The issue of climate change to me is of truly great
importance. I feel as if this issue is, if not on the top, near the top of what
will come to define how we advance in the next century. Our society, our
civilization is at a crossroads of what will be either a global dark age or the
creation of a neo-enlightenment period, and it hinges on the state of our
climate. Well the real factor that will determine our course is how we
have/will deal with this global flux. I am hesitant to compare our culture to
the Roman Empire in this regard, but the
analogy acutely is effective in the American consciousness.
What stands
before us is the question of change now or change later. Soon enough there will
be a threshold when those two become one and then it will turn into change now
or perish. In the case of the roman empire, and I am by no means a historian,
but conceivably it happened like so: change now a little, change now a little
less, change now only a little, and then perish. Perish into a dark age of
feudal systems and mindless warfare. Humanity continues in this story, of
course to refit itself with a society that can change up faster and better to
perpetuate itself, and we see this in the early stages of what became the Roman Empire . Soon enough along this path the change that
was once faster and better is complacent in comfort, and comfort overrides hard
fixes. This is where we are now. This is what we need to learn from. I am very
much supporting that history repeats itself, but only it’s worse every time.
This time it isn't only external barbarians and internal moral decay, but
external environmental decay (with relations to the biosphere) and internal hubris
in our ability to solve our issues.
This hubris
is that somehow, technologically we can ‘solve’ global climate change. The joke
is that technology is one of the prime sources of the issue. I present this metaphor:
You are in a lifeboat, and there is a small hole in the bottom of the boat
filling the boat with water. In order to keep the boat afloat, you devise a
plan to remove a section of the hull from another part of the boat to fix the initial
hole. The only problem is that the wood used to fix the hole created another
hole in the bottom of the lifeboat. Now the hole that had a makeshift fix is
still leaking water, at a slower rate albeit, but the solution to the problem
left a hole in the boat, undermining the initial fix. In this metaphor, it
would be far more intelligent to take wood from maybe the side of the boat to
fix the hole, not the bottom. The analogous answer for climate change isn't as
easy a fix. Neither is committing to change for an unforeseen future easy, nor
accepting that the comfort we have comes at an ultimate price for our (and
every other) species on the planet. Difficulty isn't the problem; it is complacency
that will drive us towards darkness, both on our electric grid and in the advancement
of our species.
