In my mind, one would think that the 1968 NASA “Blue Marble” image of our planet, showing it as one beautiful blue and white globe with no borders, would have, certainly by now, persuaded most people on Earth that we were “one planet, undivided” and need to respect and revere all people and all forms of life. John Muir anticipated this NASA image – and even embraced a cosmic perspective, not just a planetary one, when he wrote:

“When we contemplate the whole globe as one great dewdrop, striped and dotted with continents and islands, flying through space with other stars all singing and shining together as one, the whole universe appears as an infinite storm of beauty.” 

Dr. Barnett says that this global vision of the commonality among all people and all forms of life on earth requires a radical shift not just in thinking, but in our economics, forms of government, and lifestyles.

For this final part of the book, Barnett relies heavily on Naomi Klein’s book, This Changes Everything. That book tells the sad story of how in 1988,  NASA climatologist James Hansen first sounded the alarm to the U.S. Congress about the problem of global climate change.  But little has been done between then and now.  International Climate summits in 1992, 1997, and 2009, failed miserably to agree to any binding emissions limits by any country. Then, in 2012 , a study by the international accounting and auditing firm Pricewaterhouse-Coopers concluded that the climate studies “mean, quite simply, that climate change has become an existential crisis for the human species.”   

Clearly the data indicated not just challenges to civilization, but its widespread collapse around the world as temperatures increased above 2℃, accompanied by horrific death rates from famine and disease, especially in the already-warm equatorial belt. Had meaningful responses to climate change begun to be gradually phased in shortly after the initial 1988 announcement by Hansen, the threat could have been handled relatively easily, and catastrophe averted. Three decades of refusal to seriously address the issue, however, had presented humanity by 2012 with a very different scenario.  Dr. Barnett shows that this was primarily to the very successful efforts of Big Oil, Big Coal, and the Heartland Institute. What is now required to avert the specter of civilization’s collapse on the planet was wrenching change focused into a short window of time.

So what have we gotten? The United Nations Conference on environment in Paris in 2015 resulted, for the first time, an agreement to address human caused climate change.  However, none of the provisions of the agreement were legally binding, and its goals would still allow for a 3 percent increase in global temperature, well above  the 2 percent that scientists believe is necessary.  Any thought of a tax or fee on carbon was studiously avoided. This is despite the fact that not only numerous scientists, but even major economists, including agencies like the World Bank, believe that the affects of climate change will be – and I quote –  “widespread drought, famine, severe-weather episodes, flooding of coastal areas, and creation of climate refugees in the hundreds of millions, which will together bring about the death of millions of people.”

What we are talking about here is inter-generational justice – or the lack thereof.

As Bill McKibben writes, in the face of such a threat, we should immediately stop drilling, coal mining, and fracking for fossil fuels – anywhere – and to start immediately building solar panels and windmills at a breakneck pace all over the world.” 

In a study released during Earth Day in 2015, a group of leading scientists and economists said that we truly need to go even further: “Three-quarters of known fossil fuel reserves must be kept in the ground if humanity is to avoid the worst effects of climate change.”

But what has happened instead?   In 2020, then-President Trump opted the United States out of even this limited Paris Agreement, and moved swiftly in precisely the opposite direction, to rapidly open up even formerly protected public lands to expanded oil drilling, even in the critical caribou habitat of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, not to mention the continental shelf on both coasts. (Fast forward to 2022, well after the publication of Barnett’s book, even President Biden, who had campaigned on a promise of  “no new drilling on federal lands, period,” and in 2021 had re-instated U.S. participation in the Paris Climate accords in his day one executive order, nonetheless ordered massive oil releases from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, in a bid to tamp down runaway gasoline prices. This was followed on March 13, 2023 when the Biden Administration approved the gigantic Willow Project, a ConocoPhillips venture that will open up an immense swath of public land on Alaska’s North Slope to new oil drilling. The Willow project has been called a “carbon disaster,” and could result in the release of more than 249 million tons of carbon dioxide over three decades, after all the oil is drilled and burned — the equivalent of adding around 2 million cars to the road each year. 

Merely a week later (March 20, 2023), the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued its sixth report since 1988, culminating an eight-year long series of science papers. The report states, “Without urgent effective, and equitable mitigation and climate change increasingly threatens ecosystems, biodiversity, and the livelihoods, health, and wellbeing of current and future generations.”  Kelly Trout, co-director of Oil Change International, contends as a result of this and earlier reports that “The science is crystal-clear: We must take immediate action to phase out fossil fuels if we’re to keep the 1.5 degree (Celsius) limit alive and stave off devastation to people and ecosystems worldwide. The IPPS has shown the fossil fuel phase-out must start now, and wind, solar, and energy efficiency are the keys this decade, not fossil-fuel-industry-favored techno-fixes like carbon capture and storage.”

In earlier reports, the IPPC described climate change as “code red for humanity,” and warned that “some parts of the planet will become uninhabitable.” Yet, even more drilling is likely in store as the newly-Republican-controlled Congress beginning in 2023 clearly plans to stop even President Biden’s lukewarm efforts to wean the economy off the fossil fuels that drive climate change.

In Barnett’s view, “The crushing inertia of a world view solidly based on the notion that humans are the center of the world, superior to other life forms and not constrained by the laws governing the rest of life, is relentlessly preventing the necessary urgent responses to climate change.”

To change the world we need some big ideas, and a big change in world view.

Barnett  argues for adoption by society at large of a  new world view based on the three pillars of John Muir’s Earth Wisdom. These three pillars he sees as being not limited to governmental action, but also can be implemented within capitalism with an entrepreneurial spirit, and within both secular organizations like environmental groups, and also within religion.  He sees hopeful signs for these in all these institutions.  

Barnett spends some time addressing how his three pillars can be better  integrated into each of these various institutions, and especially in the world’s various religions. He finds hopeful signs in the recent messages of Pope Francis, as well as other recent religious efforts to address climate change.

Dr. Barnett’s three pillars all relate to John Muir’s Earth Wisdom, which, as we have seen, is congruent with both ancient Taoist philosophy and simultaneously with modern scientific thinking.

Dr. Barnett’s prescription to help humanity survive the coming challenges of climate change is a simple three fold expression:

“First, more Earth, living here and now;

Less Heaven, living the future and elsewhere.

Second: More Kinship with all earth’s creatures;

Less Human superiority and focus.

Third: More Yin traits expressed;
Less Yang dominance.

(More cooperation, acceptance, nurturing, and feminine ; less competition, dominance, destruction and masculine.”

Barnett’s book Earth Wisdom makes an excellent case for the best path we can take to live in  harmony with the Earth. Let’s find ways to apply the three pillars from three sources – from the wisdom of John Muir, from Taoism, and from science.   If we do that, we can make a better world for not only ourselves but for future generations and for all living things – and the rocks and clouds and the interconnecting cycles of water and carbon and oxygen and nitrogen upon which our Earth revolves. 

Conclusion

I would like to conclude this review with two final quotes which serve to summarize Barnett’s book, though written many decades earlier.  

Muir biographer Linnie Marsh Wolfe, summarized the way John Muir saw the world: 

“Man must be made conscious of his origin as a child of Nature. Brought into right relationship with the wilderness he would see that he was not a separate entity endowed with a divine right to subdue his fellow creatures and destroy the common heritage, but rather an integral part of a harmonious whole. He would see that his appropriation of earth’s resources beyond his personal needs would only bring imbalance and beget ultimate loss and poverty for all.”

John Muir contrasted this selfish appropriation of Earth’s resources by mankind with the abundance that Earth actually possesses:

“One is constantly reminded of the infinite lavishness and fertility of Nature — inexhaustible abundance amid what seems enormous waste. And yet when we look into any of her operations that lie within reach of our minds, we learn that no particle of her material is wasted or worn out. It is eternally flowing from use to use, beauty to yet higher beauty; and we soon cease to lament waste and death, and rather rejoice and exult in the imperishable, unspendable wealth of the universe, and faithfully watch and wait the reappearance of everything that melts and fades and dies about us, feeling sure that its next appearance will be better and more beautiful than the last.”

– John Muir, in  My First Summer in the Sierra (1911).