Finding Fragility
Fragility: (n) the quality of being delicate or vulnerable.
When we say fragile, people think of glass; beautiful, delicate, and oh so easy to shatter. There’s this habit to assume that fragility is a sign of weakness and frailty. But rather glass can be incredibly strong, it retains its shape at great depths, at great heat, and can even be treated to be stronger than steel. It just has a specific rupture point, a pressure that it cannot withstand. I choose to see fragility as strong until the breaking point is reached. It can absorb and deflect lots of impacts until the specific point of weakness is reached at which point a catastrophic failure occurs. Sometimes that’s when your wine glass hits the kitchen floor, or it can be when the carbon tipping point is reached. Fragility is the core of everything, from a single dish to the planet’s ability to absorb man made impacts. And defining the fragility and tipping point it the only way to avoid accidentally hitting it.
Back in late 2016 we began to see articles proclaiming that we were “past the point of no return” for Climate Change. Scientists were saying we had officially done so much damage that our planet would never recover to where it was in the past. We had found the point of fragility. We tend to forget that our planet is a system, highly adaptable but fragile at the same time. There is a point where each individual ecosystem and the planet’s natural order as a whole can no longer function. I call this Finding Fragility. Finding fragility is the process of identifying that specific breaking point in order to avoid running headlong into it. We are beginning to understand this concept on a global scale; coral reefs began to die in the early 2000’s, and as scientists and concerned activists dug into why coral was bleaching, rotting and dying they found that it could only handle ocean temperatures at a certain level. And we had warmed our oceans by just enough to make any weather based temperature spike lethal for the local reefs. The ecosystem was fragile, it could only adapt so far before a catastrophic fail occurred and suddenly a once vibrant habitat was found empty and decaying. (Chasing Coral, 2017) Similar stories can be found with global glaciers, habitat loss, carbon footprint reduction, etc. We raced towards the cliff and went flying off of it before understanding what we were doing to our planet, and now scientists are racing to figure out how we claw our way back to the realm of safety.
So how do we recover? Has this ever been done? There have been success stories, the Montreal Protocol is widely considered incredibly successful in turning back the clock on the ozone depletion. Our ozone layer had protected the planet from the sun's harmful UV rays for billions of years but due to the products used in everything from our hairspray to refrigerants we found that we were creating "holes" in this protective layer in the late 1970's. The Montreal Protocol sought to combat this issue, banning the use of certain ozone damaging chemicals. Now 31 years later we are seeing the effects of our actions, the ozone layer is slowly healing, limiting the UV rays battering our already struggling planetary ecosystem. (EPA, 2018) The Endangered Species Act also came about as we began to realize that our choices were wiping entire species from existence. We have successfully identified fragility and corrected our actions to avoid hitting that defined breaking point. But the key part of this success was almost immediate and widespread action. Working to identify the fragility of a system led to making choices, laws, and technology needed to avoid crossing the threshold to failure. Without cooperation and understanding from all the parties involved the point of fragility may never have been discovered, and certainly not course corrected in time.
This need for cooperation and immediate action is the very factor we are missing in current issues. Scientists have defined the moment of catastrophic failure, the point of no return. We know the limits of our planet's fragility in issues like greenhouse gasses, raising temperatures, critical species loss. But we are lacking the cohesive cooperation and efforts needed to avoid them. While most countries agreed to the Paris Agreement, taking steps in the correct direction, one of the largest powerhouses refused to sign. The United States' unwillingness to help avoid the tipping point spoke volumes about how little we were willing to cooperate with a global effort to save our future if it meant change.
This unwillingness by our government to avoid the fragility point is discouraging, but not the end of the world. As it turns out there are only a few hundred people making these decisions. There's 19,354 cities and towns, 327,465,951 citizens, 200 million registered voters in this country. (US Census, 2018) Should we be able to harness even half of them into some semblance of action, cooperation, and organization it would count as one of the smaller countries in the Paris Agreement. Several cities and even states have already pledged to follow the terms set by the agreement, organizing on their own to do their part in reducing the human impact on the planet. We as voters and individuals hold a distinct kind of power to individually cooperate and create a mass effect on our own. Simply by making choices that follow a more sustainable lifestyle or researching the planet's point of no return we become advocates for protecting the Earth's fragility. Our planet may be fragile, but this is not a sign of weakness. We are a part of this fragile ecosystem, and we have the strength to keep it on the correct side of our point of no return.
For further reading check out:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/uhenergy/2017/03/16/have-we-passed-the-climate-change-tipping-point/#55ed2a277e12
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-38146248
http://www.globalstewards.org/sustainable-lifestyle.htm
Image Credit:
Shutterstock Images https://recyclecoach.com/blog/item?id=86