It’s Not Just Climate Change

Here is my latest missive from my personal essays entitled “Earth Meanders“:

Climate change is the collapse of the global atmospheric system’s processes and patterns and represents a massive environmental challenge to maintaining a habitable Earth. Yet climate is but one of several planetary scale ecological crises that threaten existence and are occurring now concurrently.

While climate change is so omnipresent that it interacts with and exacerbates virtually every other environmental crisis, it remains but one symptom of a much more malignant systematic breakdown in the global ecological system. Global heating could stop being a major issue tomorrow (it will not) and there are at least half a dozen ongoing ecological catastrophes that could still destroy the Earth and civilization such as it is.

It is critical in a post-natural ecological world that these global crises are understood to be connected and addressed holistically if there is to be even a sliver of hope of a human future… Global heating and all the attendant changes in ocean currents, atmospheric circulation and temperature and precipitation patterns may well kill us off by itself. But sadly, climate change is not the only or perhaps even the major global ecological issue threatening global ecological sustainability, sustainable development, equity, justice and international security. [entire essay].

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