Climate Crisis — Who’s Driving This Bus?
In the years and decades to come, there will be nice days. Not as many as we have now, but there will still be nice days. In the years and decades ahead, there will be food. Not as much, but there will still be some food. For many of us, that is comfort enough.
Consensus Is No Leader
We — the human race — are facing our existential moment, and yet it seems that we don’t know it. What a thing to ponder. The cliff we are charging toward is not going to disappear. There are signs along the road warning us there is no bridge and that the road will end, but we are content to be in the crowded bus — taking comfort in the multitude of oblivious others — and we are confident that whoever is driving is reading the signs. What we don’t realize is that this bus is being driven by consensus. We think someone smarter will apply the brakes in time. We believe that tomorrow, like all our yesterdays, will be just fine. We assume the cliff will be attacked in the nick of time by a fleet of huge bulldozers, leveled out, and even paved for us. But, this won’t happen. Not this time.
We are a crowd of robber barons, pillagers, and ravaging locusts, plundering our homeland with little regard for tomorrow. And like children who count on mom and dad to pay for things, bring us what we want, wipe our noses, and protect us from our own ignorance, we are going to end up stupefied when we realize, as we plummet off this cliff, that there are not even any safety nets to catch us. How can this be? Didn’t Mom Earth put up some safety nets for us? It is then, in our moment of “Oh, no,” that we will all know our mistake. We will realize we are the parents and that Mother Earth is our child, not the other way around.
As parents of Mother Earth we are each charged with its care, providing to its needs, helping it, and protecting it. We are responsible for spending our time and money on it, to make it better off so it can have a good, long life. We know what good parenting looks like, and we know how we feel about parents who tragically neglect their children. And, yet, even knowing this isn’t enough to awaken us to the tragedy ahead. We act like entitled children, taking and taking from her whatever we can contrive, wrangle, or steal. We pollute the air, bury our trash, litter the oceans, burn our carbon, and ignore the accumulating cry of evidence.
7 Billion Children, Oh No
Thought: Put only children in charge of a boat and it will soon sink. Put caring adults in charge and the boat will last a long, long, time.
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Most of us aren’t even behaving like adolescents on the edge of adulthood — teenagers who realize the weight of responsibility is tiptoeing around the corner and will soon demand we become good stewards. Ignoring the cliff’s edge ahead is the same as maxing out debt with no means of paying it back. We know we will one day face a comeuppance as the responsibility we own advances its onus. Most of the powerful who rule this world act like toddlers who want what they want; myopic and greedy bullies who will fight, claw, lie, blame, and throw a fit to have it — and still want more of it — no matter the cost to Mother.
As parents of human children we are responsible for providing a safe home, food, lessons and skills, and a sense of responsibility. But, that’s not what we are doing. Not really. Instead, we are destroying their future home, reducing their future food, teaching them to follow our lead and destroy the only boat we have. We even coddle them and condone their irresponsibility, guaranteeing they will be as blind as we have been. And even worse than that, when they learn lessons about the ecological cliff — the ecological catastrophe we are racing toward — and dare to speak up about applying the brakes, we scoff at them, dismiss them, and refute their science, not as a matter of knowledge but as a matter of fear. We who should know better are afraid of being exposed as errant fools. We shout them down to protect our hurt pride, and instead of doing right by them we demonstrate our shamefulness — refusing to admit we screwed up and should have done better. Yeah, aren’t we something?
Consensus, even an errant consensus, is a powerful beast. Once it gets the herd moving it becomes more of a stampede with no one daring to question aloud if we are headed in the best possible direction, or even a good direction. We see this phenomenon acted out in lost civilizations where despicable leaders were hailed and enabled, tolerated, and then supported instead of being dethroned. We see it in boardrooms where junior executives who know how to save the company are shunned. We see it in journalism where infotainment replaces hard truths just because advertisers only sign checks for popularity ratings, and viewers (we the people) prefer to be comforted instead of empowered. Consensus is a good and powerful thing when it is grown from seeds of goodness, forethought, courage, and inclusion. But our toddler leaders who rant their way onto the dais only want to draw us into their myopia. It is up to us, as adults, as parents of our planet, to sort through the options and find better paths; paths that don’t take us toward deadly cliffs.
Who Will Save Us?
When our child is in the street and no cars are coming, we may be satisfied calling to them from the porch, coaxing them back to safety from the comfort of our seat. But, when a car appears, we abandon futile words. We dash to them and whisk them out of harm’s way. Why? Because we care and tragedy must be prevented.
Decades from now, the Earth will be a very different place. The decimation of our numbers will decrease our carbon output. Plants will have a chance to breathe in more and more CO2 without being harvested, burned, or deforested. The oceans may never wash themselves clean of the plastics, but much of the trash will find its way to shore. And, Mother Earth herself, wounded, weak, and suffocating will evolve and create a new reality we can’t even imagine. One thing is certain, though, there will be fewer of us.
Yes, there will still be a few nice days each year when it will be safe to go outside, and there will be food to eat as flora and fauna meagerly adapt, but there will be much less of these things than we have now. My, what terrible, inadequate parents we will see ourselves as then — like the parent who is still seated on the porch while their child lies dead in the road.
Unless… unless we speak up from the back of the bus and get somebody to stomp on the brakes, we are going to fly off that cliff and finally feel the gravity of the situation.
