Global warming is not just
another issue in a long line of environmental problems that have
received attention starting with Earth Day 1970. With honor and
respect to all the great environmental victories, and to the people
who fought for them, we feel that global warming will take a
revolution in the way we see ourselves.
Adequately
confronting global warming will require as much change from us as
was required during the transition to the industrial revolution. We
must, in effect, learn to live in a whole new world.
While there is still much uncertainty about how global warming will
impact the earth, we know enough now to start the journey to
sustainability. Evidence of global warming is sufficient to hold
policymakers guilty of public-policy malpractice if they fail to
act immediately and vigorously. History’s judgment will be
harsh on those who ignore such clear warning signs.
Our
oceans are warming, our ice caps and glaciers are melting, our
soils are eroding, our rainforests are shrinking, our ocean coral
is dying, our fisheries are being depleted, and more and more
species are disappearing. We are told by the National Academy of
Sciences, the Royal Society and by most of the living Nobel Prize
winners that global warming is a reality that we must take
seriously. Even the Pentagon, hardly a historic voice for the
environment, has issued a report, “An Abrupt Climate Change
Scenario and Its Implications for U.S. National Security,” laying
out a series of possible nation-threatening scenarios for global
warming.
How can anyone read these reports and return to
business as usual? Perhaps because the implications to our everyday
lives are so immense that we’d rather not comprehend them.
One reason the attack on 9/ll succeeded was that the possibility of
crashing planes into skyscrapers was almost beyond imagination.
Likewise with global warming: Trying to imagine a world
without growing petroleum use, or traditional ways of growing the
economy, or where human population must shrink rather than grow
comes close to the unimaginable. Historian Barbara Tuchman observed
how hard it is for those in charge to react to new realities: “When
information is relayed to policymakers, they respond in terms of
what is already inside their heads and consequently make policy
less to fit the facts than to fit the baggage that has accumulated
since childhood.”
It is also immensely difficult to see
our individual place within the ecological whole. The most cited
article in the history of Science magazine helps
us understand why. Garrett Hardin’s “The Tragedy in the
Commons” concluded that when natural resources are held in common,
free and available to all for the taking, people steadily increase
their exploitation of the common resources until they are
exhausted. Every participant in the tragedy pleads “not guilty.”
But the entire system moves toward disaster.
The poet W.
H. Auden wrote, “All life is the question of whether or not to have
children, after you’ve already had them.” It is hard for us
to see how our automobiles, our airplane travel or our third or
fourth child will affect the environment when they bring us so much
pleasure, but the impact is shared worldwide.
We do not
recognize the lifetimes it takes to correct environmental damage or
to reverse the damage already done. So it is a surprise to realize
that the exhaust from President Kennedy’s automobile on the
day he was assassinated still hasn’t fully played out its
environmental impact. It takes perhaps 60 or 70 years for
today’s pollution to reach full impact as greenhouse gases.
Like a car braking down, it will take us a significant and perhaps
fatal amount of time to brake down our industrial society. It will
require foresight not historically present in humankind.
What we treat as just another environmental issue is more
accurately a clash of civilizations. It is the shift from
identifying individual polluters to be stopped to the issue of all
of our lifestyles. We can only observe how nearsighted it is that
so many people today focus on cultural and religious differences
between the West and Islam, when human civilization itself stands
on the brink of collapse.
Is it naive to hope that
— like the appearance of an earthbound asteroid or the
invasion of extraterrestrial aliens in all those countless, trite
science fiction films — global warming may be the common
cause that finally unites the human enterprise? Whatever it takes,
we must begin to focus on the one environmental issue that
threatens us all.
Richard Lamm and Buie Seawell
are contributors to Writers on the Range, a service of
High Country News (hcn.org). Both are professors
at the University of Denver, Lamm in public policy, and Seawell in
business.
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