MARCH 9, 2020 – Yesterday’s edition of The New York Times—delivered late and to a dwindling snowbank more than stocking feet away from our front step—contained the usual week’s worth of interesting reading material. However, given the ridiculously nice weather that blossomed over our region, I read nothing except the lead story of the SundayStyles section.
The headline: Fleeing Babylon for a Wild Life/Some people wary of civilization’s prospects are preparing for a one-way trip to the Stone Age. It featured a woman named “Lynx,” who lives in the sticks four hours out of Seattle. For $600 a head, she teaches city slickers who think the Stone Age is now for them. If you want to learn how to rub two sticks together to keep yourself warm; if you want to know how to chop down trees by using an ax with a head that keeps flying off; if you’d like to make your own clothes out of rotting deer hide . . . then Lynx is your go-to-person. Personally, the closest I care to be to the Stone Age is strictly vicariously.
I’m as worried as the next person about the impending climate debacle—assuming the next person believes in science. It seems that the world is already in hot water—or at least water a lot warmer than it should be and far warmer than it would be without 7.5 billion people pumping carbon emissions into the atmosphere. Moreover, the very agricultural practices that allowed our species to grow to 7.5 billion is undermining the globe’s life-sustaining capacity.
However ominous our prospects on the environmental front, I’m still not a fan of binary choices—Stone Age or “game over.” Science and technology, creative thinking and political will can save the day. If only Trump were JFK; if only saving the planet were our shoot-the-moon goal “before the decade is out”
The irony here is that perhaps the panic over corvid-19 will save the day. Maybe global consumption will continue to plunge us into another Great Depression, with the result that our collective carbon footprint will shrink to manageable proportions. By way of a rogue wave, we’ll avoid hitting the (melting) iceberg.
Of course, any sensible person would want to avoid the rogue wave and the iceberg. If history, psychology, and sociology are any guides, however, we’re as insensible as we are sensible. Our paradoxical burden is that as much as we’ve evolved beyond all other creatures, we haven’t yet evolved far enough to avoid self-initiated extinction. One can hope that with AI, maybe we stand a hint of a flicker of a slim chance. Perhaps at the last moment we can turn sideways, make ourselves thinner, slicker, faster, smarter and slip through the closing jaws of fate, just as we do in the movies we make.
If history, psychology, and sociology are any guides . . . we are just as smart, innovative, and resilient as we are dumb, unimaginative, and stubborn. Let’s fire up! Let’s head for the metaphorical moon before the decade is out!
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© 2020 by Eric Nilsson
