish, which thrive as warming seas kill off other marine life, have taken over the waves. The planet’s diameter will remain eight thousand miles, and its surface will still cover 200 million square miles, but the earth, for humans, has begun to shrink, under our feet and in our minds.
“A Shrinking World” is excerpted from Falter, by Bill McKibben. Copyright © 2019 by Bill McKibben. It appears here by permission of Henry Holt and Company.
