End Game: Tipping Point for Planet Earth?
overconsumption / population growth / dwindling resources / climate change / disease / contamination / storms / thirst / war … will the struggle to simply stay alive become humanity’s future rather than its past?What happens when vast population growth endangers the world’s food supplies? Or our water? Our energy needs, climate, or environment? Or the planet’s biodiversity? What happens if these all become critical at once? Just what is our future?In ‘End Game’, world-renowned scientists Anthony Barnosky and Elizabeth Hadly draw on their work to explain the growing threats to humanity as the planet edges towards a resource war for remaining space, food, oil and water. And as they show, these wars are not the nightmares of a dystopian future but are already happening today. They explore the origins of Ebola in densely populated areas of south-eastern Guinea, witness raging fires in Yellowstone and Colorado and explain how drought-induced food shortages are already causing problems in the Sudan, Gaza Strip and Iraq. Finally, they ask: at what point will inaction become the break-up of the intricate workings of the global society?The planet is in danger now, but the solutions, as Barnosky and Hadly show, are still available. We still have the chance to avoid the tipping point and to make the future better. But this window of opportunity is closing fast and will shut within ten-to-twenty years. ‘End Game’ is the call we need.
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First published in Great Britain by William Collins 2015
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers,
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
Copyright © Anthony D. Barnosky and Elizabeth A. Hadly 2015
The authors assert the moral right to be
identified as the authors of this work
A catalogue record for this book is
available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780007548156
Ebook Edition © July 2015 ISBN: 9780007548163
Version: 2016-04-28
To our parents, Emma & Michael Barnosky and
Jane Grassman Hadly & William McKell Hadly,
whose work to make a better world, each in
their own way, made us who we are.
And to our daughters, Emma and Clara,
who carry on with the future.
CONTENTS
Introduction
This is a story of a journey. Like most journeys, it started out as a personal quest, but for us it has also been a professional one. It began when we were young scientists, driven mostly by curiosity and looking for the next big adventure. We found adventures aplenty, because our jobs as palaeoecologists – people who study how our planet changes through time – took us to remote places all over the world. Along the way we fell in love and got married, and then the personal and professional adventures started inexorably to intertwine. We had one daughter, and a few months later got her a passport and hopped a plane to Australia. Then another daughter, same routine, but this time it was six weeks in Patagonia. By the time our kids were two-year-olds, they’d spent many nights in wilderness tents with us, buried their fingers in koala fur, been carried on our backs as we forded waist-deep rivers and stared down grizzly bears, and fallen sound asleep in their snugglies as we skied back-country trails. By the time they were fifteen, they had their own list of exploits: they’d hunkered down in their own tent as lions paced through camp, taught our graduate students the Latin names of various species, trapped rodents in Patagonia, faced off angry rattlers in the Oregon desert, and watched grapefruit-sized chicken-eating spiders lead around their hundreds of young on a dark Amazonian night.
By now we’ve travelled to every continent in the world, save Antarctica; sometimes together, sometimes alone, sometimes with our daughters, sometimes not. All those trips were research expeditions as well as adventures, each of them undertaken to learn something about how nature worked in the places on which we hoped humans had not yet laid a heavy hand. And we did discover answers to some of the questions we were asking – like how animals respond to climate change that isn’t caused by people, what causes mass extinctions, how ecosystems are assembled, and how evolution works at the genetic level to keep species alive.
But we also discovered that as the years went by and the personal and professional experiences added up, the questions we were asking ourselves began to change. From the personal perspective, the more different places we visited, the more they seemed the same in a very important respect: the values that people hold dear. Eventually we came to understand that the basic wants, needs and emotions that draw people together are much more deep-seated than those that separate cultures and countries. It didn’t matter whether we were with the native Inupiat in an Arctic fishing village, with an indigenous tribe in the jungle of Peru, with scientific colleagues in India, or with executives imbibing at a fancy hotel in one of the great cities of the world. Everyone seemed united in wanting a healthy, comfortable life, putting family and friends first, and in the joy they took in basic pleasures like a good meal, a good laugh, or a pleasant stroll through a pretty place. And without exception, no matter the religion, the country, the political views or the economic class, everyone wanted the best for their children, and hoped that as their sons and daughters grew up, the world would just get better and better. As we watched our own daughters grow up, listening to their own dreams and hopes, we realised that we were no different from anyone else in those respects. Adventure and curiosity were no longer the be-all and end-all; giving our kids, and everyone else’s, the future they deserve became much more important. And our lives in science began to change.
