1. Checkmate
I used to love to tell the story about the window of opportunity. When I was young and devoted to activism, I told it to anyone who would listen.
You know how it goes. Even though we’re in mortal danger, we still have a chance to save ourselves—but only if we take action right now, no more talking, no more delays—because the window is closing and it’s closing fast. How much time have we got? That depends. Some say ten years, some twenty, some go as high as a hundred. Still, in the long journey of human history a decade or two or even a century is only the blink of an eye, and our fate is in that blink.
If I had crossed your path back in those days, I would have barraged you with details about the threats we’re facing, laying them on thick, then even thicker, watching you carefully until I saw your eyes fill up with fear. Then I’d pivot and announce that for yet a little while hope was still ours for the taking.
I provoked distress because I wanted to move people to action. And it’s true that fear can fire people up, but it’s also true that fear shuts people down even more than it fires them up. A net loss. So it didn’t matter how sincere I was, I wasn’t helping. And maybe it’s just that I wanted you to be as scared as I was so I’d have company.
Now, though, when I hear someone tell the window story, I hear it as an admission of defeat. The time frame is too short for us to pull off something as momentous as the salvation of our species. We’d have to make an impossible leap overnight. Tomorrow morning billions of us would have to get up and go show up out on the playing field of survival, giving it everything we’ve got, all of us in synch, one harmonious global team. But that kind of togetherness is not possible for us. By our nature, we humans are too contentious and contrary. Which means this cherished window of ours is only a pretty picture painted on the wall we’re about to hit.
Alexander Pope, in his epic poem An Essay on Man, wrote those three famous words of inspiration: “Hope springs eternal.” But there’s a second half to that line, and though I doubt Pope meant it this way, I take it as cautionary because it says, “…in the human breast.” That’s where hope springs, in us, in our hearts. It’s got remarkable resilience. It really does. Hope springs again and again—right up to the day it dies. And hope can die because it’s only human.
There once was a time, a very long time, when our ancestors had the art of togetherness mastered. For the first ninety-five percent of our history, so our best evidence says, we evolved in bands of thirty or forty individuals living within larger tribes. These were communities where people knew each other well. There was a high degree of mutual caring and, just as important, accountability. Both were necessary for survival. Tribes which couldn’t sustain effective togetherness disappeared. Lots of tribes did survive, though, more and more because we had the luxury of time, tens of thousands of years, to master the art of taking care of ourselves in small groups.
But since then, we’ve turned into a monstrous global mass, and we haven’t got a clue how to nurture a population of such magnitude. We’re drowning in ourselves. A hundred years from now, if we last that long, there could easily be ten billion of us, every single person with their own urgent needs. How can all those needs possibly get met? Who do we imagine will meet them? Especially since we’re already failing so badly now with only seven billion of us.
When I was a child, I believed we were the apple of God’s eye. Weren’t we created in his image? Didn’t he protect us with his divine love? Didn’t he swear his sacred promise of eternal salvation? Didn’t he give us the rainbow sign? But here we are on the brink of extinction and now is when we need him most and where is he? What’s he waiting for?
When I grew up and stopped believing in God, I decided that we must be, had to be, the apple of evolution’s eye. Wasn’t evolution looking out for us in its own nonsentient way? After all, aren’t we life’s greatest creation, what it’s all been leading up to, the apex? Sure, we’re on a continuum with the rest of the species, but still it’s true we’re special. Look at our closest living relatives, the chimpanzees, who are so cute mugging for the cameras but who have created nothing compared to the incredible world we’ve created. It’s no contest. There’s nothing we’ve ever discovered anywhere in the universe that’s more complex than the human brain. Carl Sagan said each of us can have, even the humblest among us, more brain states, meaning combinations of synapses being on and off, than there are atoms in the universe. Atoms in the universe!
But here we are, face to face with fate, and suddenly we’re nobody’s chosen ones. The promise that we’re exceptional and deserve special treatment and will get it, this happy entitlement, is only a promise we made to ourselves. Still, we’ve counted on it, so now that it’s broken why wouldn’t we feel betrayed?
We used to believe Earth was our mother. And for a long time she was. We could suck from her with abandon, do our ravages to her body, and no matter what we did, no matter how much damage we inflicted, she would heal and recover because there just weren’t that many of us and we weren’t that big a deal. But now we are a big deal, and Earth has become our baby. But nothing has prepared us to take care of an Earth-sized baby. No species has ever been called on to parent the planet. It’s not a species kind of thing to do.
When I look at the state of our world what I see is this: the problems are too big and too many, and the activists too few and too tired. Of course, the activists we’ve got, the ones keeping at it, are doing yeoman’s work. They’re devising strategies and solutions by the score. They’re showing us exactly what we should be doing to save ourselves and this would be very hopeful except not enough of us are actually going to do enough of those things. We just aren’t. We can’t. That’s not who we are. Our salvation programs won’t run on our human operating system. There’s a fatal split in us between our dreams and our abilities. When it comes to saving ourselves, we’re not even in the game.
Worse, there’s no way we can get in the game. Our operating system precludes that. And what’s it like for activists—is it angering? is it heartbreaking?—to have to work so hard for every inch of forward movement only to see one bad election or one bad Supreme Court decision take us racing at breakneck speed right back into the destruction we were hoping to escape?
I don’t know what’s ahead for us, whether it’s absolute extinction or merely a catastrophic collapse of population. I believe it’s one of those two, though I find extinction more credible because the odds against us are so bad. Either way we’re looking at megadeath. I once read a novel about people surviving in the wake of a worldwide nuclear holocaust. They had returned to hunting, gathering, and farming, not an easy life, but the author described it so beautifully it struck me as okay, even tempting, until I remembered that the wind blowing across the meadows and the fields in such a time would be filled with the stench of billions of corpses. And I had to wonder, how much sanity could you hold on to after witnessing megadeath? How could you begin to mourn something that big? How many of us would even want to survive such a thing?
And what if over subsequent centuries, scattered human remnants were able to repopulate the Earth only to repeat our tragedy in a sickening round of karma because we still hadn’t learned the lessons we needed to learn? Lessons it’s not possible for us to learn.
I can’t prove that it’s over for us. I don’t want to prove it. With all my heart I don’t want it to be over, but with all my heart I do believe it is. And if I’m to tell the truth, this is the truth I need to tell.
For me, hope is Humpty-Dumpty. It’s fallen and shattered and nothing and no one can put it back together again. So I’ve stopped asking, “How will we save ourselves?” If hope is dead that question is dead. So the issue now is not whether we as a species are going to die but how we will die. I wish for us to die with dignity, but I don’t believe we will.
I’ve never been one of those people who likes to go to horror films. Instead, I’ve been drawn to dark scenarios I discovered in science books about the end of human life. Horror films are too scary for me. Even something as mild as Jaws would keep me awake at night. But stories of extinction—I couldn’t put them down. The freaky dangers got to me most, like nuclear weapons, with which we could kill a million people in a single morning before coffee break, or tens of millions before nightfall, or everyone during the course of a nuclear winter.
There are many ways things could go wrong. Maybe unstable leaders in a failed nation get their hands on the missing uranium stockpiles stolen back when the Soviet Union collapsed, then they find a nuclear scientist with financial troubles to sell them the secrets they need so they can build workable bombs. Or maybe a major nuclear power gets taken over by a demented political party willing to do insane things to carry out their paranoid agenda.
I tried to make myself believe the certainty of mutually assured destruction would prevent even irrational leaders from launching missiles, but then I remembered Hitler who at the end of World War II when all was lost and he was in his grandly suicidal, Götterdämmerung state of mind would have used nuclear weapons against anybody and everybody in a heartbeat if he’d had them.
What scares me now, though, way more than the freaky scenarios, is the perfect storm that’s upon us. See how it intensifies so gradually there’s no alarming drama. See how we let the days slip by because today doesn’t feel that much worse than yesterday. See how every one of the fundamentals necessary for our survival, you know the litany—food, water, air, energy—is quietly sliding into a state of stunning distress. If only one fundamental were going to hell, maybe we could find a way to resolve it and pull the rabbit out of the hat. But what do we do when everything’s a problem? And when every problem is bigger than us—bigger than all of us put together. And when each problem is feeding the others, making the storm perfectly diabolical. And when the storm is not in the province of the future, but is here now, gathering us in like the snake swallowing the captured mouse.
What happens when we’ve paved over too much farmland and can’t grow enough food? What happens when we’ve emptied the seas of too many fish and can’t find any to catch? What happens when we’ve contaminated too much water and can’t find any to drink? What happens when we’ve turned our air so toxic we find ourselves fighting against each breath we have to take? What happens when these things and more slam us all at once and the whole seven billion of us become desperate? Really desperate. Crazy desperate. A species bristling with terrible weapons. What will we do to each other then?
The more I studied the question of how we will die, the more scared I got, so I don’t ask it anymore. Instead I focus on this: “In the time we have left, how do we choose to live?”
Hope is gone, but despair is very much with us and it’s deadly. It drowns us in loneliness when what we need is comforting and company. It takes us from each other at the very moment when we need each other most.
But having lived on the far side of hope for many years now, I’ve learned a few things that keep me going. Despite how bitter this place is, there is happiness here, a surprising amount. Which does not make this a happy place. And though it’s not a blessing to have to live here, there are blessings, chief among them what I call love with fight in its heart.
And then there are contradictions. Hope is gone from my life, I miss it terribly, and yet I’m thankful it’s gone. Our species needs salvation. We can’t have it, but we do need it. And I can’t get over that need. At the same time, I’m glad I’ve quit trying to suck nurturance from hope when it has nothing left to give. I’m glad I’m no longer dragging the cadaver of hope around with me pretending it hasn’t died. Now I get to see what hope did not let me see. Now I get to be who hope did not let me be.
In the last few millennia, we humans have taken dominion over the Earth. It’s been a long, hard journey for us, albeit with deadly consequences for so many other species. Still, to give us our due, we’ve achieved a remarkable level of success, and we’ve enjoyed the benefits of that success. But we’re no longer winners. Suddenly we’re losers trapped in a losing game. We’re a failed species condemned to living out the rest of our days in a state of checkmate.
But so what? I want us to fight for ourselves anyway. If we have to be losers, I want us to be kick-butt losers. I want us to be here for each other. I want us to ask more of love than we’ve ever asked of it. In the face of death—right in the face of death—I want us to hold ourselves deeper in our hearts, every day a little deeper.
