These days, even ostriches suffer from heat waves. More than 1,000 of them reportedly died from overheating on South African farms during a 2010 drought. As for American ostriches, the human variety anyway, at the moment it should be increasingly hard for them to avoid extreme-weather news.
After all, whether you're in sweltering heat, staggering drought, a record fire season, or a massive flood zone, most of us are living through weird weather this year. And if you're one of the lucky few not in an extreme-weather district of the USA, you still won't have a problem running across hair-raising weather stories, ranging from the possible loss of one out of every ten species on this planet by century's end to the increasing inability of the oceans to soak up more atmospheric carbon dioxide.
Then, of course, there are those other headlines. Here's a typical one: "As Water Rises, Florida Officials Sit on Their Hands" (a former member of the just abolished Florida Energy and Climate Commission points out that, thanks to Republican governor Rick Scott and the legislature in the part of the country most vulnerable to rising sea levels, "there is no state entity addressing climate change and its impact"). And here's another: "Economy Keeps Global Warming on the Back Burner for 2012" (American climate-change "skeptics" are celebrating because "the tide of the debate -- at least politically -- has turned in their favor" and "political experts say that... concerns over global warming won't carry much weight in the 2012 election"). And then there are the polls indicating Americans are confused about the unanimity of the scientific consensus on climate change, surprisingly dismissive of global-warming dangers, worry less about it than they did a decade ago, and of major environmental issues, worry least about it.
It's true, of course, that no weird-weather incident you experience can definitively be tied to climate change and other factors are involved. Still, are we a nation of overheating ostriches? It's a reasonable enough conclusion, and in a sense, not so surprising. After all, how does anyone react upon discovering that his or her way of life is the crucial problem, that fossil fuels, which keep our civilization powered up and to which our existence is tethered, are playing havoc with the planet?
Bill McKibben, author most recently of Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, is a man deeply committed to transforming us from climate-change ostriches to climate-change eagles. Perhaps it's time, he suggests, in his latest post, "Will North America Be the New Middle East?," for the environmental movement to get one heck of a lot blunter.
