Oct 15 2009
Blog Action Day — Climate Change
I blog about this all the time anyway, so throwing in a particular post on a particular day is no biggie. I’ve blogged about eustasy, about storms, about the whole works. But today, I want to actually just talk to you about Climate Change.
The world is changing.
It’s possible we’ll be able to slow it down, and keep the planet liveable for our species, and the ones we depend on for life. But considering how completely non-starting the planet’s politicians are, unless each and every one of us suddenly change all of our habits drastically, we’re in for a really rough future.
And here’s the kicker. The planet doesn’t care. Mass extinctions have happened before, and they’ll happen again. Entire epochs have come and gone and the planet keeps spinning.
Worrying about the collapse of the financial world is small potatoes, and in my more cynical moments, I think they’re doing it to distract us from the real threat, which is climate change. Right now we’re a species that complains if the temperature varies more than a few degrees from our idea, and wastes billions of kilojoules to adjust our buildings temperatures one way or the other. We have air conditioning in our cars, fercryingoutloud. How the heck are the majority of us going to make it if the entire planet changes temperature?
We aren’t.
Many people and many groups are making gestures and making noise, but very very few people are actually getting quite the right tone of panic about what’s going on. And yet week after week, new research is published that says “we have far less time than we thought” or “we were wrong; it’ll be far worse than we said last time.”
This is the point where most folks tip over into survivalist thinking. And I am too. But here’s the deal; you can’t stockpile against something like this. You can’t hope to put aside water in barrels and MREs in cases and weather this crisis. The planet is changing. We have to focus on what really matters right now. Figure out how to grow your own food, and then keep an eye on how that process changes. Figure out how to find your own water and make it palatable. Do it now. Figure out how to do everything you need to do to survive without any kind of power and any kind of outside input. And then teach everyone around you how to do it too.
This is so far beyond installing new lightbulbs or buying a Prius or buying “green” products. This is radically rethinking the concept of “need”, and making determined progress in that direction.
There isn’t much time. Do it now.
Related posts:
indeed!
It really makes you consider how independent and compartmentalized we’ve all become. The radical nature of this type of change means you just might have to invest some time in getting to know your neighbor and looking out for the community. You may have something I need and I likely have something YOU need (whether it be a thing, knowledge, or service). That’s so far from what most have ever known. I SO hope this won’t just turn into a brutal survival of the fittest event.
Yes, it’s not longer “save the planet” as we so often hear. The planet will survive, it’s the people and most life forms that we have to focus on.
~2Shaye