We need to work together to preserve our vessel — earth

A close friend of mine during my time at the University of Minnesota in Duluth earned money for school by working on a ship carrying iron ore pellets from Minnesota ports on Lake Superior to steel mills along the lower Great Lakes. My roommates and I would slip down to the terminal whenever his ship docked in town to surreptitiously chat with him while he and the other deckhands maneuvered the large vessel back and forth along the wharf to even out the loading of the cargo.

I once asked him how he and his fellow crewmembers occupied their days out on the open water between the hectic loading and unloading at ports. He shrugged and replied: Every hour of every shift was spent monitoring, repairing, scrapping, painting and cleaning. The aggregation of all sorts of necessary tasks, large and small, kept the ship seaworthy. 

We all grasp the importance of maintenance, although it’s easier acknowledged than accomplished since it requires investments of time and money now in exchange for future benefits. Cars require regular checkups and servicing, lest they fail us at moments that can be inconvenient or even disastrous. Homes have all sorts of needs that if ignored can  make them uninhabitable.

We all accept the necessity of maintenance when we can get our heads around the scope of the tasks, whether that involves taking care of our personal property or — with quite a bit of prodding — maintaining big shared infrastructure projects, such as our country’s electrical grid, interstate highways or air traffic control system. 

But we all now face a far greater maintenance task that challenges our capacity for comprehension and thus our ability to act.

This planet that sustains all 8.2 billion of us should be perceived as a remarkably complex and intricate ship. But this ship travels through the vastness of space without any ports of call, no reprovisioning of supplies, and no stops for the removal of wastes. You board this ship when you are born and disembark when you die. The only input from beyond the ship is energy from the sun, which powers the physical, chemical and biological infrastructures that sustain us all.

This planetary ship has been an astonishingly favorable home for life for a very long time. We have built a vast global human enterprise on the expectation that earth’s infrastructure will always deliver the services on which we depend, while we simultaneously degrade that very infrastructure. We are changing the composition of the atmosphere and thus altering how it and the ocean below it behave. We are altering the chemistry of the ocean and thereby damaging its capacity to support fisheries. We are dramatically reducing biodiversity everywhere and hence decimating our ability to improve the genetics of our crops against diseases and pests.

We must now acknowledge the daunting implication that our planet’s infrastructure is declining in its capacity to support us. It can be easy to dismiss reports from those responsible for monitoring our planet’s infrastructure that things are amiss, especially when some political leaders won’t acknowledge the seriousness of our current situation and actively deny that there is anything that needs to be done and instead seek to divide our earth ship into spheres of influence.

Imagine being a passenger on a vessel where different factions seek to establish domains over various portions of it, dismissing the fact that its infrastructure cannot be divided up. The ship either functions as a whole or eventually fails to function.

Some of our current leaders mistakenly claim that doing the work of slowing and ultimately reversing the decline in our planet’s infrastructure is too difficult and too expensive. We deserve leaders willing to champion our ambitions. Great infrastructure empowers great human achievement. Doing the work of repairing our planet’s deteriorating infrastructure will unleash the greatest flourishing of human creativity and enterprise we have ever witnessed.

We now live on a human-dominated plant. The future of earth will be determined by human decision making; either by default or by design, either by accident or by intention. Together, let’s imagine, design and realize a more secure and prosperous climate future.