The First Step to Action on Climate Change is Facing Its Reality (CommonDreams)

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The First Step to Action on Climate Change is Facing Its Reality
by Elizabeth R. Sawin

In a past column I have written about a narrow window of opportunity, a period of perhaps as few as ten years within which humanity must make dramatic reductions in worldwide CO2 emissions or run the risk of unleashing dangerous cascades of “runaway” warming. In this scenario, warming would begin to feed upon itself and outgrow the human power to slow it, leading to shifts in temperature, sea level, ocean currents, rainfall patterns, and ecology with the potential to disrupt coastal cities, agriculture, and ecosystems.Minimizing this risk calls for massive improvements in energy efficiency, decreases in consumption, and a rapid shift to clean energy. There’s plenty of evidence to suggest that all of this is possible if we were to get serious about public investment and incentives for a life-serving energy system, but ten years is a short window for going about such large scale change, especially in a nation that has not yet gathered itself to rise to the challenge.

A few hours and a little research will provide all of the information you need to come to your own conclusion about the above assessment. But then what? If you find yourself agreeing that we have ten years to address a problem of human survival and that addressing it will require very deep changes in much that we take for granted, how do you find the response that is right for you, whoever you are? What’s a fifth grade teacher to do? Or a grandmother? An artist? A carpenter? A student?

The answer to this question doesn’t strike most people instantly or with total clarity. Grave threat though it is, climate change isn’t at all like a burning building or a raging flood. It’s not the sort of crisis that automatically pulls our best selves forward. All our highest capacities are there to draw upon - our creativity, our intellect, our perseverance, our selflessness and courage - but most of us seem to need to hold the reality of global warming in our awareness for some time before ours hearts and souls cipher out a response.

But here is a dangerous irony. While we may need to sit with the reality of climate change for a while before we can see what it is that we are able to offer in response, most minds don’t react to our global crisis with calm and deliberate introspection.

Some minds know for certain that calls for immediate and dramatic action are flat out wrong and typical alarmist environmentalism.

Some minds leap with fear for beloved people and places and can’t see or think very well beyond that fear.

Some minds quickly find distraction, in daily obligations or solvable problems.

And some minds decide that’s its too late anyway because people will never change and one person can’t make a difference. ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/05/02/911/