Adaptation (ad·ap·ta·tion)

Noun / Biology. a change or the process of change by which an organism or species becomes better suited to its environment.

Whether we recognize it or not, adaptation isn’t a choice for living things; it’s an evolutionary mandate. It is how all life forms — humans very much included – have survived and thrived over the millennia. When, for whatever reason, this process is disrupted (dinosaurs meet asteroid), life ends for those that cannot adapt to the changed circumstances. If adaptation is a successful strategy for continuing, extinction brings it to a halt.

We are in the Sixth Extinction now (see abstract of Elizabeth Kolbert’s book by that name), a culmination of decades of business as usual in the face of louder and more alarming warnings from the scientific community about greenhouse gases, resource depletion (oil, soil, water, forests), and biodiversity loss. Lately, the headlines are starting to catch up with the conclusions of peer-reviewed papers while emboldening the denialist camp (One Million Species Face Extinction). We are, the majority of scientists say, on the brink of societal collapse caused by us.

It is cold comfort indeed to learn that collapse is already occurring in our lifetime, just unevenly distributed. Says Vinay Gupta, software engineer, disaster consultant, global resilience guru, aka, The Man Whose Job It Is to Constantly Imagine the Collapse of Humanity In Order to Save It: “Collapse means living in the same conditions as the people who grow your coffee.”

When you bring to mind the existential struggle of the people of the Marshall Islands and Bangladesh or how sea level rise is redrawing the map of Louisiana (Elizabeth Kolbert: Louisiania’s Disappearing Coast) or watch how prolonged rain and flooding in the Midwest is threatening farmers’ livelihood and our food security (PBS News Hour), surviving to pick coffee for pennies sounds almost bearable.  Of course, coffee (along with chocolate, wines and many other climate sensitive foods) is on the endangered list. Sorry.

Starving for some good (well, somewhat better) news? Check out Leonardo DiCaprio’s HBO documentary Fire on Ice. It follows the trajectory of the previous Years of Living Dangerously documentary series by James Cameron (Avatar) in that it offers a raft of technology solutions. I have two reactions to these approaches 1. Apparently, we are capable of entertaining the most extreme ‘techno-fixes,’ while the real driver of biosphere destruction, that is, corporate capitalism and its bunkmate, consumption, get a free pass, and 2. Even if these solutions manage to keep us below the ‘safe’ PPM level of atmospheric CO², the best time to have implemented them is, as is said of tree planting, 20 years ago. Further, I fear that films like these tend to do just the opposite of what Greta Thunberg and young people are demanding: urgency, even panic, both of which are commensurate with the facts and timelines.

OK, I’ll be 78 this year and Buddhist teachings about impermanence resonate with me. I am less concerned for my personal survival in an age of climate disruption than for those who will live more deeply into its unfolding, including my own beloveds. My adaptation so far is light on practical details, though relocation from South Florida seems sensible, and more about adapting in a spiritual sense and helping others to do the same. I’ve signed up for an online training in facilitation of Joanna Macy’s Work That Reconnects. More on that in a future post.

Going Deeper
New Climate Debate: How to Adapt to the End of the World

What To Do About Predictions of Imminent Food Collapse