I once had a sweet pit bull named Thembi. While walking, I’d feel the leash go taut and know she’d sniffed out something tantalizing, like a squirrel or rabbit. She’d snuffle along, muzzle to the ground, tracing her quarry’s path up, down and around the dirt road. I once saw a rabbit scurry away just inches from Thembi’s face. Our clever dog had missed the rabbit because she was so intent on its scent.
I share this story because I fear this is what we’re doing with climate. We’re so focused on carbon dioxide that we overlook the extent to which ecosystems regulate climate. We’re not only missing opportunities to minimize climate disruption. We’re also missing the plot.
The truth is our planet has developed an exquisitely fine-tuned system to stabilize climate primarily via the water cycle — the phase changes of water from solid to liquid to gas — and back.
These processes are driven by life — by flora, fauna and fungi, and the interactions among them.
We often think of nature as passive. But as a colleague says, “Nature doesn’t just sit there and look pretty. It does work.”
Nature’s work is to create and maintain the conditions for life to thrive. Our climate is only as healthy as the state of our ecosystems.
Not that CO2 is irrelevant. Rather, carbon in the atmosphere can be seen as a lever, part of a climate-regulation regime governed by natural systems like healthy forests.
The good news is nature’s tendency to self-heal.
The trouble is ecosystem health is barely considered. We’re too busy watching CO2 numbers, just as Thembi had her snout to the ground while the rabbit skittered away.
Unfortunately, landscapes are under threat from development, including, ironically, renewable energy. All over New England, forested hillsides are being stripped for solar.
Because climate change is framed as an energy problem, we’ve been blind to nature’s hand in regulating climate. We’re sacrificing the very thing that could stabilize it.
Truly addressing climate change means not just decarbonizing, but also preserving and restoring ecosystems.
Otherwise we’re like my dog Thembi, chasing phantom rabbits.
Judith D. Schwartz is a science journalist based in Bennington, Vermont. A version of this commentary first appeared in the journal Mongabay: News and Inspiration from Nature’s Front Line.
