Environment

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.

Covid rates are abating just in time for surging gas prices to eclipse the pandemic as our crisis du jour, and people from both sides of the political aisle are crying out in unison: something must be done! The current energy crisis debate consists of a few camps: one group professes that they can’t abide fossil fuels being used at all, while another can’t imagine living without them. The third group makes up the middle of the Venn diagram, and though a paradoxical state of mind, it contains the most members. Choosing a winner from among the prevailing arguments is no simple task.

Famed ant specialist and sociobiologist E.O. Wilson passed away on December 26, age ninety-two. He came to national attention in 1975 with the publication Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, which is one of those books that steamrolled into public consciousness. It may not have been as revolutionary as Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, but not for want of trying. Wilson had something new to say about how evolution works and it provoked responses every bit as harsh as those Darwin encountered a century earlier. He was especially reviled by his Harvard colleague Richard Lewontin, one of the founders of molecular evolutionary theory, who saw no validity at all in Wilson’s interpretation of social structures as embodying evolutionary strategies.

With a laboratory leak in Wuhan looking more and more likely as the source of the Covid pandemic, the Chinese authorities are not the only ones dismayed. Western environmentalists had been hoping to turn the pandemic into a fable about humankind’s brutal rape of Gaia. Even if “wet” wildlife markets and smuggled pangolins were exonerated in this case, they argued, and the outbreak came from some direct contact with bats, the moral lesson was ecological. Deforestation and climate change had left infected bats stressed and with nowhere to go but towns. Or had driven desperate people into bat-infested caves in search of food or profit. Green grandees were in no doubt of this moral lesson. “Nature is sending us a message.

“UN Global Climate Poll: ‘The People’s Voice Is Clear – They Want Action.’” So ran a typical headline in the British newspaper the Guardian in January. Yet this month, a poll released as world leaders met at the Glasgow Climate Change Conference prompted a very different Guardian headline: “Few Willing To Change Lifestyle To Save The Planet, Climate Survey Finds.” Huh? Yes, surveys are essentially universal in showing people worldwide are terribly concerned about Global Climate Change (GCC) and support efforts to mitigate it, often no matter how drastic. But those polls may reflect a false perception.

President Joe Biden is set for his rendezvous with climate destiny at the Scottish Event Campus in Glasgow on Monday. The president left Washington on Thursday empty-handed after congressional Democrats abandoned an attempt to put his infrastructure and climate package to a vote. “I need you to help me. I need your votes,” Biden implored them. “I don’t think it’s hyperbole to say that the House and Senate majorities and my presidency will be determined by what happens in the next week.” At least he wasn’t invoking anything as serious as the future of the planet to get their backing. Nancy Pelosi weighed in, according to Politico’s Laura Barrón-López, telling her colleagues that overseas parliamentary leaders had asked whether American democracy can survive.

How many headlines have you seen about climate and environmental racism? So many you think of it as a real problem? Now, how many articles have you actually read about climate racism? If you’ve read one, just one, then you already know it doesn’t exist. Once you get past the fear-mongering click bait and the SEO-friendly headlines, almost all reportage of climate racism dances around the real issue: wealth inequality. Journalists are quick to note that poverty perpetuates climatological and environmental issues against inner-city working-class Americans, many of whom are non-white, but no less American. They don't seem quite so bothered about rural Americans with cancers and lung disease caused by pesticides and pollutants, almost all of whom are Caucasian.