Climate change? Phooey…I don’t have offspring so why should I care? Or, I do have children and grandchildren but I still don’t give a shit. Over a quarter of the population over 50 hasn’t picked up a book and read it, maybe ever. And almost 50% of Americans believe that Fox News is a credible news source. Sheesh. If the issue of CLIMATE CHANGE comes up on the teevee box, it’s a national frenzy of speed dial to Hogan’s Heroes reruns.
Yep, we baby boomers have left a pile of doo-doo for the younger generation to clean up and I think it’s going to take themthar youngsters to step up and do something about it. But, as Kim Stanley Robinson so eloquently put it in his novel Galileo's Dream: "There were no words that would reach the youth. You could never teach other people anything that mattered. The important things they had to learn for themselves, almost always by mistakes, so that the lessons arrived too late to help. Experience was in that sense useless. It was precisely what could not be passed along in a lesson or equation."
What to do? I will say I was heartened to see CBS’s Sunday Morning show do a segment on the warming of the oceans last week. This animation, directed and designed by Nate Milton, was most helpful to me as I tend to absorb information better visually than any other way. The blurb that accompanied the video on Youtube says: As greenhouse gases warm the Earth, our oceans play a significant role in absorbing heat that helps regulate rising temperatures. But as writer and narrator Robert Krulwich explains, there is a huge price to pay for heating the oceans. He explains why in this first of a series of "CBS Sunday Morning" video essays, based on the work of Aatish Bhatia.
I’m not going to jump into the weeds here about WHAT TO DO about climate change…it’s too big and too complicated. But a three-part documentary series on PBS’s FRONTLINE recently reported on ‘The Power of Big Oil’ and how the fossil fuel industry employed PR tactics in the 1990s to emphasize uncertainty on climate change, among other things.
As former Tucsonan (anyone who has ever spent a summer in Tucson without leaving), Babs Kingsolver penned in Animal Dreams, “The very least you can do in your life is figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof.”
And now…
Woops! … researched and an engaging read.
If you like KS Robinson’s writing, I highly recommend Ministry for the Future. It has a very hopeful perspective on what humans could do to change their behavior. It’s typical of his writing in that it is well r