"None of us think we live in the past. But we do. Just not yet". There is usually a gem in your pieces, this one caught my eye. I got to thinking about your comments on Greta and the sense of her living more in the future, "smelling the ash". I get 2 Substack newsletters, yours and Heather Cox Richardson's. I've been reading the latter for quite a while now and found that it has helped me make sense of what is happening today by providing a really insightful historical perspective. This approach really speaks to me and has helped keep me on an even keel over the last couple of years. A historical frame of mind may not be all that helpful when it comes to climate change though. Unless we're thinking in terms of tens of thousands of years, which we don't, we usually look back a few generations. We search for comparable challenges like fighting the Nazis, confronting the Great Depression, facing the cold war, or ending slavery. We were successful in meeting those challenges and that leads to a confidence that eventually we will figure it all out and prevail...just in time. There is no comparable challenge for climate change. The scale of the event is just too great to fit into our heads. Greta is cast by her detractors as childlike, uninformed, manipulated and impatient because she doesn't buy into this same framework that most of us use. Like the father in McCormac's book, I think she sees it all as quaint.
Thanks, Tom. I'm sure you're right. There's certainly a history of the efforts (and lack thereof) to raise awareness and to make systemic change as the climate and life-on-Earth crises have unfolded, but that's not the history you mean. For the global scale you could look at WW2 or vaccination campaigns (ah, the good old days...) or the green revolution in agricultural production, but of course they pale in comparison. I like to insist that the warming climate is only one, if the largest, factor in our comprehensive distortion of the physical/biological/chemical features of a planet that has been remarkably hospitable for our species up to now. But the natural sciences make up such a small piece of our worldview (and thus our education) that as a civilization we're scarcely looking at the full problem which is, as you say, too big to fit into our heads anyway.
I wish as a writer (and fellow traveler) that like HCR I could say, Here's what we did before when this happened, but I can't. We've accomplished things in the last century or two which amount to bites out of the Anthropocene apple - like the Montreal Protocol re: atmospheric ozone, or the Antarctic Treaty signed at the height of the Cold War, or the moral work of abolishing the slave trade - but the barriers to success here, which range from population to mega-corporate disinformation to poor science education and more, make success astonishingly difficult. Success is possible, but it will be in new ways and at a new scale.
"None of us think we live in the past. But we do. Just not yet". There is usually a gem in your pieces, this one caught my eye. I got to thinking about your comments on Greta and the sense of her living more in the future, "smelling the ash". I get 2 Substack newsletters, yours and Heather Cox Richardson's. I've been reading the latter for quite a while now and found that it has helped me make sense of what is happening today by providing a really insightful historical perspective. This approach really speaks to me and has helped keep me on an even keel over the last couple of years. A historical frame of mind may not be all that helpful when it comes to climate change though. Unless we're thinking in terms of tens of thousands of years, which we don't, we usually look back a few generations. We search for comparable challenges like fighting the Nazis, confronting the Great Depression, facing the cold war, or ending slavery. We were successful in meeting those challenges and that leads to a confidence that eventually we will figure it all out and prevail...just in time. There is no comparable challenge for climate change. The scale of the event is just too great to fit into our heads. Greta is cast by her detractors as childlike, uninformed, manipulated and impatient because she doesn't buy into this same framework that most of us use. Like the father in McCormac's book, I think she sees it all as quaint.
Thanks, Tom. I'm sure you're right. There's certainly a history of the efforts (and lack thereof) to raise awareness and to make systemic change as the climate and life-on-Earth crises have unfolded, but that's not the history you mean. For the global scale you could look at WW2 or vaccination campaigns (ah, the good old days...) or the green revolution in agricultural production, but of course they pale in comparison. I like to insist that the warming climate is only one, if the largest, factor in our comprehensive distortion of the physical/biological/chemical features of a planet that has been remarkably hospitable for our species up to now. But the natural sciences make up such a small piece of our worldview (and thus our education) that as a civilization we're scarcely looking at the full problem which is, as you say, too big to fit into our heads anyway.
I wish as a writer (and fellow traveler) that like HCR I could say, Here's what we did before when this happened, but I can't. We've accomplished things in the last century or two which amount to bites out of the Anthropocene apple - like the Montreal Protocol re: atmospheric ozone, or the Antarctic Treaty signed at the height of the Cold War, or the moral work of abolishing the slave trade - but the barriers to success here, which range from population to mega-corporate disinformation to poor science education and more, make success astonishingly difficult. Success is possible, but it will be in new ways and at a new scale.