Triage comes from the French “trier,” which means to pick or cull. It refers to allocation of scarce resources under life-and-death conditions — disaster, war, medical emergency, or calamity — where the needs of all claimants exceed the available resource supply.
I read an article in the Guardian recently by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, titled, “The key to halting climate change: admit we can’t save everything.” Johnson writes that, “The best use of resources is to adopt a triage approach to climate change — deal with the direst circumstances first, and work from there.”
The sobering statement that “we can’t save everything” is readily apparent when one looks at the fast-melting glacier systems, learns about endangered species and extinction (12 birds alone here in Franklin County), and receding shorelines around the world. What really came home to me were the deadly climate change impacts on people.
Johnson’s article led me to a scholarly paper by Noah M. Sachs from the University of Richmond School of Law titled, “Climate Change Triage.”
“Many nations,” Sachs writes, “will become overwhelmed by (climate change) impacts, and some nations will likely be destroyed.” Sachs points out that Pacific island nations are already evacuating their citizens as they lose their territory to the rising seas. Here in America, Miami Beach’s future is actually a complicated and expensive experiment. The Miami Herald, in October 2015, reported that as much as $500 million was being spent to install 80 pumps and raise roads and seawalls across the city. “A first phase appears to be working,” the Herald stated, “at least for now. But just one year into a massive public works project that could take six more, it’s way too soon to say whether and for how long it can keep the staggeringly valuable real estate of an international tourist mecca dry — especially in the face of sea level rise projections that seem to only get scarier with every new analysis.”
Climate change, and human resistance to making the changes needed to halt it, just keeps on keeping on. 2015 was the hottest year in recorded history, we are facing major species extinctions in our oceans and yet political will is barely noticeable to tackle this solvable problem. I keep asking the question; what is keeping us from responding to this enormous threat to humankind?
Why would people who, in most every other aspect of life accept without question the results of peer-reviewed science, reject the overwhelming consensus of climate scientists in this case? One reason is the way the issue has been politicized, with the Gallup polls showing the most entrenched climate-change denial to be found in conservative spaces; distrust of the science is now seen by many to be an important marker of conservative identity. Naomi Klein points out that many of those on the political right see climate change as merely a cover for an attack on capitalism.
Others have theological reasons for ignoring the crisis, believing that whatever is happening is part of the plan of an omniscient God. For others, perhaps it is simply easier to disbelieve than to face the implications, which is made easier by the well-funded media campaigns to create doubt.
The politics of climate change have been thoroughly dominated by economic considerations, especially in the United States. It squarely highlights the need for moral accountability and allocative fairness. New Yorker staff writer Jane Mayer, in her new book, “Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right,” said in a Rolling Stone interview “… that you can trace something like $25 million from the Koch family and their foundations, just over a three-year period, to organizations that deny the reality of global warming. And you can see that our Congress has been captured by their interests and those of the fossil-fuel companies, so it will do nothing about global warming.”
That said, there is some light at the end of this particular tunnel. No less than 175 countries signed the historic Paris agreement on climate change on April 22, Earth Day. The agreement includes new perspectives on the core allocation dilemmas of the treaty that are urgently needed. But world leaders made it clear that more action is essential — and quickly — to slow down the relentless rise in global temperatures.
The Guardian’s Johnson states that given “dire ecological trends, limited public funding and legislative gridlock, the time is ripe for a budget-neutral, executive-branch approach for managing our natural resources: triage.” Johnson’s “science-based triage approach” would be used to classify lands and species into one of three categories: (1) not at immediate risk, (2) in need of immediate attention or (3) beyond help.
“Refusing to apply triage,” Johnson writes, “implicitly assumes that we can save everything and prevent change, which we cannot.” She points out that prioritization will occur regardless but in an unplanned, ad hoc and “shrouded” manner. Johnson’s and Sach’s triage system “would replace the status quo of inadequately managing our full portfolio of over one million square miles of public land and 1,589 threatened and endangered species.” Except for those “beyond hope.”
John Bos lives in Shelburne Falls. He can be reached at: john01370@gmail.com