Don't Face Facts!

It has been a couple months since I finished reading the bound version of Elizabeth Kolbert's global warming series, Field Notes from a Castastrophe. As the best books will, it has been weighing on my mind ever since. In Sierra magazine not so long ago, I wrote that, if you were to read only one book on global warming, you should make it Tim Flannery's The Weather Makers. Now, I'm not so sure. As great as Flannery's book is, it hasn't stuck with me in quite the same way that Kolbert's has.

One passage in particular from Field Notes jumps to mind almost daily. It comes toward the end of the book, in the section about Burlington, Vermont's laudable efforts to shrink its carbon footprint. Kolbert writes:

If every single town in the United States were to match the efforts that Burlington has made, the aggregate savings would amount--very roughly--to 1.3 billion tons of carbon over the next several decades. Meanwhile, the lifetime emissions just from the new coal plants China is expected to build would amount to 25 billion tons of carbon. To put this somewhat differently, China's new plants would burn through all of Burlington's savings--past, present and future--in less than two and a half hours.

Despair might seem to be the logical response to such figures. In this way, the hazard of looking objectively at global warming can be almost as great as refusing to see the problem at all.

This is an occupational hazard for the environmental reporter, one Aldo Leopold foresaw when we wrote that, "One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds." How to cope? The trick, it seems to me, is to find some middle path between blind optimism and utter despair. It's like F. Scott Fitzgerald said:

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.

That those brave words were written by a hopeless drunk in a hopeless book called "The Crack-up" are facts we needn't focus on.