Finally, a mainstream media reporter has the courage to bring up the elephant in the newsroom: CLIMATE CHANGE!!!
In a blog post—not a front page or prime time news story, alas–ABC News reporter Bill Blakemore writes candidly of the fear that a realistic assessment of the threat of climate change must raise in anyone who cares about the future of human civilization on this planet.
“Established scientists, community and government leaders and journalists, as they describe the disruptions, suffering and destruction that manmade global warming is already producing, with far worse in the offing if humanity doesn’t somehow control it, are starting to allow themselves publicly to use terms like “calamity,” “catastrophe”, and “risk to the collective civilization,” Blakemore writes.
“Sooner or later, everyone who learns about the rapid advance of manmade global warming must deal with the question of fear.”
Blakemore advises us to take a page out of the U.S. Air Force playbook and learn to “hug the monster” of climate change, rather than recoiling into fearful paralysis.
“If you freeze or panic — if you go into merely reactive “brainlock” — you’re lost,” he says.
“But if your mind has been prepared in advance to recognize the psychological grip of fear, focus on it, and then transform its intense energy into action — sometimes even by changing it into anger — and by also engaging the thinking part of your brain to work the problem, your chances of survival go way up.”
It is absolutely clear that we stand on the edge of the greatest crisis ever to confront human civilization.
It is also quite clear that almost NO ONE WANTS TO TALK ABOUT IT.
Sometimes when I bring up the reality of impending climate change I really feel like the drip, the drone, the total wet blanket in the room. People actually give me dirty looks and do their best to change the topic ASAP.
Okay, people. You go your way and I’ll go mine.
I don’t know whether it’s possible for humanity to survive the coming catastrophe of global heating.
If we survive, it will only be through a drastic change in our ethos and way of life.
We cannot continue to treat the planet as our private killing field, burning and hacking at all other life forms as if they did not matter a damn.
We in the Western world cannot continue to pretend that our wasteful, profligate lifestyles are a given that cannot be questioned, touched or changed.
To me the monster in the room is not so much global heating itself, as the destructive, predatory mindset that has brought it about.
If we are going to embrace the monster, as the Air Force suggests, and even employ anger as a tool of resistance, than we need to start getting angry at ourselves.
We Americans and Europeans have brought the planet to the brink of the next “global extinction event”—aka, the brink of total annihilation for the majority of current life forms on Earth.
Where is the anger? Where is the outrage? Where is the will to change?
First step: acknowledge that the problem exists.
Thanks, Bill Blakemore, for getting us just a little bit closer to taking that first baby step.
Transition Times 