Optimism has its purpose, but we should not be using it to intoxicate ourselves into inaction. We Pittsburghers stand, along with the rest of the world, on the edge of a possible fall into unimaginable levels of difficulty. Other parts of the world are already inundated by problems. We here are still treading water (and complaining mightily), but it's quite clear that if we keep making the same mistakes we'll continue "progressing" until we get to a time in which it will be too late for us.
I have been increasingly disturbed, not only with worsening environmental reports, but also with what seems to me to be irrationally optimistic spins on things. Take the reaction to my monthly Hazelwood Homepage articles, for instance. Every time I mention some huge problem such as the Earthwide extinction rate or - something I just read yesterday - a study that concludes that the Canadian forests are now emitting more carbon dioxide than they are absorbing, I couple that bad news with something that gives me hope. I'll refer, say, to the promise in the quantum leaps we humans are taking in communication and other technology. Appropriately using the latest in science can yield a peaceful, happy planet. But I'm beginning to wonder if I've been talking about the good things too much. People have been saying they like my articles but don't mention the terrible problems we should all be working on. I'm spending so much time pussyfooting around
people's fears I barely get anything important written before the article's done. So here's some naked truth (in my opinion, of course). Let's enjoy working on these things together:
There's not going to be any economic recovery until we re-orient our lives from war and other conflict to love. If we don't things are shortly going to get much worse.
Burning anything causes carbon dioxide, which is already part of the cause of abrupt climate change. The rose-colored glasses people are wearing who say "not in our lifetimes" are an obstruction to their vision. Stop fantasizing and wake up; we all need to have clear heads to help each other deal with these problems. People who have their heads in the sand are a danger not only to themselves but to us all.
Burning wood or other biomass (anything that was or is alive) is "renewable", but not ideal. Trees and other plants absorb co2, but give it off when they rot or burn, so they are "carbon neutral" but not "carbon negative", which is what we really need. An example of a carbon negative technology would be using co2 to grow a type of algae that produces hydrogen that can be harvested to feed fuel cells, which can provide energy without burning anything.
Far from pessimistic climate scientists exaggerating the extent of the weather problems upon us, they have been pulling their punches. Nobody wants to either say or hear bad news, so they have been trying to be optimistic. The fact is we - every single one of us human beings - are in trouble. The only difference between the massive suffering in other parts of the world (going on almost unreported in our happy-happy self-intoxicating news) and us is that it hasn't hit us yet. If you're able to read this you're one of the luckier ones - at the moment.
What should we do? Stop burning anything to the extent that you can. To the extent we have to use fossil fuels, they should not be from coal or tar sands gasoline. Natural gas is cleaner than coal. The coal industry has to be shut down, period. Pittsburgh, which has been called "the Paris of the Appalachia's", and which has a history so deeply tied up with coal, needs to use it's fantastic research and industrial base to pioneer the world's transformation to new energies - Now! We don't have much time. Our ability to work together is going to be even more severely tried than it has been. We are proud of our ability to get along and work peacefully with such a diversity of people. Now we're going to have to step it up in the storm of changes coming.
That's right, I said stop burning anything. Stop buying cars until they cough up all the patents they've shelved over the years that could build truly clean electric cars dependent on green electricity. I'm talking about the only power we average citizens have at this point - the power of the pocket book. Stop buying their crap. I don't mean to be confrontational or blaming. Most of my readers and most employees of the corporations that make these cars don't know that the vehicles on the road today are able to be made a hundred times better.
If we want to get the country working again, we're going to need some structural change. No more planned obsolescence. It should be made a crime to manufacture anything purposely to fall apart so that it has to be replaced quickly. No more corporate personhood. The companies should work for us, not us work for the companies. No food stamps should be allowed to be spent to buy junk food. This was a corruption of federal law that corporate lobbyists made to encourage purchase of their unhealthy processed "food". Stop mowing your lawns and stop cutting down trees unless you absolutely have to. Stop labeling certain plants and animals as bad. Nurture biocontrols like more foxes and hawks and cats and snakes to keep "vermin" in check. Get off the industrial monoculture agricultural machine which muscles out decentralized diversified traditional growers both rural and urban.
Accept that we have drastic times coming, including the need for heroic large scale technological attempts to rebalance the climate (commonly known as "geoengineering"). We humans mucked up the ecosystem and now we're going to have to try to fix it.
And we may not succeed. The dinosaurs were surely not the first creatures God or Evolution or whatever you want to call it created, and we homo sapiens are not likely to be the last. Recognizing our mortality, we need to more deeply enjoy each moment, working together for life.
