Sorry, You Gotta Show Up

Mixing up the ABCs.

The occasion is Bridge to a Cool Planet, which will likely be British Columbia’s largest event marking the International Day of Climate Action. Expect drummers, people dressed up in polar bear costumes, dudes on stilts and unicycles, and lots of off-key improvised call-and-response singing and chanting.

It’s the kind of gaggle-of-people-holding-signs event that, once upon a time, I would have driven on past without even blinking. But this time, I’ll be on the other side of the windshield. And you should be, too.

After the jump: Five reasons why you should circle October 24 on your calendar—no matter where you live—and plan to join all the cool kids who will be calling for their leaders to finally get with the program.
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Collapse Anxiety: It’s Okay to Feel It

I’ve never been so good at the whole relentless optimism thing. So I’ll just come out and admit it: I’m feeling pretty anxious these days. It’s an odd twinge in my gut telling me that—despite the assurances from economists who swear up and down that “these things are cyclical”—that the present situation feels more “cyclone” than “cycle.”

Who among us can honestly keep a smile plastered on when the earth is heaving so mightily underfoot?

Oh, I know, I know, I’m supposed to keep a laser focus on solutions. It’s the only productive response to all this. There’s no shortage of good ideas out there, important goals to work toward, and, thank god, at least one gushing firehose of hope to sip from.

But can I propose we ditch the talking points for a moment, and allow ourselves to feel terrified.

Because the current “correction” feels more like a sudden and dramatic contraction, a massive pandemic stitch, the first few nanoseconds of a star going supernova. It’s the sound of a paradigm breaking. Let’s call our associated collective “oh-shit” response what it is, folks: collapse anxiety.

If there’s wiggle room to feel good here, it’s knowing that we’ll emerge on the other side with a much-improved society. It has to get worse before it can get vastly better.  Like the prez says, “we will rebuild” and make something much better, a place of greater understanding, sensitivity, awareness, happiness. A place where we define prosperity based on something other than profit. We’ll get there. But there’s no harm, I’d argue, in a good scream on the way down.

Combatting CO-Tuneout

Here’s my latest mini-essay on The Huffington Post, “Combatting CO-Tuneout“…

Do you know how much carbon that quick Google search just kicked up? Or the atmospheric price of that orange juice?

Me neither. In fact — even though I theoretically stay on top of this stuff for a living — I don’t care.

Evidently I’m an odd man out, though. It seems like every other week, another one of these “did you know” carbon-audit nuggets sweeps through the blogosphere. Unburdened by context, propelled and perpetuated via retweet and the Facebook share button, we read them and pass them along for the same reason that we like to pause to look at car wrecks; morbid pleasure.

These eco-snippets do little except underscore that we need to reinvent even the most mundane aspects of everyday life. Which explains why they generally lead to one of two reactions amongst those who receive them, neither of which are particularly productive.

The first response is temporary paralysis (”Damn, even YouTube is killing us!?”). The second is perhaps more dangerous: Apathy, which takes the form of a creeping climate-change ennui that I call “CO-Tuneout” — a mashup of “CO2″ and “tune-out.”

It’s the eye-roll reflex. “Oh, God, I’m so sick of hearing about carbon,” you might be muttering to yourself. “Can we please talk about something else?”

We can. And I have a few suggestions: How about values? Maybe ingenuity, and collaboration, and volunteerism? Maybe we can start planning a food garden for this year — where, I assure you, the low-hanging fruit tastes far sweeter than a defrosted can of Five Alive.

That said, some numbers are important to keep in the back of your mind: The mileage of your car is a useful one. And let’s not forget 350, perhaps the most important sum of them all.

But let’s stop rehashing disassociated noise that adds about as much value to the climate conversation as Tyra Banks.

We’ve already changed our leadership — and it was a long time coming. Now let’s change our attitudes to match the task that lies ahead. It’s crunch time, folks. Let’s stop seeing baggage in everything around us, and instead focus attention where it really matters: The big picture.

Orange juice photo by BettyBL.