December 2018
At the beginning of this year the amount of substantive material in the mainstream media about climate change was scant. That changed in the second half of the year with headlines about it popping up all over the place. Even now you have to squeeze past the controversy to get to the information itself. Going straight to the Science Guys doesn’t guarantee success, either, because — no big surprise — we’re crap at predicting events in complex systems and the Planet’s climate system is complex with a capital C. So the task of finding the meat of the matter is fraught to the point that you just have to choose your own baseline after digesting enough of the data and interpretations to construct an adequate basis for informed choice. Over the past few months I’ve been gobbling up data and interpretations like a pig at a trough. Fortunately the science doesn’t involve pages of equations so I can read the original papers in order to assess the point of view used to interpret the data. I’ve come to a baseline I believe is reasonably well-informed as much as any baseline on so complex an issue can be judged to occupy that state.
I recently came across an interesting video about climate scientists in Australia taking an individual stance about what to do for their own lives. Its title is “Climate Scientists Reveal Their Fears for the Future” and it’s viewable on YouTube here. It’s the only video I’ve ever found in which some of the scientists responsible for getting the bad news out to the rest of us talk about what it means for them as individuals. Two women and two men were interviewed, two senior scientists, one junior professional and one PhD student. They’re all thinking about personal strategy at this point. One of the senior scientists revealed that at meetings of climatologists small talk revolves around subjects like, “Where are you going before things get bad?” If climatologists are now developing personal strategies for dealing with climate change effects, it looks like my timing is right for doing the same.
Despite all objections to the contrary the data used to assess climate change factors are fairly straightforward. Parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide (CO2 ) in the atmosphere, for example, is not an esoteric measurement open to contention from experts. We can safely leave aside those folk (invariably not experts) who think such measurements mean nothing or are “fake news.” We know that before the Industrial Revolution the atmospheric CO2 level was about 280 ppm. Daily average CO2 levels recorded at Hawaii’s Mauna Loa Observatory over the past few years tell a very different tale (website here).
Highest-ever daily average CO2 | Mauna Loa Observatory
2018
412.60 ppm on May 14, 2018 (Scripps)
412.45 ppm on May 14, 2018 (NOAA-ESRL)
412.37 ppm on April 23, 2018 (NOAA-ESRL)2017
412.63 ppm on April 26, 2017 (NOAA-ESRL)
411.27 ppm on May 15, 2017 (NOAA-ESRL)
2016
409.44 ppm on April 9, 2016 (Scripps)
409.39 ppm on April 8, 2016 (Scripps)2015
404.84 ppm on April 13, 2015 (Scripps)
Things are going up, not down, that trend is clear from the data. Since we’re now consistently over 400 ppm some climatologists and conservation biologists opine that we’ve already crossed the threshold of no return. As far back as 2009 an article by climatologist Susan Solomon entitled “Irreversible climate change due to carbon dioxide emissions” (article here) suggested that carbon dioxide levels were already at irreversible levels due to the very long time it takes for the gas to degrade in the atmosphere. Irreversibility is a hotly debated topic but I take Solomon at her word especially since emissions continue to climb and no effective global reduction strategy is in effect despite international meetings and the targets they set.
Ocean acidification is another important index, where ocean pH rises with the increase in atmospheric CO2 due to the gas dissolving in ocean water and forming carbonic acid. I’ve mentioned in another post (here) the frightening rapidity of the increase in ocean pH and the devastating effects that increase has already had on coral reefs. One marine biologist from Australia speaks about the Great Barrier Reef already looking like a “graveyard.” It can only get worse as time marches on.
I bracket out news of climate change denial because the issue is ideological, not scientific, and it’s no use arguing about ideology. In ideological discussions opinions replace facts, which destroys the reality basis of the discourse. Opinions are not physical facts — they only relate to something in somebody’s head, not to something in the physicality we inhabit. Facts are the only thing that matter when you’re talking about physical phenomena like climate change. As one climate scientist recently quipped about President Trump’s dismissal of the recent US government report on climate change, it doesn’t matter whether or not you believe in gravity when you go off a cliff, you’re going to fall.
Sir David Attenborough had a one word answer when asked what it would take for people to do something strategic about climate change: “disaster.” When disaster is on the doorstep it’s far too late to do anything about the causative phenomena. I don’t want to be in that majority segment of humanity who gets whapped up side the head by the truth of the situation and then agonizes about what to do. It’s time to get a head start on that agenda.
Richard Wiles wrote an excellent article that appeared this year in The Guardian (text here) about the history of climate change research and corporate deceit about what was known scientifically as much as 50 years ago. That tradition continues: there was a Trump administration official at the climate change conference in Poland advocating for the use of coal. So it’s also time IMHO to write off the public sphere as a hopeless case with regard to the ability effectively to address the issue. People will continue to argue while the house burns down around us. It’s time to set aside the talk and get strategic. CYA is the only legitimate modus operandi for an individual at this point.
My purpose here is not to provide an enormous compilation of primary research nor to persuade anyone to adopt the point of view that seems to me justified on the basis of the data and interpretations available. As an individual you have first to pick a point on the severity continuum as your strategy baseline then assess the effects timeline. There’s quite a range, of course, since climate change research has been going on for a very long time. In 1979 the World Meteorological Organization held the first World Climate Conference. Not until 1988 did James Hansen, a former NASA scientist and now a doyen of the climate activist movement, testifiy before Congress about anthropogenic causes of climate change (info here). It took until 2015 to orchestrate the Paris Accord with targets for the year 2020. The new climate change report released last month by the US government (full text here) is more than 1,600 pages long. Its predictions are dire. So you can read until your eyes fall out and still have digested only a small fraction of the available material. All an individual can do is to cross-section the literature, assess points on the continuum of severity and timeline of manifestation and then determine a baseline. I did the bookend approach, which looks at the two extremes of the continuum.
At the conservative end of the spectrum is the special report (here) issued recently by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) about the need to reduce the temperature increase target in the Paris Accord from 2 °C to a lower maximum of 1.5 °C. The IPCC is one of the least radical bodies issuing opinions on the matter, as one might expect from a group associated with the United Nations. It had a serious wakeup call delivered by the data produced since 2015 . Both the tone and the recommendations of the new report are marked by urgency. If the IPCC is sounding the alarm bell it’s safe to say things are indeed in a bad way. They’d be the last people in the world to cry wolf.
Even though the IPCC has jumped with both feet on the urgency bandwagon they still don’t paint a very realistic picture of present conditions. The degree to which the new report softpedals the full extent of the problem can be gauged from the analysis done by Peter Wadhams, Emeritus Professor of Ocean Physics at Cambridge with a specialty in Arctic ocean dynamics, who says the report seriously underestimates some indices and ignores others of incontrovertible importance. Wadhams’ response to the report is viewable on YouTube here. As a seasoned field expert he knows very well what he’s talking about. Too bad for the IPCC. And too bad for the rest of us.
From the end of the spectrum opposite the IPCC comes the article written in 2017 by David Wallace-Wells and published in New York Magazine (annotated edition here) that intentionally engages worst-case scenarios. He experienced his own kind of global warming after publishing the article because it triggered a firestorm of criticism that threatened to roast him alive. Fortunately he’s still with us, not looking unduly singed, and his book The Uninhabitable Earth will come out in April, 2019. I’ve given the link for the annotated edition of the article he prepared after publication of the original so that those interested can consult his sources. He used creditable scientific data and interpretations, not a Ouija board. It just goes to show how contentious the issue is — not surprising, since we argue about absolutely everything. It’s one of our least endearing qualities.
How quickly changes will take place is a matter of contention but the implications of the data are clear. We’re already very near or at the point where other feedback systems in the environment will kick in and exacerbate the effects of continued anthropogenic CO2 emissions. Methane release in the Arctic is one such feedback. It’s a concomitant effect of warming and threatens to trigger the release of enormous amounts of methane into the atmosphere from both sea (through phase change of methane hydrates) and land (through permafrost thawing). That’s bad news because methane is so much more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide and because there are many gigatons of the stuff currently in suspended animation in polar regions. There’s an excellent article from 2013 (!) in The Guardian on the phenomenon here. Peter Wadhams and Natalia Shakova are two of the most prominent researchers on the subject and they say today what they said five years ago: not good. Methane release from arctic lakes in Alaska has been reported this year (article here). The SEO title of the webpage includes the phrase “arctic lake farts fire.” Oops.
To all the data and interpretations supplied by the experts one must add the evidence of one’s own experience. That kind of input gets no coverage in the scientific literature or in the media, of course, but it forms the meat and potatoes of an individual’s life on the Planet. The products of my own experience and observation tilt toward the bleaker end of the outcome spectrum. Why? Here are just three reasons: (1) the momentum of industrial civilization has reached juggernaut proportions and cannot be stopped; (2) the global economy is based on fossil fuels and certainly will not cede self-interest regardless what consequences ensue, and (3) global population continues to grow by leaps and bounds so the human causes of climate change will also increase because there will be ever more people using carbon-based energy sources to live their lives. We don’t need a 30-year longitudinal study to figure out what the outcomes will be.
Consequently it matters little to me as an individual whether or not we’ve already crossed the point of no return or just continue to careen toward it like a runaway bus. The momentum of the human status quo on the Planet is too great for a rapid course change and there’s no collective will or agency to accomplish it. The window of time in which effective reductions can take place is short and demands drastic action. No human society on the Planet is agile enough to accomplish such rapid change. That fact makes prediction simple: if we aren’t already beyond the point of no return, we’ll cross it soon. The UN projects a world population of 9.7 billion by 2050 with most of that increase in countries without the means to adopt alternative energy sources because they’re broke to start with. Once again, it doesn’t require a PhD in chemistry to see the handwriting on the wall.
So, what’s a body to do? In the post I wrote on the Sixth Mass Extinction (here) I said I wasn’t interested in remaining “positive” (a word I dislike almost as much as “appropriate”) or in clinging to hope the data show to be futile. Better to be a realist, as Guy McPherson (Mr. ExtinctionsRUs) claims for his viewpoint about things already being well over the cliff. I’m not looking for something to use as my hope mantra as I scud along in my inner tube on humanity’s greywater toward the Grade VI climate change rapids ahead of us (portage not an option). What I need is a practical strategy to deal with the effects likely to manifest before I bite the Big One.
This is a good point to discuss personal responsibility. Given the state of things, what’s the individual’s responsibility in the face of climate change? Having done my best all my life to live lightly on the Planet in the course of my daily life, I find any efforts I make nullified by the swelling throngs of my fellow human beings, whose huge and still growing numbers overwhelm efforts by any individual to effect change. The course of climate change activism has now entered political territory having finally saturated the scientific community. It took over 30 years for that to happen. We now have the public political sphere heating up along with the atmosphere. Greta Thunberg, the Swedish teenager who spoke to the UN (text of the speech here), has become an international phenomenon. Her activism follows the lawsuit James Hansen and Our Children’s Trust filed against the U.S. government in 2015 which finally came to trial this year. An excellent article by Oliver Milman in The Guardian from June of this year (text here) sounds out Hansen’s thoughts 30 years after his 1988 testimony before Congress and offers some important points for consideration from an individual perspective:
“All we’ve done is agree there’s a problem,” Hansen told the Guardian. “We agreed that in 1992 [at the Earth summit in Rio] and re-agreed it again in Paris [at the 2015 climate accord]. We haven’t acknowledged what is required to solve it. Promises like Paris don’t mean much, it’s wishful thinking. It’s a hoax that governments have played on us since the 1990s.”
Later in the article comes this bit:
“Poor Jim Hansen. He’s a tragic hero,” said Naomi Oreskes, a Harvard academic who studies the history of science. “The Cassandra aspect of his life is that he’s cursed to understand and diagnose what’s going on but unable to persuade people to do something about it. We are all raised to believe knowledge is power but Hansen proves the untruth of that slogan. Power is power.”
That power has been most aggressively wielded by fossil fuel companies such as Exxon and Shell which, despite being well aware of the dangers of climate change decades before Hansen’s touchstone moment in 1988, funded a network of groups that ridiculed the science and funded sympathetic politicians. Later, they were to be joined by the bulk of the US Republican party, which now recoils from any action on climate change as heresy.
And last September we learned that the USA is now the world’s largest oil producer. Hmm …
Without a doubt the most compelling tocsin I’ve found during my research is the RSA President’s Lecture given by Sir David Attenborough in 2011 on the subject “People and Planet” (YouTube video here) which places overpopulation at the center of climate change causality. It’s the only discussion I’ve found of overpopulation as a major contributing factor. Why are government reports and climate change activist not talking about overpopulation? “Why this strange silence?,” as Attenborough asks. The answer is not far to seek: species self-referentiality, which erects a taboo around overpopulation that nobody will break. If we can’t address overpopulation then any measures we devise to deal with emission reduction will be off the mark. Even in this, the year of our Lord 2018, we find in media outlets like Vox — as lefty as can be — things like this: “Why you shouldn’t obsess about “overpopulation” (article here). As I said earlier, we like to argue about absolutely everything. I’d say it’s an even more powerful contributor to climate change than methane feedback. We’ll still be arguing when the flames engulf us.
Through looking at the current economic and political landscape a person must assess the likelihood of significant change at the collective level, the only level where effective action can occur. With the entire world unwilling to address overpopulation as a core factor in human contribution to climate change, hope for effective change hovers around zero, as Attenborough points out. Activism is certainly worthwhile if it brings personal satisfaction, but it’s difficult to see it as environmentally strategic. Despite 30 years of climate change dialogue greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise. Given how the world works — by running off fossil fuels — it’s unlikely that the trend will change within any strategic timeframe. So what difference does it make that I, an individual, attempt to limit my carbon footprint?
It makes no significant difference at all. That’s the bare truth of the situation. My action as an individual is merely symbolic, not strategic. In truth it’s always been symbolic, never really strategic. If we’re already over the CO2 cliff my individual contribution to the increase also makes no difference now, be it huge or small. What’s toast is toast, no matter how you butter it. I can soothe my conscience by continuing to be circumspect concerning my carbon footprint but my actions are nugatory with regard to the Big Picture.
The human collective has no governance as a collective, which turns out to be the fatal flaw. It brings about a curious state in which the ethical framework for individual action vis-a-vis the environment becomes irrelevant because it’s now irrelevant at the collective level, the only level where effective change can occur. Ethics have been permanently superseded by ppm measurements and feedback loops, which aren’t susceptible to moralizing. Having precipitated the disaster through our own activity, we humans are now both chemically and ethically superfluous to its dénouement. It looks like we’ve all become dead men walking.
Then so be it. I’ll choose my path according to what fits my own value framework. My choice is: going down with the ship. Which means: Planet first. That’s exactly what the collective stance should have been all along. If it had been we wouldn’t have created this disaster.
I came to this choice by myself, but I realized just recently that it was also made in the 20th century by someone who wasn’t facing the climate endgame. That person is the poet Robinson Jeffers (info here).
The Answer
Then what is the answer?- Not to be deluded by dreams.
To know that great civilizations have broken down into violence,
and their tyrants come, many times before.
When open violence appears, to avoid it with honor or choose
the least ugly faction; these evils are essential.
To keep one’s own integrity, be merciful and uncorrupted
and not wish for evil; and not be duped
By dreams of universal justice or happiness. These dreams will
not be fulfilled.
To know this, and know that however ugly the parts appear
the whole remains beautiful. A severed hand
Is an ugly thing and man dissevered from the earth and stars
and his history… for contemplation or in fact…
Often appears atrociously ugly. Integrity is wholeness,
the greatest beauty is
Organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things, the divine beauty
of the universe. Love that, not man
Apart from that, or else you will share man’s pitiful confusions,
or drown in despair when his days darken.The End of the World
When I was young in school in Switzerland, about the time of the Boer War,
We used to take it for known that the human race
Would last the earth out, not dying till the planet died. I wrote a schoolboy poem
About the last man walking in stoic dignity along the dead shore
Of the last sea, alone, alone, alone, remembering all
His racial past. But now I don’t think so. They’ll die faceless in flocks,
And the earth flourish long after mankind is out.
He got that last bit right. Thank goodness he died in 1962. In this, the year of our Lord 2018, he’d likely find himself spluttering unpoetically in outrage.
Jeffers called his stance “inhumanism.” I’ve published a three-part series this month on shifting from an anthropocentric perspective to perceptual perspectives including the levels of Planet, Cosmos and Microcosm. I had no terms ready to hand for those perspectives. I rediscovered “inhumanism” when I recently came across Jeffers again — after an interval of some 40 years — and remembered how forcefully his perspective struck me when I was young. His “inhumanism” is similar to my abandonment of the anthropocentric perspective but not identical.
With regard to climate change “ahumanism” comes closer to my notion but still doesn’t satisfy completely. The problem is what comes after the “in-” or the “a-” part. Jeffers remained embroiled in a dialectical relationship with humanity over the course of his entire life and his work is a coming to terms with humanity as much as it’s a move into a conceptual arena that goes beyond the human framework. So his example offers encouragement but provides no viable model for my own path. Jeffers was not living in humanity’s endgame. That’s precisely what we’re facing now. That state of affairs requires a strategy different from the one Jeffers developed over the course of his lifetime living in the then pristine environment of Big Sur in California.
My individual strategy requires a neologism: “outbracketing.” By that I mean bracketing the human collective out of one’s consideration — even out of one’s awareness — to a very large degree. I mean to be done with the dialectical tangle Jeffers lived with and wrote about all his life. Obviously humanity has now become strategically beside the point, so why pay attention to it anymore? It’s clear that the human collective will continue on its current path until disaster strikes. At that point it will be far too late to apply correctives. For me it’s time to put humanity out of mind and focus entirely on the Planet for the remainder of my days.
What I envisage for myself as the years roll on is a biological Götterdämmerung. As conditions worsen, right in my own backyard, I’ll ride my steed into the flames with the Planet leading the charge. I could give a rip what happens elsewhere. We’ve made our bed as a collective so let us lie in it as our individual circumstances dictate. I can only have a strategic effect on my own circumstances at this point. Personal responsibility in the face of climate change now has its locus solely at the level of the individual. The collective level is a hopelessly failed juggernaut.
The outbracketing approach nullifies the collective in the same way that the collective — consistently and now permanently — has nullified the individual, so it’s an appropriate quid pro quo. The circumstances we now face are far beyond extenuating. They’re like a diagnosis of terminal illness. Human life on the Planet as we know it has been given an end term. Such a thing has never before happened in the entire history of humanity. At the collective level we will just keep doing what we’re doing until we sink in the flames. In the face of such collective amorality the individual is the only agent capable of positing a moral stance based on a practicable personal ethos. I’ve chosen mine: Planet first. Bugger the human collective who brought the house down in the first place.
My strategy of outbracketing simply appropriates for the individual the collective’s standard approach to life on the Planet. We’ve acted entirely in our own species-interest and paid attention only to our own backyard — in other words, we outbracketed the biosphere. “Don’t sweat the big stuff” has consistently been our modus operandi over the entire course of human history. If it didn’t mess up our cozy little arrangements, it didn’t register as a problem. It’s time I start doing the same instead of agonizing over things I can’t even influence let alone control.
Now that it’s clear where things are headed I’m not going to worry my pretty little head about the details. I won’t scan the Internet anxiously for news about increases in methane emissions from the Arctic. I won’t lose sleep over the icesheets in Antarctica going TU. If the plains of Bangladesh flood and displace or end the millions of lives lived there, it’s just a small piece of the drama we as a collective have set in motion. Such things will happen now no matter what we do. Nobody cared what happened while we were creating the disaster, so why should anybody care now about how it plays out for humanity writ large? It’s out of anybody’s hands at this point.
It’s time to reverse the positions of humanity and Planet in humanity’s own dynamic and bracket out the human element. It’s quite simple from a practical standpoint: only your own backyard counts. You needn’t worry about the fate of humans halfway around the world, you only have to deal with the humans in your own backyard. Since we remain embedded in a social structure you can’t ignore that fact, that goes without saying. You still have to pay your bills and vote and be nice to little old ladies, but society in that scenario is a small presence for the individual. As long as it doesn’t happen in your own backyard it isn’t primary. People who cling tenaciously to the anthropocentric perspective will likely find the outbracketing stance ethically reprehensible, but what humanity has done to the biosphere and to millions of companion species has rendered such moral delicacy beside the point. I repeat: the human species has become chemically and hence ethically superfluous. The amoral pursuit of human species-interest has sealed the collective’s fate by tipping things over the climate change threshold. The jig is up and the party’s over.
From the Planetary perspective this environmental glitch we humans have caused is just another input into the global biological system. There will be massive destruction of lifeforms — that’s already happening and we call it the Sixth Mass Extinction — but we know that our microbe pals are far smarter and faster than we are about adapting to adverse environmental conditions. They’ll sail through the mass extinction we’ve orchestrated (they’ve already been through five of them) with nary a cilium out of place regardless what curve balls we throw them. As for the rest of the Planet beneath the surface layer of the crust, we’re a cipher anyway. What business does the mantle have with humanity? None. What can humanity do to disturb plate tectonics? Nothing. The Planet is safe as houses. It only needs to worry about things like the sun going red giant in a few billion years, by which time human beings will be ancient history. In a word, we’re expendable in the long trajectory of Planetary life, just as 99% of the species over evolutionary history have been expendable.
In the post I wrote about adopting what I call “Planetary Perspective” can be found the first prong of my strategy. Now I see that to meet the prospects of the climate future before us I need the second prong of outbracketing, which didn’t form part of the perspective I elaborated earlier. Outbracketing is a response to the extremity of the situation we now face. It’s a replacement for hope for humanity, now utterly futile. The Planet will continue after the nightmare scenarios of climate catastrophe have taken their course and the biosphere will continue in some vastly altered form, as well. So I’m putting my sights where hope lies, since humanity’s light has already gone out.
Considered in that way, outbracketing is hardly an index of despair. It’s a realistic embracing of the life force on the Planet and of the physicality we inhabit. It positions me to engage the source of the life I have as a biological entity and to cherish that source consciously as long as I live. At the same time it minimizes attention on the human collective that has sold us all down the river of irreversible climate change. When I consider it in that light, it makes perfect sense and I’m content that I’ve come to a viable baseline for my own life as the world enters the end game we’ve triggered with our collective stupidity and negligence.
The outbracketing stance does another important job for me that I think worthy of mention: it changes the locus of individual identity. Over the past few centuries human culture developed an aesthetic appreciation of the Planet. It took off in a big way only in the 19th century with the Romantic movement in art and literature. Writers didn’t wax poetic about daffodils, for example, until Wordsworth came along. The appreciation of Nature (i.e. the Planet) is, then, a late development in human history. It’s built into our cultures now, in a way that I imagine would leave people from the 14th century quite astonished. That appreciation is not strategic, however. It regards Nature as a kind of decoration. Nature accessorizes our humanity but doesn’t define it in any central way. In the stance I describe here the Planet, not humanity, forms the basis for individual identity.
There’s great hope in that shift of identity. The anthropocentric perspective makes human beings the primary focus of all estimations of value and sets the value of human life above all other life on the Planet. It becomes clear that such an approach is flawed simply by looking at what’s on the ground: the majority of human reality is a dismal business. We’ve hardly created a utopia where everything works perfectly and everybody’s happy. We’ve created a huge mess with those big, fancy brains we have — a mess for the biosphere and thus for ourselves, as well. The sooner it stops the better, in my opinion. So bring on the Arctic methane feedback and let’s be done with it. It’s clearly well past time for the Planet to cut its losses. It could use the break.
I have my work cut out for me, no doubt about that. The Planet is an enormously complex creature and my powers of observation and understanding are miniscule. I’ll be doing double time for the rest of my days just to capture conceptually a fraction of what the Planet actually has going on. It’s unclear at this point how quickly the damaging effects of climate change might visit my own backyard, or in precisely what way, so I need to develop some whatif scenarios to keep my micro-operation going as smoothly as possible. No, I’m not talking about fending off masses of starving refugees or building bunkers lined with cans of tuna and baked beans — this isn’t the John Birch Society, thank goodness. We’re talking about systemic things like heat and storms and changes in rainfall and what a reasonable person might do to deal with those changes. I’ve lived on the land for half of my life so the business of figuring out what to do to meet a particular set of environmental circumstances isn’t unfamiliar. None of us knows how soon severe effects of climate change might come. I’ll take on the task of strategizing as a game so I have a plan for all of Doors 1-3 before one of them opens to reveal humanity’s ultimate climate prize. It’s not likely to be an all-expense-paid vacation in Fiji because it will probably be underwater by that point LOL.
The primary life focus, however, is companionship with the Planet. That’s always a delight. The prospect of the life I’ll lead until I’m no longer with us isn’t grim in the slightest. I know bad things are coming down the pike, but with my focus on the Planet and its ultimate inviolability I’m comforted in my human vulnerability, however odd that may seem to someone who considers things solely from the anthropocentric perspective.
With a pal like the Planet at my side, there’s nothing to worry about. Chin up! 🙂