As our climate changes, more and more people ask themselves “Where is it safe?” No place on earth is free from potential natural disasters, no part of our interconnected planet is unscathed by the effects of climate change. Many climatologists differ in their opinions on where the climate will best sustain human life as our planet continues to warm and experience greater extremes of temperature, wildfire, super storms, flooding, ice melt, drought.
I was the ripe young age of 17, a college freshman sitting in a lecture hall of 300 people when I first heard the concept of carbon offsets. I couldn’t help but wonder at the concept of “karmic offsets.” The way we try to cap and trade harm done to our air and ozone layer, might we also do the same for the ways we harm each other, ourselves, the natural world.
Migration is part of human history, often forced by political forces, poverty, searching for opportunity. The Syrian refugee crisis, while it had a political aspect, was largely motivated by crop failure caused by drought. One of the factors that pushes Guatemalan people to leave the land and subsistence farming to head toward the US border is crop failures due to drought and weather extremes.
Dante famously said “the urge to create is the same as the urge to destroy.” So much of our literature and pop culture stories are apocalyptic that climate fiction now a genre section unto itself at the bookstore.
Philip Zimbardo, who was behind the Stanford Prison Experiments of the 70s, found that when he took a group of college students and put them into a prison environment, within a matter of days, the guards became sadistic and the prisoners hostile. His later work found that people are just as capable of selfless, heroic action, if you give them a chance to be heroes. Jane McGonigal, author of Reality is Broken, posits that the reason there is an exodus from the real world to the virtual world is that games give people a chance to make a difference, to borrow a phrase from the tech world “to make an impact.”
I wish I had answers to offer. This set of interviews and writing is my attempt, however small, to “make an impact,” to not turn away from the problem, and to continue to seek solutions.
