The Story of More: How We Got to Climate Change and Where to Go from Here

by Hope Jahren

because only after we see where we are can we duly ask ourselves if this is where we want to be.

It makes sense that the most effective and long-lasting mechanism for curbing global population growth revolves around an elimination of gender inequality.

Every year, more and more GMO crops are being adopted around the world. Is it prudent that the literal seeds of global food production should rest in the hands of fewer than five American companies, to sell or withhold as they see fit?

In the world today, a billion tons of grain are eaten by humans while at the same time, a different billion tons of grain are offered to animals as feed. From all this feed, we get about one hundred million tons of meat and three hundred million tons of feces.

If every American cut their red meat and poultry intake by half—down from four to two pounds a week—it would free up 150 million tons of grain. This kind of decrease wouldn’t constitute much of a sacrifice: two pounds of meat per week per person is generous compared with the consumption within many developed countries—it is still well more than the average consumption in Ukraine, for example. And the grain not used to make unnecessary meat for America would increase the world’s food-grain supply by a respectable 15 percent.

Sooner or later we will have to reconsider the fact that every year, we actively waste 90 percent of the grain we feed to animals, in exchange for a little meat and a lot of manure.

How much of the working, learning, playing, and being together that you do every day could be done in the absence of electricity?

Q for reflection

The United States is rich in plenty of other resources, however, and creative efforts to convert them into an ersatz fossil fuel has given rise to what may be the most absurd environmental innovation of the twenty-first century: the conversion of food for people into fuel for automobiles.

Like most energy innovations of the last one hundred years, development of the corn-ethanol biofuel has simply been used to facilitate increased fuel consumption.

This is true as well for the electric car that you sometimes think about buying. Tethered to fossil fuels through an umbilical cord made of lead, nickel, cadmium, or lithium, an electric vehicle emits its smog on the other side of town, allowing us to imagine it as clean and green.

Every single scientist I know is freaked out by the steep increase in carbon dioxide of the last fifty years. But we are more freaked out by the fact that our governments are not as freaked out about it as we are.

Nevertheless, the world places great symbolic value on the appearance of loyalty to these doomed protocols. Donald Trump announcing that the United States will not comply with the terms of the Paris Agreement is like me announcing that I will not rule England after Queen Elizabeth dies, but the international media still reported it as news.

My own goal is to inform you, not to scare you, because teaching has taught me to know and respect the difference. I’ve found that fear makes us turn away from an issue, whereas information draws us in. Thinking logically, in light of the above, it is clear that to avoid warming and upheaval beyond what we’ve already experienced will require a transformative approach to energy use, rather than the incremental changes supplicated within the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement. We need to transform our collective idea of what energy is for, and then transform our individual—and eventually collective—practices of how energy is used.

It’s no use pretending that conserving resources isn’t at direct odds with the industries that helped to write our Story of More and that increasing consumption over the last fifty years wasn’t tightly coupled to the pursuit of more profit, more income, more wealth. It’s time to look around and ask ourselves if this coupling is truly the only way to build a civilization, because the assumption that it is may represent the greatest threat of all. Each one of us must privately ask ourselves when and where we can consume less instead of more, for it is unlikely that business and industry will ever ask on our behalf.

I stress one thing above all else: Having hope requires courage. It matters not only what we do about global change but how we talk about it, both in the classroom and beyond. We risk our own paralysis with the message that we have poisoned the earth and so the earth rejects us. As far as we know, this is still our species’ eternal home, and we must not alienate our children from it. We must go forward and live within the world that we have made, while understanding that its current state arises from a relentless Story of More. We can make this easier by being kind to one another along the way.