So, it seems that the world is ending. And I really don’t want to sound narcissistic, but all of humanity coming to an end is the sort of thing that could only happen to me.
So how did it come to this? It seemed like only last century we were really getting our act together. We’d had electricity installed, sorted out our global finances, and finally had Perth built. Things were really looking up. It felt like all of humanity…nay, all of Creation, had been put in place purely for our benefit. We were the pinnacle of all possible achievement, and all that was left was a bit of refining here and there. You know, faster Internet, a slightly bigger space program, a new building or two for Perth.
We were very confident of our place in the world. Too confident. We continued burning through natural resources such as oil, coal and immigrants without any sense of restraint. And then the doomsaying began. Those observing our behaviour with objective eyes told us that these resources would either run out or kill us or both. Unlike the most earnest of American 1950s science fiction movies, we did not all run screaming in the streets, terrified by the imminent destruction of the planet. Like the most dour of Swedish 1950s existential movies, we just stared back blankly. It was simply too difficult a concept to grasp.
After all, we’d been fine up until now, hadn’t we? Precedent suggested we would continue to expand and expand with no real tangible effects, save for the occasional extinction of a flightless bird.
This was, of course, the same irrefutable logic often employed by smokers: “These things haven’t killed me yet, so, given I’ve never died once from several decades-worth of smoking, I am statistically immortal.”
Of course, there’s still debate about how much the world is ending and how much we’re responsible, in the same way that there’s still a debate over which is bigger, Miley Cyrus or Greenland. (Teen magazines say Miley. Geographers say Greenland. You decide.) There’s a small contingent of naysayers who will almost certainly be the ones fiddling as Rome burns, a sentence you wouldn’t right now be giggling at if you’d bothered to pay attention in History class. Honestly.
When I try to figure out the divide between the two schools of thought – or rather, the divide between the school of thought and the building of saying things loudly – I see one side being led by very smart people who have spent years studying this sort of thing, and the other being led by those who really wish this sort of thing wasn’t happening. I can’t help but feel that we really all belong in the same group.
Right now, I’m working on this article because today I was supposed to be working on the other side of town, but my car has been making strange noises and smells. As someone who himself often makes strange noises and smells, I naturally only become concerned when I notice it in others. Particularly if those others are my primary form of transportation.
My current car conundrum leaves me with two competing feelings. The primary feeling is one of dread, fear and denial. I do not want my car to be sick, because taking it in for repairs means I’ll be subjected to many days of using the public transportation system I so often praise because I don’t have to use it. Then, at the end of it, I’ll be confronted by a man covered head-to-toe in engine oil. Instead of cleaning him and sending him back out to sea as Greenpeace taught me, I’ll instead give him All The Money I Have in order to get my life back to Basically Operational.
This denial is strong. It’s much like the thought I had when I first noticed my brakes were squealing whenever I tried to use them. “Oh, I should really get the pads replaced,” thought I, thirteen months ago. I swear, I’ll do it any day now.
But there’s another part of me, the objective, observational one that divorces itself from my emotions and says, “Hey, all those things the engine is doing, the rattling, the odd odours, the frequent overheating… those could mean something bad.”
And so, I face a fundamentally human contradiction: something bad is happening, but I don’t want it to be happening! But, is this really a contradiction? This is generally the reaction we have to all bad things in the world. It’s a recognised stage of grief, denial, right between “anger” and “phoning a mechanic”.
With my car spluttering in the garage (or preparing to splutter, obviously I don’t leave it idling whilst I write, though if I did that could explain where the problems are coming from), I have more sympathy – or, at least, more empathy – for both sides of the climate change debate.
I can, of course, relate to the people controlled by their rational observations of the world, but I feel I can also relate to the ones who really, really wish it wasn’t happening. And the truth is that the two sides aren’t that far apart: nobody wishes it was happening. The actual divide is defined by how much we let our id control the debate.
But for me, it’s time to finally get my car repaired. If nothing else, I will take comfort in the fact that the reparation of my pollution-emitting vehicle will serve, in this context, as a symbol for the environmental lobby. How’s that for a contradiction?
Image credit: Kathryn Sprigg
