Let me start by giving credit where credit is due. This is a punchy and effective bit of expression. With six letters and one number positioned in a certain space at a certain time for maximum ironic impact, an opinionated citizen was able to make an unmistakably strong statement. And leaving aside the violence done to an innocent pin oak, I have no problem with this kind of gesture. Every voice makes the discourse more robust. In theory, anyway. As a big fan of the First Amendment, I feel I have to appreciate all forms of self-expression in the name of philosophical consistency if nothing else. The problem with a broad, permissive personal philosophy, though, is the ease with which it can be exploited.
Snarky faux-grief over a nail in a tree aside (not to mention the impressions I’ve made on most people who’ve come within my orbit, especially in The College Years), I am not a knee-jerk spotted-owl-hugger. I just like to see people conduct themselves with a modicum of forethought and evenhandedness. I eat meat, but I could probably stand to eat less of it, though I will never give it up completely as long as it’s an option. (Again, The College Years: I tried. It didn’t take.) I want to live in a world that has viable coral reefs and rainforests, but I also want everyone in the world to be able to live in a stable structure with clean drinking water, and there has to be some compromise between unspoiled wilderness and habitable development to make that happen. I believe in the power of extremist factions to push the great middle mass down a sensible, sustainable route. Sometimes I find myself walking that best-of-both-worlds path of splitting-the-difference, and sometimes I ramble out to the fringes of one side to counterbalance something on the other, but in the end it all amounts to the same thing.
That said, the latest frenzy over global warming controversies drives me fucking insane. Apparently no matter how much I try to explain that “all things in moderation” is my middle name, I will always come across as belligerently bleeding-heart on matters environmental because I am fastidious about sorting the recycling (what a waste of time!) and because I feel the number of wildlife sanctuaries that should be protected by the government from oil drilling is non-zero (what an unpatriotic dope!) and so on. Apparently what I see as a great wide field of possibilities with everyone basically marching in the same direction, others see as two very narrow paths separated by a howling abyss. I am willing to concede that we don’t yet know everything there is to know about the impact of human development on the planet’s overall health. I will readily grant that there are more scenarios available to us than “go organic or die”. All I ask in return is that anyone disagreeing with me about the exact execution of our stewardship of the earth at least nod to the fact that we are having some undesirable effects on the biosphere and we should be taking some responsibility for it. Everything else is just details. But I am consistently surprised and saddened by the sheer number of people who retreat all the way back to “NOOOOOOOOO! We are having no effects on the environment! We don’t need to do anything different! Science is dumb! Everything different from my lazy self-interested preconceived notions is dumb!”
Or words to that effect.
And the extra ladling of gall-sauce (for me, at least) comes from the fact that a lot of it comes down to semantics. Environmental science is complicated. You would be hard-pressed to distill every chain of events cascading from every human action every day throughout our planet-wide atmosphere and oceans and land biomes down to a few hundred pages of comprehensible text. And we are not exactly a society of readers., so scientists have the impossible task of coming up with a soundbite that gets the idea across. This was probably doomed to fail no matter what. As it happened, the exact way that it failed was that they settled on the expression “global warming” to encapsulate these mind-bogglingly intricate patterns of human causes and damaging effects. One frightening hallmark of these effects, a rise in overall average temperatures, became the namesake. And the curse of the movement towards awareness and respect.
Because soundbite-addicted morons can’t be counted on to remember why we say things a certain way or what meanings would be elaborated on if a person had more than five seconds to convey an idea. They just rely on their own interpretations. So people began to think of global warming not as “gradual but deleterious rise in overall average worldwide temperatures over time” but as “every year hotter than the last”. And then the signal degraded further, into something along the lines of “too warm to snow. EVER.”
I’m not so obtusely pedantic that I don’t get the social conventions of conversation. If Monday the mercury doesn’t climb above 25° F, and on Tuesday it gets up to 30° F, and I say “Hey, it’s really warming up outside!” you then have every right to slug me for missing the point even though I’m technically correct. But seriously, how hard is it to understand the flipside, that science isn’t expected to have a loose conversational feel to it? That science is in fact supposed to be technically correct (and even pedantic)? “Global warming” was never intended to mean “not just a slightly higher reading on the thermometer but warm enough to wear shorts in the winter.” And that’s not even getting into averages over long periods of time, where you can simultaneously have a record-setting coldest day for January and yet also the warmest winter in decades. (That’s, like, Stats 102, so forget that noise.)
I’ve heard scientists talk about the potential effects of global warming (or, more recently, “climate change” which is a little better for trying to sidestep all of the above confusion, but too little too late) and I’ve heard them mention melting polar ice caps and rising sea levels and more frequent hurricane disasters and summer droughts damaging crops and all manner of eco-outrage. I have never once heard them allude to mid-Atlantic states experiencing snow-free winters. But I’ve lost count of how many times this month I’ve overheard people saying they want to rub Al Gore’s lying face in the impressive snowbanks on either side of their driveway.
And so even though I strive for compromise and commonality, I can’t help but feel like I’m surrounded by enemies. Their credo, as I understand it, is “There is no way that the average global temperature is fractionally but steadily increasing over time due to continually more common man-made pollutants. No possible way. Because where I live got two feet of snow in a single storm. QED so suck it.” And I don’t even know how to engage with that. Because the awful truth is that it sounds right. It can be condensed down to a CO2 HOAX sign hung over a pile of evidence and it touches a “hey, yeah!” nerve. It’s not right, not when you seriously think it through, and the various ways in which it’s not right can be explained to someone who might be confusing the semantics, but that takes time. And in what passes for discourse at this moment of our civilization, the side that needs time and reflection and understanding to explain itself will usually lose, and the side that has a catchy buzzword will usually win. Right and wrong has little if anything to do with it. The human-nature tendency to cheer on the scoring of cheap points is why so many axe-grinding assholes win so many debates, even though most people when asked would probably say they do not want to live in a world ruled by axe-grinding assholes.
The ugly flipside is that less information conveyed requires more information to be interpreted and extrapolated, and increases the chances for misunderstanding astronomically. Conversely, the more information laid out at the outset should (again, as always, in theory) minimize the chances for misunderstanding. Most of my life I’ve tested other people’s patience with my insistence on backing up and explaining things and elaborating on points and saying the same things over and over again with only the slightest variation of shades of meaning. This probably comes across as classic overthinking most of the time, but the deeper motivation has always been a fear of my words being misconstrued and a desperate attempt to avoid such a fate. (Words are, like, my thing, man.) When what I say fails to properly execute my intent, that’s my downfall. Just in case you were wondering where multi-thousand-word blog posts come from some times.
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