Robustness and Vulnerability: Caring for the Earth in an Age of Loss

The old metaphor of the canary in the coal mine has lost its edge. When applied to global warming and climate change, the relevance of its parts has become reversed—the canary is clearly dead, and it died a good while ago, its warnings mostly ignored. The coal mines of the world, meanwhile, are busier than ever, as the power plants they serve pump vast amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere. A better metaphor for the present human predicament is the frog and the kettle of water. Everybody knows that the frog, if thrown into hot water, will leap out. No problem there. But we pity the frog placed in cool water because, when its kettle is gradually heated, the complacent frog hasn’t the sense to escape, and it stays until it boils. . . . Climate change is transforming the polar regions of North America fastest—melting ice, thawing permafrost, and drowning polar bears— but for most people who live in the Lower 48, those transformations are nearly as remote as a tsunami hitting Borneo. While we lament such calamities at a distance, the warming kettle, now rattling up toward a boil, is working changes closer to home that promise sweeping transformations. The place where those changes might best be observed is a region already straining from rapid growth, whose water resources are stretched to the utmost—the aridlands of the North American West. What happens under the turquoise skies of the continent’s most celebrated landscapes will presage changes that human frogs in kettles the world over can expect to experience.