TICK TOCK THE CLIMATE CLOCK – PART FORTY-SIX

I haven’t written one of these climate posts for a long time, but a trip to Namibia brought into focus just how violent geological and climate change has been in the Earth’s history and how the latter threatens our species and every other living organism on the planet today.

The configuration of land masses on Earth did not always look as it does today.  Eight hundred million years ago, Africa, South America, Australia, Antarctica, and parts of the Indian Subcontinent were one land mass known as Gondwana.  Here is what that supercontinent looked like 420 million years ago.

Gondwanaland eventually separated east and west along a north-south axis, as you can see if you look at the coastlines of Brazil and Namibia.  They fit together like jigsaw puzzle pieces.

Prior to the violent geological separation, about 280 million years ago, a dramatic warming event occurred in Gondwanaland at the end of an Ice Age.  Eighty- to 100-meter-tall pine trees growing in what is today Congo, were forced about 2,500 kilometers southward into what is today Namibia in a massive flood. The trees eventually sank and petrified 1,000 meters below a lake bed formed by the ice melt.  This article about the petrified forest near Khorixas, Namibia, a UNESCO World Heritage site, describes the petrifaction process:

The name is a bit misleading as it is not exactly a forest, which turned to stone, but rather an accumulation of enormous fossilized tree trunks about 280 million years old. Scientists found out that these trunks haven’t grown in today’s Namibia but were washed down a river in ancient times when one of the many Ice Ages ended on the Gondwana continent. There must have been a huge flood that carried along the trunks to where they lie today.

This flood also carried a lot of sand and mud which covered the trees to such an extent that air intrusion was prevented and consequently no decay took place. The organic material of the trunks was conserved. Due to enormous pressure and over a period of millions of years even the finest structures of the wood have been dissolved by silicic acid and replaced by quartz, which is silicic acid in crystalline state. The result is perfectly conserved and completely petrified trunks.

Thanks to erosion many of these trunks are now exposed and amongst many smaller specimens two fully exposed trees measuring up to 45 m have been discovered. 

Geologists did some research on the trunks and found out that the trees belong to the family of the Cordaites tree, which grew a long time ago in today’s Europe and was the ancestor of firs and spruces. 

Even more interesting, according to our guide at the site, the same species of petrified pine was recently found in Brazil, meaning the huge ice melt flood occurred before Gondwana separated into smaller continents. 

 

The Atlantic sea level off the Skeleton Coast of Namibia (above) has risen 300 meters and fallen 300 meters over millions of years, partly as a result of climatic change, partly as a result of tectonic plate activity, and partly as a result of erosion.  The sea level rise predicted by climate scientists as a result of today’s global warming is a mere blip in comparison.  What is different, however, is that man did not exist when Gondwana existed and this melting event occurred hundreds of millions of years ago.  While it is clear from the geological record that the Earth can survive cataclysmic climate, tectonic plate, and seismic events, it is unclear that the plant and animal species that populate our planet today can survive even the comparatively minor sea level rise and warming events predicted in our immediate future.  The evidence, however, for mass extinction is mounting.

Namibia is a vast, desert country of 318,260 square miles populated by only 2,721,524 people.  That's 8.55 people per square mile.  It's the second most sparsely populated country in the world, after Mongolia. There are only three settlements in Namibia that you might call cities:  Windhoek, population 431,000, the capital; Walvis Bay, population 63,000, the shipping port; and Swakopmund, population 45,000, an anachronistic German colonial town on the Atlantic coast.  

Outside of these urban areas, people live in very small, widely dispersed settlements.  

Their dwellings are either hand-made mud and dung huts or shacks made of mud bricks or sheets of corrugated metal like those above.  Most dwellings looked to be no more than eight feet square in floor area.    

People living in these settlements have electricity but no plumbing or running water.  Some have cars or 4-wheel drive vehicles.  There is no public transport.  Most people either share informal "taxis" (private individuals with vehicles who organize group transport), they use donkey carts,  or they walk.   

Their carbon footprint is pretty much limited to the wood they burn for cooking and warmth.  Their impact on the land is minimal.  People in the countryside and on the outskirts of the "cities" live in a state of what we would call poverty, and yet, people--especially children-- looked well-fed and happy.  There is no famine in Namibia--yet.  People are still smiling as they continue their traditional ways of living in a desert landscape.

 

 But Namibia is in its fifth year of drought. 

Subsistence farmers have little or no water.  Corn has not been planted, or if it has, in some areas it is desiccating in the fields.  Aquifers exist in parts of the country, but many lie deep below the surface, making boreholes speculative in their production of water and expensive to drill.  Some areas of Namibia rely on rivers and streams as catchments:  They are dry beds most of the year and become raging torrents when it rains, but if there is no rain, there is nothing to catch.  

 

Farmers are left to buy water from developments (often tourist lodges) that have gotten government permission to drill boreholes, an activity that has engendered controversy among environmentalists.  Some of those who cannot afford water move their herds north, where there has traditionally been more rain. 

But if they cannot afford to move their herds, then they must slaughter their animals.  After five years of no rain, even the northernmost grasslands are tinder-dry and in many parts of the country, we saw no goats, no cattle, no sheep.

While in Namibia, I read a Substack piece, Requiem for Our Species, by Chris Hedges, an American journalist, author, commentator, and Presbyterian minister.  I don’t always agree with Hedges but in the context of drought and the simple subsistence living we saw, these excerpts from Hedges’ piece really resonated:

Complex civilizations eventually destroy themselves. Joseph Tainter in “The Collapse of Complex Societies,” Charles L. Redman in “Human Impact on Ancient Environments,” Jared Diamond in “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed” and Ronald Wright in “A Short History of Progress,” detail the familiar patterns that lead to catastrophic collapse. We are no different, although this time we will all go down together. The entire planet. Those in the Global South who are least responsible for the climate emergency, will suffer first. They are already fighting existential battles to survive. Our turn will come. We in the Global North may hold out for a bit longer, but only a bit. The billionaire class is preparing its escape. The worse it gets, the stronger will be our temptation to deny the reality facing us, to lash out at climate refugees, which is already happening in Europe and along our border with Mexico, as if they are the problem.

 Wright, who calls industrial society “a suicide machine,” writes: 

Civilization is an experiment, a very recent way of life in the human career, and it has a habit of walking into what I am calling progress traps. A small village on good land beside a river is a good idea; but when the village grows into a city and paves over the good land, it becomes a bad idea. While prevention might have been easy, a cure may be impossible: a city isn’t easily moved. This human inability to foresee — or to watch out for — long-range consequences may be inherent to our kind, shaped by the millions of years when we lived from hand to mouth by hunting and gathering. It may also be little more than a mix of inertia, greed, and foolishness encouraged by the shape of the social pyramid. The concentration of power at the top of large-scale societies gives the elite a vested interest in the status quo; they continue to prosper in darkening times long after the environment and general populace begin to suffer.

We will frantically construct climate fortresses, like the great walled cities at the end of the Bronze Age before its societal collapse, a collapse so severe that not only did these cities fall into ruin, but writing itself in many places disappeared. Maybe a few of our species will linger on for a while....One thing is certain. The planet will survive. It has experienced mass extinctions before. This one is unique only because our species engineered it.

I accept this intellectually. I don’t accept it emotionally any more than I accept my own death. Yes, I know our species is almost certainly doomed — but notice, I say almost.

We must do everything in our power to halt carbon emissions. We must face the truth that the ruling corporate elites in the industrialized world will never extract us from fossil fuels.

The hardest existential crisis we face is to at once accept this bleak reality and resist. Resistance cannot be carried out because it will succeed, but because it is a moral imperative, especially for those of us who have children. We may fail, but if we do not fight against the forces that are orchestrating our mass extinction, we become part of the apparatus of death.

I share Hedges' realism and I also share his determination to do everything we can to resist our extinction.   

 

The Earth is a beautiful place. It is indifferent to us, but we are indifferent to it at our peril.  Spending almost a month in a vast, desert country, the majority of whose population is indigenous tribes of Herero, Nama, Himba, San, Ovambo, and others pictured above was humbling.  These ancient African cultures have lived in Namibia for thousands of years.  They didn’t screw it up.  What can we learn from them?  We owe it to ourselves and future generations to find out. 

 

Keep it real!

Marilyn