Climate change

Ever since I can remember, I have always been aware of something called the “Doomsday Clock,” a symbolized calculation produced by a panel of prominent scientists of just how close humanity is to destroying itself. Published on the cover of every issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a journal founded in 1945 by Manhattan Project physicists, the clock’s hands would move toward or away from the dreaded midnight hour depending on how near Armageddon was believed to be. As a kid, the Doomsday Clock seemed an appropriate warning of how the conflict between the US and the Soviet Union might accidentally spin out of control.

Stanford professor Paul Ehrlich's recent appearance on CBS’s 60 Minutes reminds us what can happen when those with impressive academic credentials begin making end-of-the-world predictions. It was 1968 when Ehrlich published The Population Bomb, a book that declared with absolute certainty that “the battle to feed all of humanity is over.” Because so many people were living so close together and consuming so much of the world’s limited resources, the inevitable future was one of “mass starvation” on “a dying planet.” A year after the book’s publication, Ehrlich went on to say that this “utter breakdown” in Earth’s capacity to support its bulging population was just fifteen years away.

What does throwing soup on a piece of art have to do with the environment? When we hear the word environmentalist, what comes to mind is something like an Extinction Rebellion or JustStopOil activist: young, urban, progressive, with an expressly political agenda. But what if there are other categories of environmentalists that are expressly ignored, that may have the insights we need to solve the very real environmental problems we face? In my PhD research, I spoke with people who produced a significant amount of food for their own consumption in and around Chicago. Many of them were were disaffected by the focus on climate change and the obsession with consumption as activism.

Never did I think the day would come when I would be writing about West Virginia coal miners and Lululemon’s “Hotty Hot pants” in the same article. What truly strange times we live in. Last week, I traveled down to wild and wonderful West Virginia for the Bluefield Coal & Mining Show, “A Show for Mining: Past, Present, and Future.” It was a cloudless day in early fall, with crisp air, manly Southern gentlemen with the most charming drawls, huge, impressive, American-made machinery, and free beer everywhere. “Almost heaven” indeed!

Hailed as America’s first comprehensive climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act was signed by President Biden earlier this summer. It had been thirty years and sixty-five days since President George H.W. Bush signed the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Rio de Janeiro. The UNFCCC’s objective was to stabilize concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere “at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system,” a threshold that the convention left undefined. In 1992, the average concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 356.54 parts per million by volume (ppmv).

I’ve been fed two competing storylines for as long as I can remember. On one side, the world I’ve inherited is a tinderbox just waiting to erupt in flames. If I’m not the one engulfed, then surely my children or my grandchildren will be. And on the other side... crickets. The conversation around climate change has no spectrum. It’s just a bimodal screaming match luring young people into either skipping along into the sunset in blissful ignorance or slowly sliding into the fiery pits of hell in nihilistic resignation. Through young eyes, the dominant message from the right amounts to: your ecological inheritance is diddly-squat to us.