As Harry trumps River Piracy, our planet is quietly collapsing
For the first time in modern history, a river changed direction almost overnight. This happened not by the awesome hand of God (or the wooden staff of Charlton Heston), but by the perfectly ordinary human hand of climate change.
In more scientific terms, news emerged this week that the gigantic Kaskawulsh Glacier in the Yukon has receded so extensively, its “meltwater” actually changed course. As a result, it is now flowing into an entirely different body of water. The scientists who made this discovery last summer call the water-rerouting phenomenon “River Piracy.”
River Piracy: it sounds like a really bad indie rock band listed in fine print at the bottom of a Coachella poster.
Unfortunately for Planet Earth, it’s an adverse environmental event of biblical proportions — an event that highlights just how suddenly and significantly climate change can afflict the world — and even more troubling, an event that is likely the consequence of human behaviour.
In other words, it’s big news. Big, bad news. Yet it doesn’t feel like it at all. Why is this? Because even though climate change is a problem routinely dubbed “The Issue of Our Time” by scientists, journalists and world leaders, it also happens to be an issue we appear to know and care very little about.
A river suddenly changing course for the first time in modern history is news that should provoke the kind of fiery Facebook rhetoric and debate that follows a Donald Trump Twitter tirade, but it doesn’t. Instead, it falls as flat as an arctic plain.
I’m not judging anybody here. I am just as guilty of ignoring The Issue of Our Time as the next person who absent-mindedly throws her apple core in the garbage can. The first time I read about the receding Kaskawulsh Glacier, I abandoned the story halfway through when my eyes caught another breaking news alert: “Prince Harry Reveals He Sought Counselling in Aftermath of Princess Diana’s Death.” If only Prince Harry lived at the bottom of a melting glacier. Perhaps we’d take a greater interest in the planet’s health if it were bound up in the health of the royal family.
Alas it is not. So, research shows, we keep on ignoring a global problem we deem too big and confusing to curtail. But why do we do this even in the face of disturbing environmental events? And what will it take to get us fired up about something called River Piracy? American social psychologist David Dunning says the prevailing barrier to mass interest in climate change is “presentism,” i.e., a preoccupation with the present moment.
“The major human tendency that often seems to be in play,” Dunning says, “is that people are much more interested in what’s happening now — today. Things that are more far off in the future, people have a harder time getting motivated about.”
Per Espen Stoknes, a Norwegian organizational psychologist who wrote a book about climate change apathy called What We Think About When We Try Not To Think About Global Warming, is of a similar mind.
“Global warming feels distant in time: the years given — 2050 and beyond, seem very far away,” Stoknes says. Climate change is also, for the most part, invisible to the average human being: “CO2 is colourless and odourless. If CO2 was a black ooze, we’d have solved it a long time ago.”
Glaciers may be melting right now, in present time, and sea levels might be rising in places like Florida and Bangladesh, but the end result — i.e. the cinematic catastrophe everyone fears — when the planet warms over and society collapses — isn’t projected to take place for decades. The general consensus then among regular people seems to be: “What’s one more runny ice block in the interim?”
Perhaps what’s needed in the quest to get society to care about something that won’t cause it massive grief for years to come is a universal rejection of “Presentism.”
Dunning and Stoknes are right: we love the present. But not only do we love the present, we live in a culture that has a near pathological obsession with it.
The cult of mindfulness, living in the moment, YOLO-ing, dispelling negative thoughts in favour of Good Vibes Only: this is our secular religion. It’s a religion that actively campaigns against thinking too much and too hard about what lies ahead.
And while this religion is a friend to the individual — especially the individual who’s just returned from a hard day’s work and would rather read about Prince Harry than River Piracy — it’s the enemy of long-term critical thinking and long-term change. Until we ditch the power of now, we’ll continue to live in the moment at the expense of the future. Emma Teitel is a national affairs columnist.