Climate change is bringing life’s biggest disaster to us, and it’s coming within our lifetimes. I don’t just mean it will be humanity’s biggest disaster. I mean, with the possible exception of the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs and changed all life on this planet, it will be the biggest disaster since life began on our planet 3.5 billion years ago. We are effing it up that bad. Runaway greenhouse effect, desertification, and ocean acidification – if we were trying to ruin the good life we have going in this beautiful delicate biosphere, we couldn’t be doing a better job of destroying it.

In the middle of all of this, we have people, trying to make a living, motivated powerfully by what’s convenient and economical for them, motivated powerfully by the stories they tell themselves and each other. In Jared Diamond’s Collapse, there is a recurring question from his student: “What did Easter Island’s inhabitants tell themselves as they chopped down its very last tree?” You see there are no more trees. You see this is the last one. You know there aren’t any more after this. You know the wood from this tree solves a problem for only a minute, then you need another tree – another tree you don’t have, won’t have, can’t have. You know it’s futile to chop down the tree. You do it anyway. 

Naked self-interest fuels capitalism. Capitalism is one of the mightiest forces going in human society. The global climate will show us who’s boss in the end, but until climate change becomes too unignorable to explain away, capitalism is running the global economic show. Fear of being unable to compete if we mitigate climate change puts the brakes on cooperation that would otherwise be within our reach. The US won’t do it if China won’t do it. We are playing chicken with life on our planet.

That’s one story we tell ourselves. There are more local stories too. In Oregon, the drought-stricken southern part of the state is up in arms that the desperate fight to save sucker fish from extinction means less water for human use, mostly for agriculture. I hate extinction as much as the next person. I guess it’s a little controversial to say, but the problem isn’t losing a single fish species – and I think that is the picture that’s frequently painted. The problem is our common problem of climate change altering weather patterns so we don’t get as much rain. The problem is excessive human-created burdens on the water we have. It’s making life harder for lots of species in addition to sucker fish. But the story that’s told is that we have to disrupt human life to save the fish, and the counternarrative is that people won’t stand for that. People who might otherwise agree that protecting the environment is a good idea are being told their concerns are less important than a single fish species. In the fight to win the battle of saving this fish, we are losing the war for people’s hearts and minds to combat climate change.

Logging in Oregon follows a similar pattern. Absurdly, the industry that has the most to lose from runaway wildfires fueled by climate change is fighting hardest to accelerate climate change through deforestation. This is supported by people employed and supported by the logging industry, fighting for the privilege of chopping down Oregon’s very last tree. Our common problem is to protect and responsibly steward what forests we have left. But the logging industry is so odious to Oregon’s environmental activists that they will not find common cause. Smarter people than me have created solutions to allow the logging industry to make money (maybe not quite as much money, but forever instead of only a few more years) and keep Oregon green. If we can tell stories that put people and their needs still at the center, but still promote habitat retention and mitigate climate change, everyone wins. If we can bed down with the logging industry and its supporters, we might combat climate change using the power of the almighty dollar. 

I think of the meat industry too. Global meat production is responsible for 14% of greenhouse gas emissions (to say nothing of the holocaust of cruelty that is factory farming). Advocates for animal rights and the environment tell the story that eliminating animal products from our diets is the ethical way forward. People at large clearly reject this, and will continue to do so. Yet there are efforts to clone cell-based meat that can be synthetically grown, at a fraction of the inputs of live animal meat. And, to paraphrase the president of Tyson Chicken, if meat producers can sell meat without the animals, they’re all for it – keeping living things alive and fed is expensive work, and if that was unnecessary, that’s a huge upside. To advocates, the meat industry is the worst humanity has to offer. Yet if they can find common ground, cultured meat makes money, reduces climate impact, and has no cruelty footprint. Everyone wins.

Our planet will not wait for us to stop telling horrible stories to each other – stories about tree-huggers and human suffering, stories about rapacious capitalists who would burn the world to be CEO of the ashes. The solutions that will work are the ones that simultaneously pump the brakes on climate change and facilitate people from small towns to boardrooms making a pile of money. If we can get over our mutual distaste, hop into bed together, and make some mutually beneficial babies, maybe we can preserve this shimmering blue outpost of life in the vast inky void of space.