It’s Not in the Bag …
It’s hard to miss the green. Bordering on fashionable, sometimes imitating political correctness, tugging at our sensibilities of responsibility, the green movement is here. The issue is enormous and affects everything from choices about the water that we drink in or out of plastic bottles, how we sort and take out the trash, our transportation choices, and even the faddish colors of the cloth bags some carry to the market. I suspect that I’m not alone in the surrealism of the duality of playing a participant actor in my micro world, and simultaneously as a spectator to the unfolding of the global drama. Surrealism emerges in that I may “feel good” about my cloth bag, but am skeptical of how the big drama will end, and whether the writers of this bigger play have blinders as I may.
Let’s stipulate that environmental responsibility is essential and that we have far too many that chose to ignore it or value their other interests far more, or simply are ignorant of the impact of choices. Let’s also stipulate that the consequences of being wrong are asymmetrical in that being wrong in one direction is far worse than being wrong in the other. We should all do more and debate less about the doable and personal choices. But there are questions that I don’t yet see being discussed sufficiently. The foremost is what if global warming is not arrested? Be it from what we do or what happens from climactic changes outside of our influence, then what? I’m convinced that the answer lies not in whether I carry my little cloth grocery bag.
What’s the plan for a hotter, wetter, or drier world? What are our strategies for living and thriving in that very, perhaps uglier and different world? Climactic change has had enormous change on life and extinction. While our current version of Homo sapiens (knowledgeable man) survived changes precipitated by ices ages, the Neanderthals could not. Man-made or climatic depletion of food production have wiped out civilizations (read Jared Diamond) and triggered migrations and adaptations for those who survived (we have some of their genes….) Yes, we do it to ourselves, but change comes also. The rigid lose to the agile.
Awful as or cynical as it may sound, we must have at least one path in our thinking, debate, and development of solutions that treats global warming, the changes in climate, sea levels, and countless other changes as an opportunity. Yes, an opportunity! If we consider that change may come as one possible and highly probable future, we may harness focused creativity and strategies that bring essential solutions. Solutions need to be developed addressing the fundamental ways that people, governments, leaders, technology, scarcity and abundance collaborate. Or we can degenerate into might makes right, war or subjugation of the weaker. I pray we become better than that.
Proactive thought may bring out what is best in us. I fear that waiting for calamities and scarcity to come, will surely bring out what is worst in some.
What are some questions we should be asking?
Who’s responsible?
What’s the cost of not asking?
