Matthew Pye - Plato Tackles Climate Change

The tragedies written by Sophocles, Aeschylus and Euripides were preoccupied with the notion of fate. Even though the characters could see their destiny coming, even if they understood the main plotlines of their own dramas, they simply could not escape. This is most famously evidenced in Sophocles’ play ‘Oedipus Rex’ (429 BCE) when the oracle informs the young Oedipus that he will kill his father and marry his mother.

Two Modern Tragedies: The Northern Forests and the Amazonian Forest

In the Spring of 2019, under the gentle reminders of longer, stronger sunbeams, the coniferous trees of the Northern hemisphere forests unsealed their dark buds. In a ritual that has been practised for hundreds

of millions of years, (43) they slowly uncurled their baby bright green leaves open to face the sun. With biotechnology that has been perfected through eons of evolutionary practice, this astonishingly beautiful natural tapestry began to suck out billions of tonnes of CO 2 from the atmosphere with remarkable efficiency (44). A major organ of the planet had burst back into life again on the upper side of our tilted planet.

Meanwhile, in the Southern Hemisphere, a democracy surrounded by around 3 million square kilometres of rainforest had voted into power a ‘strong man’ President – (Bellicose) Bolsanaro. His popularist policies included radical environmental deregulation in favour of agro-business, supported by crude claims that climate change was a plot by “cultural Marxists”.

By the spring of 2019, he had mobilised his angry army of petrol-powered chainsaws deeper into the Amazonian jungle. As they sank their steel teeth into the tender timber, they were backed up by flanks of bulldozers, excavators and skidders. During the invasion, once the major tree trunks had creaked and crashed to the floor, all that the other plants and animals could do was to offer their silent resistance. The orchids and mosses, the humming-birds and the butterflies, and the thousands of impossibly complex and diverse communities of life were all conquered, square inch by square inch – at a pace of 2.2 football fields per minute. (45)

From our human perspective, it was as if one of the planet Earth’s vital organs was suffering a terrifying advance of emphysema. When the machines eventually fell silent and the brown earth was left open to the baking sun, the trees were not the only thing that was left utterly stumped.

43 Fossil remains of the Wattieza tree (found near New York) date back to the Middle Devonian Period, c. 385 million years ago.

44 Oxygenic photosynthesis began 2.4bn years ago, resulting in the build-up of free oxygen in the atmosphere. Blankenship R.E., “Early Evolution of Photosynthesis”, Plant Physiology, October 2010.

45 Deforestation was recorded at 2.6 football fields per minute in 2020. http://terrabrasilis.dpi.inpe.br/app/dashboard/alerts/legal/amazon/aggregated/

Perhaps the howler monkeys of the Amazon know more than we think? In the remaining lush of the rainforest, their polyphonic treetop banter makes an appropriately mocking chorus for those supposedly more evolved primates who are busily cutting down their own future. Maybe these monkeys are taunting humans who just cannot see or avoid their fate, like an Ancient Greek Chorus in a tragic script? In all that tropical cacophony of sound, the most absurd noise of all is that which continues to be made by the machines of the Anthropocene.

Indeed, there was always a natural contrast between the vast, silent expanses of Boreal forests in the Northern Hemisphere and the exotic, busy equatorial forests of the South. Yet with a glance back at the Northern Hemisphere, the same idiocy can be seen in Alaska, a state dominated by the Boreal Forest.

Republican Mike Dunleavy, Alaska’s governor, abolished the state’s climate change strategy commission with Administrative Order No. 309. His spokesperson explained the logic of leaving Alaska without an official plan for addressing climate change in a brief email: “For various reasons these AO’s are no longer needed: they are no longer relevant, have fulfilled their intended purpose, are not aligned with the Governor’s policy direction, and/or appear to have been made primarily for political or public relations purposes.” The US democracy had voted Dunleavy into power in December 2018...