Climate change forces us to take a new look at our future expectations
When Saturday evening social conversation a few weeks ago turned to books, I made a mental note to purchase a novel that friends had enjoyed.
Just because I could, I used my phone’s Amazon app to order it before retiring that night. When we returned home from church services the next morning, a parcel sat propped against our front door.
The book ordered a few hours earlier had arrived. We’ve paid for an Amazon Prime account for a couple years now, so I am accustomed to “free,” guaranteed, two-day delivery. This kind of speed, however, seemed not only surprising, but strange, excessive, even spooky. How far had this book traveled overnight? Who had delivered it on a Sunday morning, and with what sense of urgency?
If nothing else, I had a better sense of why I never complete my daily exercise walks through quiet, low-traffic neighborhoods without seeing at least a couple delivery vans, usually sporting the Amazon logo, at any and every hour. We want what we want when we want it, and because we can, we get it. All this convenience is never “free,” however, as events of the past week have dramatically demonstrated — again.
Amazon Prime customers pay fees for free delivery long before they place orders, but the full cost of this and many other conveniences fall on populations easy to overlook, or far away in space and time.
A New York Times story this week describes the harried lives of those myriad delivery van drivers as well as the grief and emptiness in the lives of family members whose loved ones those drivers have occasionally, accidentally, and inevitably killed in their weariness and haste. Amazon cleverly insulates itself from legal liability for these costs, so Prime’s annual fee is actually much larger than it appears. Sadly, it falls on plenty of folks who have never received a delivery.
The Bahamas, which Hurricane Dorian’s brutal assault devastated perhaps irreparably, has a relatively insignificant carbon footprint, so although it contributes almost nothing to climate change and the rising, warming seas that spawn monster storms, its people will pay the biggest, and in some cases ultimate, price.
All over the planet, island and coastal populations not already forced to relocate find themselves on the brink of homelessness thanks to rising oceans and assailants like Dorian. Curiously, we hear more about the diminishing habitat for animals in polar regions than about displaced human populations, but except for a few concerned individuals and groups, we haven’t yet summoned the resolve to do anything focused and national in scope that might address this crisis. Even calling it a “crisis” is controversial, and for sure, we won’t be taking in coastland refugees.
Do I prove myself a hypocrite if I don’t forthwith renounce Amazon Prime and all its works and ways, and next time I want a book, ride my bicycle to my town’s lone remaining bookstore (a chain store at that) and ask folks there to order it for me? Probably.
However, even if I did swear off the swooping smiley arrow, a host of other daily, unavoidable actions and decisions adversely affect the lives of people I will never see or know, so at the very least, it behooves individuals like me not to hold up my way of life as one capable of saving humankind from itself.
We can no longer afford leaders who won’t admit that our environmental circumstances have reached a crisis point that demands a focused response.
Unless, of course, we’re ready for the day when Amazon needn’t deliver anything besides oxygen masks and life preservers.