New kinds of activism keep springing up. In Sweden this fall, a one-person school boycott by a 15-year-old girl named Greta Thunberg helped galvanize attention across Scandinavia. At the end of October, a new British group, Extinction Rebellion -- its name both a reflection of the dire science and a potentially feisty response -- announced plans for a campaign of civil disobedience. Last week, 51 young people were arrested in Nancy Pelosi's office for staging a sit-in, demanding that the Democrats embrace a "Green New Deal" that would address the global climate crisis with policies to create jobs in renewable energy. They may have picked a winning issue: several polls have shown that even Republicans favor more government support for solar panels. This battle is epic and undecided. If we miss the two-degree target, we will fight to prevent a rise of three degrees, and then four. It's a long escalator down to Hell.
Last June, I went to Cape Canaveral to watch Elon Musk's Falcon 9 rocket lift off. When the moment came, it was as I'd always imagined: the clouds of steam venting in the minutes before launch, the immensely bright column of flame erupting. With remarkable slowness, the rocket began to rise, the grip of gravity yielding to the force of its engines. It is the most awesome technological spectacle human beings have produced.
Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Richard Branson are among the billionaires who have spent some of their fortunes on space travel -- a last-ditch effort to expand the human zone of habitability. In November, 2016, Stephen Hawking gave humanity a deadline of a 1,000 years to leave Earth. Six months later, he revised the timetable to a century. In June, 2017, he told an audience that "spreading out may be the only thing that saves us from ourselves." He continued, "Earth is under threat from so many areas that it is difficult for me to be positive."
But escaping the wreckage is, almost certainly, a fantasy. Even if astronauts did cross the 34 million miles to Mars, they'd need to go underground to survive there. To what end? The multi-million-dollar attempts at building a "biosphere" in the Southwestern desert in 1991 ended in abject failure. Kim Stanley Robinson, the author of a trilogy of novels about the colonization of Mars, recently called such projects a "moral hazard." "People think if we f*ck up here on Earth we can always go to Mars or the stars," he said. "It's pernicious."
The dream of interplanetary colonization also distracts us from acknowledging the unbearable beauty of the planet we already inhabit. The day before the launch, I went on a tour of the vast grounds of the Kennedy Space Center with NASA's public-affairs officer, Greg Harland, and the biologist Don Dankert. I'd been warned beforehand by other NASA officials not to broach the topic of global warming; in any event, NASA's predicament became obvious as soon as we climbed up on a dune overlooking Launch Complex 39, from which the Apollo missions left for the moon, and where any future Mars mission would likely begin. The launchpad is a quarter of a mile from the ocean -- a perfect location, in the sense that, if something goes wrong, the rockets will fall into the sea, but not so perfect, since that sea is now rising. NASA started worrying about this sometime after the turn of the century, and formed a Dune Vulnerability Team.
In 2011, Hurricane Sandy, even at a distance of a couple of hundred miles, churned up waves strong enough to break through the barrier of dunes along the Atlantic shoreline of the Space Center and very nearly swamped the launch complexes. Dankert had millions of cubic yards of sand excavated from a nearby Air Force base, and saw to it that a 180,000 native shrubs were planted to hold the sand in place. So far, the new dunes have yielded little ground to storms and hurricanes. But what impressed me more than the dunes was the men's deep appreciation of their landscape. "Kennedy Space Center shares real estate with the Merritt Island Wildlife Refuge," Harland said. "We use less than 10 percent for our industrial purposes."
"When you look at the beach, it's like 1870's Florida -- the longest undisturbed stretch on the Atlantic Coast," Dankert said. "We launch people into space from the middle of a wildlife refuge. That's amazing."
The two men talked for a long time about their favorite local species -- the brown pelicans that were skimming the ocean, the Florida scrub jays. While rebuilding the dunes, they carefully bucket-trapped and relocated dozens of gopher tortoises. Before I left, they drove me half an hour across the swamp to a pond near the Space Center's headquarters building, just to show me some alligators. Menacing snouts were visible beneath the water, but I was more interested in the sign that had been posted at each corner of the pond explaining that the alligators were native species, not pets. "Putting any food in the water for any reason will cause them to become accustomed to people and possibly dangerous," it went on, adding that, if that should happen, "they must be removed and destroyed."
Something about the sign moved me tremendously. It would have been easy enough to poison the pond, just as it would have been easy enough to bulldoze the dunes without a thought for the tortoises. But NASA hadn't done so, because of a long series of laws that draw on an emerging understanding of who we are. In 1867, John Muir, one of the first Western environmentalists, walked from Louisville, Kentucky, to Florida, a trip that inspired his first heretical thoughts about the meaning of being human. "The world, we are told, was made especially for man -- a presumption not supported by all the facts," Muir wrote in his diary. "A numerous class of men are painfully astonished whenever they find anything, living or dead, in all God's universe, which they cannot eat or render in some way what they call useful to themselves." Muir's proof that this self-centeredness was misguided was the alligator, which he could hear roaring in the Florida swamp as he camped nearby, and which clearly caused man mostly trouble. But these animals were wonderful nonetheless, Muir decided -- remarkable creatures perfectly adapted to their landscape. "I have better thoughts of those alligators now that I've seen them at home," he wrote. In his diary, he addressed the creatures directly: "Honorable representatives of the great saurian of an older creation, may you long enjoy your lilies and rushes, and be blessed now and then with a mouthful of terror-stricken man by way of dainty."
That evening, Harland and Dankert drew a crude map to help me find the beach, north of Patrick Air Force Base and south of the spot where, in 1965, Barbara Eden emerged from her bottle to greet her astronaut at the start of the TV series "I Dream of Jeannie." There, they said, I could wait out the hours until the pre-dawn rocket launch and perhaps spot a loggerhead sea turtle coming ashore to lay her eggs. And so I sat on the sand. The beach was deserted, and under a near-full moon I watched as a turtle trundled from the sea and lumbered deliberately to a spot near the dune, where she used her powerful legs to excavate a pit. She spent an hour laying eggs, and even from 30 yards away you could hear her heavy breathing in between the whispers of the waves. And then, having covered her clutch, she tracked back to the ocean, in the fashion of others like her for the past 120 million years.
This article appears in the print edition of the November 26, 2018, issue, with the headline "Life on a Shrinking Planet."
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