Goodbye To Normal

(Please note: given the latest CDC guidelines, we intend to resume our physical Member Monday sessions in the library starting with MM 3/29 for those who have received their final vaccination at least two weeks prior; MMs 3/15 and 3/22 mark our final remote Zoom sessions . . . . my special thanks to Bud W., Maria, Peter, and Oak for having stood in as guest hosts during my absence)   

Riddle: How do you confront the truth of climate change when the very fact of letting it in risks toppling your sanity?

When it comes to a return to some sense of normal one usually thinks in terms of the pandemic. Time to get out and about, already. YOLO. Can't wait to meet up once again, maskless, at the club, take that deferred vacation, get married and have a child. We've deferred our lives enough already.

And, indeed, the background article (Goodbye To Normal) starts with a lament for our pre-Covid existence. But that's not its real point. Rather, the article's thrust is that the forced time-out afforded by the pandemic presents us with the opportunity, a unique chance, to really understand and internalize the fragility and transience of our collective existence. The insights thereby revealed about the meaning and consequences of "normal" allow us to pivot to our real subject: the radical shifts in behavior demanded in the face of climate change. 

The above-referenced article is labeled as background for it covers, in a very readable and succinct way, much of the material we've addressed in previous sessions e.g. the acceleration of warming trend assumptions, the resulting predicted consequences to our natural world, the need to develop a new ethos. All in all, though, the article addresses the head more than it punches the gut.

The focus article (Gut-Check Time), on the other hand, brings it all home. You will inhabit the world of a climate scientist who is both privileged and cursed to understand the depth of the problem. He is privileged by virtue of his pedigree credentials: Harvard and Columbia educated, a one-time astrophysicist, years spent at Nasa's JPL studying the reefs. He is cursed in that this 47-year-old Pasadena (near L.A.) resident and father of two teenage sons are obsessed. He has, as it's sometimes put, burned the boats when it comes to his own personal lifestyle commitment -- that is if you can call quasi dumpster diving and the installation of outdoor composting toilets in a suburban setting a lifestyle. If nothing else, you may be intrigued by the family dynamics which includes his long-suffering wife (also Harvard).

The easy reaction would be to write this man off as some crazy eccentric who's lost all touch with reality. A more thoughtful response, however, might be to ask whether it is we -- you know, us "normal" folks -- who are living in some alternate reality. 

And, if so, we might ask ourselves, once again, how do we confront the truth of climate change when the very fact of letting it in risks toppling our sanity? We might begin by picking up where we left off from our MM 3/8 discussion (hosted by Oak) with specific reference to the attached two-page summary of the interplay of Ecological Principles and Economics.