Unless you were sleeping, the world has been divided into people who are part of the climate change solution and everyone else. More bluntly, you are either part of that solution or part of the global warming problem. It wasn’t always like that; that is, most of us were very content living in our own worlds with an ignorance is bliss perspective. We didn’t know what we didn’t know, so we went about being good global citizens by being, first of all, good human beings. We would help and not hurt others, take care of our families and communities, and we lived with the values our parents and faiths instilled in us.
But one day recently we awoke to a new reality. It likely may have started like a hazy vague notion that something in our world was not quite right – out of balance. That feeling turned into a dull ache or an intermittent uncomfortable or painful feeling upon hearing an unsettling story or news afflicting our friends, family, and the environment: a farmer enmeshed in persistent drought, a friend engulfed in the floodwaters of a hurricane, a cousin concerned about the rapid decline of the honeybee, and your child heartbroken about the portent extinction of the polar bear.
That feeling wouldn’t go away. It only grew larger and larger into a sort-of hopeless realization that our way of life has been put in jeopardy caused by forces seemingly out of our control. This crisis felt like it snuck up on us because it seems so incomprehensible, its scale beyond our human capacity to measure. Since our individual responses seem so inconsequential, so ineffective, we just chose to ignore the chatter, the now false debate occurring over climate change. The truth is that, unfortunately, global warming has been a known phenomena, and human induced causes have been occurring since the Industrial Age.
The question now is, after you’ve taken that deep breath, become aware of the crisis before us, and truly realized its severity: are you part of the solution or are you part of the problem?
Sustainability X 