It's the second week of October. When I was a kid it would sometimes snow and always be cold by now. I'm typing this on my laptop sitting outdoors in the warm sun with no sweater or jacket on the downtown mall, a pedestrian street in Charlottesville, Va. Flowers are blooming, and butterflies and hummingbirds are hanging out, several states out of their old territory. We haven't had the heat or the air conditioning on in our house for months. The weather is perfect and we're saving money. Global warming is making it easy for us to take steps to reverse global warming. So why does the perfect summer breeze on the back of my neck scare the hell out of me?
Because I'm not a fundamentalist hoping for the end of the world, a raving lunatic unclear on the concept of science, or a certified moron who claims to read every newspaper in the country but reads and knows essentially nothing. In other words, I'm not Sarah Palin. The entire damn planet is in danger, ecosystems are collapsing, the mild warming is getting dangerously close to entering a vicious cycle that nobody will be able to reverse, species are vanishing at an ever faster pace, and the town I live in, no matter how pleasant it may be at the moment, is not an island. If it were, it would be in danger of going under, as real islands are.
So, it comes to this: Are we a nation of complete and utter imbeciles?
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