Today is Earth Day. What should we do to celebrate?
I would suggest we do nothing. Stay at home as you have been doing for more
than a month now. Unless you have a
local prairie—as I do; then take a walk in the prairie. Or take a bike ride on the empty streets or
a local bike path. Don’t go to the
store. Maybe if it’s hot where you live,
turn the air down, or if it’s cold, turn the furnace off.
Like me you have probably been struck
by the fact that one of the unexpected and mostly unacknowledged consequences
of corona virus sequestration is the huge drop in the amount of carbon dioxide
we are sending into the atmosphere.
Marvelous! The L. A. freeways, I
have read, are virtually empty as are streets in city and town and country all
over the United States. Many factories
have stopped production altogether and others have cut way back.
Just yesterday I heard this amazing
bit of news: oil on Monday of this week in the U. S. was being sold for a
negative 8 dollars a barrel! Apparently
storage space was maxed out so the oil companies had to get rid of the oil it
could not sell or store.
Of course this can’t last. Both workers and owners are chomping at the
bit for the country to be opened up again so that buying and selling and
consuming can get back to “normal.”
I understand that. But here’s my hope. What if our 6 or 8 or 16 weeks of living the
non-consumptive lifestyle has taught us that we don’t have to drive to Wal-Mart
to buy something we don’t need. We can
live in homes that are 5 or 10 degrees warmer in summer and cooler in winter.
My hope in all this is that a
slow-down of consumption and production brought about by the virus will
continue after the corona crisis is over and this will lead to a slow-down of
global warming. The deaths attributable to
the corona virus are dreadful, and the last thing I want to imply is that there’
something good about the virus, unless it can teach us a lesson about scaling
back our energy consumption. Because, as
I read the evidence accumulating from climate scientists, the devastation
brought about by an ever warming earth is beyond our imagining.
According to David Wallace-Wells in a July 10, 2017 article in New York Magazine, “The Uninhabitable
Earth”:
“The five warmest summers in Europe since 1500 have all occurred
since 2002, and soon, the IPCC warns, simply being outdoors that time of year
will be unhealthy for much of the globe. Even if we meet the Paris goals of two
degrees warming, cities like Karachi and Kolkata will become close to
uninhabitable, annually encountering deadly heat waves like those that crippled
them in 2015. At four degrees, the deadly European heat wave of 2003, which
killed as many as 2,000 people a day, will be a normal summer.”
“Malaria, for instance,
thrives in hotter regions not just because the mosquitoes that carry it do,
too, but because for every degree increase in temperature, the parasite
reproduces ten times faster. Which is one reason that the World Bank estimates
that by 2050, 5.2 billion people will be reckoning with it.”
“By 2080, without dramatic
reductions in emissions, southern Europe will be in permanent extreme drought,
much worse than the American dust bowl ever was. The same will be true in Iraq
and Syria and much of the rest of the Middle East; some of the most densely
populated parts of Australia, Africa, and South America; and the breadbasket
regions of China. None of these places, which today supply much of the world’s
food, will be reliable sources of any.”
These are pictures that
when compared to the corona virus make it seem a bit less horrendous. Especially because there is very little “coming
back” from the horrors of climate change that Wallace describes.
PS—I am posting this so
late because suddenly this afternoon the opportunity arose to use a Dordt College
tiller. So my friend Duane Bajema and I tilled
26 community gardens. Talk about EARTH
day, I can feel the earth in my socks as I sit here at the computer.
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