Facebook twitter linkden Youtube pinrest

• Donate

• News & Event

  

  Mission Blue’s Expedition to Malpelo Studies Sharks and the Challenges of MPA Enforcement

  

  

  “A Tree For Nuñez” Initiative Takes Place Around the World

  

  

  Palau Youth Work To Remove Single-Use Plastic From Their Island

  

How Hot Does It Have to Get?

By Bryan Walsh

AT THE FIRST EARTH SUMMIT, HELD IN 1992, LEADERS FROM AROUND THE WORLD—INCLUDING U.S. President George H. W. Bush—converged n Rio de Janeiro to show concern about the imperiled global environment. But mostly they paid lip service. For all the international power on display, it was a speech by a 12-year-old girl named Severn Suzuki that truly captured the moment. “I am only a child,” she told the assembled audience. “Yet I know that if all the money spent on war was spent on ending poverty and finding environmental answers, what a wonderful place this world would be…You grownups say you love us, but I challenge you, please, to make your actions reflect your worlds.”

Twenty years later, Suzuki was back in Rio, this time for the second Earth Summit in June 2012. She was older, wiser—and sadder. In interviews, Suzuki noted that for all the talk in Rio—and in all the climate and environmental summits that have followed it—we’re losing ground in the war to save the environment. A report released before the second Earth Summit by the U.N. Environment Programme noted that of the 90 most important international commitments to sustainability, the world has made significant progress on only four. An assessment published the same month in the journal Nature warned that because of human activity, the planet was reaching a potentially catastrophic tipping point. Twenty percent of vertebrate species are at risk of extinction, coral reefs have declined by 38% since 1980, and greenhouse-gas emission could increase 50% by 2050. As Suzuki told a reporter in Rio in 2012, it “is clear that we have not achieved the sustainable world we knew we needed 20 years ago.”

While I haven’t been following environmental issues for quite as long as Suzuki has, I’ve seen that same cycle of hope and disappointment that seems to drive our efforts to save the planet. When I began my work as TIME’s environment writer in 2007, interest in global warming and the environment was at a high. Al Gore had just won an Oscar for the documentary An Inconvenient Truth and shared a Nobel Peace Prize for his work on climate change. After years of paralysis under President George W. Bush, the U.S. seemed ready to join the rest of the world in acting on global warming. In the 2008 Presidential election, both the Democratic and Republican candidates embraced proposed legislation to cut carbon emission. Global corporations built advertising campaigns around their environmental efforts. It was a good time to be green—or report on it.

Five years later, we seem to have gone backwards. Global warming has become a politically divisive issue in the U.S., where republicans have turned wholesale against any climate action, as well as internationally. The global energy picture is changing, with new supplies of oil and natural gas—including in the U.S.—complicating the promised clean-tech revolution. Yet even as we dither, the planet keeps on getting hotter, with natural disasters piling up and 2012 on track to be the warmest year on record. The worse things get, the less we seem to be able to do about it, as even the most pressing environmental problems are swallowed by the constant crises in the global economy or security. We can’t see to be bothered to save ourselves.

Yet the reality is more complex than that. If the case for climate action has been dented and bruised over the past few years, it reflects a growing realization of just how difficult it will be to halt the warming of the planet without compromising the economic growth on which we all depend. We may miss the certainty we felt five years ago about the crusade to save the planet—let alone 20 years ago at the Earth Summit—but we also should have realized that this was never going to be easy.

Still, as the chapters of this book show, if there’s much to fear, there’s also a basis for hope. Activists in the field and scientists in the lab are pushing for solutions to our most pressing environmental threats. New technologies like advanced solar and fuel cells promise sources of energy beyond fossil fuels. Even everyday actions like biking to work or air-drying laundry can add up.

As Severn Suzuki knows, it’s hard to keep hoping when you’ve been disappointed so many times in the past. But we have to believe that this time will be different, if only because we have no other choice, and no other planet to call home.

###

Bryan Walsh is a senior editor for TIME International and the environment writer for TIME magazine. He created and writes the Ecocentric blog on TIME.com.