Abstract
Climate change presents a dilemma. On the one hand, the effects of global warming will be devastating: rising sea levels could displace hundreds of millions of people, and flooding and desertification could wipe out entire habitats and species. On the other hand, such scenarios are decades away. Although human beings have to act now to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases, the imminence of the threat remains remote.
Are people capable of making sacrifices today to protect generations that have not yet been born? Decades ago, the late philosopher Norman Care described the reluctance to confront long-term environmental threats as the “motivation problem.” Contemporary society, he pessimistically concluded, shares no “community bond” with future persons, no “sense of belonging to some joint enterprise.”
In this issue of the Bulletin, Bill McKibben–the noted author of such books as The End of Nature and Deep Economy–sounds a more hopeful note. He suggests that we've mistaken our consumer-centric culture for “the whole of humanity and, in so doing, have limited our sense of the possibilities for real change.” McKibben points to anthropological evidence that “most people in most cultures have had something other than their own selves close to the center of their identity.” He sees as a positive sign the growing number of grassroots activists who have taken time from their daily lives to protest the insufficient efforts to mitigate climate change.
The general public might be even more motivated to confront the problem if they had a better sense of how global warming would affect their own communities. In fact, researchers undertook such an effort seven years ago when they published the National Assessment on the potential impacts of climate change on various regions across the United States. It was a pioneering study that grew out of conversations between scientists and regional stakeholders–farmers, hunters, ranchers, fishermen, local activists, businesspeople, mayors, and other elected officials.
However, as Chris Mooney–Washington correspondent for Seed magazine–reports, global warming skeptics teamed with industrial lobbyists and the Bush administration to delegitimize and suppress the National Assessment, despite a strong endorsement from the National Academy of Sciences. What's more, the White House has evaded a congressional mandate to produce a follow-up assessment that would utilize the most up-to-date modeling techniques and data. Mooney cites the National Assessment process as “a model of how democratic governments can and should do science–in interaction with their people, in the service of their people.” He further warns, “Without a nationally coordinated effort to study and communicate these types of impacts, U.S. communities cannot be expected to prepare in anything beyond a haphazard fashion.”
“When the waters begin rising, that will not be enough.