This chapter deals in evidence, not interpretation. The figures below are reported measurements, attributed to the bodies that produced them.
A philosophical argument about consciousness earns nothing if it cannot look plainly at the physical record. So here is the record, stated conservatively. Nothing on this page is a metaphor.
420ppm
Atmospheric carbon dioxide has passed 420 parts per million, against a pre-industrial level of roughly 280 ppm — a concentration higher than at any point in the ice-core record covering the last several hundred thousand years.
NOAA GLOBAL MONITORING LABORATORY
1.1°C
Human influence has warmed the climate system by approximately 1.1 °C above the 1850–1900 baseline. The Assessment describes this attribution as unequivocal.
IPCC SIXTH ASSESSMENT REPORT, 2021
69%
Average decline in the monitored population sizes of mammals, birds, fish, reptiles and amphibians between 1970 and 2018. This is an average of population trends, not a count of species lost.
WWF LIVING PLANET REPORT, 2022
1million
Species assessed as threatened with extinction, many within decades, out of an estimated eight million animal and plant species on Earth.
IPBES GLOBAL ASSESSMENT, 2019
Water and land. The IPCC reports that roughly half the world’s population experiences severe water scarcity for at least part of each year. Assessments by the UN Convention to Combat Desertification and by IPBES find that a substantial share of the world’s land surface has been significantly degraded by human use, with soil loss outpacing formation across much of the world’s cropland.
Two honest observations about this page. First: none of these findings require anyone to accept a philosophical position. They are measurements, produced by instruments and reviewed by large scientific bodies, and they would be true whether or not this book existed. Second: measurements do not tell you what to do. They establish a situation. What a situation demands of us is an ethical question, and no instrument answers it.
That is exactly the seam this book works along. Science tells us where we are with a precision no earlier generation possessed. It cannot tell us what kind of beings we intend to be. For that we need a different vocabulary — and we have one, several thousand years old, sitting largely unused.