It’s the Climate, Stupid

Saw something crazy over on Huffington Post today about midwestern states and ten degree rises in temperature by 2010; farmers will be effed, oh they will be seriously effed (and what do farmers grow? Food. And who eats food? We do!), but the best part of the article is the classic regurgitation of what could surely be the epitaph on civilization’s uncelebrated tombstone: “[S]enators from Kansas, which will be most ravaged by climate change, are unlikely to support legislation addressing it.”

Let me try to understand. And yes, it has been said; I know I beat my head against it with nearly every environmental article I read. The planet is boiling, and our elected officials ‘are unlikely’ to support legislation addressing it?

What should we do to pull their heads out of the clouds and get them down here on the ground where the birds and bees are dying, crops are failing and all of Earth’s alarm bells are shrieking out our danger? Not that many of us can can hear, we’ve all got fingers in our ears, we use our chemically whitened teeth to rip the plastic off our burgers/ipods/American Apparel V-neck Summer Tees.

Feels kind of like life in an ivory tower; close the shutters, turn on your central air, and you can easily forget that your kids’ kids’ kids are gonna spend their days dressed in retro leather drinking irradiated water and scrounging pre-apocalyptic twinkies from the ruins of this little thing called Life.

This has to be the realization of a horrible Catch 22 situation: to accomplish anything in our society, one must amass power through cultural appeal, moderation and strategic alliance building; but the System is so far gone, our captains of industry and politics are so beyond the point of no return, that anyone who lets intuition drive his/her analysis of our environmental situation will end up ostracizing themselves because increasingly, horribly, it just doesn’t look like there’s a way out of this mess.

We’re on a super fast train riding magnetic tracks off a thousand foot cliff and we’re stuck arguing about a coal vs. solar powered caboose? We need to stop the effing train!

But no one wants to talk on that level, because 1.) it makes you sound crazy and 2.) the American zeitgeist says that ‘well, action is better than just words, so even though I just scratch the surface at least it’s something, right?”  Sure.  Ride the subway in New York City and marvel at Con Ed’s helpful tips for how to be a greener citizen.  I’m sure that deciding what you want to eat for your midnight snack before you open the refrigerator is the miracle for which we’ve all been waiting.

But I don’t know what to  do.  Real talk, I feel a horrible guilt ridden duality; I enjoy my job. I love the internet, I want freaking ipods and American Apparel, but I think our society is seriously messed.  We’ve sold the land out, and like a plane ride to a foreign country with a fake passport and a duffel full of cash, the baubles I’ve collected and the bullet points on my resume read like a sociopath’s sick manifesto. I’m a convicted convict.  So right to live in the age we live but there’s always a catch, ain’t there?

And this time, it’s the Climate.  It’s the air we breath.  We think we’re making major progress – civil rights, women’s rights, universal health care – but we’re still pushing the limits of what we can get wrong, and I’m afraid we’re going to take the whole planet with us.  And I know it sounds stupid, but that just doesn’t feel fair.

We’re humans, damnit; religion, space travel, 808s and heartbreak…all this time, I thought we were something special.  So why can’t we feel the world’s pain?

Posted by:

Sam Patton