Living in Interesting Times

What am I looking for in your first blog entry? Well, we’re working here on telling a story about an issue of interest to you in world politics, and a place to begin that story is with how and why you’re interested in this issue. I’m interested in how we create stories about politics and create narratives that either empower or disempower us in relation to the pressing political issues of the day. Why do we get involved? Why not?

These narratives have to start with some account of why we care in the first place. In order for anyone to be engaged in politics you have to have some level of concern and/or interest in things like global poverty, climate change, genocide, or fair trade. Where does this come from, and what kind of stories do we tell about this kind of concern?

To give you a sense of what I might like to see, I’ll sketch a bit of my own story about my current interest in climate change and international environmental issues. This isn’t any easy question to answer. There are all sorts of things that might explain why I was drawn in that direction: my mother and older sister were interested in political issues (the Vietnam War, the plight of Native Americans), my Dad read me stories about knights who actions were governed by a strict moral code, and I had experienced injustice myself a few times as a child. But, for whatever reason, from an early age I felt the need to help, to do the right thing, and to be engaged politically. Part of this seems to relate to one’s willingness to empathize with others—to feel their pain, as they say--and this was part of my experience growing up as well.

I was also interested in big political issues from the time I first read about the holocaust, and later when I learned about the nuclear arms race and the huge arsenal of weapons the U.S. had accumulated over the years. These were huge, potentially apocalyptic events, and they frightened me as well. The huge stockpiles of nuclear weapons struck me as just insane, and I worked for a few years on trying to understand why we had these horrible things, and what we might be able to do to reduce the chances of them being used.

More recently I’ve become interested in environmental issues, in part because of living and working near to the Mississippi River (as a really cool river that needs a lot of cleaning up), and in part from what I’ve learned about climate change, and in part from my long-standing love of the natural world. Growing up, I loved being outdoors, and often went camping, traveling, and at times living out in the wilderness, experiencing the wonder and amazement of “nature.” I valued the preservation of the parts of the world that were relatively unaffected by humans and also found many aspects of modern, industrial society very unpleasant and destructive.

And climate change now appears to be an issue that has the potential to really shake up our world, and I find that prospect both intriguing and disturbing. I would argue that we are in the midst of the end of the fossil-fuel age, and becoming increasing aware of the impact of that age on the health of our ecosystems. The scientific evidence appears to telling us that we are in the midst of dramatically changing our environment. To avoid some really pretty bleak consequences, we will have to change our whole way of life. Either that or the scientists are really, really wrong (and I don’t think they are). Probably what we’ll get is a mix of the two: not the worst of the environmental changes that people are predicting and not the total transformation of our economy, but I’m guessing we will be seeing some big changes in each. We’ll make some very large changes in how we run our economy, but it is very unlikely that we will make them in time to avert fairly dramatic changes in the earth’s climate. Some pretty dramatic shifts—in things like temperature, rainfall, rising sea levels, species extinctions, crop failures, severe storms, tropical diseases that will have a disproportionate impact on the world’s poorest people—will likely happen. The more we do now to reduce our global ecological footprint, the less severe the future damage, but it’s an open question as to how much will do. That’s part of why I’m interested in understanding this question of why people get involved in these large political issues.

To get a sense of the scope of this, take two facts that are fairly certain—First, according to the vast majority of the scientific community (the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change or IPCC), if our global temperature rises more than 2 degrees Celsius, we will suffer “massive and irreversible damage” that will cost the world millions of lives and many trillions of dollars in damages. Second, that in order to avoid this outcome, by 2050 (forty years from now) we need to reduce our carbon emissions down to 20% of the amount we were emitting in 1990. Now try to get your head around a world in which we burn 20% or less of what we did in 1990. Right now, our fuel consumption is increasing, not decreasing at all. To cut out 80% of our current fossil-fuel consumption will require nothing short of an eco-energetic revolution (a fundamental shift in how we power our economic activity).

On top of that, this means that in effect almost all the oil, gas, and coal we burn between now and then needs to go into creating the post-fossil fuel economy (renewable energy infrastructure), which means that all the things we use fossil fuel for now will need to be given lower priority than this process of transitioning.

And is that going to happen without a fight? Just ask GM, Ford, the coal companies, the aluminum industry (that require huge amounts of cheap electricity), the chemical companies (that need lots of energy and hydrocarbons to create their plastic), the lumber companies, and all the people that like huge homes, huge cars, air travel, and who think that global warming is just a weird left-wing conspiracy cooked up by people who want to raise taxes. We are in for a big fight, and the stakes and transformations at hand could hardly be larger.

For those who say they want to live in interesting times, you got your wish.

So, what sort of issues do you find interesting? Is there anything from your life experience so far that draws you to that issue? What about the issue interests you? What questions do you have about it? What would you like to find out that you might be able to use in your own life?