Remember all that talk in the 1980s and 90s which surrounded the environmental problems which we would all be facing in the 21st century? You know: rising sea levels thanks to the melting of arctic glacial ice, rapid and extreme shifts from desert to ice-age temperatures, increasing hurricane and high-wind activity? Thinking they were all just cries of lunacy from that weirdo geography teacher from the tenth grade, by and large we ignored climate change (inaccurately called Global Warming back then) in favour of business as usual. No skies are falling, we said as over the 1990s we began to get addicted to SUVs and other equally stupid ways to accelerate climate change. It was the head in the sand approach, and it failed miserably.
Let me make this perfectly clear: WAKE THE FUCK UP AND LOOK AROUND RIGHT NOW. Notice that our seasons have been radically altered from the four traditional ones that we grew up with. You might also notice how animal populations have reacted: birds have altered their migration patterns, fish have moved to different waters, and flying insects which normally stay dormant over the winter now have altered life cycles. I think the problem with the way we were taught environmental issues way back then was that all the discussions involved what was going to happen in the future. In retrospect, this was entirely the wrong tack. It allowed many people to ignore data that was presented to them, disregarding it like the nonsense from a religious pamphleteer.
The new mantra is this: climate change is happening now, not in a few decades, not next year. Right the hell this second. Just as it was happening all throughout our recent history when we were talking about future calamities. If you add to climate change, you are making that difference now, not in the distant future which you might not be alive to experience. This sense of immanence can be seen in fact as the hope of the environmental project, as only by focussing on the now can we stand to make change in the hearts and minds of the world.
So here’s a current example, some data to be reconciled if you like. According to the US National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, due to glacial melting there has been a rise of 25mm in ocean levels since 1960. 2002 had the highest level of glacial melt ever recorded. Now, I am not a scientist and 25mm might not sound like much, but when you multiply that by the surface area of the oceans involved, you end up with quite a bit of extra water cycling around the planet. Where might that water go, you ask? For starters, you might have noticed that it has been raining a lot these days. Today (January 13th), it is currently 14 degrees and raining steadily. You might also want to look around, as heavy rains have recently washed out massive parts of Costa Rica, Panama, Ohio, and California (re: the famously fatal landslide of a few weeks ago, which occurred after nearly 21 days of continuous rain).
Key to this understanding is the awareness of one’s place in the world. I mean by this the knowledge of how one’s life impacts the globe. I predict the 21st century to be one of absolute self-awareness, as we will increasingly find ourselves without the luxury of the 20th century gameplan of “seemingly unlimited resources causing a comfortable ignorance”. There are a few programs online which can calculate what is known as an “ecological footprint”, which details the amount of emissions leading to climate change that are produced by your lifestyle. The point is not for you to be weighed people down with the doomed news of the inevitable decline of the world. Instead, use this information to begin altering your life to suit the sustainability of the earth. It is not evilness which pollutes the earth, but rather lifestyles to which we have become accustomed and do not seek to challenge on a daily basis.
The public needs to made aware that environmentalism is not a punitive process, for the simple reason that we will all be punished together for our environmental crimes; we are all guilty. Environmentalists are well aware that humans by their very existence will make an impact on the earth. The point of the environmental project is to try to move such impacts from the “negative” column to the “positive” one. Take using public transport as an example. Owning a car today brings an annual cost of ownership of about $5000 to an individual, plus $20,000 on average for the car itself. Buying a yearly Go Transit pass (with HSR included) between Hamilton and Toronto costs $3216. Positives: less cash, less pollution, plus you can read while travelling, and sometimes you get to meet the cast of Train 48. If you work in the city you live, it’s even cheaper to travel (a yearly bus pass is $780 in my city, while bikes cost pennies a day to operate and give you another positive: exercise).
The most obvious positive that consumers can notice is a reduction in their energy bills. By installing energy efficient lightbulbs (low-volt halogen, fluorescent) in all your fixtures, can reduce lighting energy use by 70%. The US Department of Energy estimates that current lighting systems account for 25% of electrical demand, of which 5% represents the electricity required to cool or remove the waste heat generated by those old lights. There’s also a landfill issue here, as energy efficient lights tend to last 10-25 times as long as incandescent bulbs (thus making your $5 bulb even more of a wise purchase over its $1 grandfather). If Canada were serious about Kyoto, it could ban outright the manufacture and sale of old-style lightbulbs and subsidize the purchase of energy efficient ones so that we can get rid of all the shitty technologies that consumers have normalized.
There’s a big reason that many scientists are studying climate change, principally that we will be increasingly unable to cope with the change in ecosystems that we have ourselves fostered. Life is a rather fragile thing when viewed in terms of individual species. Just because the earth can survive without us, we should not begin to think that we can survive without it.
ucsusa.org – Union of Concerned Scientists
safeclimate.net/calculator/ – calculate your ecological footprint
changingtheclimate.org – play a new game, the Big Game SUV Hunt!
arctic.noaa.gov/detect/index.shtml – arctic change, according to the NOAA
go rant! go!!
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