“It is what it is,” said my friend, Biker Bill from down the street. Biker Bill was blowing off the West’s heat records, as he kept working on his bikes. He was headed to Montana for several day ride in the sun. Being a devoted climate change obsessionist, I looked at him in shock.
“How can you be so callous? You lived in Australia years ago and loved it and now you are watching it burn up. Not to mention the death of the Great Barrier. And now our very own West is burning. The national parks, the wilderness areas are eventually going burn. Gone forever,” I shouted.
“As I said,” he said, “It is what it is. What do you, one lonely, pathetic soul, plan to do about it? 99.9999 percent of almost 8 billion people aren’t going to do diddley squat about it, and you think a few thousand other zealots like you could stop a million downhill runaway freight trains, packing heat,” he said as he torqued down on the cam bolt. He was really impressed with his clever little metaphor. “Oops, maybe I should back off. The cam bolt, that is. Not you,” he laughed uproariously. I didn’t.
I have thought about that conversation a lot since then. I reflected to the 1980s, when I first got involved in climate change research and advocacy. Had we listened to the scientists, the canaries in the global mineshaft, we probably wouldn’t be experiencing the record-shattering temperatures we are today, four decades hence. And now, as we helplessly stand by and watch in bereavement, breath-takingly beautiful Australia and the American West burn up, the reality of climate change is finally sinking in even to the most obdurate. I believe those of us who care for Earth and the future for our descendants, are really scared. We have been slowly, and insidiously, entering a Hell on Earth for which we are totally unprepared. Now what?
Biker Bill said, “It is what it is.” Perhaps but does that mean we throw in the towel? It may take a nuclear war or mega cyber-attack, bringing society and infrastructure to a grinding halt, resulting in MILLIONS of deaths. It would have to be millions, because 600,000 dead people from Covid didn’t move us to forget our differences and work as one big team.
I’d like to think we don’t have to accept my neighbor’s complacency and let the future run itself. This option may be acceptable to those of us who choose to ignore the science and scientists and believe that the After Life will be better anyway and don’t care about our children and grandchildren and great grandchildren.
I’d rather go down swinging. Edward Abbey wrote in his introduction to Desert Solitaire, “Don’t drop it on your foot—throw it at something big and glassy. What do you have to lose?” I have never forgotten those lines or that book. If we assume that as much as 50% of us voted for an illusionist in 2020, roughly half the country, 74 million people are living in a fictional bubble, kept afloat by ignorance, stupidity, selfishness, insensitivity, and greed. They are not likely to change even though they may be broiling in their backyard or riding their bed down a river. Unfortunately, those 50% are heavy baggage, dead weight on that accelerating runaway climate change train Biker Bill talks about.
A few months ago, my wife and I were in Abbey country in Tucson, and I thought about the ancient saguaros having to survive 120 degrees, day after day. I would like to think that my hero, Edward Abbey, wouldn’t have just grabbed another cool one, and instead fought to save his desert, ignoring complacency, and thrown a metaphorical rock at “something big and glassy.”
It behooves those 50% of us in the U.S., who are not residing in that bubble, and “Living on A Prayer,” as Jon Bon Jovi put it, to not accept complacency toward these record temperatures. Instead, we should focus our energy on ameliorating the reality of extreme heat for human generations and the plants and animals to come. They must sit and suffer day after day for our ignorance. They don’t have the luxury of escaping to air conditioning.
