Why aren’t the people we watch and adulate – from Mad Men, from Game of Thrones, from Glee and from all the other really juicy, addictive series and albums – talking about climate change? It’s boring, boring, boring, like last year’s fashions, Nokia phones, yesterday’s heroes and orts, and anything that’s been repeated too often, like that quaint Chicken Little shtick about the sky falling. A chunk of that sky would have to bean Usher before he or anyone would take notice. Sure, by then it might be a little on the late side for him but whose going to get excited about something that won’t happen for a billion years, like the loud Bar-BQ searing sound as the ballooning sun swallows up the earth.
Some people, that some of us admire, but that most have never heard of, like Barbara Kingsolver (“Flight Behaviour”) and Lee Smolin, are trying to be heard over the din of indifference and boredom. Lee Smolin went so far as to include climate change in the epilogue of his most recent book, “Time Reborn,” even though he couldn’t draw but the most tenuous connection between the book’s central topic and climate change; it is considered by him that important.
Here’s a looming disaster, a species ending event, inexorably on the way and all it gets is a big boring yawn. There is no doubt that its leading edge has already arrived and only a few people, always the same ones, are looking into finding other living quarters, off-planet. I’m thinking of Elon Musk of SpaceX, the purveyors of private, commercial spaceships resupplying the International Space Station; there’s also the Branson fellow, with big infrastructure plans for the moon and, of course, the reality show people selling the disenchanted on the really slim chance of making it alive on a one-way trip to Mars.
Maybe it’s the lack of populism in the message that we are already in trouble, and it’s only going to get worse. What we might need is to engage the services of a good aphorism monger. Someone like the Dali Lama who might say something like, “Our purpose here on earth is to keep it clean and livable.” Or, Oprah, perhaps, who might gush something like “I buy $39,000.00 handbags because I love you all and am determined to keep it out of the reach of people who emit too much Carbon Dioxide, which could be dangerous and heat up our cute planet.”
The reality is that we all know in our unconscious zombie systems that run our bodies, and where we want to keep it hidden, that climate change is dangerous and it will end civilization if nothing is done. But it’s so far in the future, maybe as much as 50 years or as little as 10, that we are deluding ourselves, something we are really good at, into believing that a tech solution will emerge just in time to save us the annoyance of lifestyle changes. It will not happen and I, for one, have decided to party as though there’s no future.
