Bumpy Road Ahead

 

Little baby River was born in the time of coronavirus and climate change. His father is already apologizing to his newborn son:

My dearest River,

Against all odds you were conceived in a lighthouse, born during a pandemic and will taste just enough of Life as We Knew It to resent us when it’s gone.

I’m sorry.

I’m sorry we broke your sea and your sky and shortened the wings of the nightingale.

I’m sorry that the Great Barrier Reef is no longer great, that we value Amazonmore than the Amazon and that the waterfront neighborhood where you burble in my arms could be condemned by rising seas before you’re old enough for a mortgage.

 

Bill Weir is River’s dad. He is also CNN’s Chief Climate Correspondent. He’s done what so many have resisted: he’s actually read the science.

For generations, scientists told us that if we weren’t careful, a different kind of invisible enemy would come out of our farms, factories, homes and cars, get into the sea and the sky and end Life As We Know It … but that was a story too few wanted to believe. Including me.

But like today’s coronavirus, carbon dioxide and methane molecules don’t care what we believe. The laws of physics have no regard for how we vote or what we worship.

 

River gets a lesson in natural history from his father…:

If the lifespan of our 4.5 billion-year-old planet was scaled down to my age, Homo sapiens showed up about three months ago. The Industrial Revolution began when you started reading this letter and in that blink of Earth time, your species went from cave monkeys to demigods. We rose from bands of insignificant hunter-gatherers at the mercy of nature to city-building, river-bending, mountain-moving masses with weapons and tools that grow mightier by the hour.

 

… and some family history, too:

Take your Grandma Pat. She believed the stories in a very old book with such passion, we followed her dreams from our home in Wisconsin all over the Bible Belt where the heroes were Jesus, cowboys and oilmen.

So we burned gasoline for no good reason. We left Prosperity Gospel megachurches, tied a rope to a dirt bike and belly-surfed across a sod farm. We rooster-tailed across Lake Tenkiller on two-stroke Jet Skis and cruised mall parking lots in muscle cars singing “The road goes on forever and the party never ends.”

Turns out that it doesn’t, and it does. I’m sorry.

 

The choice in front of us is simple: Do everything we possibly can to stem human-caused climate change, or do nothing at all. A comfortable “middle ground” is, unfortunately, a cruel illusion, and seeking incremental changes only denies the scope, the severity, and the urgency of the climate crisis. With either choice, the father tells his son, the road will be bumpy:

If we follow the warnings of science and do everything possible to spare your generation maximum pain, it will mean completely new forms of power, food, construction, transportation, economics and politics. It will mean landscapes covered in solar panels, windmills and carbon capture plantations and the kind of intimate relationship with our land and water that went the way of the hunter/gatherer.

And if we do nothing? It will mean the end of predictable growing seasons, flight schedules and supply chains, resource wars and tens of millions of climate refugees changing everything we know about borders, neighbors and strangers.

And either scenario will bring out both the absolute best and worst in human nature: Hero first responders, innovators and leaders as well as mendacious grifters, conspiracy theorists and tyrants.

 

On the cusp of a brand new year, maybe it’s time to start telling ourselves and each other truthful stories based on facts and not feelings.

Read the rest of Bill Weir’s compelling story here.

 

(Google Images)

 

source http://www.thepediablog.com/2021/12/30/bumpy-road-ahead/