The Williams River was so languid
and lovely last Saturday morning that it was
almost impossible to imagine the violence with
which it must have been running on August 28,
2011. And yet the evidence was all around: sand
piled high on its banks, trees still scattered as
if by a giant's fist, and most obvious of all, a
utilitarian temporary bridge where for 140 years a
graceful covered bridge had spanned the water.
The YouTube video of that bridge crashing
into the raging river was Vermont's iconic image
from its worst disaster in memory, the record
flooding that followed Hurricane Irene's rampage
through the state in August 2011. It claimed
dozens of lives, as it cut more than a
billion-dollar swath of destruction across the
eastern United States.
I watched it on TV
in Washington just after emerging from jail,
having been arrested at
the White House during mass protests of the
Keystone XL pipeline. Since Vermont's my home, it
took the theoretical - the ever more turbulent,
erratic, and dangerous weather that the tar sands
pipeline from Canada would help ensure - and made
it all too concrete. It shook me bad.
And
I'm not the only one.
New data released
last month by researchers at Yale and George Mason
universities show that a lot of Americans are
growing far more concerned about climate change,
precisely because they're drawing the links
between freaky weather, a climate kicked
off-kilter by a fossil-fuel guzzling civilization,
and their own lives.
After a year with a
record number of multi-billion dollar weather
disasters, seven in 10 Americans now believe that
"global warming is affecting the weather". No less
striking, 35% of the respondents reported that
extreme weather had affected them personally in
2011. As Yale's Anthony Laiserowitz told the New
York Times, "People are starting to connect the
dots."
Which is what we must do. As long
as this remains one abstract problem in the long
list of problems, we'll never get to it. There
will always be something going on each day that's
more important, including, if you're facing flood
or drought, the immediate danger.
But in
reality, climate change is actually the biggest
thing that's going on every single day. If we
could only see that pattern we'd have a fighting
chance. It's like one of those trompe l'oeil
puzzles where you can only catch sight of the real
picture by holding it a certain way.
So
this weekend we'll be doing our best to hold our
planet a certain way so that the most essential
pattern is evident. At 350.org, we're organizing a
global day of action that's all about
dot-connecting; in fact, you can follow the action
at climatedots.org.
The day will begin in
the Marshall Islands of the far Pacific, where the
sun first rises on our planet, and where locals
will hold a daybreak underwater demonstration on
their coral reef already threatened by rising
seas. They'll hold, in essence, a giant dot - and
so will our friends in Bujumbura, Burundi, where
March flooding destroyed 500 homes. In Dakar,
Senegal, they'll mark the tidal margins of recent
storm surges. In Adelaide, Australia, activists
will host a "dry creek regatta" to highlight the
spreading drought down under.
Pakistani
farmers - some of the millions driven from their
homes by unprecedented flooding over the last two
years - will mark the day on the banks of the
Indus; in Ayuthaya, Thailand, Buddhist monks will
protest next to a temple destroyed by December's
epic deluges that also left the capital, Bangkok,
awash.
Activists in Ulanbataar will focus
on the ongoing effects of drought in Mongolia. In
Daegu, South Korea, students will gather with bags
of rice and umbrellas to connect the dots between
climate change, heavy rains, and the damage caused
to South Korea's rice crop in recent years. In
Amman, Jordan, Friends of the Earth Middle East
will be forming a climate dot on the shores of the
Dead Sea to draw attention to how
climate-change-induced drought has been shrinking
that sea.
In Herzliya, Israel, people will
form a dot on the beach to stand in solidarity
with island nations and coastal communities around
the world that are feeling the impact of climate
change. In newly freed Libya, students will hold a
teach-in. In Oman, elders will explain how the
weather along the Persian Gulf has shifted in
their lifetimes.
There will be actions in
the cloud forests of Costa Rica, and in the
highlands of Peru where drought has wrecked the
lives of local farmers. In Monterrey, Mexico,
they'll recall last year's floods that did nearly
US$2 billion in damage. In Chamonix, France,
climbers will put a giant red dot on the melting
glaciers of the Alps.
And across North
America, as the sun moves westward, activists in
Halifax, Canada, will "swim for survival" across
its bay to highlight rising sea levels, while
high-school students in Nashville, Tennessee, will
gather on a football field inundated by 2011's
historic killer floods.
In Portland,
Oregon, city dwellers will hold an
umbrella-decorating party to commemorate March's
record rains. In Bandelier, New Mexico,
firefighters in full uniform will remember last
year's record forest fires and unveil the new
solar panels on their fire station. In Miami,
Manhattan, and Maui, citizens will line streets
that scientists say will eventually be underwater.
In the high Sierra, on one of the glaciers
steadily melting away, protesters will unveil a
giant banner with just two words, a quote from
that classic of western children's literature, The
Wizard of Oz. "I'm Melting" it will say, in
letters three-stories high.
This is a
full-on fight between information and
disinformation, between the urge to witness and
the urge to cover-up. The fossil-fuel industry has
funded endless efforts to confuse people, to leave
an impression that nothing much is going on. But -
as with the tobacco industry before them - the
evidence has simply gotten too strong.
Once you saw enough people die of lung
cancer, you made the connection. The situation is
the same today. Now, it's not just the scientists
and the insurance industry; it's your neighbors.
Even pleasant weather starts to seem weird.
Fifteen thousand US temperature records were
broken, mainly in the East and Midwest, in the
month of March alone, as a completely
unprecedented heat wave moved across the
continent. Most people I met enjoyed the rare
experience of wearing shorts in winter, but they
were still shaking their heads. Something was
clearly wrong and they knew it.
The one
institution in our society that isn't likely to be
much help in spreading the news is... the news.
Studies show our papers and TV channels paying
ever less attention to our shifting climate. In
fact, in 2011 ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox spent twice
as much time discussing Donald Trump as global
warming. Don't expect representatives from
Saturday's Connect the Dots day to show up on
Sunday's talk shows.
Over the past three
years, those inside-the-Beltway extravaganzas have
devoted 98 minutes total to the planet's biggest
challenge. Last year, in fact, all the Sunday talk
shows spent exactly nine minutes of Sunday talking
time on climate change - and here's a shock: all
of it was given over to Republican politicians in
the great denial sweepstakes.
So here's a
prediction: next Sunday, no matter how big and
beautiful the demonstrations may be that we're
mounting across the world, "Face the Nation" and
"Meet the Press" won't be connecting the dots.
They'll be gassing along about Newt
Gingrich's retirement from the presidential race
or Mitt Romney's coming nomination, and many of
the commercials will come from oil companies lying
about their environmental efforts.
If
we're going to tell this story - and it's the most
important story of our time - we're going to have
to tell it ourselves.
Bill
McKibben, a TomDispatch regular, and the
author, most recently, of Eaarth: Making a
Life on a Tough New Planet, is the founder of
350.org, which is coordinating Saturday's Connect
the Dots day. You can find the event nearest you
by checking climatedots.org.
(Copyright 2012 Bill McKibben)
(Used by permission Tomdispatch.
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