Category: Climate Change

How do we urge people to fight climate change without scarring them into inaction?

On By Malcolm R. CampbellIn Climate Change

Every few weeks or so, I see an online article about one expert or another who states that climate change is a hundred times worse than s/he thought.

Such statements or predictions are probably published in the hope they’ll wake people up. I wonder if they have the opposite impact. Perhaps they make the problem too large to grasp or make it sound like it’s too large for anyone to do anything about.

Personally, I would rather see climate change information disseminated in bite-sized chunks that include things individuals can do rather than in large-scale reports that no individual can address.

Most people don’t have the money, knowledge, clout, or other means of addressing large-scale warnings, much less separating the wheat from the chaff when politicians and experts are not on the same page about the dangers or the remedies.

We need facts we can trust. For example, some people say it’s pointless buying an electric car when the power for recharging facilities comes from power plants using fossil fuels. What about this? Can we have a discussion without bumping into people and groups with a vested interest?

Some people say that California’s approach–making everything connected to fossil fuels illegal–is the route all states need to follow. But is it? On the surface, that approach is pricing everything out of the range of manufacturers and buyers.

When the issue becomes partisan, we all lose and have no idea what we can personally due to benefit the planet.

–Malcolm

Malcolm R. Campbell is the author of contemporary fantasy, paranormal, and magical realism short stories and novels. Save money by buying all four Florida Folk Magic novels in one Kindle volume.

Climate Change – Is Resistance Futile?

On By Malcolm R. CampbellIn Climate Change, writing

If you watched Star Trek, you saw the spaceship built like a giant cube. You know that this cube attacked everyone in order to assimilate them into the cube. Those in the Borg gun sites were told: “Resistance is futile.”

I think of this when I think of climate change. Individually, have we decided that resistance is futile; or, as Robert Swann said, “The greatest threat to our planet is the belief that someone else will save it.”

I do not think Marianne Williamson has a chance of becoming President. But I do think her statement on her website about climate change is worthy of consideration:

“Our biggest crisis regarding the climate emergency is humanity’s massive state of denial that it exists on the scale it does. Yet a willingness to recognize the depth of the problem is a prerequisite to our solving it. It is a psychological and moral challenge to face the horror of what stands before us over the next ten years should we not act; yet there – in our standing raw before the truth that it confronts us with – lies our only hope for surviving it.

“And our environmental crisis is not only climate; it is also water, air, food, and soil. Our earth is like a body beginning to experience an all-systems breakdown. The glacial ice melt is so extensive that the sheer weight of melted polar water is changing the shape of the earth’s crust.”

The problem is so huge, all most of us can do is hope that some smart person will come along and fix it. We balk, though, at many of the proposals because they are inconvenient and ask us to greatly change our habits and our attitude about what the environment needs to survive. In some respects, people use a similar excuse to the one they use when they don’t vote: “My vote won’t make any difference.” And so we say, my “green car and green house” won’t make any difference.

When millions of people think this way, then we’ve basically written off the planet and decided that while the planet will support us, it won’t be here for our children and grandchildren. “Kids, it was just too much trouble to leave you a viable world.”

So, we’re sitting here watching it happen as though doing anything about it is futile.  I have to say, I don’t understand this attitude.

—Malcolm

 

 

 

 

‘Sea Change: An Atlas of Islands in a Rising Ocean,’ by Christina Gerhardt

On By Malcolm R. CampbellIn Climate Change4 Comments

I cannot help but think of the title of Rachel Carson’s 1951 masterpiece The Sea Around Us as I write here about Christina Gerhardt’s University of California Press book that will be released May 23. If you live on an island, the sea has always been around you, but with climate change, the sea may soon be above you. The book, which New Scientist calls One of the Best Science Books of 2023, is available for pre-0rder on Amazon and elsewhere.

From the Publisher

“This immersive portal to islands around the world highlights the impacts of sea level rise and shimmers with hopeful solutions to combat it.

“Atlases are being redrawn as islands are disappearing. What does an island see when the sea rises? “Sea Change: An Atlas of Islands in a Rising Ocean” weaves together essays, maps, art, and poetry to show us—and make us see—island nations in a warming world.

“Low-lying islands are least responsible for global warming, but they are suffering the brunt of it. This transportive atlas reorients our vantage point to place islands at the center of the story, highlighting Indigenous and Black voices and the work of communities taking action for local and global climate justice. At once serious and playful, well-researched and lavishly designed, Sea Change is a stunning exploration of the climate and our world’s coastlines. Full of immersive storytelling, scientific expertise, and rallying cries from island populations that shout with hope—’We are not drowning! We are fighting!’—this atlas will galvanize readers in the fight against climate change and the choices we all face.”

From the Booklist Review

“How often does an atlas command immediate attention, warranting a page-by-page perusal? This offering from Gerhardt and mapmaker Molly Roy is much more than a geological survey of the many islands around the world being affected by rising sea levels caused by climate change. There are compelling maps that indicate current coastlines and what the coastlines consist of (volcanic rock, ice shelves, mangrove forests) and project what coastlines will look like in 2050 and 2100. Lengthy essays introduce the inhabitants of these often-remote places, detailing their unique languages, histories, and ways of life.” See the full review here. 

Christina Gerhardt is Associate Professor at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, Senior Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, and former Barron Professor of Environment and the Humanities at Princeton University. Her environmental journalism has been published by Grist.org, The Nation, The Progressive, and the Washington Monthly.

As a university press book, Sea Change is priced slightly higher than a similar large traditional publisher’s price. However, it’s well worth it even for people who live in Kansas and think they’re immune to sea changes.

–-Malcolm