openspace4life

"Take me where I am supposed to be,
To comprehend the things that I can't see."
- Melissa Etheridge, "I Need To Wake Up"

First it came for New Orleans
and I only spoke up a little
because I did not live in an area threatened by hurricanes.
(And anyway, science cautions against using any specific disaster as evidence for a global trend.)

Then it came for the Midwest and the Southeast
and I only mentioned it in passing
because I could easily afford to pay the increased food prices due to the floods and drought.
(And hey, it provided good data points to add to that trendline, so in the long run it's a good thing, right?)

Then it came for the mountain forests just north of where I lived
and I only spoke up about planting a few trees afterward
because I had lived through a worse brush with wildfires in 2003.
(By the way, my friend

firelizard5 wrote a really cool poem about the 2007 fires.)

Then it came for the Midwest again
and I did not speak up
because the Microsoft campus in Fargo made fun of us here in Redmond for having trouble with a few inches of snow, so they deserve it.
(Just kidding, of course.)

And someday it will come for me
and despite everything, I will not be prepared
because I will never have believed that it could.

I was moved to write a really bad imitation of Martin Niemöller's famous poetic statement by an image I encountered less than two hours ago, and wish I could have photographed: a small child peering out the window of the laundry room in my building, looking at the fire truck whose ladder was extended to the roof, while his parent/guardian, totally unconcerned, worked on transferring some clothes to the dryer. The firemen (and one firewoman) hadn't forced them or anyone else to evacuate, apparently, because they were pretty sure that the building wasn't really on fire. There was no smoke visible from outside, and all the smoke detectors were found to be untriggered, meaning the cause of the alarm wasn't even a typical stovetop flare-up, just some fault in the alarm system. But I talked to the guy operating the ladder, noting that some people had been wandering back into the building for awhile, and he basically said they should have been stopped because "pretty sure" simply isn't good enough.

The lesson here is that even climate skeptics should acknowlege that they might be wrong, and it might be a good idea to do something about that just in case. But on the other hand, it's all too understandable that we're reluctant to take action when we can't see that any given possibly-climate-related disaster affects us in any significant way.