When Hurricane Sandy made landfall this week, climate change roared back
into the public consciousness. It seems that suddenly, something had to
be done, even though the issue was barely mentioned in the election. As
surely as the flood waters will recede, though, so will global warming
in people's minds. We will go back to thinking about our jobs, our
families, and our Honey Boo Boo.
People's fickle attention to big
issues is maddening, but understandable. We don't do well with problems
that extend well beyond the scale of everyday human existence. For
millions of years, the human brain has evolved to tackle problems of
immediacy:
hunting for food now, escaping the predator now, feeding the crying
baby now. The human scale of time is about seconds and minutes, maybe
hours. Even planning for drought or famine next year requires vision and
foresight that doesn't come to us instinctively. When confronted with
the size and age of the universe, many people become uncomfortable, and
for some, the idea that humans evolved from fish is laughable. The tools
that we call common sense are best equipped to deal with the plainly
obvious in the here and now.
By contrast, no issue in our lives
is grander in scale than global warming. We began burning massive
amounts of fossil fuels some 150 years ago, and the effects of doing so
may continue for centuries. The atmospheric CO2 levels are like a giant
locomotive that has been accelerating for generations, and continues to
accelerate as industry takes over Asia and much of the Third World. All
of this has happened effortlessly, as
developing societies need lots of energy, and fossil fuels make that
easy.
Looking at the big picture, it's hard to imagine slowing
down and eventually stopping that locomotive based on our good
intentions alone. Knowing about species extinctions and the bleaching of
corals will motivate us only to a point. An immediate experience, like
seeing the images of Sandy, is needed even to get people to be more than
just intellectually "concerned" about climate change — that is, until
the waters recede and a more pressing issue takes our attention
elsewhere.
Part of the difficulty is our discomfort with matters
of scale. When we humans see a problem, we want to fix it, and we want
to see direct results
from these efforts. If a room is dark, we switch on a light because we
know this will help us to see. So when a Hurricane Sandy occurs, and we
know that global warming is part of the equation, we intuitively seek an
easy fix. To help us believe that global warming is within our control,
we appeal to human-scale terms of cause and effect ("Plant a tree, cool
the globe," one bumper sticker reads). Except there is no switch that
will stop the Frankenstorms from coming. The Earth doesn't operate on a
human scale, and given the complexity of the system — interactions
between the atmosphere, the oceans, the methane-rich permafrost, etc. —
even heroic efforts now may not stave off the effects of climate change
in our lifetimes. The more ideological voices on the left cringe at
hearing such discouraging news, but reality, like the planet, doesn't
necessarily operate according to human-scale desires.
The only way to deal with
climate change is to approach it on the same grandeur of scale as the
issue itself. Over generations, we must shift our global mindset
regarding energy and consumption. Clean energy, sustainable farming, and
recycling should not be seen merely as ways to end global warming;
instead, they must be seen simply as the right things to do.
The 20th-century slash-and-burn approach to civilization is
unsustainable, and a return to sustainability, at some point, will allow
the planet to settle back into a healthier equilibrium. It's inevitable
and has happened many times in the Earth's history.
Just don't expect to see results before the next airing of Honey Boo Boo
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