SHATTERING - Center for Ecozoic Studies

MY ONGOING EXPERIENCE OF A COLLAPSING WORLD

*Michael Powell**

Every single worst-case prediction made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) about the rise in temperatures, extreme weather, sea levels, and the increasing CO₂ content in the atmosphere has fallen short of reality.

–Dahr Jamail, The End of Ice

In December 2019, six months after I retired and four months after my 65^th birthday, I was shattered by my two-week-long, deeply experiential reading of The End of Ice: Bearing Witness and Finding Meaning in the Path of Climate Disruption by Dahr Jamail.[1] My initial grieving, which lasted for more than three months, allowed me to absorb what I viscerally was experiencing. In going back through every page of the book for the first time since reading it over three years ago, the feelings evoked by the author then came through again. As I write this article, I am two months short of my 69^th birthday.

I have pulled a number of expert “testimony” statements from The End of Ice. They are referenced by page number(s) following each passage. As you read this article, and as you may read the book at some future time, dive into the author’s energy, his experience of the situations humanity and other species are faced with due to climate disruption. Enter into the experience of the various ecological science experts as they state their understanding of what is happening. Feel the emotions churn within you when you come to realize the depth of our self-inflicted predicaments; we cannot go back to the 1980s and change where we are now; and we must live without hope in the shallow sense as we decide what we will give our lives to now.

This article highlights Jamail’s deeply personal and comprehensively informed reporting of how climate disruption is sundering our world. The conversations with scientists and others he presents in this book brought me into moments of painful reckoning with the ecological damage resulting from climate disruption. My persona and image were shattered. Regardless of my ecological awareness and activism, too much of how I currently lived was business as usual.

“Shattered.” I have yet to come up with a different term to describe my experience. I came to understand well the truth of what Aldo Leopold said in A Sand County Almanac,

An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.[2]

Jamail knew the truth of this too when he wrote:

I regularly found myself not knowing what to do with the information on an emotional level. While I was grateful that I was, in operating like a scout, getting to peer into the future and see where the world was going, the apocalyptic information was often too much to hold. It became imperative that I spent time out on the planet. When I was home in between my research trips, I spent every weekend venturing up into the mountains in nearby Olympic National Park. Listening to birdsong and the wind sift through the tops of forests never failed to provide respite from bearing witness to ecocide. . . .
Simply getting lost in studying the face of a mountain or noting the incremental changes in orange light on a distant mountain peak as the sun set brought me much needed solace and perspective. These regular respites were long, slow deep breaths that sustained me, as the deeper into the information my work took me the worse the news became. (p. 146)

The End of Ice

The End of Ice asks the questions and tells the story of the research that led me to an ecological conversion. It consists of an introduction, eight chapters, and a conclusion titled “Presence.”

Chapter 1: Denali:

Jamail speaks of mountains and glaciers. As an accomplished mountaineer, he has seen and researched the “evidence of dramatic climatic shifts [that have been] in front of all of us for decades. Most people in the so-called developed world are not connected enough to a place on the planet to notice. They are unaware of the dire ramifications of what [the shifts] mean, both for the planet and for our species” (p. 21).

Jamail states, “Becoming aware of the wounds climate disruption has caused to the mountains and the glaciers I have come to cherish over the years felt like watching a dear friend struggling with a terminal illness. . . . What I had learned . . . about the rapid glacial melt rates around the globe was overwhelming” (p. 21).

Chapter 2: Time Becomes Unfrozen

“Alaska’s glaciers are losing an estimated 75 billion tons of ice every year” (p. 36). Dr. Mike Loso, a “glacial geologist” with the Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve in Alaska states,

I ask myself, as a park steward, how to manage the park’s resources for future generations. We can’t manage the climate back to where it was. So, we are standing by watching the diminishment of our glaciers without any tools to do anything about it. If the Park Service can’t stop the change, we at least have to bear witness to it. I am trying to tell this story to the people who have no idea as to the seriousness of these changes. (p. 36)

Dr. Dan Fagre, a United States Geological Survey (USGS) research ecologist and lead for the USGS Benchmark Glacier Program based at Glacier National Park, observes, “Ice is not just melting, it is collapsing” (p. 39). “The glaciers are going away, it is going to be pretty soon, and it’s going to be a big deal because they have been here for seven thousand years” (p. 45). All glaciers will be gone in the contiguous United States within a few decades (p. 45). “The impact on future available water needs from mountain ecosystems is great as these ecosystems provide 85% of all the water humans need, not to mention other species” (p. 45).

Dr. Farge explains “Earth has a resilient system that has been through much worse than what we have caused—volcanism, ice ages, etc. ‘So many of these things will recover,’ he says of the glaciers and forests vanishing before our eyes. ‘But not in the time frame that includes humans. . . . It is tough to watch the thing you study disappear” (p. 41).

Chapter 3: Canary in the Coal Mine

Chapter 3 is about oceans and marine life in northern Alaska. It contains reports on the rapid decline of fur seals, halibut, snow crab, and many other species in the area.

Bruce Wright, scientist with the Aleutian Pribilof Islands Association and formerly with the National Marine Fisheries Services and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, states, “We’re not going to stop this train wreck. We are not even trying to slow down the production of CO₂ in the atmosphere” (p. 71). He describes a time when the planet experienced mass extinction events: “They were driven by ocean acidity. . . . The Permian mass extinction, approximately 252 million years ago, where 90% of the species were wiped out, that is what we are looking at right now” (p. 73).

Chapter 4: Farewell Coral

“Coral reef ecosystems cover less than 2% of Earth’s ocean floor yet are home to 25% of all marine species. Some reports show that coral reefs even surpass rain forests in terms of biodiversity. Without coral the entire oceanic ecosystem takes a turn for the worse” (p. 79). “Oceans continue to absorb over 90 percent of the excess heat trapped by greenhouse gases in the atmosphere” (p. 63); and ocean warming is impacting coral through coral bleaching. We are killing off coral reefs at a breakneck pace. Half of the planet’s coral has been lost. Some species of coral will survive, but the colorful and diverse coral discovered through scuba diving will be but a memory (p. 80).

Dr. Laurie Raymundo, coral ecologist with the University of Guam Marine Lab, is concerned. She states, “We are losing [coral and associated life] before we even actually know fully what we are losing. And this is a global issue, because we know loss of diversity makes the system less stable” (p. 87).

“If you took all the heat humans generated between the years 1955 and 2010 and placed it in the atmosphere instead of the oceans, global temperatures would have risen a staggering 97^oF” (p. 94).

Chapter 5: The Coming Atlantis

Jamail highlights the uniqueness of the Everglades:

There is no other land/seascape in the world like the Everglades. It is a synergy of worlds, where both tropical and temperate species from the Caribbean and North America meet and flourish. The entire national park is one massive subtropical wetland, the only one of its kind in the United States. It is part of the Kissimmee-Lake Okeechobee-Everglades watershed, a giant drainage basin covering 11,000 square miles. (p. 101)

Along with the Everglades, two other national parks, Biscayne and Dry Tortugas, are located in South Florida, and also Big Cypress National Preserve. These four areas total 2.46 million acres. Projections by Dr. Ben Kirtman of the University of Miami, one of the leading sea level experts in the world, indicate that by 2050, sea levels are projected to increase by one to nearly three feet (p. 104). If so, these areas may be completely submerged.

Deep adaptation to these near-term threats is required. Kirtman says that now is the time to start planning:

How are you going to relocate people? How are you going to recapture certain property in order to return it to its natural environment? How are you going to change building codes? All of these things and others take a tremendous amount of time and public buy-in. We’re talking about twenty-year time horizons that are required for that kind of infrastructure.” (p. 110)

Dr. Harold Wanless, professor and chair of the Department of Geological Science at University of Miami, exclaims “We have gone off the cliff. 93.4% of the global warming heat we have produced is in the oceans, and half of that went in since just 1997. That is unbelievable. If we had only got a hold of this in the ’80s we’d have less than half the problem we have now” (p. 115).

“[He] is taken aback by the general public’s business as usual mindset. With population increasing, with industrialization ongoing, and with sad exuberance about opening the Arctic as an opportunity to get more oil and gas, shouldn’t we be thinking, ‘Oh my God, what have we done?’” (p. 115). Wanless asserts that the IPCC sea level rise projections are skewed too low because they underestimate the amount of melting in Greenland and the Antarctic (p. 116).

As an example of business as usual, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission approved Florida Power & Light’s “plans to build two brand new nuclear power reactors, as well as store radioactive material and waste in an area below aquifers already contaminated by saltwater. The aquifers are Miami’s single largest source of drinking water and supply water to 2.7 million people” (p. 119, footnote omitted).

Jamail asks Dr. Philip Stoddard, mayor of South Miami and a professor in the Department of Biological Sciences of Florida International University in Miami, how he deals with climate disruption emotionally and psychologically. He responds, “The vernacular term for this is ‘mindfuck.’ . . . How do you get your head around this? The place you grew up in will not be there. The world you know will be gone. That is a hard thing to accept” (p. 125). Mayor Stoddard looks up the political ladder and asks, “What kind of morality allows [administrators and legislators] to ignore what is going to happen?” (p. 125).

Chapter 6: The Fate of the Forests

Dr. Craig Allen, USGS research ecologist at Bandelier National Monument, knows more about trees than anyone Jamail has come across. He reports many examples of higher tree mortality in forests around the world with trees made vulnerable and dying due to climate disruption and says, “I think we are flying blind about the fate of forests on planet Earth” (p. 137).

David Peterson, a US Forest Service research biologist based out of the Pacific Northwest Research Station, says, “90 percent of the forests across the western United States have been cut down at least once, sometimes twice. This means that you are working with a landscape already highly altered by human activity” (pp.138-139).

Dr. Phil Townsend, a professor of forest and wildlife ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says “mountain pine beetles have destroyed ten times the area that fire has in any one year, and the monetary damage they have caused is eight to ten times greater than fires because the area is so vast” (p. 144). The beetle population is prevalent due to reduced snowpack, moisture, and lack of colder temperatures which kill the mountain beetle larvae (p. 144).

“A 2016 study showed that when large number of trees die from drought, heat, deforestation, and insect infestations in North America, it can, for example, negatively affect the climate of forests in Siberia. This is possible because changes in one place can ricochet to shift climate in another place because everything is connected via the atmosphere” (p. 147, footnote omitted).

Dr. Nate Stephenson, a USGS research ecologist associated with the Western Mountain Initiative, does research on the Sequoia National Park. He first felt grief over climate disruption back in the mid-1990s when he “got it on a visceral level that it wasn’t going to be possible to maintain the parks as they are for future generations” (p. 150). He says, “We’re seeing things happen we’ve never seen before. We are documenting things that have never been documented before” (p. 152).

Chapter 7: The Fuses are Lit

Chapter 7 concerns the fate of the Amazon rain forest:

The largest rain forest in the world, the Amazon, is a system dominated by water. Generating half its own rainfall and holding 20 percent of all the world’s rivers within its borders, it covers an area two-thirds the size of the contiguous forty-eight United States. There are more than eleven hundred tributaries of the Amazon River alone, with seventeen of them more than one thousand miles long. (p. 158)

Dr. Thomas Lovejoy has worked in the Brazilian Amazon since 1965 [until his death in 2021] and has the nickname of “the godfather of biodiversity” (p. 159). In 1980, Lovejoy wrote that “hundreds of thousands of species will perish, and this reduction of 10 to 20 percent of the Earth’s biota will occur in about half a human’s life span. . . . This reduction of the biological diversity of the planet is the most basic issue of our time” (p. 160, footnote omitted).

“Around the world 1.5 acres of rain forest are lost every second” (p. 167). “The UN held its first environmental conference in 1972. . . . By 1988 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was formed to provide policy-relevant information about climate change to global decision-makers. IPCC consensus reports have been published in 1990, 1995, 2001, 2007, and 2014 [and in 2023]. . . . None of the reports have led to any real policy change” (p. 168).

Dr. Rita Mesquita, biologist and researcher with the Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas da Amazônia (INPA), the largest research institute for the Amazon, “believes the root cause of climate disruption is humanity’s lack of connection to the planet” (p. 171). She chooses not to have children because, “I don’t have a future to offer them. I don’t think we are going to win this battle. I think we are really done” (p. 172).

Mesquita’s husband is Dr. Mario Cohn-Haft, a staff scientist and curator of birds at INPA. What bothers him is that people “don’t understand what they are doing. . . . How can anyone not want to understand the world we live in?” (p. 174).

Warwick Manfrinato, director of Brazil’s Department of Protected Areas, believes:

What is required is a shift of awareness toward our being part of nature. Humans are not the apex. We need to respect complexity in order to survive as a species. Everybody and everything wins, or everybody and everything loses. Our contribution is the awareness of the complexity, and the protection of that. If we are of service to nature, then we provide the benefits to all other living things on the planet.” (p.176)

Later he says, “You belong to [a place of nature] because it belongs to you. The land belongs to me, not because I own it but because I belong to the land” (p.178). Jamail quotes Lovejoy again at the end of this chapter: “In the Amazon we witness the awe-inspiring wholeness of a living Earth, upon which our human existence depends entirely” (p. 179).

Chapter 8: The End at the Top of the World

“These kind, warm, gentle people and their culture will not be long for this place.” This observation was made of the Indigenous people of Utqiagvik (formerly Barrow), who live in the northern-most incorporated area in the United States, 1,300 miles from the North Pole. Summers have never been warmer or longer. Climate disruption is having an impact on their hunting and gathering way of life due to excessive heat (p. 185).

This is a problem because “according to a NASA report, over hundreds of millennia, ‘Arctic permafrost soils have accumulated vast stores of organic carbon’—an estimated 1,400 to 1,850 gigatons, compared to 850 gigatons of carbon in the Earth’s atmosphere” (p. 189, footnote omitted). Dr. Vladimir Romanovsky, a professor of geophysics at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks who specializes in permafrost says, “assuming changes continue as they have been for the last thirty years, the permafrost on the North Slope will hit 0^oC [32^oF] by 2050 or 2060 at the latest” (p. 191). And this means that as the permafrost thaws stored carbon and methane will be released into the air.

Permafrost in the interior of Alaska and in Siberia is already beginning to thaw (p. 191). Permafrost also exists under the Arctic seas. Permafrost is already melting under the Barents Sea and this could happen in the Arctic’s other shallow seas, including the Chukchi, Beaufort, and Bering Seas, and also the Kara, the Laptev, and the East Siberian Sea (pp. 196-197).

A further concern is methane hydrates on the Arctic seabed, which “contain the equivalent of one thousand to five thousand gigatons of carbon. The lower estimate of a thousand gigatons is still roughly one hundred times the total carbon equivalent that humans release in the atmosphere annually by burning fossil fuels” (p. 199).

Rapid release of methane will accelerate global warming.

Over a five-year cycle, methane can trap up to a hundred times more heat than carbon dioxide, and thirty-five times as much over a hundred-year time scale, making it a far more potent greenhouse gas in both the short and long terms” (p. 194, footnote omitted).
[According to Dr. Ira Leifer,] an academic researcher who specializes in bubble-related oceanographic processes (such as subsea bubble plumes emanating from the ocean floor), remote satellite sensing, and air pollution, “Over a ten year-timescale, methane globally dominates climate change” (p. 194).

Leifer also says that even if humans were immediately to stop producing CO_2, the heat already in the oceans would affect thawing in the Arctic for hundreds of years (p. 200).

When these warmer currents begin to have their full impact on the East Siberian Sea, underneath which the brunt of known methane deposits are stored, it will have a ‘positive forcing’ on global climate. This coupled with ongoing human forcing from CO₂ emission, will push the global system past tipping points that haven’t even been identified yet. . . .
Right now there is no reason that global climate couldn’t push past tipping points that mean only 1 billion people can live on the planet. (p. 200, italics added)

All of this is overwhelming to take in. With this accumulation of knowledge presented in The End of Ice, Jamail reflects, “I thought about how it’s over, how it’s already too late, about how any real struggle to stop or even mitigate what was already upon us and what we were doing felt pointless” (p.207).

This is when my soul cried. I pondered the eventuality that only one billion people would remain alive. That would mean seven billion people will have died through the 21^st century. I couldn’t wrap my mind around that figure.

When I was a young adult, I used to state cavalierly, “Oh Earth will survive, even if we don’t,” without any real empathy and compassion about what I was saying. I had been hiding behind a persona of rational reasoning mixed with apocalyptic concerns, thereby deadening the impact of the suffering climate disruption could bring.

What will we being going through as we attempt to re-imagine and re-invent the human as a species?

Conclusion: Presence

Disrespect for nature is leading to our own destruction. By desecrating the biosphere with our pollution and bringing about Earth’s sixth mass extinction of species around the planet, we are setting ourselves up for what Jamail believes will be our own extinction. This is a direct result of our inability to understand our part in the natural world. As he was coming to these realizations, he also began to realize the need to share his own grief with others about what was happening to nature (p. 212).

Jamail nearly lost a dear friend named Duane, one of the world’s oldest living quadriplegics, in the course of writing The End of Ice. He thought of his grief for the planet and what he should do in relation to the loss he had felt as Duane struggled to breathe:

Reflecting on what is happening to the planet, I realize that the intimacy I shared when I thought I was losing my best friend is the intimacy we should have with the Earth. When I thought I was losing Duane, I did not want to leave anything in my heart for him left unsaid, nor were there any wrongs left to make right. In an analogous way, we may be watching Earth dying, so we each get to ask ourselves: What am I called forth to do at this time? Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh has written how the most precious gift we can offer others is our presence. . . .
Given that the Earth may well be dying, we may be ready to stand up to protect what we love. An extraordinary alchemy can take place when people follow their inner directives to stand up and face squarely the dire odds of biosphere survival. These actions involve extraordinary outer and inner courage, which can nurture a profound activism. The gifts provided by the crisis at hand are the conditions to make possible widespread shifts in political identity, purpose, and consciousness. . . .
We should be asking ourselves, “How shall I use this precious time?” (pp. 215-216, italics added)

My Response to The End of Ice

In this time of great uncertainty, one program I facilitate weekly is called “Contemplation in the Desert,” as I live in the Phoenix, Arizona metro region. Through the Care for Creation Ministry at the Franciscan Renewal Center people come and join us outside on the grounds and we listen deeply and reflect on writings that speak of Earth loving, and our loving Earth, thereby building our loving relationship more deeply and gratefully. Within our time together, people also wander the sacred grounds and experience their holy moment as they reflect on their miracle of creation. This ground within the Renewal Center becomes one’s place to stand with nature.

The program is part of a greater personal realization that others will also be affected when the realization comes that our suffering from climate disruption reflects a true impasse, and new ways of living are necessary to embrace and adapt to the suffering through love. Thomas Berry stated that we need to “re-invent” the human by developing new, transformational ways of living values that restructure the human experience, so human living is within and aligned to the framework our Living Earth provides for life to thrive. Trying to force nature into submitting to human will doesn’t work in the long run as demonstrated by the tremendously damaging consequential feedback loops in play that are leading to the great damage and suffering described in The End of Ice.

Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee says, “We have arrived at a threshold: a liminal space where the world we have known is coming undone and new configurations are still taking place. In this moment of great loss, possibility, and transformation, what are the stories we need to orient ourselves within our shifting landscapes?” How do we tell and include each other in the stories needed to create the living psycho-social-cultural-ecological scaffolding from which to thrive in a new landscape of interconnected reality and wholeness, infused and imbued by and with Love?

Dahr Jamail offers insights through the practice of presence that enables one to see things as they are. My scaffolding through the many insights I have gained from this experience is to “start from wholeness.” How broad and deep are the perspectives I can lightly hold, connecting them to gain a greater appreciation of what is in the moment. This is not an exercise in thinking hard. The intention/effort is feeling, living one’s way into the spaciousness that exists, leaning into the love that is creating a new place from which to see what is real, the awareness and compassion to serve life, and loving our neighbors, all of our neighbors, human and non-human beings, as ourselves.

Jamail states,

My acceptance of our probable decline opens into a more intimate and heartfelt union with life itself. The price of this opening is the repeated embracing of my own grief. Grief is something I move through, to territory on the other side. This means falling in love with the Earth in a way I never thought possible. It means opening to the innate intelligence of the heart. I am grieving, yet I have never felt more alive. (p. 219)

In experiencing this, Jamail is showing how he has become “committed in his bones to being with Earth, no matter what, to the end” (p. 220).

He adds, “To live well involves making amends to the Earth by finding gratitude [for everything the Earth gives us]” (p. 219); and also living well means “living in community with others who are remaking themselves and their lifestyle in accord with what is” (p. 220).

Jamail’s final interview in The End of Ice is with Stan Rushworth, elder of Cherokee descent, teacher of Native American literature and critical thinking classes focused on Indigenous perspectives. Rushworth says,

The dire position we’re in now is solid evidence that the predominant civilization does not have a handle on all the interrelationships between humans and what we call the natural world. . . . We simply do not have a big enough or right-minded vision. Because of this, we need to allow for something we cannot understand. This is not about hope, but more, humility, and carefully considered action within that humility, and much deeper listening. (p. 221)
Each person must find their own agency and from that place decide upon their proper course of action. (p. 224)

Jamail closes with this reflection:

While Western colonialist culture believes in “rights,” Indigenous cultures teach “obligations” that we are born into: obligations to those who came before, to those who will come after, and to the Earth itself. When I orient myself around the question “what are my obligations,” the deeper question immediately arises: “From this moment on, knowing what is happening to the planet, to what do I devote my life?” (p. 225).

I feel those obligations.

Daily I ask, “To what do I devote my life now?

* Michael Powell’s past work, across education, government, nonprofit, and profit sectors includes organizational change and development, employee and volunteer training, grant writing, public service, teaching, and political engagement. He has two master’s degrees, one in Organizational Management, the other in Conscious Evolution. Since retiring in June 2019, his new “work” is, at heart, building relationship to release the hidden capacities that exist in everyone. He is conscientiously evolving an ethic of deeper caring and learning that serves others, beginning with loving our living Earth and being deeply grateful for the life our Earth provides. To continue his learning, Michael is studying for a Doctor of Ministry in Evolutionary Ecological Spirituality. He seeks to create psychological, cultural, and social spaces/refuges that honor and explore the deep pain and suffering we feel for our world through our love for one another. His major volunteer service is with the Franciscan Renewal Center’s Care for Creation Ministry and social justice efforts and the Center for Ecozoic Studies.

[1] Dahr Jamail, The End of Ice: Bearing Witness and Finding Meaning in the Path of Climate Disruption (New York, The New Press, 2019). All page numbers cited in this article refer to this book. The quotations of scientists in this article, are quotes recorded by Jamail and then included in this book. In other words they are the scientist’s words quoted by Jamail.

[2] Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac with Essays on Conservation from Round River New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 197.