Fuck This Cassandra Motherfucker!
Okay, it's a strange problem, and I want to make sure that if this ever gets back to Tim Flannery that he understands that I know he's doing his best. There is a global warming story in the Times every damn day. The New Yorker is chockablock with hair-raising predictions. These (last I checked) are mainstream news outlets.
I read these stories. I care about them. You'd think I would be the perfect audience for Flannery's The Weather Makers. But 75 pages in, I want to throw the book at him, hitting him squarely in the jaw, and I am willing to fly for 13 hours to do so.
Cassandra probably wasn't cursed. She was probably just being too negative, like Flannery. Who wants to read that air pollution tends to cause mass extinctions, and that the last time there was a major air pollution problem on the earth (they think it was an asteroid that released a bunch of CO2 and particulate into the atmosphere) caused the extinction of the dinosaurs?
It wasn't just huge beasts that vanished. It was everything over 70 lbs or so, and many small species too. 95% of all life on the planet, dude! Gone! Soon! Try wrapping your brain around that! I spent my evening trying to figure out what that meant. Envisioning life during the extinction process. It can't possibly go quickly. Would I survive? I am pretty hardy. I probably would. Fuck! What kinds of resources would I need? Probably lots of decongestants and clean water. Should I buy a farm upstate? I put Road Warrior in my Netflix cue. And Waterworld.
And even though my thoughts were perfectly rational given the information that is being presented, I shook myself awake, decided that I was being completely crazy, and swore off that damn book. That is the problem.
I am an artist, not a scientist. I can't question his facts. I trust that they are correct. Scientists have been coming to similar conclusions about climate change for hundreds of years. And as an artist I am in the inspiration business, not the facts business. So I renew my pledge to choke down Flannery's scarefest, because it seems deeply necessary to provide a counterpoint.
You can't just tell people that everybody's going to die so they should really rethink their whole lives, even though the government is mute on the issue. People have committed to the way things are now. People have 4 hour commutes from huge houses that they can't afford to sell.
There has to be a better way.
I read these stories. I care about them. You'd think I would be the perfect audience for Flannery's The Weather Makers. But 75 pages in, I want to throw the book at him, hitting him squarely in the jaw, and I am willing to fly for 13 hours to do so.
Cassandra probably wasn't cursed. She was probably just being too negative, like Flannery. Who wants to read that air pollution tends to cause mass extinctions, and that the last time there was a major air pollution problem on the earth (they think it was an asteroid that released a bunch of CO2 and particulate into the atmosphere) caused the extinction of the dinosaurs?
It wasn't just huge beasts that vanished. It was everything over 70 lbs or so, and many small species too. 95% of all life on the planet, dude! Gone! Soon! Try wrapping your brain around that! I spent my evening trying to figure out what that meant. Envisioning life during the extinction process. It can't possibly go quickly. Would I survive? I am pretty hardy. I probably would. Fuck! What kinds of resources would I need? Probably lots of decongestants and clean water. Should I buy a farm upstate? I put Road Warrior in my Netflix cue. And Waterworld.
And even though my thoughts were perfectly rational given the information that is being presented, I shook myself awake, decided that I was being completely crazy, and swore off that damn book. That is the problem.
I am an artist, not a scientist. I can't question his facts. I trust that they are correct. Scientists have been coming to similar conclusions about climate change for hundreds of years. And as an artist I am in the inspiration business, not the facts business. So I renew my pledge to choke down Flannery's scarefest, because it seems deeply necessary to provide a counterpoint.
You can't just tell people that everybody's going to die so they should really rethink their whole lives, even though the government is mute on the issue. People have committed to the way things are now. People have 4 hour commutes from huge houses that they can't afford to sell.
There has to be a better way.
posted by fisher6000 at 8:17 AM
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