Summer 2022 Message from the Chair

There are so many postures/angles/entrees possible into this eulogy for a myopic, selfish, gargantuan and hubristically doomed attempt at planetary use/abuse/stewardship, but I had to settle on one thread to achieve some modicum of cohesiveness, so, here we go….

Why do I often feel like the Priam’s daughter Kassandra?

The most damaging and fatal illusion/delusion we are asked to operate under is that the Climate Catastrophe can be mitigated or adapted to while humanity maintains first world lifestyles “as usual.” The presumption is that new technologies will enable us to maintain our current way of life — even improve it — while exporting that beneficial improvement in lifestyle to other countries. This is the Big Lie, supported by clever greenwashing PR campaigns, pseudoscience and our absolute inability to admit the obvious — humanity (as an admittedly generalized collective), most especially Eurocentric, capitalistic, exploitive humanity, long ago divorced itself from any kindred relationship to nature and other species, abandoning any awareness of carrying capacity, limiting factors or interdependent symbiotic systems.

Or, to speak more plainly: We can’t have all the cake and eat it, too.

Congress recently passed and the President signed into law the Inflation Reduction Act, which is landmark legislation both in the scale and scope of its goals to address Climate Change: reducing emissions by 40%; funding renewable energy solutions; investing in environmental justice communities and green jobs and a 15% tax on corporations making $1 billion or more profit annually. But the compromises necessary to gain passage in the Senate tied renewable energy investment with oil and gas leasing — three steps forward, two steps back. Still, because it is by far the greatest financial expenditure towards combating Climate Change the nation has ever seen, it is well worth doing, even though it will take a lot more to keep pace with the unfolding global catastrophe. For instance, nowhere in the language of the legislation is there any mention of educating the public on energy conservation or reduction; nothing about producer responsibility.

In Europe — a Europe sweltering in unfamiliar heatwaves and combatting hundreds of unexpected wildfires — a war persists in Ukraine, threatening world food supplies and energy markets. Rather than seeing this horrific situation as a call to ramp up renewable energy sources and begin to work together collectively as a block of nations on energy conservation and alternatives, old coal plants are being brought back online, along with other non-renewable energy sources to fill the gap left by the missing Russian oil and gas. And I don’t even want to consider the ramifications of playing chicken with Europe’s largest nuclear power plant, Zaporizhzhia, which Putin declares will belong to Russia or no one. Follow that argument to its demented conclusion.

Back here in the U.S. there is record drought. Lake Mead and Lake Powell, reservoirs serving vast areas downstream with water and hydroelectric power are drying up, as is the Great Salt Lake. Heat waves are now so intense and protracted that the National Weather Service is naming them, like hurricanes. The first to be so honored was “Zoe.” Dry lightening is igniting wildfires throughout the west and wherever else it’s bone dry. Wherever wildfires have been, rain events produce flooding and landslides, as they did in Yellowstone this summer. Similar dangers exist for regions that have been in prolonged drought — heavy rain will create very hazardous situations.

Heavy rain is something those in the east — both north and south — will need to get used to in this new altered climate. According to an article by Alejandra Borunda in the August issue of National Geographic, severe thunderstorms, like those that historically rolled across the Great Plains, are moving east and will soon be the norm along the east coast. If you wonder what that will look like, just ask folks in eastern Kentucky who lived through the recent flooding. Welcome to our new world.

And let’s not forget flooding on a cloudless, sunny day — areas along the coast that are so close to sea level that they flood when there’s a particularly high tide due to ocean level rise. That would include areas all along the Gulf Coast, the eastern seaboard, the West Coast, the Alaskan coast, Puerto Rico and Hawaii. Many of these areas are home to environmental justice communities less able to “adapt” or relocate. Between the melting of the Greenland ice sheet, which is accelerating at an unprecedented rate, and ice loss from Antarctica and other continental glaciers, the conservative estimate is that global sea levels will rise two feet by 2100. That is beyond devastating for millions around the world. Whole island nations will cease to exist.

The really inexcusable tragedy in this dark tale is that we have had ample warning and time to make different choices, but we chose to bury our heads and assume someone else would fix it or the problem would go away. Well, alas, there are no magic wands, no do overs, no aliens to the rescue. As long as we persist on clinging to the capitalist economic growth model, exploiting the earth and other nations for short-term profit the catastrophe is going to continue to grow and consume us, perhaps to our own extinction. Even now, billionaire capitalists are seeking to exploit the melting face of Greenland to search for rare earth metals and to drill in the ice free Arctic Ocean for oil and methane.

All this has to stop. We need to learn to live within a sustainable footprint, not continually reach beyond it as if we were the only species that matter on this planet. We need to participate in the biosphere, not live apart from it. And we need to do so as a global collective. This is the time when the United Nations truly needs to live up to its moniker, and the nations of the planet need to come together in a unified effort to reimagine our relationship to one another and to the natural world. We don’t have any time left. Our planet has given us ample warnings, and it’s tired of waiting.