The People's Climate March - A Politically Impotent Work of Inspiring Art

Yesterday, New York City was host to the largest climate change demonstration in history. Events took the place the world over, but the largest and most public was the march in Manhattan that drew more than 300,000 estimated protestors. The impetus was to express mass frustration and sound an alarm as a United Nations summit addressing climate change takes place later this week. I am heartened to see such an enormous spectacle of engaged activism but not because I think it will accomplish anything politically. The value in this march is that it documents how devastatingly obvious this catastrophic problem is to so many. A public record of discontent and awareness has been placed in the history books so that as the shit hits the fan in the coming years or decades, we will know that our failures were not without dramatic warning. I’m afraid we can hope for little more in terms of tangible or effective policy changes. Perhaps even harder to digest is that we really don’t need policy changes if we global citizens, especially those of us in the most energy-consumptive cultures, would choose to change our lifestyles and habits en masse. That is not likely to happen anytime soon.

It Used To Really Snow In Nashville...

It used to snow in middle Tennessee. Beyond the occasional powdery dustings, at least once or twice each winter, we had enough downfall, even just a few inches, to sled on snow-packed paved roads. We used "real" sleds with wooden bodies and metal rudders. Being "free range" children of the 80's (or latch key kids if you prefer), we capitalized on the lack of constant parental supervision with joyful, exhilarating, and irresponsible behavior. The goal of our "dogfight" races was to line up maybe eight or ten kids at the top of a steep, paved hill (a public street) and race to the bottom with no rules against forcing your opponents to crash or tumble. Strategies involved grabbing opponents' rudders and spinning them into ditches,  yanking competitors from atop their sleds at full speed, and other creative methods of abusing our bodies and our parents' property. Some bumps, bruises, and, occasionally, broken sleds, were the only casualties in my experience, thankfully. Aside from the rare close call, we also managed to avoid the cars from the intersecting street at the base of the hill. This was one of the few events where everyone from the neighborhood came out, engaging in community building through the foolish, reckless rituals of pre-adolescent suburban boys. Nostalgia for the good old days of easy concussions aside, we don't seem to have those snow days too often anymore. It seems that transferring the carbon from millions of years worth of buried fossil remains into the atmosphere, within only a century and a half, has had a relatively fast insulating effect. Perhaps I'm a sucker for the rhetorical arguments made by all those wind and solar billionaires and their undue influence on public policy, but this seems like pretty clear science to me. Much like we took our resilient young bodies and our family possessions for granted as indulgent children, we seem to be equally cavalier with the entire planet these days. The fact is that our winters have changed even in my quick 41 years on this planet. This isn't to say we won't get the greatest winter storm in history this year as our weather seems to enjoy more statistical outliers in this new climate, but, thus far, even a recent glorified dusting was excuse enough to head out to Shelby Park in East Nashville in hopes of finding a few good photographs. Despite the blades of grass defiantly standing above the lackluster snow cover in the images below, it was still fun to see enough wintry precipitation to reminisce about the childhood days I experienced in our prior climate.

What is Security On a Hot Mess Planet?

I just finished reading Bill McKibben’s climate change treatise, eaarth, and I’m quickly becoming a global warming alarmist. I feel a bit like a starry-eyed cult member, but the depth of cultural, historical, and scientific investigation in the book resonates powerfully. McKibben is almost meek and apologetic for his analysis, which makes the book much more affecting than the doctrinaire rhetoric one typically hears in any political argument. And, let’s face it, climate change is a fundamentally political issue given the largest challenges to understanding it, much less solving the problem, are economic. If money is the currency of our economy, politics are the currency of money. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t come into the book as a climate change denier, but my worries have never felt the least bit urgent. I’ve worried about climate change in the same way I’ve worried about nuclear weapons: as a distant, creeping, and very abstract threat. When considering life in the distant future I’ve often thrown out the caveat, “if we don’t blow ourselves up with nuclear weapons, perhaps the world will look like…”  I’ve now come to believe that climate change will not only be a significant threat in the lifetimes of my young nieces and nephews, but quite plausibly in my own lifetime (if I don’t blow myself up with my own nuclear threats of crappy foods and other bad habits...)