Yesterday, my friend Todd and I drove
from New York to Chicago. We're on our way back to Carleton College
for our first alumni weekend with our ultimate frisbee team in which
we are the alums. Preparing myself to attempt the role of sage
graduate rather than the familiar party animal reversion that some of
my ex-teammates will surely perform, it still came as a bit of a
surprise when amidst my excitement for reunion, yesterday turned out
to be a sobering day.
As we neared Chicago in the late
afternoon, traffic predictably thickened until we found ourselves
mired in the nastiest sludge of interstate snarl come 6:30. We were
listening to Chicago band Wilco's beautiful, at-times apocalyptic
album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.
After finally making it to Todd's parents' house in Oak Park, I
flipped open my laptop before bed and, performing the ritual Facebook
check, found a link to James Hansen's New York Times op-ed entitled
“Game Over for the Climate.” Cue the apocalyptic music.
In the piece,
Hansen mourns the recent news that Canada plans to exploit its huge
tar sands reserves for oil. Dirty, dirty oil, the extraction of which
will release irrevocable masses of carbon dioxide into the
atmosphere. The raised level of heat-trapping gases, Hansen writes,
“would assure that the disintegration of the ice sheets would
accelerate out of control. Sea levels would rise and destroy coastal
cities. Global temperatures would become intolerable. Twenty to 50
percent of the planet’s species would be driven to extinction.
Civilization would be at risk.”
Boom.
Apocalypse. Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. And why isn't this front page news?
Oh right, sorry, that's the long-term
outlook. Who cares about the long-term these days? But wait, Hansen,
continues (and here's where things really get dour), “over the next
several decades, the Western United States and the semi-arid region
from North Dakota to Texas will develop semi-permanent drought, with
rain, when it does come, occurring in extreme events with heavy
flooding. Economic losses would be incalculable. More and more of the
Midwest would be a dust bowl. California’s Central Valley could no
longer be irrigated. Food prices would rise to unprecedented levels.”
What?
You mean this global warming crap might actually affect me
in my lifetime?
Yeah, people, it
will, and it already has. Last year's historic, devastating drought
in Texas was probably no coincidence. As Hansen, a director at NASA,
notes, Earth is at the point of its extended orbit cycle where
temperatures should be cooling. They're not. It barely snowed back
home in Massachusetts this winter, and the only real storm was an
out-of-the-blue Halloween behemoth that wrought millions in damage to
the region. Random, extreme weather punctuating abnormal warmth.
That's what's already starting, folks.
After reading
Hansen's warning, the truth of it all became clearer than ever:
climate change is not a right vs. left problem, it is a right vs.
wrong problem. And right now, nearly all of us are still making
far too many wrong choices about it.
I, for one, love to
drive my car. I have recently chosen to drive from Texas to
Massachusetts to Minnesota to New Mexico to start my summer (getting
36-40 miles per gallon in my car and staying with friends, it's
actually cheaper than flying). But is the true, not-just-monetary
cost of this decision really less? Nearly every car ad these days (at
least in blue states) touts fuel efficiency. That's neat, but what do
35 mpgs vs. 25 really matter when we're talking about heavy flooding
and incalculable economic loss?
No, we need to cut
back on cars altogether. Concentrating our fossil fuel consumption to
public transit is part of it. Walking or riding a bike whenever possible
is another. But more than that, we need to change our locational habits
in order to cut back our car love. Pay the extra money for a house or
apartment within walking distance of work. Get the fuck out of the
suburbs and the ridiculous sprawl cities like Houston where everyone
drives everywhere. It's not a matter of preference anymore, it's a
matter of survival.
Of course, our
reliance on the internal combustion engine is just one of this
hydra's many heads. The way we heat our homes, the way we dispose of
waste, the very food we eat – it all needs to change. We can't pick
and choose when to be green like a shopper going back and forth
between the organic and candy aisles.
Hansen's piece
turns its focus to policy as a necessary change. It's true, our
lawmakers and executives need to make those hard, unpopular choices
that will ultimately improve the lives of their constituents. That's
what government is for. But if we are to save our species from the
tidal waves of disturbance that are coming faster than ever, we can't wait
for the law to force us, because let's face it, with our broken
political system, we may still be waiting when Brooklyn sits under
five feet of water.
It comes down to
ethics. Aldo Leopold, more than sixty years ago, described “The
Land Ethic,” stating, “a thing is right when it tends to preserve
the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is
wrong when it tends otherwise.” Few people have listened to
Leopold, whose early, pre-global warming concerns were land
management, not fossil fuels. Now we have no choice. We must adopt a
shared environmental ethic, one that pervades every decision we make.
Cold turkey. No going back to the candy aisle. I may have to
sacrifice the liberating joy of those long roadtrips.
One of my favorite
motivational quotes for outdoor adventures is an anonymous one that
goes, “there's no growth in the comfort zone and no comfort in the
growth zone.”
When it comes to
the climate, we've reached the point where we can substitute
“survival” for “growth.”
It's a sobering
prospect, yes. But it doesn't mean life will stop being life. We can
laugh, cry, and fall in love without consuming fossil fuels. I'll
still have fun at alumni weekend. And I might just choke down a few
veggie burgers while I'm at it.
