Far enough Away
By Albert B. Kelly
As someone who doesn’t have as much time as I would like to read, I still like to read whenever I can. I mostly enjoy reading about recent history and by that, I mean American history. Whenever I get a chance to go into a bookstore, I’ll scan the history section as well as the section labeled “current affairs”. For me, that’s the dividing line. I say that because the older I get; it occurs to me that in order to really understand the importance of a specific period, we have to be far enough away to gain perspective.
I don’t know exactly what constitutes “far enough away”, opinions differ, but I have some guesses. For example, when it comes to more recent history I’m not at all certain we’re able to properly assess the impact of the Clinton era 20-plus years removed nor can we get the full measure of how 9/11 has impacted and shaped us. We’re just now starting to sift through that history to try and make some sense of it. That’s why I mostly avoid books on current affairs since these are really just first drafts of history.
But the need to be removed presents its own set of problems, especially when it comes to issues like climate change and global warming and sea level rise. The challenges are many. First, the subject is so massive, so global. For that reason alone it is hard to wrap our minds around the scope of it. We don’t spend much time thinking “global” things; we focus on what’s right in front of our faces- the weather outside our window, and how things look in the neighborhood and around town.
Another challenge in thinking about the subject is the fact that we can’t see global warming or climate change or sea level rise, we can only see the consequences of those things. Maybe it gets easier if we think of the planet as the patient - understanding that we can’t see the actual disease, just the symptoms. This approach helps when we’re talking about Artic melting, destruction of rain forests, and ozone layers which are all things that seem disconnected from what I see when I look out my kitchen window and ride around town.
Finding some way to organize these things also helps when we’re talking about something that’s so complicated, at least to my mind, especially since I know nothing about Co2 or methane or whatever else happens to be contributing to the problem. I hear a lot smart people discuss these things and even argue about them and somewhere along the line I have to take it on faith the same way I do when my doctor tells me that I have an electrolyte imbalance.
When it comes to global warming and climate change and everything that comes with these, my guess as I suggested above, is that we’re simply not far enough away from our history to understand these things and place them context. Compounding the problem is that we don’t have time to wait. By the time we’re far enough removed to understand this current moment, history will have overtaken us in unimaginable ways.
My generation’s frame of reference for all things environmental began and ended with the commercial in the early 1970’s of the crying Indian on the side of a highway in the Keep America Beautiful campaign. Since then it’s been a flat learning curve for most of us and we’re still inclined to measure the truth by how things look outside our windows. So long as things aren’t too disrupted and upside down, then it can all stay in the background.
It is hard to do, but we need to learn to think globally and allow those in power to act globally, at least when it comes to climate change and global warming and the impacts because we simply don’t have the luxury to wait until we’re far enough removed from this current history to figure out who was right and who was wrong.