How will versatility benefit humanity as it confronts global climate change?
The rate of global climate change poses a serious challenge today. I’m especially concerned about the element of instability, which causes uncertainty about precisely how we should respond. Our ability to modify our immediate surroundings owes a great deal to our heritage of adaptation to climate change. The ability to make a simple hearth, to build a shelter, or to plant a seed and tend it and watch it grow, are all ways of controlling our surroundings that improved our ancestors’ ability to survive in the face of uncertainty. Well, these approaches became so successful that our species has spread all over the globe. And once you take all these reasonable approaches to altering the local environment and you make them worldwide, that’s global change. In the modern world, this results in huge numbers of people all crowded together; and a huge ability to pollute the environment because humans generate a lot of waste. We’ve become dependent upon a few animal species and a few plant specie
