As you can see from the photograph, I wasn’t always an angry guy-
it’s not a genetic characteristic. My old friend Joe the Psychologist tells me anger can also be a result of “environmental factors”. Well, yeah. My environment is under siege, so I think outrage is an appropriate response. In fact, it’s my biological imperative to fight for survival. Look again at these 1950s Connecticut woods. I’m not dismissing the smog and the DDT, but it is fall here, and winter is coming right on schedule. This past December 3rd, 2020 walking the White Cedar Bog, I saw turtles still sunning themselves on logs. In the photo there is no bittersweet strangling those trees, no barberry hosting deer ticks, no wooly adelgids, phragmites or two-headed frogs. Invasive species have an effect like a pandemic, and should be treated with similar alarm. And the once insidious, now blatantly obvious, temperature rise is far worse. That happy kid who once played hero in the bare trees has watched continuing deterioration of the Earth despite all the efforts that have been made.
Sure, it’s my own failing too. I visualize myself as the guy who, having smoked Camels for fifty years, finds himself at the Doctor’s office. The pulmonologist says, “Let me give it to you straight. If you keep smoking you’re gonna die”. Upon walking out of the office, do I light one up or change my ways? I know I’m preaching to the choir here. And I know our actions genuinely conserve parts of our world. The work has been real and gives me real satisfaction. It just hasn’t been enough (this kind of writing too hasn’t been enough). So I’m through being merely a good environmental citizen. That’s what each of us has done since the first Earth Day, since Rachel Carson, since TR went camping with Muir in the snow in 1903. “Somebody else” is not going to take care of it. This being a personal rant, I’ll save most of my social-psychological theories for another day. But aren’t we trying to solve food, water, and waste issues technologically because we cannot resolve our own self-indulgence in favor of long-term community benefit? Is it built in, like our inability to stop eating fat and sweets? We’re putting our efforts into learning to live, right here in “Eden”, like we are a colony on the moon with limited resources.
There are two outs and it’s the bottom of the ninth. Who’s up next?
No, I don’t want to be the leader, the talking head, most newsworthy, most progressive Green Person. There’s a ballfield where the big things get done by those who have the constitution for it. I’ve been a benchwarmer (when I wasn’t out alone happily catching frogs). I confess to having had only a passing interest in my own success, the rest of earth’s life being more engaging. But now with my season coming to a close, I want to take a swing, expand the reach of my own mind and heart outward. Score a run. I’ve been to several local and statewide demonstrations and I’m involved with Extinction Rebellion. Pre-virus I advised Fridays for Future at UConn a bit (I wish I could still march and yell in the streets). Now retired, I volunteered for a season at a National Park. I’m a steward of a Joshua’s Trust conservation property, am active in Trout Unlimited. I use words, art, music, other bully pulpits, to encourage others to do more than I can. Again – I ask myself how I can have a meaningful effect rather than just talk about it. This might be as driven as I’ve ever been, strangely enough. It surprises me too. Forgive me for being so personal; it’s not going to be my damn fault.
©George Jacobi 2020
Climate change is real. Scientific findings of climate change are real. The evidence is clear: the earth’s average temperature has increased 2* during the past century, 2020 was the warmest year on record, and 9 out of the 10 warmest years have happened since 2005. Things are getting worse and may be irreversible. Yet many either don’t believe in climate science or cynically cast it’s findings aside because climate change hasn’t personally impacted them yet and they feel no sense of responsibility for the future. Yes, it’s maddening.
Glad we’re getting old George. So many changes have come, some slowly that you don’t give them thought. But they are real and they are in front of us.