Impending Doom
Over the past year, the highbrow media and now the mainstream media has seemed to jump on the global warming bandwagon. It's been several months since I saw Al Gore's movie, but I think it has made a lasting psychological impact on me. It doesn't mean the end of the human race, but it does mean irreversible man-made change to the ecosystem that has, so far, made life on this planet "relatively" easy.
I've mentioned before that Al Gore is America's lovable loser. But now he's established/regained a spin of credibility with his film-- at least among us wealthy, privileged gen-exers. My parents, of the middle-class baby-boomer generation, still don't trust Al Gore and dismiss him outright. They still don't believe that global warming is happening and that wide-spread, catastrophic climate change will occur. Either way, I guess it probably won't really get bad for us earthlings until after the "Greatest Generation" (of consumers) has gone on over to the other side anyway. But global catastrophe is nothing new to my parents generation. They grew up with "duck and cover" and the cuban missle crisis and the USSR. I have heard my parents reminiscing that before they had me and my brother, they thought that it would be cruel to bring children into this world because they would have to face a nuclear holocaust in their lifetime. Well, I'm happy to say that they took the chance and had us anyway, but who's to say that our civilization still won't blow ourselves up? It it still a possibility, but now there is a new doom for our children even worse than communism or terrism. Currently, I am by no means in the position to propagate myself, but I can't help but think of all of the impending economic and climatalogical burdens a child of mine would have to face in this century.
Public will is changing -- even Pat Robertson has said that he's a convert on global warming and that "we really need to do something on fossil fuels." At any rate, I would hate to think that Pat is more forward-thinking "on fossil fuels" than I am, so I should take steps of personal accountability such as changing to Green Mountain, minimizing power use of equipment at work and at home, starting to recycle again, and becoming more mindful of my driving habits.
But I personally don't think that as a global civilization we will be able to change fast enough to prevent things in my lifetime like the sea level rising, permanent localized droughts, worse tropical storms, accelerated species extinction rates and other equally bad things. Honestly though, I really don't have a clue what is going to happen.
Cue the obligatory:
posted by BU @ 8:41 PM
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