As I watch the salty seas of our planet slowly boil and the arid lands roast, I’m often dumbfounded whenever I meet a person who still needs convincing that there’s something very strange and very serious happening to the world around us. Never mind the visible increase in tropical weather activity, or the rapidly multiplying ‘dead zones’ around the world; vast stretches of ocean that lack too much oxygen for anything to live, anything to survive in. Even the exponential increase in the in the melting of the polar ice caps is written off by some as ‘just a natural trend.’
It sounds as if I might have written this ten years ago, but I say this because I’ve met people, as recently as last weekend, who still don’t understand what all the hype’s about. They tell me how beautiful of a day it is today! The summer has been so great! I don’t think it’s any hotter than it’s ever been!
The apparent source of their confusion and misunderstanding of the situation is this notion that the singular byproduct of global warming is heat. Yes, the world’s warming, but there’s a lot more to it than that. For some reason there are still some people that can’t get over the fact that a good summer day doesn’t negate the definable proof that the planet is literally melting before our eyes.
It’s becoming increasingly clear to me that people are motivated more powerfully by empirical results that affect their actual lives than by any sort of warning of what will some day happen, or even what is occurring already and has been for years. Take the current scenario of higher gas prices for example. As a working college student, I’ve always been environmentally and economically aware of the oil crisis that the United States faces. The only reason why I drive a Chevy Malibu instead of a Toyota Prius is because I don’t have the money to afford the latter of the two. For the average hummer or SUV driver, who cares if it’s $100 or $150 to fill up your tank each week? If you’re driving either of those two vehicles, chances are that the difference is a nominal one.
But with the economy in the tank (pun intended), only now is America starting to see the rise hybrid SUVs and the fall of hummers on the market. Reason reads to me that the only way we’re going to get more people to realize the full scope of the situation is to have them deal with the consequences first hand. But how to do so? Economically seems to finally be working in the form of higher gas prices, but how do we motivate people to look at the environment as a reason to change their destructive habits?
Maybe there’s too much work and too little time to reverse the damage done, but my advice is to try to educate anyone you can who still isn’t grasping what’s happening. For the real thickheads, just refer them to http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/. In the end, knowledge and motivation are the only powers capable of saving the planet and ourselves.
