Today is Earth Day, so what should we do? Back in the 1970s, when Earth Day began, the answer was fairly simple: plant a tree, raise consciousness, promote cleaner air and water. It was a ritual of purification and celebration, a day for us to show how concerned we were about the deterioration of our environment, and our (perhaps naïve) determination to put things right.
Now it’s more daunting. Global warming is a mega problem. A few hybrids and windmills won’t solve it, let alone devious evasions like carbon credits. We need to change completely how we live – no more long distance flying, no more pointless short car trips, no more thermostats set to our perfect comfort zone 365 days a year. The penalty for failing to change these habits, so we’re told, will be a new and more comprehensive version of Noah’s flood, with Long Island one of the first places to go under.
This is definitely something worth worrying about. But are we really going to change how we live? I could give up my car, become a vegetarian, and live in a tent but I won’t. I could reduce my carbon footprint, but that’s harder than reducing my waistline. The habits of a lifetime don’t change so easily. Every morning I get stuck in a line of SUVs waiting to deliver children to the local kindergarten – tiny kids carried in enormous vehicles. Where’s the sense in that?
Climate change must take its place in the hierarchy of human problems and, given a choice of problems, we will always prefer one which causes the least personal inconvenience. So why worry about global warming when the cosmos itself is such a dangerous place? Here we are, zipping through infinite space on a ball of dirt so small that even the most intelligent aliens have never noticed it. Every day astronomers report exploding stars, and the annihilation of whole galaxies in unimaginable collisions. Killer comets and asteroids are coming at us like paint balls from all directions, at about 26,000 miles an hour. We are threatened by giant cosmic clouds of poison dust, and super-magnetic neutron stars, and one speculation by scientists is that a rogue “bubble universe” made of phantom energy could appear out of nowhere and gobble up the earth quicker than Washington gobbles up our tax dollars.
All this is rather disturbing, but at least it puts the anxiety about global warming in proper perspective, somewhere between cholesterol and the 2020 election. There’s nothing to be done about vast cosmic threats like exploding galaxies, so we can worry about them, as it were, free of charge. There’s no need to make any change in the way we live.
Climate change is not science fiction. It seems to demand dramatic action – but what? Remember the slogan coined by Friends of the Earth: “Think globally, act locally”? It’s not exactly a rousing slogan, but it’s probably all that most of us individually can do on Earth Day: plant a tree, or maybe some rice, use a recyclable shopping bag, get a manual lawn mower, cultivate our gardens, buy some wellington boots – just do what we can.
Copyright: David Bouchier
