Humanity at Climate Change Crossroads, Says Climate Healers

With more people becoming aware of the climate crisis due to the extreme weather events and talk about greenhouse gas emissions all over the news, humanity is at a major crossroads that has implications for its existence, according to Dr. Sailesh Rao, founder and executive director of Climate Healers, an Arizona non-profit corporation that seeks to transform how people live and restore the environment.

According to Rao, we humans have a choice whether to restore life to how it was or to continue down the path of modern civilization. The first choice, restoring life, is based on evolution and how humans affect the Earth. While many people think that the Earth is at its hottest, the planet is actually in the fifth known major ice age in its 4.6 billion-year history. It is currently in the Quaternary ice age, which began 2.7 million years ago.

Each major ice age has cooler periods, called glaciations, and warmer interglacial periods between them. Over the first 1.7 million years of the Quaternary, interglacial periods were quite frequent, around every 41,000 years. However, over the past million years, the warm interglacial periods have become rarer, occurring about once every 100,000 years.

In such cycles, the earth is mostly frozen for about 90,000 years, followed by an interglacial warm period of about 10,000 years, when most of the glaciers melt and life expands beyond a narrow band around the equator into the northern and southern hemispheres. Then, the process repeats. Rao says that humans achieving mastery over fire helped warm up the planet. Around 10,000 years ago, humans started burning down forests for agriculture almost everywhere, causing the Earth to heat up significantly. Trees capture and store carbon dioxide, and cutting and burning these trees release the carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere.

Rao argues that the Earth’s temperature should have returned below the glaciation threshold about 5,000 years ago. However, human activities kept heating the Earth. Then, during the Industrial Revolution, humans started burning fossil fuels in great quantities, causing global temperatures to increase by 1.2C into the modern era.

“Now, we have developed the engineering instrumentation and the scientific knowledge to understand that humans are gravely impacting the conditions for life to thrive on this earth,” says Rao. “We believe that by stopping animal agriculture and dialing down how much fossil fuels we burn, society can create the conditions it needs to restore life as we once had on Earth. We can replant the 3 trillion trees that were cut down and largely restore the ecosystems that we destroyed over the past 10,000 years due to a multitude of unsustainable practices.”

Rao is an electrical systems engineer by training with a Ph.D. from Stanford University. In 2005, he saw former US Vice President Al Gore’s presentation on climate change and became deeply immersed in the various environmental crises facing humanity. This inspired him to change careers and found Climate Healers.

Climate Healers feels that addressing the issues above will surpass all previous achievements of humanity, whether it be the discovery of fire 500,000 years ago, the Moon landing, or the creation of the internet. This is because of how positively impactful it will be to how humans treat one another and how they treat all beings in our environment.

On the other hand, if humanity chooses to continue living under the status quo of consumption and growth, then it is certainly doomed, Rao says. Many other climate activists and nonprofits agree with this notion because all polluting activity–whether it be from the fashion, energy, or transportation industries– will eventually prevent humanity from having the many luxuries it’s currently afforded. The planet will no longer be able to sustain itself or our behaviors if we continue to harm the world’s ecosystems in exchange for short-term gains.

“We need to change our goal as a species,” Rao says. “Our goal as a species today is overly focused on achieving wealth and purchasing, using, or doing many things that consume resources and emit carbon in our atmosphere. Our desire to feel the emotional or physical benefits of these behaviors is distracting us from urgent climate issues. Climate Healers believes that changing how we relate to animals is the first step to stabilizing our disrupted environmental ecosystems and eventually creating long-term change. By living with more compassion towards all living creatures, Climate Healers hope to make humanity’s impact on the environment something all individuals are conscious of.”