I’d like to begin by congratulating the entire production team of The Yukon Star for launching in both print and online. Independent journalism can only make our community stronger, and I’m very pleased to see the birth of a new media outlet.

I must continue, though, by taking exception to the Opinion piece you printed on June 14, 2024, written by Dr. Gwynne Dyer.

With all due respect to Dr. Dyer – and his historical analyses are numerous and widely respected – his opinion that technology will save humanity from the impacts of climate change in order that we may “go on living in a high-energy civilization” could not be more mistaken.

Dyer’s errors are common to many climate engineers. They are based on the assumptions that the very sophisticated technologies proposed (geothermal power, precision fermentation and solar radiation management) may be achieved at scale without unintended consequences.

History is littered with the catastrophic effects of unintended consequences from technologies introduced by human beings. From introducing rabbits as a meat source to Australia to the internal combustion engine (ICE) itself, some claim that “tool-maker” is the essential definition of humanity.

Since rabbits have no natural predators in Australia, however, their introduction has been an ecological disaster. Their unrestrained reproduction allows them to out-compete local herbivores, and they are considered to be the most significant factor in Australian species loss and loss of biodiversity.

Moreover, the rabbits are also responsible for heavy erosion, by eating the native plants which hold the soil in place, and destroy several million dollars’ worth of food crops every year.

We can be confident that Lenoir, Otto, or even Ford did not anticipate causing the Sixth Great Extinction with the ICE; nobody is that malicious. The destructive consequences of such tools, along with many others, are entirely unintended.

What horrific consequences could we unleash on our descendants by daring to manage solar radiation today? 

The larger the ambition, the larger the failure, and I find myself reluctant to trust technology to save us from the effects of previous technology when cultural change is more suitable.

Rather than adopting Dyer’s modernist goals and, presumably, capitalist methods for the continuing exploitation of nature’s resources, this climate historian would like to humbly suggest that we orient our attention towards degrowth.

Oh, editor, would you be willing to print an excerpt from The Future is Degrowth (2023) or The Case for Degrowth (2020)? 

If you are publishing the case for continuing technological exploitation of the planet, should you not also publish the case(s) for alternatives?

Linnéa Rowlatt, PhD
Whitehorse