70 Years After Nagasaki, A World of Falling Skies

August 6, 1945 was the most important date in “the history and prehistory of the human race,” wrote author Arthur Koestler, because with the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, humanity for the first time faced the prospect of its own extinction.

The Bomb brought the concept of humanity causing its own extinction into consciousness. Among others, Norman Cousins wrote about it in the 40s, Susan Sontag in the 50s before Koestler emphasized its importance in the late 70s.  But it turns out that before Hiroshima, and before Nagasaki (with its 70th anniversary today) human civilization had been creating the conditions that might yet lead inexorably to its extinction, and has continued to do so, even as we are becoming conscious of it.

Though the nuclear threat is not entirely over, 70 years later there are warnings of extinction with a different cause: human impact on the biosphere. A study released this summer suggested that a cascading mass extinction driven by habitat loss, exploitation and climate change could begin threatening humanity in three generations. Co-author Geraldo Ceballos warned that “if it is allowed to continue, life would take many millions of years to recover, and our species itself would likely disappear early on.”

I was born during the first postwar atomic bomb tests in 1946. As have many others, I’ve lived with the specter of the Bomb all my life, amidst all the contradictory responses: alarm, denial, distracted indifference, inconsolable terror and even apocalyptic glee, and perhaps most of all, helpless numb despair. We see such responses to climate change today.

But there are differences. A nuclear exchange threatens an immediate catastrophic change, from normal life to instant annihilation. Environmentally-caused extinction would likely come at the end of a long process that’s already begun, with increasingly obvious consequences along the way.

Some changes are here and more are coming, because of what has already been set in motion. This presents new challenges, and like the advent of the Bomb, it requires new ways of thinking.

Among the places NPR commentator and author Craig Childs visited for his book Apocalyptic Planet was a research station in Greenland, where climate expert Koni Steffans would brief government officials and others seeking the latest information on global climate change. "What he tells people who visit is not that the sky is falling but that we live in a world of falling skies,” Childs writes, “and it is best not only to know your options but to make moves ensuring the worst does not happen."

In a world of falling skies, humanity will necessarily confront the effects of climate change (droughts, heat, droughts, storms, rising sea levels, food and water shortages, health problems etc.) that will continue for decades because of past actions.

Yet it will also be necessary to simultaneously and relentlessly attack the causes of climate change (principally greenhouse gas pollution) in every way possible to prevent the worst from happening in the far future. Keeping that cause and effect relationship in mind in a worsening time may be difficult but essential. It is the work of generations.

Living under the nuclear sword influenced how several generations viewed life in the present, as well as their attitudes about the future. At our best, we learned to identify and cherish the soul of this moment, while finding meaning in working for a better future.

“People have to have hope,” a conservationist told science writer Elizabeth Kolbert for her book, The Sixth Extinction. “It’s what keeps us going.” In the end, as the nuclear age may have taught us, hope is not just a feeling or attitude. It’s a commitment. It isn’t principally what you have. It’s what you do.

For even though we may have lucked and blundered our way through the nuclear threat so far, there were also 70 years of soul-searching and debate, research and imaginative inquiry, political and institutional action and change brought to bear in order to thwart the demise of the world. That counted for something.

There were people who confronted the world made by those days in Hiroshima and Nagasaki not simply out of fear but with a sense of responsibility. If we’re the species that realizes it may be causing extinction, we must be the species that does its best to prevent it.