Before I came down with MCL I'd never been in a hospital except to visit ill family members and friends. I spent hours in the gym working out, went on long hikes in the mountains and desert, bicycled and kayaked and ate a mostly organic, vegetarian diet. To say that I was surprised to discover that I had cancer would be the grossest of understatements.
My initial response to learning that my life was likely to be shorter than I had expected was, not surprisingly, rather selfish. I thought about the time that I would lose with my family and friends, of the traveling that I would not get to do, of the books that I would not get to read.
But something else happened too: the world became more poignant to me. I'd always thought of myself as a caring, empathetic, compassionate person, but now I found suffering, cruelty, and abuse to be intolerable regardless of the form it took. Debeaked hens crammed into tiny cages and stacked in factory-farm warehouses, infants shaken to death by their parents because they wouldn't stop crying, genocide in Darfur, my countrymen in Appalachia and on the Gulf Coast treated as if they lived in a Third World Country, Iraqis bombed by us and by Al Qaeda... It was all too much. I was feeling the world's pain.
And I realized, pardon my presumption here, that I didn't want to die with the world in such terrible shape, which, finally, brings me to global warming. Of all the insanities that bedevil human beings on this planet none is greater than global warming. Only all out nuclear war poses as grave a danger to the planet and human civilization. Ironically, the former, if we fail to check it, may lead to the latter--a two-for-one sale at the Armageddon store, if you like.
I'm not confident that we are going to survive this. I'm positive that we won't survive unscathed because the harm has already begun and we still haven't done anything to reduce CO2 emissions. And here's the question that keeps haunting me: If we won't stop genocide in Darfur or provide universal health coverage in the United States, two horrible but much simpler cruelties, why should any one think that we will deal adequately with global warming? We are already way behind and likely to fall farther behind because we have waited so long to begin and because the necessary sense of urgency is still not there. Witness the hearings in DC on S 2191, Joe Lieberman and John Warner's trillion dollar giveaway to the nation's biggest polluters. This is not a measure to stop global warming, it is simply "green" pork barrel politics. Business as usual in drag.
The changes required of us are enormous. A little biofuel and a few CFLs aren't going to do it. We can no longer live as we have and we have only been able to live as we have because we have borrowed so much from the future. We are way over the limit on our Gaia Visa card and the penalties and fees are going to be enormous. We can't declare bankruptcy either, because in this case bankruptcy equals death.
I love the earth. I have delighted in it for 53 years and I hope to live here for a while longer. My doctor has told me that I'm not going to die today and I'm glad. But if I have to die anytime soon it will be a lot easier if I can go knowing that we have truly accepted reality and are making the radical changes in how we live that are required. If we take the necessary measures to stop global warming and to live sustainably the world that our children and grandchildren will live in will be unrecognizably different from our own. And if we don't take those necessary measures the world that our children and grandchildren will live in will also be unrecognizably different from our own.
Crossposted at European Tribune
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