We Seem to Be Making a Herculean Effort to Get to First Base

Imagine you're a baseball player and your only focus is to make it to first base.   Not second, not third, not home plate.  Just first, that's it.   All of your aspirations begin and end at first base.

That sounds pretty stupid, doesn't it?  What's the point of showing up at the park at all?   You're not going to be helping your team.  You won't be doing much for the fans either.   And what of those eager batters who come up after you?   What are they going to do if you won't budge from first base?

Yet that's just about our approach to this whole climate change business.  That's our focus, first base.   In the greater scheme of the planet's existential environmental and social challenges, we're absorbed in just getting to first base.

You see, we're all about emissions.   We have to get greenhouse gas emissions under control, or so we're told.   We even set targets for reducing emissions by this percentage of that volume by this year or that, usually far off in the future.   But the problem isn't emissions.   The problem is emitters - the people, the industry, the economies, the societies, the governments that make and consume and waste and discard all the stuff that generates those emissions.  It's like chasing your own shadow.

We get caught in this trap because we take global warming in isolation.   We make it first base and, in that way, forget all about second and third and home plate.

What about all those other bases, all the other challenges?  Getting to first doesn't solve them.  In fact, getting to first is pretty much meaningless if we don't also enact efforts to get to the rest.   Let's deal with just a few such as over-consumption, over-population and global inequality.   Getting a handle on emissions - sort of, maybe, eventually - isn't going to resolve those other challenges but, without resolving them, getting emissions under control is essentially meaningless.

Just as the problem with emissions is really the emitters, so too the problem with these other challenges has to be the over-consumers, the over-procreators and the powerful and wealthy who think it's just fine to eat their own and everyone else's lunch.    And we're not just stealing from each other, we're stealing the future from generations yet to appear.

Over the years, readers of this blog have been challenged to consider a variety of critical, potentially existential problems and identify the common threads that run through them all.   Here's a more or less complete list:  global warming and associated impacts including severe storm events of increasing intensity and frequency; sustained, severe droughts and floods and, in some places, cyclical drought and flooding; sea level rise and salinization of coastal habitats; air, soil and water contamination of every sort; species extinction and depletion including the collapse of global fisheries; resource depletion and exhaustion including deforestation and desertification; the freshwater crisis and groundwater exhaustion; species migration; disease and pest migration and expansion; overpopulation and population migration; and various spreading security threats including inequality, food insecurity, water insecurity, land grabs, global terrorism, resource wars, regional arms races and nuclear proliferation.

So, find any common threads?   Can you see how one problem can compound so many others?   Can you see that these are symptoms of a common disease?  Can you see the outright futility in focusing on one symptom instead of fighting the disease itself?  Can you see that we, all of us, are the contagion that underlies all of these symptoms?