Today is Blog Action Day for the environment.
It frustrates me that the environment has become a term that’s so loaded now. Like it’s a thing apart that we have to decide to favor in a zero-sum game. Do we get prosperity, or the material basis of prosperity. Such ridiculous tripe. Almost as ridiculous as Tom Tancredo’s insistence that global warming is fictional.
Granted, the GOP climate deniers are undermining their own credibility. But they’re also creating a debate in which one side is saying we don’t have to do anything and the other is saying that we don’t have to do very much. Except that we need to do rather a lot.
Consider the Step It Up! goals: 5 million green jobs by 2015, cut carbon 80% by 2050, and no new coal-fired power plants. These goals are frankly insufficient, though they are far and away better targets than anything proposed in the legislature. They are good first steps. But of the presidential candidates, only McCain and Kucinich have signed up to join a Step It Up! action on November 3rd. And McCain in his role as a Senator isn’t even supporting the most useful pending legislation, the Sanders-Boxer bill.
And we want to save our climate, which provides such ideal growing conditions for the food we all like to eat, but only have 30 days to save the very tangible Appalachian mountain range. How do you convince people who don’t understand why you shouldn’t destroy whole mountain ranges to preserve the weather? I must admit that it seems challenging.
Though this is exactly the sort of problem that one person can’t solve. You shouldn’t feel disillusioned because you don’t have an answer. Or because none of the people who talk about it seem to have a complete answer. That’s just fine.
Saving our habitat is going to require all our human capital, all our intelligence and perseverance and hope. Our youthful energy, our hard-won wisdom, our friends, and probably even our enemies. Because we really have nowhere else to go besides the planet we call home.
“We must learn to live together as brothers or we are going to perish together as fools.” – Rev. Martin Luther King
