The impacts of climate change are only beginning to be felt. Atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide are at their highest levels in 650,000 years. Oceans are becoming warmer. A report released at COP15, by The Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity, highlights the direct link between manmade CO2 emissions and the rising acidity of the world’s seas. It estimates that at current rates, ocean acidity will increase by 150 percent by 2050, a rate10 times greater than anything that has occurred in the last 20 million years. The population of zooplankton, the basis of the marine food chain, has dropped 73% since 1960. Natural habitats everywhere are under threat, the cloud forests of the Andes, the grasslands of the Asian steppe, the lowland rainforests of the Amazon, and the entire arid belt of the sub-Sahara from the Horn of Africa to the Atlantic shores of Mauritania. Half the coral reefs of the world have either died or are on the edge of collapse. Pacific and Indian Oceans island nations such as the Maldives, faced with the possibility of dramatic increases in sea level, have made contingency plans for the evacuation of their entire populations.

But arguably the greatest immediate threat is to be found in the mountain ice fields that are the birthplaces of all the world’s great rivers. On the Tibetan plateau, source of the Yellow River, the Mekong and Yangtze, the Brahmaputra, Salween, Sutlej, Indus, and Ganges. These glaciers are not just retreating at the margins, they are melting from the surface down. Conservative estimates predict that sixty percent of China’s glaciers will be gone by the end of this century. Half of humanity depends on these rivers. Five hundred million people in the Indian subcontinent alone on the Ganges for water; for 800 million Hindus it is the sacred Ganga Ma, holiest of rivers.

Throughout the world indigenous peoples who played no role in the creation of this crisis are not only seeing the impact of climate change on their lives, they are taking personal responsibility for the problem, often with a seriousness of intent that puts many of us to shame. Eighty percent of the fresh water that feeds the western coast of South America is derived from Andean glaciers. These are receding at such an obvious rate that pilgrims, believing the mountain gods to be angry, are no longer carrying ice back to their communities, forgoing the very gesture of reciprocity that completes the sacred circle of the pilgrimage, and allows for everyone to benefit from the grace of the divine. In Colombia, The Kogi and Arhuacos, who consider themselves to be the Elder Brothers of the planet, observe each season the recession of the snow and ice fields that for them are the literal heart of the world. They notice as well the disappearance of birds, amphibians and butterflies, and the changing ecological character of the alpine meadows, which are drying out. They have increased both their ritual and political activities, and have formally called on us, the Younger Brother, to stop destroying the world.

As a scientist I try to recall every day all the things I’ve been dead wrong about. But I am afraid this really is happening. Twenty years ago, those who warned of the greenhouse effect were dismissed as radicals. Today it is those who question the existence and significance of climate change who occupy the lunatic fringe. The scientific consensus is overwhelming, the conclusions inescapable.

As my friend Paul Hawken told a recent group of graduating seniors, civilization needs a new operating system, and we, whether we like it or not, are going to be the programmers.

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In 1986, newly elected Colombian President Virgilio Barco appointed my old friend Martin Von Hildebrand as Head of Indigenous Affairs and told him to do something for the Indian peoples of Colombia. Martin, who as an anthropologist had lived for years among the Tanimukas and first paddled the length of the Río Piraparana as a young graduate student, did more than something. In five extraordinary years he secured for the Indians of the Colombian Amazon legal land rights to an area of some 25 million hectares, roughly the size of the United Kingdom, establishing 162 Resguardos altogether, titled lands, which were encoded by law in the 1991 Political Constitution of the country. Nothing like it had ever been done by a Nation State. In the years that followed, as Colombia endured the ravages of war throughout the 1990s and early days of a new century, a veil of isolation fell upon the Northwest Amazon. And behind this veil, as Martin explained when he invited me a year ago to return with him to the Rio Piraparaná, an old dream of the earth was reborn.

I had first visited the region in 1975, and at the time it seemed that the extraordinary cultures were destined to be lost. This was the familiar lament of anthropologists of the day. Wherever we went we encountered what we assumed to be disappearing worlds. But returning with Martin just last winter, I encountered another world. We landed on a dirt airstrip at San Miguel, an abandoned Catholic mission. I recognized the fields, the setting of the great longhouse, or maloca, and the white sands along the river where children and women bathed in the black waters of the Piraparaná. But otherwise things seemed very different. A mission I recalled as a rather sad place of desuetude was gone. On our first night a hundred or more people gathered in the maloca, men in feather regalia, to dance, chant and take sacred medicines, coca and tobacco, chicha and yagé. Shaman huddled over calabashes of spirit food, whispering and softly singing spells. For the first time I heard the haunting sound of the sacred yurupari trumpets, created by the ancestors at the dawn of time. Long condemned by Catholic priests as symbols of the devil, these mythic instruments had been crushed and burned during the years of the mission. That their sound was still here, inspiring new generations of Barasana, Makuna, Tatuyos and others peoples of the river suggested powerfully that the culture was very much alive. In the thirty years or more since my first visit, the only thing that had disappeared on the Río Piraparaná, as Martin said, were the missionaries.

Had you asked me in 1975 whether such a cultural revitalization could ever occur, if the indigenous peoples of the Colombian Amazon might ever find a way to reclaim their heritage, secure their land and protect their forests, I would have said no. Martin by contrast is one of those rare and extraordinary visionaries who can only say yes. His entire being recoils at the thought of the impossible. Despair for him is an insult to the imagination. When he first went to the Amazon he saw not what was, but what could be. Then, against all odds, working always in collaboration with elders and indigenous leaders, he set out and quite literally changed the trajectory of history.

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Given the rhetoric and expectations that marked the beginning of COP 15 this is a profoundly disturbing development.

I spoke this afternoon with Brendan DeMelle of desmogblog.com who has been at the Bella Center since the beginning of the conference. Here’s what I learned.

Developing countries keen to grow their economies and lacking the capacity to transform those economies with green technologies, expect financial assistance from the wealthy industrialized nations that historically have been the primary source of greenhouse gases. A figure of $100 billion a year has been suggested. This flow of anticipated capital that has been variously described as assistance, subsidies, compensation or reparations. The language is highly charged and matters.

From an industrial world they see as the fundamental source of the problem they expect emission reductions that are deep, meaningful and binding, most especially from the United States, historically the largest producer of greenhouse gases.

Knowing that any meaningful political agreement will require the support of Congress, the Obama administration has in fact proposed an emissions reduction target from the United States that in real terms is only 3% of 1990 levels, a figure that pales in comparison to the commitments of other industrialized nations. This figure is not about to change, and does not signal to delegates a seriousness of intent. The American proposal offers a further long term goal of reducing emissions 83% below 2005 standards by 2050, a dramatic reduction that would if implemented reduce US per capita emissions roughly to the level of 1875. Many doubt this will happen. As one young protestor told me, only the kids protesting in the streets of Copenhagen will still be around by 2050. They have little faith in the commitments of government officials, few if any of whom will be alive in that year.

In terms of multilateral compensation, the UN has suggested a figure of $10 billion per year, $6.5 of which will come from the EU, with the US presumably expected to pony up much of the rest. Given that the US has spent at least a trillion dollars on Iraq and Afghanistan, and recently infused its own economy with a stimulus package of close to $800 billion, a contribution of a mere $3 billion to a global effort to mitigate the impacts of climate change is considered a trivial sum, a slap in the face, by delegates who are expected to transform their own emerging industrial economies. Referring to the full UN package, a Sudanese delegate, brought to tears of rage and frustration, described a furnace of heat and drought sweeping over and already afflicting his country. Referring to the anticipated impacts of climate change throughout the world, the inundation of entire nations, water scarcity as mountain glaciers melt and rivers cease to flow, and an increase in extreme weather events, he remarked “$10 billion will not be enough even to buy the coffins that we will require to bury our dead.”

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The obvious questions provoke the obvious answers, and the responses seem to be too timid. From my reading of the literature over the last month, and from everything I have learned at Cop 15, there can be no doubt that the scientific consensus on climate change is consistent and overwhelming. So it leaves us with a quandary. All of these researchers, across a half dozen academic disciplines, are either right or they are terribly wrong. If wrong, it calls into question our entire cult of modernity, which in good measure is based on our faith and confidence in the scientific method and the brilliance of the technologies it has spawned. If however the scientists are right, as I believe them to be, then it begs an obvious question.

If, as they suggest, the entire fate of the world hangs in the balance, if a rise in sea levels promises to inundate much of the Nile Delta, as I heard just yesterday from a remarkable Egyptian business leader Rawya Mansour, if by 2030 nearly half of the world’s population will live without certain access to water, as reported in a white paper released at COP 15 by Yale and TERI (The Energy and Resources Institute), if the glaciers of the Andes and the Tibetan plateau, source of life for much of Asia, will largely be gone, then why has not our response been in any way commensurate with the severity of the crisis? Why have we failed to respond with even a modicum of the intensity of devotion and sacrifice that we have brought to other moments of national and international crisis? Why have we not fully mobilized, declared war on global warming?

According to the Chair of the IPCC, Rajendra Pachauri, who spoke two nights ago at the conference and dinner I attended at Kornborg Castle, the climate crisis could be fully mitigated and the world’s economy transformed with an investment equivalent to some 3% of global GNP. During World War 2, the United States devoted fully 38% of GDP to military victory. Nobody complained. The allied world recognized a mortal danger, reached an inescapable conclusion, and went to work. If Climate Change is the threat we now know it to be, why has the international response, all bureaucratic and diplomatic efforts aside, been so fundamentally tepid? Why are just the kids out screaming in the streets?

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There is no serious scientist alive who questions the severity and implications of this crisis, or the factors, decisions and priorities that caused it to occur. It has come about because of the consequences of a particular worldview. We have for three centuries now, as Thom Hartman has written, consumed the ancient sunlight of the world.

What intrigued me about this notion of a Journey to Zero was that it wasn’t really a slogan, and it wasn’t just a description of a technological goal – which of course it was in terms of a goal of zero emissions. But it also was so deeply metaphorical about where we all have to go.

Our economic models are projections and arrows when they should be circles. To define perpetual growth on a finite planet as the sole measure of economic wellbeing is to engage in a form of slow collective suicide. To deny or exclude from the calculus of governance and economy the costs of violating the biological support systems of life is the logic of delusion.

This conference is critical. It’s ultimately a measure of the human capacity to do what it’s almost never done, which is plan for, and anticipate, the future. I’m optimistic because of the very existence of this process, which is really unprecedented.

Thirty years ago, just getting people to stop throwing garbage out of car windows was an environmental victory. No one spoke about the biosphere, and idea of global warming was practically in the realm of science fiction. Likewise, in thirty years we’ve seen sociological transformations that would never have been imaginable. African Americans have gone from the woodshed to the Whitehouse; women have gone from the kitchen to the boardroom; and gay people have gone from the closet to the altar. As a father I can’t afford to be anything but optimistic. I really do believe pessimism is an indulgence.

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This past year for the first time in human history we became a predominantly urban species. In the year 1820 only London had a population of more than a million. Today there are 414 cities of such size or larger, and within 35 years demographers predict there will be more than a thousand. Cloistered and insulated within urban space, in many cases living already in toxic conditions, city dwellers will not be the first to notice the consequences of global climate change.

Nearly fifteen years ago I sat on the shore of Baffin Island with an Inuk elder Ipeelie Koonoo and watched as he carefully cleaned the carburetor of his skidoo engine with the feather of an ivory gull. He spoke no English, and I did not know Inuptituk. But with Olayuk translating, Ipeelie told me then that the weather throughout the Arctic had become milder, the sun hotter each year, and that for the first time Inuit were suffering from skin ailments, as he put it, caused by the sky. This is a message from the front lines of the very issue that people have assembled here in Copenhagen to address. This is a message we ignore at our peril.

Voices such as this matter because they remind us of the gravity of the problem, and perhaps more importantly, that there are indeed alternatives. Ours is a particular attitude that seems to have reduced our planet to a commodity. The reduction of the world to a mechanism, with nature but an obstacle to overcome, has in good measure determined the manner in which our cultural tradition has blindly interacted with the living planet. The anthropological lens is valuable because it reveals that there are many other options, and any number of different ways of orientating ourselves in place and landscape.

This is not to suggest naively that we abandon everything and attempt to mimic the ways of nonindustrial societies, or that any culture be asked to forfeit its right to benefit from the genius of technology. It is rather to draw inspiration and comfort from the fact that the path we have taken is not the only one available, and that our destiny therefore is not indelibly written in a set of choices that demonstrably and scientifically have proven not to be fully wise. By their very existence the diverse cultures of the world bear witness to the folly of those who say that we cannot change.

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