Craig Bowron
You’ve heard the facts about global warming, but it all seems so unimaginable, so inconceivable, as if it were an overhyped, ecofriendly version of the deeply disappointing Y2K Cataclysmic Hoax. Could it be true?So forget the facts for a moment and focus on precedent: We humans have a history of underestimating ourselves, and what human civilization can do. Sure, there’s a certain humility, a certain anti-hubris that makes global warming skepticism rather attractive (”we tiny humans are simply incapable of triggering planetary changes”). But the track record of Homo sapiens suggests otherwise.
We couldn’t possibly outfish the Grand Banks, the 280,000-square-kilometer swath of ocean that is (or was) the world’s most productive fishery. And yet we have.
When Lewis and Clark paddled back down the Missouri to St. Louis in 1806, did they imagine that America ever could or would settle the brutally vast expanse they had just taken 28 months to traverse? By 1869, the transcontinental railroad was in place and the primal American West the group once explored had vanished.
Last year TPT produced a documentary titled “Minnesota, a History of the Land.” In one segment, a lumber company scout following the Rum River north to Mille Lacs in 1847 breathlessly noted, “The pine was inexhaustible. Seventy saw mills in seventy years could not exhaust the white pine I have seen on the Rum River.”
It took 25 years to remove every tree the scout had laid eyes on, and another 25 to denude the entire state. Wrong again.
We have a way of making the farfetched come to fruition—of making the unprecedented come true. Boat tours down Broadway? Gondolas bobbing through the streets of Miami? America’s Breadbasket becomes the Ronco Food Dehydrator? Impossible.
Place a few colonies of bacteria in the center of a Petri dish and they will grow to the edge of the dish and die. You won’t hear any conversations about resource management, consumption standards, gross domestic product, the future. This is truly mindless behavior.
The daunting, massive expanse of Earth now looks something more like a Petri dish. We deceive ourselves when we suggest that we are powerless to change it, when it’s we who have changed it. There will always be a reason to do nothing. Preventive medicine doesn’t begin in the morgue. We must prepare to understand and deal with the things that we cannot afford to miss.
We are the man behind the curtain. We are the great and powerful Oz.