My blogging pal Lou Grinzo from The Cost Of Energy emailed me as he was leaving for his family’s Christmas gathering. He wished me happy holidays and voiced some really nice appreciation for Diamond-Cut Life’s “conspicuously human take” on climate change issues. Lou’s phrase that particularly leapt out at me, though, was in reference to the unsuccessful climate change talks at Copenhagen. He spoke of our shared fight for the future, which succinctly describes dealing with climate change, also known as global warming.
Copenhagen, which even with some heroic efforts failed to successfully address climate change, concluded right before winter solstice. And solstice is a window into something greater than human beings and our messes. Solstice reminds me that the earth, sun, and Creation force behind them are much greater and more durable than this current, particular human civilization in which we are emotionally invested. I’m just as invested as anyone: I want all this to work. My career in transportation options and my writing here at Diamond-Cut Life are my efforts to help us live on the earth with respect, live within our means as a civilization. I don’t want us to go over the cliff, as a number of large, proud civilizations before us have done, i.e., Mayan, Aztec, Anasazi, the Roman Empire. Pulitzer prize-winning author Jared Diamond details in his book Collapse how these and other cultures failed to live within their means, and ignored all the road-signs telling them where things were headed. Numerous cultures before ours failed to discipline their consumption, overshot their finite resource bases, and eventually . . . well, collapsed.
As much as people don’t want to hear this (who would? I don’t) I do believe our civilization, at least in its current highly consumptive iteration, is headed for collapse. That’s why I’m adopting, for today, the name Alison Cassandra Barcelona. Cassandra was the woman in Greek mythology who could foresee the future, yet nobody would believe her. (Barcelona I added for poetic effect and a playful nod to the 2008 Woody Allen film). I’m far from unique in my Cassandra status: a great many writers, scientists, teachers and other people besides me are telling the hard truths of where we’re heading without major course-corrections. But the general population, including many in power and particularly those addicted to the high profits of big oil and big coal, practices denial, sometimes aggressively, but more often passively, by refusing to take any of it seriously. By refusing to make any changes.
With many individual and sub-group exceptions, humanity in general isn’t mature enough yet to deal with something as hard as global warming. Maturity means being strong in hard moments, or hard centuries. It involves delayed gratification, balancing individual needs with group needs, not being addicted to feeling good every minute. Even many of the groups and businesses working the hardest on building a low-carbon economy present all changes as causing no interruption to current creature comforts and consumption levels. Our current culture considers the concept of ’sacrifice’ to be off the table altogether, despite the U.S.’s disciplined (rationed) consumption of luxury goods (gas and meat are two examples) being central to its winning World War II just 65 years ago. Global warming is even harder than WWII was, though more diffuse and less visible.
I may sound fatalistic, but that’s not how I’m feeling. I see plenty of hope, which I’ll write about soon in Part II of Alison Cassandra Barcelona.
Related Posts:
- Embracing Our Sphere Of Influence
- Winter Solstice And The Unconquered Sun And Son
- About Furloughs And Household Finances
Alison,
You mentioned one detail in passing that I think deserves to get much more attention than we normally give it: None of us researching and writing about and working on this stuff like the bad news. I, for one, would dearly love to see evidence that climate chaos, water issues, peak oil, etc. are all gigantic mistakes, or even “the greatest hoax” as Senator Inhofe would say. I would love to find out that we can let the free market rule all, with very little intervention from the government and no need for collective, focused action.
The problem is that what I and so many others want is irrelevant. Reality does its thing with stunning indifference to our needs, wants, and desires. Unless an incredible volume of hard data is wrong, we really are facing all these problems. We have a choice of going through a painful, accelerated maturation process as a species (and you’re right–we’re not mature enough yet to deal with these looming problems) or paying one heck of a price for refusing to do so.
Excuse me, for I suddenly have an overwhelming urge to hug my three nieces and apologize to them for what my generation and those that came before it have done to the planet they’ll inherit.
It’s interesting to speculate on the effect of harnessing all of the energy/political capital that Senator Inhofe and other “climate change deniers” put into their efforts to unveil what they see as a “hoax”. If all that energy were to go into forming a consensus around identifying the true costs of releasing greenhouse gases, we could arrive at some wonderful and very beneficial outcomes for the planet and its people.
Sorry to be such an optimist, it’s the only defense I have against despair.