Change

I'm going to start a short series on environmental stewardship. For those entirely uninterested, please read; this is for you. I promise I won't prolong your tedium too much.

Let’s begin by being honest with each other: when thinking about such massive issues as climate change or world poverty, it’s very easy to become discouraged. It’s easy to have no clue how an individual can make a difference, however much one would want to. Swimming against the current is particularly difficult to do, especially when the proverbial current is the entirety of the culture in which we live. And what’s the point, if nothing less than a sea change of culture will make any difference? Perhaps the beast we now ride is too elephantine to steer clear of the destruction toward which we are headed. Maybe the masses will require comprehensive quantitative evidence, the type that will only be compiled after it is too late. Or could it be that such evidence exists and we are too hexed by comfort and security to see that the legacy of our overexploitation will be an intractable curse on the next generation and all who follow?

Some still refute the apparent scientific consensus on the contribution of human activities to global warming, and it could be true that our part is less influential than others would suggest. But I’d like to invite you to come here and observe a distribution of emergency food relief to poor subsistence farmers whose crops have been wiped out by relentless rains, and who have been eating dirt to feel their stomachs full. Or afterward to watch the old widow who didn’t receive anything, who dives to the ground for the five beans emptied from a colleague’s shoe. She was one of the lucky (?) ones who survived last year’s drought. These aren’t normal conditions, friends.

I don’t write this from the security of philanthropic righteousness or environmental innocence; I am guilty just the same. I merely invite you to see, to experience, and then to return to Disneyworld. Where every space is climate-controlled.