But when a whole nation of people, or half or more of them, hear that our whole civilization could collapse within a generation, that billions around the globe could die of climate induced starvation, war and weather disasters, that hundreds of millions, and indeed some entire countries like Bangladesh and Holland, as well as storied cities like New York, Los Angeles, Boston, New Orleans, Miami, London and Shanghai could be engulfed by the sea forcing epic migrations to higher ground, and they just go about their lives as if nothing will happen, it’s not called denial.
Denial of Peter by Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld
I was talking yesterday with a woman at HealthGuard, a water testing firm
we’ve used in the past to test the water in our artesian well for
contaminants. We hadn’t done it in five years because the last test showed
it to be free of anything nasty, from coliform bacteria to pesticide traces
and heavy metals — so pure in fact we could bottle it and sell it.
We decided to test the well again because although we live on 2.3 wooded
acres and don’t use chemicals on the property ourselves, we are surrounded
by suburban homes that, as evidenced by most of their lawns being totally
lacking in dandelions, clearly use gallons glyphosate-laced Roundup
property.
I turns out the test we had done before tested for everything but
herbicides, so we are testing now for glyphosate too. The woman at
HealthGuard said it was becoming a popular test, and that, as I know, the
chemical is showing up everywhere.
I don’t know what the test results will be. Our well is 160 feet deep, so we
may be lucky. I’m sure that any glyphosate will be minimal compared to
what’s in the public water supply in our town, which had to shut down
several of its system’s wells because of contamination with PFAs from a now
closed Naval air station two miles from us. Fingers crossed.
But the situation with our well and the paucity of dandelions in our
neighborhood got me thinking about how crazy our society is.
When I go into a Lowe’s or Home Depot store to buy plumbing or electrical
supplies, I’m assaulted as soon as I go in the door by the smell of lawn
chemicals. Plastic jugs of Roundup are stacked six feet high right near the
entrance of these stores for easy grabbing by shoppers heading for the
garden supply area. At Costco, I found myself in line at the checkout
counter behind a man who had a huge bag of grass seed that the label on the
bag promised was already treated with “fertilizer and weed killer for a
perfect lawn.” The weed killer, I discovered on checking further, is of
course Roundup.
Most of Europe has banned Roundup because of both a determination that is
carcinogenic and because its widespread use has been linked to the
decimation of the world’s bees, essential for the pollination of some 90
percent of all plants and of 30 percent of food crops, and Monsanto/Bayer
has so far lost three major lawsuits levying a total of over $2.4 billion in
punitive damages against the company for cancers found caused by their
glyphosate herbicide. Yet despite all this, the American public wants its
pristine green lawns, unblemished by dandelions and other transgressors like
violets, buttercups and wild strawberries.
Glyphosate cancer risk and bee die-offs be damned!
Mentioning this bizarre attitude to the woman at HealthGuard, she replied,
“I know. It’s crazy. People actually tell me they’re stocking up on Roundup
because they say, ‘I’m sure the government is going to ban it eventually,
but it really works, so I want to have it to use.’”
This is a bit like the people who insist on buying incandescent light bulbs
and stocking up on them for fear they’ll eventually disappear, even as LED
lighting keeps getting better and cheaper, and uses a fraction of the
electricity required by incandescent light bulbs. In our house, switching to
LEDs has reduced our electrical bill by nearly two-thirds, lighting being
the main share of our home’s electrical use.
What are Americans thinking? Are they even thinking?
We just had a report issued by a group of environmental scientists in
Australia from the National Centre for Climate Restoration. They predict
that if climate change continues on its present track, human civilization
(such as it is!) and even humanity itself as a species, will face an
“existential risk” as soon as 2050, which is just 31 years from now. The
frightening report got major play on the major networks like CBS, ABC and
CNN, and in USA Today, but it was basically a one-shot deal. The story came
out early this week and by Friday the news cycle had moved on and the dire
prediction of mankind’s doom is now history. People are still buying
oversized cars, flying hither and yon for vacations, scarfing down beef that
is produced on vast tracts of land and from cows that emit huge amounts of
the global warming gas methane, commuting to and from work in cars driven by
single drivers with no passengers that create massive traffic jams and
living in outsized show homes requiring vast inputs of energy. And more
incredibly, many are planning to vote in 2020 to re-elect President Trump,
whose administration has been actively working to remove whatever minor
measures were taken by the Obama administration to moderate US reliance on
carbon-based fuels! Or for Democrats whose party leadership won’t even
permit a presidential campaign debate on climate change policy!
This is of course all certifiable madness.
When a person lives in an abusive relationship and continues to stay with
the abuser, we call it denial — a psychological problem that calls for
professional intervention. When a soldier returns from war suffering from
nightmares, hearing voices and having thoughts of violence or self-harm, but
tries to “tough it out” and ends up killing him or herself, or others, we
call it denial, a problem that should have been addressed by psychological
experts at the Veterans Administration or elsewhere.
But when a whole nation of people, or half or more of them, hear that our
whole civilization could collapse within a generation, that billions around
the globe could die of climate induced starvation, war and weather
disasters, that hundreds of millions, and indeed some entire countries like
Bangladesh and Holland, as well as storied cities like New York, Los
Angeles, Boston, New Orleans, Miami, London and Shanghai could be engulfed
by the sea forcing epic migrations to higher ground, and they just go about
their lives as if nothing will happen, it’s not called denial. When our
corporate media ignore the biggest story in the history of humankind, or
give it only passing attention for a day and then move on to talk about
Trump’s latest lie about nobody protesting his visit to London or J. Lo’s
latest wardrobe malfunction, it’s not called denial. It’s called normal
behavior or “professional journalism.”
This report from Australia — a country that is already facing appalling heat
waves as the globe heats up — should be producing screaming headlines on
news channels and front pages everywhere. So should reports, also low-balled
so far, that the ice sheets in Greenland and in both eastern and western
Antarctica are melting far faster than almost anyone imagined earlier, such
that a sea-level rise of not three or six feet, but 20 feet or more by 2100,
is probable unless drastic changes are made in the burning of fossil fuels.
Indeed the reality is most of us who are adults today could witness seas
that are 3-6 feet higher by 2050.
Without such honest, responsible, and continuing news reporting Americans,
most of whom prefer to get their news homogenized, filtered, sterilized and
censored by the likes of Fox News and CNN, or curated and buried by
“serious” papers like the New York Times or Washington Post, will just
continue doing what they’ve been doing: voting — if they vote — on the basis
of diversionary issues like abortion, gay and lesbian rights, terror
“threats,” and the latest gaffes by candidates for high political office,
all the while running their air-cons set to 60 degrees in summer and their
furnaces set to 70 in winter, mindlessly opposing regulations to reduce or
eliminate coal and oil as fuels, stockpiling wasteful incandescent
lightbulbs and that damned Roundup herbicide, and in the process sending us
all — including much of innocent creation — marching to extinction.
What about the kids and the grandkids, you might well ask. Well, on the
evidence, people these days don’t seem to give a rat’s ass about their
progeny.
In fact, as I think of it, that is one of the things that happen in stressed
environments in the natural world. Birds and mammals faced with a loss of
habitat and stressed with the day-to-day and minute-to-minute challenge of
surviving are known to often abandon their young, or to stop reproducing.
Maybe that is the stage many of us are in now without realizing it. As the
mad globalization of the economy and the funneling of all wealth to the
tiniest segment of the ultra-rich carries on apace, perhaps the rest of us,
struggling just to make the monthly payments for shelter and food, are
losing that primal urge so critical to species survival: a drive to raise
and protect our young.
If so, and if the rest of the world acts similarly to us Americans, the
story of mankind is probably already over.