by Mike Bendzela
I lie on a futon in a little room tucked in a turret of an old funeral home-turned-apartment building in Binghamton, New York, listening to election returns coming in over my clock radio. It is a Tuesday night in 1984, the year of Orwell’s never-ending fever dream. Madonna and Prince and Michael and Bruce play incessantly on the radio between election reports. The unfolding AIDS epidemic is a thing no one wants to talk about: A friend, a PhD candidate in poetry, is sick in faraway Florida, but none of us in the department even knows about it yet. He will be dead in six months.
I am a year into my stint in graduate school. (Two years will be more than enough for me.) The path to my master’s degree in English has been a circuitous one, even tortuous: As an undergraduate, I started out in geology with a little climatology, detoured into art and design for two years, then ended up studying American literature. But I have never lost my love of the Earth sciences.
Ronald Reagan, at 73, is the oldest candidate ever to run for election — or, in this case, re-election — as President of the United States, against . . . What’s his name again? This election marks (I firmly believe) our last chance as a civilization to change course and sail towards a Green Future, an inkling of which we saw with President Jimmy Carter. I do not know if What’s-his-name is the answer, but we all know Reagan ain’t. One term could be a fluke. A second, collective suicide.
Several months hence, the great science communicator, Carl Sagan, will say to the United States Senate, “If you don’t worry about it now, it will be too late later on.”* His talk is a plea to those in power to start controlling carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels. The concentration of atmospheric CO2 in 1984 is 344 parts per million and the global temperature anomaly a barely noticeable +0.40° Celsius.* Carbon dioxide concentration MUST be kept below 350 ppm, or the planet will heat up, creating havoc. And there are other pollutants to worry about. And also oil depletion, deforestation, ocean acidification, wildlife habitat loss, over-population. A collapsing civilization does not seem far-fetched.
False alarm! It is Morning in America.*
During Reagan’s first term, when reporters shouted him questions about what he was going to do about AIDS, about the poor, about global warming, about environmental degradation, the President cupped his hand to his ear and tilted his head, as if to say, Damned hearing aids! He is an adorable old man who looks super on TV, and he is very upbeat and very, very popular.
At last, the final numbers are announced . . . “525 electoral votes for Reagan, and 13 for” —
I lean over and slap the OFF button of my clock radio.
November 6, 1984 is the exact day my faith in politics evaporates. There is no reason to pay attention to these fools anymore, now that they’ve committed us to a path of ecological catastrophe. I will still vote, and I will give scraps of attention to the perpetual smog masquerading as news, but I do not have a television and never will, and I count myself lucky to live as I wish, away from the cacophony, among my plants, my animals, and my sturdy husband. It’s easy to let go of those immense global issues that are so beyond an individual’s control. It’s a simple matter of remaining vigilant in tuning out the noise.
Every election since that time has seemed empty, the candidates shallow and unserious, the issues meagre or beside the point (because they have nothing to do with preserving the planet), and the voters terribly misled. Reagan’s coiffured TV-talking-head of distraction has found its apotheosis in Trump, whose trick for monopolizing the vacuous gaze of the media is no secret: Plant your big, yammering face squarely in front of their faces, by any means necessary, leaving no room for the media to cover the global crisis. But we have not escaped Sagan’s admonition.
During the recent campaign, who bothered to bring up the 422 parts per million of atmospheric CO2 this year, a 23% increase since 1984, meaning the safe limit of 350 was breached long ago?
Who pointed out that a critical threshold has just been passed, a +1.5° C (2.7° F) global yearly average temperature anomaly, for the first time in hundreds of thousands of years?*
Which candidate addressed extreme North Atlantic sea temperatures, deranged jetstreams and consequent deluges, record low annual sea ice extents, escalating wildfires, and spiking methane emissions this year, forty years after Sagan’s warning?
Neither one. The campaign was all trash talk interspersed with happy talk.
If Sagan was right, these elections are all for nought. “Too late” means just that: There’s not a damned thing we can do about it.
When facing a bad time–and right now things aren’t looking so good–we may at least find a smidgen of consolation in recognizing that this is yet small beer compared to what’s to come.
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