RSS
Image: NASA/JPL
First off, congratulations to Naomi Oreskes, author of Merchants of Doubt and Pic Walker and the crew from the Alliance for Climate Change Education for winning the 2011 Climate Change Communicators of the Year given by the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communications. The event will be archived on the Center’s website for anyone interested who couldn’t attend.
Over the past year I’ve had the honor of being on a panel with Naomi at a town hall meeting with Chris Mooney last October and with Pic Walker at the American Renewable Energy Day last August in Aspen. Their individual and collective efforts to cut through the decades of climate confusion and obfuscation and denial and delay are important… and a terrific segue to Thomas Friedman’s piece “The Earth is Full” in the New York Times this morning.
Friedman, quoting Australian environmentalist Paul Gilding, picks up on the topic Al Gore eluded to in the Academy Award winning motion picture “An Inconvenient Truth“, namely, “Denial isn’t just a river in Egypt.”
Friedman writes:
You really do have to wonder whether a few years from now we’ll look back at the first decade of the 21st century — when food prices spiked, energy prices soared, world population surged, tornados plowed through cities, floods and droughts set records, populations were displaced and governments were threatened by the confluence of it all — and ask ourselves: What were we thinking? How did we not panic when the evidence was so obvious that we’d crossed some growth/climate/natural resource/population redlines all at once?
“The only answer can be denial,” argues Paul Gilding, the veteran Australian environmentalist-entrepreneur, who described this moment in a new book called “The Great Disruption: Why the Climate Crisis Will Bring On the End of Shopping and the Birth of a New World.” “When you are surrounded by something so big that requires you to change everything about the way you think and see the world, then denial is the natural response. But the longer we wait, the bigger the response required.”
Not to worry, though. Gilding is an “eco-optimist” who is convinced we’ll wake up in time to shop less and transform society in the nick of time.
As the impact of the imminent Great Disruption hits us, he says, “our response will be proportionally dramatic, mobilizing as we do in war. We will change at a scale and speed we can barely imagine today, completely transforming our economy, including our energy and transport industries, in just a few short decades.”
But cutting through denial clearly won’t be painless or necessarily as straight forward as Gilding seems to suggest. As Kari Norgaard has examined and we’ve explored previously, the seeds of denial run deep.
Moreover, we– specifically the one billion people who are the primary emitters of heat trapping gases on the planet- are the primary culprits and, although potentially in the future we are “the solution” through transformative technologies and systems, we are currently largely responsible for “the problem”.
Using the recovery metaphor from addiction, the first step is realizing we have a problem, that we essentially are powerless over our modern, fossil fuel driven affluent (or relatively affluent) lives, and that we need help.
We may be facing foreclosure. We may be out of a job. We may be struggling to make ends meet, but nevertheless, we– those living in North America, Europe, Australia and a few other clustered centers around the world– are responsible for the vast majority of the emissions and are thereby the primary cause of climate change. We can blame China or the Koch brothers or the energy companies, but we share the responsibility.
As Paul Polak has noted, a homeless person in the United States surviving on $600 a month is substantially more affluent than billions of people around the world living on a few dollars or pennies a day.
Many of us, myself included, jump on jets, drive to work, use electrical devices powered primarily by burning coal or gas to make heat to turn turbines to generate steam to make electricity, adding in a substantial way to growing global carbon emissions.
Some large percentage of us in the United States and elsewhere in the collective one billion plus population who are the primary culprits causing climate change certainly feel moments of guilt about our negative impact on the planet as we live our modern, fossil fuel dependent lives.
But the rub is, other than promoting greater awareness, better education and literacy and more effective policies, supporting clean energy and the like, we don’t know exactly what to do about “it”– the Great Disruption– in our everyday lives. We point the finger at energy companies or other merchants of doubt. We find distractions and rationalizations to avoid looking at the monster in the mirror.
But what happens when we do cut through the denial and see the horror of the situation? That’s the ultimate existential question of our age. We still need to go to work, or look for work or, if we’re homeless and unemployable, we need to find ways to stay warm and fed.
I certainly don’t have answers to these conundrums, but I do have a few favorite quotes that help me move forward in times of uncertainty and doubt and disillusionment. One is from David Orr:
The crisis of sustainability, the fit between humanity and its habitat, is manifest in varying ways and degrees everywhere on Earth. It is not only a permanent feature on the public agenda; for all practical purposes it is the agenda…
Sustainability is about the terms and conditions of human survival, and yet we still educate at all levels as if no such crisis existed . . . David Orr (1992) Ecological Literacy: Education and the Transition to a Postmodern World
If you look at the science about what is happening on Earth and aren’t pessimistic, you don’t understand the data. But if you meet the people who are working to restore this Earth and the lives of the poor, and you aren’t optimistic, you haven’t got a pulse.
