Willfully ignorant howler monkeys

Now that I have your attention... have you seen this 2015 Ford Edge ad? 

A gorgeous young woman drives an enormous red SUV through a gleaming, modern city.  Sweeping, pop-serious music swells behind her.  In voice over, the woman resolutely enumerates her personal odds in a city of "two million, four hundred and thirty-four thousand, three hundred and eleven people."  As we begin to hear the lyrics - "this is MY LIFE!" - and the music reaches a thundering crescendo, all I can help but think is - we are F***ED.

What does this ad - what does anything about this ad - have to do with the CAR they are flogging?  Yes, I obviously get the stretch they're making (car = powerful) but... really?  What does this striving young hottie in a business suit have to do with how the car is engineered, or how well made it is, or the features it has? 

Oh - and - since I care about the emissions that are causing our climate to change... what's the MPH?

The 2015 Ford Edge gets "up to 20 mpg city, 30 highway."  That's per Ford.  That's their mileage brag.

These big, bulging SUVs - all curvy lines and jellybean colors, replete with cup holders and mini computer screens and icy air conditioning and GPS - are rolling off the factory lines at a tremendous pace and selling like hotcakes.

They're being sold the same way everything is sold these days, via shameless appeals to the id and the limbic system.  Is mileage even mentioned in this ad?  Nope.  Is it mentioned in most ads these days?  Not that I have noticed.

Instead, we're buying gas guzzling cars at an amazing pace, because... personal ambition.  Love.  Sex.  Family.  Babies. 

They all do it, although the Subaru "Love.  It's what make a Subaru a Subaru." ads make me craziest.

And every industry advertises the same way, with powerful music and gauzy images of happy, sexy, vibrant people.  The ads make us long for the feelings promised by the images and the music, and make us greedy - nay, LUSTFUL - for more.

We have never been more marketed to, and we have never been hungrier for MORE.

Anyone who knows anything about climate change should know by now that we must SLASH CO2 (and other GHG) emissions by HUGE percentages immediately in order to have a hope of slowing climate change and keeping the total warming under 2 degrees Celsius. 

But we're buying SUVs and pick-ups like they're going out of style.  We're consuming like it doesn't matter what we buy.  We're addicted to enormous cars and air conditioners and riding lawn mowers and immense TVs and power tools and heated swimming pools and cities that blaze like brush fires at night with light after light after light after light...  and we're mostly ignoring an issue so immense that it boggles the mind.

If you haven't read Margaret Atwood's piece about "it's not climate change - it's everything change!" I encourage you to do so at your earliest convenience.  And then I challenge you to get a good night's sleep, or stay on the sidelines of the climate change fight. 

Into this apex consumption moment, President Obama has rolled out his new national Clean Power Plan, requiring that U.S. power plants reduce their emissions 32% below 2005 levels by 2030. 

No, the plan doesn't do anything about personal consumption, but bear with me.

Personally, the majority of Americans seem to prefer to keep the status quo.  They want their SUVs and their McMansions and their rooms full of flashy new appliances.

So maybe government can help?  Maybe government can implement sensible regulations, and work with private industry, to rapidly bring online cheap, renewable energy that will allow us to continue our lavish collective lifestyle without emissions?  Surely President Obama would like to include BOLD, effective action on climate change in his legacy, no?

Actually, yes.  He would - hence the plan.  The only problem is that, compared to the scale of the action that we need to take, this is an almost laughably meager effort.  No less an authority on climate change than James Hansen says the new policy is 

practically worthless.

Nevertheless, the usual troop of willfully ignorant howler monkeys are ENRAGED that our imperial muslin communist usurper president would DARE to make even the tiniest change to the relevant EPA regulations.  The GOP is prepared to fight with everything they've got to stop this new presidential action in its tracks.

And here we are, and that's why we're f***ed.

There's no personal will to learn about climate change and take sensible, immediate, personal action.  All the vast majority of us want to do is consume, consume, consume and damn the torpedoes.

There's no political will on the right to act with intellectually honesty and take immediate, urgent, "war effort" style action on climate change.  All the vast majority of politicians - left and right - want to do is get along to go along, appeal to their base, take Big Daddy Oil's money, and get reelected.

The president - our intelligent, caring, effective, fired up president - puts forth a demonstrably timid climate change plan that is doomed in the cradle.   

A national plan that would actually make a difference on emissions would be centralized and coordinated federally.  It would take enormous effort and enormous will and unprecedented amounts of cooperation and "reaching across the aisle," to use a tired old phrase.

It would require immediate government action and personal sacrifice from every single American.

And we're not there.  The people don't even care enough to worry about the mileage their new gas guzzling SUVs get.  The republicans pretend climate change isn't happening.  And our next president very well might be Donald Trump - the actual living embodiment of the MORE IS MORE personal credo of consumption.

Yep.  We're doomed.

Let's talk about insects

Let’s talk about insects. 

I live in Seattle now.  I consider myself a New Yorker despite not having lived there since right after 9/11 (it’s been a long, strange trip).  And my family farm is in Iowa. 

As a kid I spent weeks there every summer, peeling potatoes, hanging up laundry, picking beans, making pickles, husking corn, going fishing, “helping” Grandpa Channer milk the cows, exploring in the pasture beyond the apple orchard, and taking minute inventory of the astounding variety of insect life.

I was a mini-biologist back then, and the farm was paradise for someone so inclined.  Everywhere, there were insects.  If you couldn’t see them you could hear them, thrumming and whirring and scratching as they went about their business.  Bees crowded the garden, all industry and drive amongst the peonies and bachelor’s button.  Palm-sized garden spiders hung in wait in the long grass at the far side of the driveway, midriffs bright with orange and scarlet coats of arms.  An almost infinite variety of beetles were everywhere to discover – huge ferocious stag beetles, pretty ladybirds, longhorns, and loud, startling click beetles.

There were giant walking sticks and waterbugs to catch and release – katydids and praying mantises to observe – wasps to fear as they buzzed protectively about their immense, bulging nests – fireflies to catch and imprison in Mason jars – and giant red velvet mites astonishing in their tiny perfection.

Clouds of gnats hovered in the cool under the oak trees at the bottom of the lawn, and at the stone quarry in Chickasaw Park there were traffic jams of dragonflies – bright blue skimmers, heavy cruising darning needles, emeralds and petaltails.  In August, any tiny patch of moisture on bare ground attracted cabbage moths, yellow and white, fluttering delicately as they sipped and looking in their numbers as if, when they flew off, they could hoist the Earth with them.

And now?  Now, there isn’t nothing, but there’s not much left.  The full-throated chorus of droning, humming, throbbing insect song is a barely-heard ghost in the distance.  A handful of gnats bother late porch-sitters if the screen door isn’t closed.  The garden spiders are a greatly reduced army, and they are all much, much smaller than before.  A Monarch butterfly in the garden is cause for exclamation, and farmers are importing bees from Australia. 

A recent study published in Science and led by UCL, Stanford and UCSB found that invertebrate numbers have decreased by 45% on average over the last 40 years.

I can see the decline when I visit the farm each August.  I can hear the silence where once there was an omnipresent roar.  But I had no idea how drastic the change was – and when I saw it quantified, I was astonished.

You might ask, “So what?  I don’t like spiders.  Gnats are nasty and annoying, and butterflies are pretty, but who needs them?”

According to the study,

This decline matters because of the enormous benefits invertebrates such as insects, spiders, crustaceans, slugs and worms bring to our day-to-day lives, including pollination and pest control for crops, decomposition for nutrient cycling, water filtration and human health.

And Dr. Ben Collen, last author of the study, said,

We were shocked to find similar losses in invertebrates as with larger animals, as we previously thought invertebrates to be more resilient. While we don’t fully understand what the long-term impact of these declining numbers will be, currently we are in the potentially dangerous position of losing integral parts of ecosystems without knowing what roles they play within it.

And yes, climate change.  

It’s not the only reason, of course, that insect populations are in decline.  We don’t know what’s happening with the honey bees yet.  In Iowa I suspect that factory farming, so reliant on chemicals, is killing off populations of any number of species.  And monoculture agriculture can’t be conducive to biological diversity, even where insects aren’t bug-bombed into oblivion.

But climate change isn’t helping.  Sure, a species here or there is able to expand its range – but that comes at the expense of other, neighboring species, on whom it must encroach.

Most concerning, I think, is that WE DO NOT KNOW WHAT WE’RE DOING.  We don’t know what’s out there.  We don’t know precisely how these complex ecosystems work.  We don’t know which species can die off with no human repercussions, and which are lynchpins on which our very survival might depend.  We suspect – we think we know – we study feverishly, attempting to limn the outlines of the story before the players change – but we don’t know.  Not for certain.  Not enough.

The issue is not that we act as though insects are pests to be gotten rid of.  The issue is that we are heedless in every way.  Our lumbering, careless, devouring predation and annihilation of ecosystem after ecosystem does not strike us – or at least not many of us – as the amoral violence that it is.  We’re rushing toward the future and we think it’s bright.  We think of planetary prosperity and food for everyone, a never-ending upward rise and expansion, a glorious future of technology and pleasure.

The minatory finger of evidence, however, points in the exactly contrary direction.  The insects are telling the real story.

So listen, will you, when you step outside.  What do you hear?