Terraforming the New Frontier

Here’s a long article from the New York Times on the bright side of global warming. The quick summary: there’s money to be made, land claims to fight over, and a good time to be had by all—or at least all the newcomers. It’s a new frontier. Yee haw!

It depresses the hell out of me.

To some extent it’s the reporter’s stump dumb assertion that we don’t know anything about the cause of this. (Yes the comment is a bit more nuanced than that, but not by much.) Mostly, what depresses me is that divvying up the Arctic commons will create a powerful set of interests actively supportive of global warming. And it won’t simply be big corporations who think that way.

Think I’m crazy. Hey, if you work in a port that’s open five glorious months of the year, and a little more warming will make it six and stick really big bucks in your pocket, just how fast will you write that check and lobby that congressman in the hope of ending or at least slowing the melt down? Now, be honest.

At one level, this is nothing new. Humans have long been unconscious terraformers, reshaping the environment, sometimes to better suit their needs and sometimes in ways that thwarted human habitation.. Early Native Americans, plus some “natural” global warming, killed off the mammoths and mastodons. Part of the complexity (to put it mildly) of Native American/European American interactions focused on the latter group’s desire to change the landscape on a far grander scale that Native American values and necessities could or would allow.

In a sense, the global warming debate has echoed that interaction. The debate has been focused on whether we are changing the environment and whether we should stop that. However, this article makes it clear that there really is a different “debate” happening. One sometimes sees it in grand, quasi-science fiction suggestions for reacting to global warming. Most of the time, however, it is more implicit in actions than explicit in discourse.

I’ll put this new debate this way (with maximum human hubris): we are terraforming the Earth, so what do we want to do with it? And how do we decide? Do we warm it or cool it? Do we want to increase of decrease land masses. Do we want to try to “tame” more parts of the sea to farm it?

We are doing all these things now, most bit by bit, mostly unconsciously. What will we try to do as we become conscious?

Postscript: When Frederick Jackson Turner lamented the loss of the frontier, I bet he never once thought about creating a new one.