What if there was a way to conclusively tell the future that here in our time we knew that certain people were short-sighted opportunists, and that we didn't want their short-sightness forgotten? What if we could tell politicians today that their inaction on Global Warming was going to be noted permanently and this information would be transmitted in an indelible form to the future?
I've been thinking about the problem of global warming and how to deal with it within the confines of existing political reality. Like most environmental problems, it's a hard one to solve through the democratic political process. Politicians appeal to constituencies in hopes of getting votes, and neither the environment nor the humans of the future are given votes. Consequently, politicians tend to pander to the short-term needs of constituents, passing laws to deal with sensational news items, taking actions to stimulate the economy when it fails, or rallying for war in response to insults from foreigners. How, then, do we make the politicians of today accountable to the future, and, furthermore, to demonstrate today that they are indeed being held accountable? It's been too easy for politicians to dismiss the judgment of history by claiming "we'll all be dead" or that "historians are still debating Washington's legacy." But what if there was a way to conclusively tell the future that here in our time we knew that certain people were short-sighted opportunists, and that we didn't want their short-sightness forgotten? It occurred to me that perhaps a monument could be built out of some durable material like bronze (which can theoretically hold its shape for a million years) and this could be used to forever freeze this moment in time, drawing attention to those most responsible for the bleakness of our future. Statues are routine erected to commemorate heroes, even those our modern sensibility now finds repugnant, but they could just as easily be used to showcase our villains. When Sarah Palin signs off on a ghost-written opinion piece trivializing global warming and it's published in the Washington Post, she needs to know that the future will take note.
In my mind I'm picturing a bronze statue with a base surfaced with a relief map of North America featuring the shorlines expected to result from a complete melting of the polar ice caps (perhaps with the old pre-melt shoreline lightly embossed on the otherwise-smooth ocean surface). On this shrunken North America would be large bronze figures of those contributing the most to the politics of global warming inaction: Sarah Palin, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Tom Coburn. I tried to imagine what these figures could be doing to symbolize their pathological focus on the short term, and the best I could think of was having them all be absorbed by tiny electronic gadgets in their hands. They could be Twittering on Blackberries while the stability of the Holocene dissolves around them.