ABlog

Here I sit, sweltering in yet another mid-September day on which temperatures were supposed to reach ninety degrees and probably did. We’re in a terrible drought, the trees and bushes in Prospect Park more exhausted-looking than I’ve ever seen them. Tomorrow is predicted to be slightly cooler—only in the upper eighties—and there’s some chance of afternoon showers, “That dreaded word—showers,” as the radio announcer just put it. New Yorkers couldn’t care less if it doesn’t rain for years on end. Let the desertification begin!—just so long as their stroll from the subway to the stoop isn’t disrupted by water falling on their hair-do’s. Hurricane Ophelia is heading for land. And I just read some information garnered off the Internet: the UK’s Mail on Sunday published an article dated Sept. 11, 2005, under the title “New Orleans Doctors: We Had to Kill Our Patients.” The article details the claims of a doctor whose name and location were kept confidential to protect from being scapegoated; she said that medical personnel had given high doses of morphine to terminally ill patients who they deemed unable to survive in the appalling conditions—lack of basic services, security, and rescue—that were allowed to develop in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Earlier today, I learned from an article in the New York Times Science Section (“March of the Conservatives: Penguin Film as Political Fodder” by Jonathan Miller, Sept. 13, 2005, p. F2) that the documentary film “March of the Penguins” has become a huge hit among right-wing politicos and evangelicals. The film focuses on the fraught reproductive rituals of emperor penguins, who trek across 70 miles of ice to reach their breeding grounds and protect their eggs from temperatures averaging -70 degrees Fahrenheit. Apparently some reactionary viewers discern in this instinctual behavior a positive message about monogamy and responsible parenthood, while others perceive a refutation of the theory of evolution. (How, absent Intelligent Design, could such an elaborate method of producing young come about?) While the film does briefly allude to the “millions of years” for which the penguins have engaged in this behavior, it mercifully neglects any further mention of a Darwinian framework. Any reference to the global warming that may soon disrupt the penguins’ march along with many other biological phenomena of impressive duration is also missing from the sound track.

The makers of the film, who say they are firm believers in evolution, claim they simply wanted to make a picture that would reach the largest possible audience. The Times cites Luc Jaquet, the film’s director, as commenting to National Geographic Online that “It’s obvious that global warming has an impact on the reproduction of the penguins. But much of public opinion appears insensitive to the dangers of global warming. We have to find other ways to communicate to people about it, not just lecture them.”

You can’t just lecture them—fair enough. But how, then, do you communicate? How does “informing” the public about a “nature” that it is allowed to perceive as abstracted from devastating historical processes encourage engagement with the effort to mitigate those processes? And, for that matter, why would including information about the impact of global warming on penguin reproduction necessarily constitute “lecturing” the viewers?

I want to get under the surface of this notion of the public’s indifference to the exigent reality of galloping climate change. I want to know how we actually know that “the public” is indifferent to the issue. What if a big chunk of that “indifference” is really cynical pessimism about the possibility of doing anything about the problem, given the apparent commitment of the powerful to maintaining the economic status quo no matter how horrible the environmental (not to mention human) consequences? Our democracy is so eroded that I don’t think it makes a lot of sense to take people’s failure to protest as proof of contentment with existing conditions.

At the same time, though, I speculate that a significant portion of the “resistance” runs deeper than either simple laziness or complicated despair about possibilities for social change. I think really acknowledging the depth of the problem is enormously threatening in a way that goes beyond the immediate issue—a threat I would compare, though the parallel is far from exact, to the resistance exhibited by so many whites to admitting how completely our social order is structured by racist inequality. Global warming is not just a practical problem to be solved but an urgent symptom of our need to radically reorder how we conceive of our relationships to each other and to all biological systems. Really facing up to global warming means abjuring our American religion of consumption. It means becoming what Rudy Giuliani once contemptuously called “anti-car”—obviously a huge no-no to all red-blooded patriots. (It’s been pointed out to me that the news coverage of the criminal failure to devise an effective evacuation plan for New Orleans uniformly assumes that not having a car could only be a function of poverty; there’s no thought that anybody might have been carless by choice.) It means recognizing that our corner of the world has been gobbling up inconceivably more than its fair share of resources. It means an end to our ability to take comfort in an “eternal” nature that is reliably impervious to human politics—even as, paradoxically, it also means re-confronting the ways in which nature is the ultimate “reality-based” experience, the ultimate rebuke to humans’ wishful thinking. It means acknowledging that capitalism has been a spectacular disaster, one we may not survive if we don’t get rid of it fast.

I think that many people who ostensibly form part of that “[U.S.] public opinion insensitive to the dangers of global warming” know in part of their minds that the game’s up, that we’re in big trouble. But for so long now—at least since the Reagan years—our political culture has encouraged a rampant cognitive disconnect, a practice of feeding on emotionally satisfying images that are transparently at odds with facts. For the better-off portion of the citizenry, any truly harsh consequences of this self-indulgence have been deferred in such a way that it’s easy enough not quite to believe in the inevitability of that which is in fact—plainly, provably--inevitable.

What a dazzlingly horrible privilege to live in a time like this, when the biological inheritance of millions of years is on the verge of being irrevocably squandered. Once imaginations awaken to the implications of such a development in the history of our planet, business as usual will seem pretty pointless.

Who better than the poets, artists, storytellers to foster that awakening?