PandemicGreen

In honor of Blog Action Day, I am back. And I want to talk about climate change.

Today I read this post on Grist that really underscores just how bad things are getting for us. But what spoke to me most was that amid the deterioration, experts continue to speak to the public in calm, even boring tones. Where is the passion? the fervor? the

All the latest science shows climate change is accelerating at an alarming rate. But all we do is explain the sometimes minute details of how we know this. Except science also shows that the simple steps we encourage the public to take — recycling, walking more, unplugging electronics — can’t help much. Just cutting greenhouse-gas emissions isn’t enough anymore. We need real, major overhauls. We need global shifts in energy practices. We need multinational resource protection. We need worldwide, permanent changes.

Thus far, the Grist article notes, the climate change story has been largely data-driven or promoted through what essentially are gimmicks to get us to change a light bulb – everyone loves the polar bear and frankly you are heartless if you don’t. But the real stories matter, too! The stories about “coastal insalination rendering vast swaths of farmland useless, houses plunging into the sea as permafrost melts, even wildfires threatening the City of the Angels, to name just a very few” are the ones that we need to hear. They may be happening far away or under the radar, but they are happening. We are losing entire species of underwater creatures! We are sweating in October! These things are all interconnected. And worsening.

Adam Sacks in this Grist article says:

We climate activists are the ones who aren’t saying what needs to be said. Our silence is not the lack of words, it is the absence of an essence in urgent human relationships, an essence with power to break the bonds of unthinkable thoughts: Passion.

He goes on to quote an excerpt from a moving speech out of American history that is filled with exactly that – passion. Our ancestors found passion when it mattered, yet we are barely mustering up enough passion to continue the equal rights fight today. But I see passion in everyone trying out for So You Think You Can Dance and American Idol. So we are still passionate people … ha. Where is our passion for our PLANET? For the FUTURE OF EVERYTHING AS WE KNOW IT?

Check out Sacks’ call for passion – and pass it on!

Today we are addressing the end of the world we know, quite possibly the extinction of homo sapiens and most other species on earth, and we can do little more than cite statistics? Surely an unravelled web of life, miserable ends for countless creatures great and small, and mass death of billions of human beings, mostly innocent, should call for “scorching irony,” at the very least.

Where are our fire, thunder, ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, stern rebuke?  Why are we so polite? Why are we so obedient?  What are we thinking?  What aren’t we thinking?  What are we doing?  What aren’t we doing?  When do we start?
I have a proposition for you.  Try your hand at a letter—to an editor, or to a friend, or to a lover, or to a child—availing yourself of all the passion you can muster as we hasten blindly toward world’s end…

… When do we start?  Now’s the time.

Quill and ink (or keyboard) in hand, summon your muse and write for our lives!

Ok, admittedly this is a little insane-sounding and over the top. But I don’t want to face the problems that are on the way for our children and say I did nothing to lessen the blow. Blog Action Day is certainly a start, but let’s keep the conversation going!