Or... "Moving Away From This Kind of Imagery Without Avoiding The Truth Of It Seems Like The Single Most Important Thing We Can Do'
Joe Romm is sounding the alarm, again, this time in conjunction with the LA Times, and it's about Australia, which is, increasingly, uninhabitable.
I grew up in Tucson, Arizona, and moved not just because Tucson is boring and I hate being hot, but because there's no permanent source of water anymore, and I couldn't see myself getting comfortable when I couldn't count on my next shower. So I get it. I understand from personal experience that the deserts of the world are in big trouble, because they are really fragile ecosystems. And I want to slap Joe Romm's hysterical-sounding face anyway.
Get a fucking grip, Joe! Stop scaring people! I am not saying this because I don't believe you but because I do! You are not helping!
When I read Joe Romm these days I want to ask him if he's ever been in a real emergency before. Real emergencies require calm, collected, strong and optimistic action. Romm has the facts, but he's not providing the leadership required to get anyone on board. I can't imagine anyone but an adrenaline junky or a misanthrope reading this article. Not the narrow demographic you want to reach if you really want to do something about the problem.
Here's my question for everyone engaged in the environmental movement: Is a detailed list of all the apocalyptic things that are going to happen a good way to get anyone on board any cause?
For the good of the planet, I call on Joe Romm to hire a brilliant and honest PR person, who will take every single post he writes and turn it into a few different posts for a few different audiences. This message needs to be shaped into a positive story about stewardship. A story about Australia turning into a dustbowl-slash-hellhole is so important that it needs to be sitting on a strong armature of actions that can be done about it. These actions must be serious, achievable and positive--no sitting in the dark for an hour. No getting rid of your refrigerator. No spending tons of money.
If we really want to solve the climate change problem, then there should be no story about climate change that doesn't make that journey from planetary to individual scale--that links your call to your senators, your composting and your choice to ride a bike instead of drive to a volume of people who are similarly making that decision, and that links that volume of people to fixing the problem. Visually. With a simple graph.
Nobody is going to listen unless they can do something.
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