By Richelle Boyd
In a recent Interdisciplinary Humanities Center Regeneration Talk, writer Elizabeth Kolbert said that humans must “do more with less” to combat climate change.
Day to day conversations with friends don’t typically bring up the kind of thought-provoking contemplations about the future state of the world that guest speaker Elizabeth Kolbert inspired last week in me and other members of a UC Santa Barbara audience.
“There’s all sorts of crazy stuff that if we just simply stopped doing we would be better off— and why aren’t we? That’s the $64 trillion question,” said Kolbert, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and environment writer for The New Yorker.
Kolbert was speaking as part of the Regeneration lecture series hosted by the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center. She talked about her new book, Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future, in which she explains the complicated entanglement of technology and the Earth’s ecosystem and how the two can no longer be mutually exclusive.
She warned about the current track humans are on and their impact on climate change. She also urged those who attended to dedicate themselves more fully to what can be done about climate change, and offered guidance by way of her research into the role new technologies will play.
Kolbert said human intervention with technologies may be the only thing that can save us now. That was hopeful news to me, countering the doomsday message of science fiction movies I have seen and novels I have read about a possible environmental apocalypse.
Kolbert seemed to say a way out is always possible, though it’s easier said than done. “We should be focusing on doing a lot more with a lot less, and not with just technology. That’s not going to save us,” she said. “That doesn’t mean all is lost and it doesn’t mean all hope is lost, but it does mean that there are no easy answers.”
Our current society cannot escape technology and needs to find more effective ways to apply it. Kolbert brought up the new idea of “solar geoengineering,” a way of making synthetic clouds by spraying light reflective particles into the sky that would help to reduce the growing level of heat being trapped on the planet.
Her book outlines interventions scientists are working on, such as the cloud engineering and geoengineered coral in Australia, where the Great Barrier Reef’s natural coral is dying quickly due to warming water temperatures.
Pulitzer prize-winning author Elizabeth Kolbert signing her book for a student at her talk for the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center. Photo courtesy of IHC
In her book, Kolbert puts a human face to data statistics and research abstracts. “There are many different ways of conveying information and we are, you know, a very visual culture and you can convey a lot of information with data,” Kolbert said. “It just doesn’t happen to be what I do.”
Kolbert says the dominant role humans play on Earth is a Catch-22: we make great strides with our intelligence, but it comes at the cost of the Earth’s ecosystem. “We just turned out to be technologically extremely capable, and we are socially not capable,” she said.
By bringing these urgent issues to life, Kolbert prompted me to think about the alarming situation we find ourselves in with climate change without becoming overwhelmed. Her words made me realize that we aren’t doing enough to save the only planet we have, and we aren’t devoting enough time or effort to handling the situation properly. What I took from this lecture was that the more people are thinking about these issues, the more they can involve themselves.
College students in the crowd had questions about how to handle the future. Kolbert was anxious to pass the torch to a younger generation, urging students to look for jobs in activist related fields as she posited that there would be no shortage of environment-related employment going forward.
Amid the doom and gloom about where climate change is leading us, it was refreshing to hear Kolbert say that we can come up with the necessary survival technologies. “One day or another, we’ll get there and not necessarily in a timely fashion but it will have to happen,” she said.
Audience members —including myself— left the auditorium feeling newly inspired towards action. We might just yet be saved.
Richelle Boyd is a third-year English major at UC Santa Barbara. She wrote this piece for her Writing Program class, Digital Journalism.