Too Little, Too Late
Back in the 1990s, I spent about a year as a door-to-door canvasser for Greenpeace. soliciting memberships and money. Back then, there was still a LOT of debate about global warming and human responsibility for the problem, but one phrase stood out for me: the “make it or break it decade”.
This is how scientists who saw evidence of the oncoming catastrophe referred to the 1990s, meaning it was our last chance to clean up our act before the problem became irreversible. Now, seven years post “make it or break it”, the glaciers are melting faster than previously suspected. So when David Ignatius’ latest column, I shake my head and mutter, “too little, too late.” This isn’t to come down on Ignatius as if he’s only now showing up at the table: he’s been writing on the subject for sometime, and has been attacked by all the right people (pun definitely intended) for his efforts.
It’s still too little, too late. We should have done something 10 years ago, when we had a decent shot of changing our habits before catastrohpe hits. Now, as Ignatius points out,
The world already is precarious; the networks that maintain political and social order already are fragile, especially in urban areas; the dividing line between civilized life and anarchy is frighteningly easy to breach, as the daily news from Iraq reminds us. We look at the behaviors of butterflies and migratory birds as harbingers of climate change. But what about early effects on human beings? “The steady escalation of climate pressure will stretch the resiliency of natural and human systems,” writes Schwartz. “In short, climate change pushes systems everywhere toward their tipping point.”
The list of problems reads like the Apocalypse: water shortages; refugee crises; widespread flooding and land loss (anyone who’s seen “An Inconvenient Truth” has seen the model of a flooded Florida, and the drowning of Lower Manhattan); and of course, the associated breakdown in society.
On a related note, the Times has run their second opinion piece on the disappearance of bees,/a>, responsible for the pollination of an enormous number of crops, including almonds; fruit from fruit trees (like apples, peaches, and pears); blueberries; various vegetables like squash and zucchini, broccolli, the list goes on and on. No one knows why they’re disappearing, although somegirl at allspinzone offers some suggestions, in a post I highly recommend.
It’s really not that hard to put 2+2 together here. The bees’ immune systems are impacted by GE foods, loss of native plants, and pesticides. We continue to destroy our environment in hundreds of ways, and it is rapidly catching up to us. What will happen when our ability to grow food is greatly weakened by a few powerful corporations? I don’t want to find out.
Place me in somegirl’s camp, on both counts. It’s not hard to add 2+2, and I really don’t want to find out what’s going to happen to our food supply. Unfortunately, I think we’re all going to find out, and sooner than we’d like.
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