Here Be Dragons

Ecology and conservation in the light of climate change

- SHASHANK KELA

TOWARDS THE END OF HIS LIFE, James Baldwin wrote a meditation on the polymorphous nature of human sexuality and the irrational fears awakened by it. For its title, he chose an old, possibly apocryphal phrase used in ancient maps to mark the region where America would one day be discovered: “Here Be Dragons.” For what are dragons but potent symbols of our deepest anxieties (and farthest hopes)? Some are ancient, others are new. None is as novel or as unprecedented as climate change, if only because there is nothing imaginary about its effects.

Governments have been talking about reducing greenhouse-gas emissions for almost three decades, from the Rio Earth summit of 1992—on the whole, to very little effect. Some fifty percent of the carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution was added after 1990. Currently, the best estimate— provisional like all estimates—tells us that if global warming is limited to 1.5 degrees Celsius, there is some chance of avoiding the worst. Above this, large swathes of the natural world will cease to exist. As it happens, this state of nature is not very old—a mere twelve thousand years or so, when the last glaciation ended and the current interglacial began. Homo sapiens is much older than that, but most of the achievements we associate with our condition date from the Holocene: agriculture, cities, states, culture in the sense of artifacts, writing, art, and the built environment.