When haven’t we humans been on the move? The answer may be never. Unlike most of our closest primate relatives, to be human is to wander, to range far beyond that little patch of familiar forest, into the unknown. It’s been the norm for us for at least several hundred thousand years. And even back at the beginning of human experience it may have had to do with climate change.
The very day that I finished reading this urgent and magisterial book, a new analysis was published concerning the earliest evidence we have yet found of indiscriminate violence against humans of all ages. Researchers from France and the United Kingdom, writing in Nature’s Scientific Reports (27 May 2021), analyzed the remains of sixty-one of our ancestors who lived at least thirteen millennia ago. Their bones had been discovered in the 1960s at Jebel Sahaba, a cemetery of the late Pleistocene, in the Nile Valley. The new paper revealed a hundred wounds previously missed, both healed and unhealed, suggesting that the dead, male and female, children and adults, were not as was thought, the victims of a single battle, but the battered casualties of long periods of sustained conflict. Their skeletons were riddled with wounds caused by projectiles, blunt trauma, and stabbings with sharpened stone weapons. The researchers believe that this brutality was a result of the long-term stress on resources caused by the climate change at the end of the last glacial maximum.
We are still slaughtering each other. But some things have changed. We are no longer the clueless hostages to the fortunes of the Earth’s natural cycles, but instigators of our own catastrophe. It is our fate to be citizens of the Anthropocene, the epoch of human-caused global environmental destruction and massive species extinction. We and our children, and theirs, live beneath the swiftly descending shadow of global catastrophe. There is hardly a place on Earth that will be left untouched, no nearby clement valley to pick up and move to for refuge from the deteriorating environment for the billions of us humans and our fellow Earthlings.
Science has given us unprecedented predictive powers. For more than a hundred years, the scientists have known that a reckoning over our planet-wide production of greenhouse gases was coming. Prophecies of the rising global mean temperature, made more than sixty years ago at the dawn of climate modeling, have proven to be surprisingly accurate. And yet, these early warnings could not seem to awaken us from our sleepwalking. In the 1970s when I first began writing about climate change, there was an impenetrable wall of fossil fuel economy propaganda buttressed by our natural tendency to
Today, all but the most invested and benighted of us have joined the scientific consensus that we are in trouble. This dawning recognition was earned at the cost of countless scorched acres of land, evaporating glaciers, bleached reefs, inundated homes, and extinguished species. The marketplace has discovered a world-wide consumer appetite for the recycled, the renewable, and the sustainable. This critical first step towards change, the acceptance of reality, is a source of hope, one that has the potential to slow the rate of the warming of the world.
Though no matter what we do now, the worst impact of the agricultural and industrial revolution on our environment can only be blunted, not averted. For those consequences that are already built into our future, the question remains, how will we meet this challenge.
From the shattered bones of Jebel Sahaba through the broad cross-cultural surveys of human history, we know that scarcity and adverse change bring out the worst in us. The global novel coronavirus pandemic, itself possibly another symptom of climate change and habitat ruin, has exposed the vulnerabilities of our supply chains and the inadequacy of our health care infrastructure. For those of us who felt aggrieved by the restrictions and deprivations of the pandemic lockdown, rest assured this was but the mildest foretaste of what the full effects of even mitigated climate change hold in store for us. Recently, in the United States we have seen how civil and legal norms deemed solidly established for a couple of centuries can rapidly disintegrate under the assault from a single anti-democratic politician in power.
That’s why this book is so important to me. Dawson and Laut are unflinching in their grasp of our blood-stained history and the grave trepidations of climate science. Their response is to propose a detailed, well-argued legal and social framework for navigating unprecedented dislocations without repeating the heinous sins of our violent and greedy past.
One of the most encouraging passages concerns the great wall being built across the entire Sahel, from coast to coast, where Africa is at its broadest. Not a wall to keep out desperate and starving humans on the move, but something much more promising. A natural wall of forest that can prevent the Sahara Desert from encroaching farther. Dawson and Laut encourage human self-confidence with their account of the Great Green Wall, a collaborative initiative of twenty-one African nations, begun in 2007, to transform a million square kilometers of desert into lush and fecund forest. A fifth of this epic goal has already been accomplished.
But first things first. Earth is where we make our stand now. Our world is in need of loving, conscientious restoration. Read this book and become inspired by our ability to break the ancient spell of Jebel Sahaba. We don’t have to slaughter each other in a hopeless struggle for resources; we can act constructively to redeem our future. Humans on the Move is a survival manual for our humanity just when it is likely to be tested as never before.
Ann Druyan
Ithaca, NY
1 June 2021