Rob Lewis

So what does happen when a family, with four hundred acres of historically abused land on their hands, decides to let go and let the land lead the way? To find that out, you’ll have to buy the book and read it yourself, which I wholeheartedly recommend.

On this planet, life is central, as breath by breath we are reminded. So it is with Earth’s climate. Our language, our science, our conversations, our media reports, our poems, our songs, our demands should reflect that.

The point is, the physical science basis is a term intended for science, and it makes most sense within those boundaries where its meaning and limitations are understood. It’s when it crosses the border to society that things get weird, where you suddenly you wake up to discover everything from forests to farms to whales have been reduced to carbon quantities, and life itself is being financialized.

When we speak of saving the climate, it’s really the Holocene climate we are trying to save, and the biological richness holding it up.

What happened to the two-legged approach to climate? The land leg proved “incommodious,” as Millan puts, so the two were split. The CO2 leg, championed by the IPCC, strode into the climate spotlight to save humanity, while the land-change leg, housed under the IGBP, remained behind for further research.

This knowledge, about Earth’s capacity for regulation and renewal, is still just cresting the horizon of human understanding, but as with a sunrise, the Earth is rolling us towards it. It feels inevitable.