Earthblog

Or,

WHY CYCLING, RE-CYCLING & COMPOSTING

ARE NO LONGER ENOUGH

(& the Same Goes for Being a Locavore)

Photo by David Niblack

But before I upset you even more, let me start with a personal story.  You might call it a near-death experience.

One summer day when I was a kid, sure-footed and agile, I decided to pick my way out to the end of a quarter-mile-long rock jetty on Long Island. I thought it would be cool to watch the ocean waves throw themselves around, as though I were standing in the middle of the Atlantic.   So I headed out, jump-stepping from one gigantic rock and concrete slab to another, stopping frequently to watch the foam below me explode over barnacles and crabs, then seethe between boulders cushioned in sea moss.  I knew enough to keep an eye on the wind, which was holding steady.

The universe, however, was not.  Though I couldn’t feel or see it, the Earth was spinning on its axis and waltzing with the moon in a graceful ellipse around the sun.  Grand-scale gravitational forces were on the move, hauling a tremendous watery bulge over the surface of the sea.

In other words, the tide was rising.

When I got to the end of the jetty and finally turned around, my stomach sank.  The ocean was suddenly gnawing at rocks that had been dry an hour or two before.  Then, midway between me and the beach, a huge gray wave smashed over the jetty.  It was the scariest moment of my life.

It was also proof that I was an idiot.

My stomach still sinks every time I think about that moment.

But these days, I’m scared for bigger reasons, too.  Like that perilous tide I did not notice rising, global climate change has snuck up on us with mostly-unseen yet tremendously powerful forces that may overwhelm us.  Melting glaciers and snow packs (and their drinking water), rising seas, and temperature changes in the short run threaten the quality of our lives, and in the long run threaten our lives themselves--not to mention the lives of animals and plants and trees: the Greater Than Human World.

To make matters worse, we’re coming to recognize these dangers unbelievably late in the game, especially in the U.S.  As the recent Copenhagen climate conference showed, we are also a long way off--as a world and a country--from figuring out what to do about this.  Unlike that twice-daily rising tide that threatened to wipe out skinny little me, climate change is not going to recede according to any significant natural cycle.  There’s not a damn thing natural about it.

I’m an English professor and a writer, so I’ll leave most of the science explaining to the scientists themselves, who overwhelmingly—repeat, overwhelmingly—agree that the planet is heating up because of human activity.  For clear and sound discussions of this science--and not political opinion, not bilious clouds of hot air from the TV and online chatterati--check out some of these links:

http://www.realclimate.org/

http://www.ipcc.ch/

http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/

Or take a look at Robert Henson’s The Rough Guide to Climate Change, the best, most easy-to-follow explanation I know of, although really just one of many fine recent books on the subject.

But bear with me for a few basics, anyway.   Greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide have increased so dramatically in our atmosphere in the two centuries we’ve been burning fossil fuels big time that Earth, i.e., the Only Home We Have, is warmer now than at any time since humans have walked the planet.  Despite what Fox News may say, 11 of the last 13 years have been the warmest on record.  In other words, we’re doing just a great job of keeping “the home fires burning.”

That’s a climate change joke.  Haha.

Never mind that, this year, our northern Colorado winter has sometimes been cold enough to crack your eyeballs and the East Coast has been smothered in snow.  This is weather, in all its daily, weekly, monthly and yearly roller-coaster variations.  The recent cold snap also comes from an extreme state of an ongoing phenomenon known as the Arctic Oscillation, a name that the poet in me loves.  For an explanation of this, see: http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=42260

Weather is far different from climate, which is the much longer series of trends that years of weather add up to.  Think of the difference this way: weather is the clothes you decide to wear for today; climate is the clothes you buy for next year.

So the Earth is undeniably heating up, and more in some places, like the higher latitudes of the planet, than in others.  Bye bye, polar ice packs.  See you around, Arapahoe Glacier that gives Boulder its drinking water.  Hasta luego, ski vacations and snorkeling over magical coral reefs, which are bleaching out thanks to climate change-caused acidification of the oceans.  http://www.ucar.edu/communications/Final_acidification.pdf

So long, a thousand Himalayan glaciers that feed rivers which two billion Asians depend on for drinking and irrigation.

It’s true that not all of this will occur in the next few years or maybe even during your lifetime.  But we’re on our way, and what kind of world do we want to leave for our children, our grandchildren?

Mount Kilimanjaro’s summit snowfield is going so fast that if Hemingway wrote today, he might have to call his story “The Pebbles of Kilimanjaro.”

That’s another climate change joke.  Haha.

And don’t give me that sci-fi stuff about how someday we’ll all rocket away from this vale of heating-up tears to start over on Mars or the moon.  Think for a moment about padding around in a giant terrarium with a 24/7 view of lunar dust the color of crushed human bones.  You call that a life?

A heating-up world, though, isn’t even the scary part of the fix we’re in.   The scary part is that we’ve just begun to cook.  Right now, there’s about 35% more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than there was before the Industrial Revolution.  If we keep pumping the stuff into the air at our present rate of increase, by the end of this century, there’ll be triple the amount of CO2 than before!

At bottom is a very simple equation, despite the mind-boggling math and complications of measuring and predicting local and global climate.  Colorado State University climate scientist Scott Denning puts it this way, “We can argue about how much the climate will change, and when it will change, but the idea that putting extra CO2 into the air will warm the surface of the earth is pretty much a no-brainer.  You add energy to something, it changes its temperature.”

I have yet to meet a scientist who’s happy about global warming.

I sure don’t want these facts to be true.  I want to deny them every bit as badly as do well-meaning people who can’t believe that puny humans have altered God’s Creation, even though there are now nearly seven billion of us on Earth, compared to 1800, when there were one billion.  And even though every five days sees a net world population increase of a million hungry mouths.  And even though China alone opens a new coal-fired energy plant about once a week.  And even though our atmosphere is a lot smaller and thinner than you might think, wrapping the Earth no more thickly than a shell wraps an egg.

I want to deny climate change as badly as do the professional climate skeptics whose well-paid jobs are to sow doubt about science itself and confuse the media and the rest of us about the ways that science works, which they have done exceptionally well, especially in the U.S.  In their forthcoming book, Merchants of Doubt, historians of science Naomi Oreskes and Eric M. Conway describe how some of the very same industry-linked “experts” and science advisors who now claim that climate change science is “not settled” have also denied the truth of studies linking smoking to lung cancer, coal smoke to acid rain, and CFCs to the ozone hole.

Others complicit in this knowing obfuscation include, of course, Rush (to Judgment) Limbaugh and the Radio Rage crowd with their cherry-picked kooks and hack scientists.   Then there are the George Wills of the world who’ve gone bonkers with “the facts” because they’re terrified that we might have to second-guess capitalism and the free market, never mind actually change it.  They’re probably right to be scared, because thinking hard about something as enormous as climate change really does open the door onto a brave new world of rebuilding our economic and political systems.

Bye bye, Big Oil, Big Coal, and old ways of doing business?

Then there are the increasingly voluble anti-intellectuals of any political stripe who are not just willing but proud to dismiss or denigrate en masse college professors, scientists, or any whiff of genuine learning, as though in some foggy blogosphere of the mind, all opinions carry equal weight, whether they’re backed up by evidence or not.

All opinions do not carry equal weight.  Just look at how the absurd idea of Death Panels shouldered its way into the health care discussion.

When more than 3,000 IPCC scientists from around the world have unanimously agreed that there’s a 90% certainty that humans have caused the Earth to warm, why newspaper editors continue to run one pro and one con opinion side by side is beyond me.  That’s a classic case of false bifurcation.

Maybe these editors have been worn down by years of Creationists arguing that they wish only to present “the other side of the evolution debate,” as though there are really two remotely equal sides, as though there is an actual “debate” among the thousands and thousands of scientists who, because of overwhelming evidence, haven’t the slightest doubt about the truth of evolution.  These scientists include, by the way, a growing number of evangelical Christians, such as Francis Collins, the Director of the Human Genome Project, who finds the notions of God and evolution perfectly compatible.

A January 2010 Stanford University-Roper national poll shows that only 30% of Americans clearly believe that human activities are responsible for most of our warming, a lower percentage of the populace, by far, than that of any other industrialized nation.

I’d like to think this is another climate change joke, haha.  But it’s not, because it means that zillions of us are out to lunch, deep in denial, or being hoodwinked by a toxic amalgam of what I’ve described above.  We seem to have turned into a nation of idiots—a vigorous and growing American Dumbocracy.   And meanwhile, as we dither, the greenhouse gas molecules piling up over our heads could care less.

Sure, some less vicious forces also disrupt or complicate the climate discussion.  For instance, climate change doesn’t easily reveal itself to the naked eye; and if you live in mile-high Colorado, and you’re crushed by student loans and losing sleep over next month’s rent, you may not worry much about rice farmers in Bangladesh fighting the Indian Ocean ten or fifteen years from now.  (Though you should worry anyway---there are now more environmental refugees world-wide than war and political refugees combined.  Where are they going to go?)

There are also the complications of evolving science itself, which include honest differences of opinion and nuance, the real and sometimes messy discussion of complicated ongoing science, which is NOT the same as the science being “not settled”.  Then there’s the unfortunate inability and, too often, the unwillingness of many working scientists and scholars to engage with the deniers and the doubt merchants, or to take the time to explain things to those of us who are genuinely ignorant or confused.

All the while, the tide is rising, and we’ve been stuck at the end of an awfully long jetty, looking back at shore and wondering what to do.

I might ask you to excuse me for this long rant, except that it’s true, damn it, it’s true.  And that’s shameful.

But . . . the situation is not hopeless.

Despite the terrible state of our national discourse, there’s been forward movement, anyway.  We’ve finally gotten ourselves an un-oil-addled President who gets climate change and who’s put great, knowledgeable people onto the problem, even if he and they haven’t pushed ahead nearly as hard as I wish they would.  Some business leaders and state governments are racing way ahead of Congress.   Solar power systems and low-energy-use cars seem finally, finally to be nudging us into the techno future I heard was just around the corner when I was in junior high school.  Unfortunately, I was in junior high school more than forty years ago.

CSU in particular and the Colorado Front Range in general have become centers of new, exciting climate change thinking and technological innovation.  All of these initiatives speak also to learning how to live a more sustainable life on our beleaguered planet.

So why do I say that cycling, recycling, and composting are no longer enough?  Why am I picking on the good, green habits of so many of us who think hard and mindfully, who mean well and in fact DO well in trying to live more sustainable lives and reduce our carbon footprints?  I recycle and ride my bike, too, sometimes eighteen miles round-trip.

I think it’s because I keep going back to the moment when I found myself in trouble at the end of that jetty.

Once I got over the shock of my plight and noticed tiny figures on the beach waving their arms at me, I hauled my skinny little butt out of there.  Scanning madly for killer waves, soaked from flying sea spume, I leapt from boulder to concrete slab to boulder until, with a great final jump, I landed on terra firma.  Only then did I realize how incredibly lucky I’d been.

At this late point in the game, can we really trust luck to save us from climate change?  Or, do we dedicate ourselves to do more than we do now, to go beyond forging ecologically splendid lives in isolation?   Given the not-so-slow-motion pace of climate change, we need to act soon, at scales far larger than those we live by with our good, green daily habits.  Remember: barefoot Gandhi spun his rickety little loom for peace of mind and to underscore his common man status, but he also led mass protests that transformed the world.

What to do, then?  Here’s a starter list.

One, vote.  Vote even if you hate the present state of local or national politics.  A vote held back is the same as a vote for the wrong candidate or initiative.  Don’t like any of the candidates locally?  Urge someone better to run.  Or run yourself.  Write or call those already in office.  But don’t sit on your hands waiting for The Revolution to come.  Greenhouse gas molecules aren’t waiting for The Revolution to come.

Two, act larger than yourself.  Meaning: do much more of whatever you’re already good at, or can be good at.  If organic gardening’s your thing, grow your garden into community size or help someone else do it.  Devise a recycling plan that works better for your neighborhood than what it has now.  Whatever you do, though, get out of your own backyard.

Three, fight climate change idiocracy.   Respond to letter writers and columnists who base their arguments on flimsy or non-existent evidence, or who show contempt for true learning and scholarship, the real workings of science.  Toxic voices that go unanswered spread toxins through the body politic.  Respond to friends and acquaintances on this, too, family members, classmates.  Urge scientist-friends or other experts to join the public discussion, not sneer at it and remain silent.

At the same time, you don’t have to be a climate scientist to demand that private or public discourse requires civility, reason, and proof, proof, proof to back up arguments.  Remember: the more outrageous the claim, the more proof somebody needs to back it up.  So climate change is “a hoax”?  Bring on the evidence, Bro.

Four, learn more about the science of climate change.  We’re all going to have to, anyway, whether you like it or not.  Plus, you’re smarter than you think, and more and better explanations of the basics are becoming available by the minute.

Inside of big problems lie big opportunities.

As we figure out how to slow or mitigate global warming, we can refashion how we live in this beautiful world of ours.  But first we have to do something.

So, in your case, what will it be?

JOHN CALDERAZZO is a multiple-award-winning teacher of creative nonfiction writing at Colorado State University and has published essays, fiction, and poetry in Audubon, Georgia Review, North American Review, Orion, and dozens of other journals and anthologies.  His books include Writing from Scratch: Freelancing, 101 Questions about Volcanoes (for children), and Rising Fire: Volcanoes and Our Inner Lives.  He recently finished a book of poems, At the Night Window.   With his wife and CSU English Department colleague SueEllen Campbell, he directs Changing Climates at CSU, a national education and outreach program which looks at climate change from multidisciplinary perspectives and helps scientists and scholars communicate with the public and policy makers.  Check out:  http://changingclimates.colostate.edu