If you read this, you likely already know about this special number; it is, after all, at the core of the problem with climate change, and the reason why no amount of behavior grounded in ‘political reality’ will ever do anything useful. But, for the sake of things, let’s go over it. It is the number which identifies the amount of CO2-equivalent gas we can safely have in the atmosphere in order to retain a climate familiar to our species. It is an exceptionally important number because we’re already past it, at 390 parts per million and rising; the climate will warm measurably, desertification and polar melting will intensify, and the world in which homo sapiens has flourished will be gone, along with countless familiar races. Humanity will have set the stage for the next population explosion, and there is no promise that our descendants will be among the survivors.
Today is October 24; the day marked by the founder of 350.org as International Climate Action Day. It is a day meant to show that there is a strong movement around the globe that wants to cut emissions and drop them into the negatives, to give politicians the backing they need to motivate them to commit to strong goals and bind their nations to them. Already, as I write this, there have been many thousands of people demonstrating around the globe. Today is the day the global warming movement breaks into the spotlight, and it is already an incredible showing. I am heartened by the sheer energy being put forth by my fellow inhabitants of this small world, in defense of the only home we have.
Yet we must not stop here; this is merely a beginning, not a capstone. The future remains precariously in the balance. Climate change and resource peaks are the specters of my generation; from them come a vast number of ills, from the spread of tropical disease into new areas to the growing threat of an abject failure of the delivery systems that supply food, water, and much more to people everywhere. So, good reader, I ask this of you: participate, today. Tell the leaders of your government, whoever they may be, that they need to address the threat of climate change as if it were imminent nuclear armageddon. And then, tomorrow, take up your shovel, and find the nearest place offering food trees. Start planting them. Start learning skills that you can teach others, and share with both those currently alive and generations to come. Fight as hard as you can to find your way toward a zero-emission future, because the lives of all things alive today depend on that goal.
Demonstrate today, because the aid of the political machine would be immeasurably beneficial. But tomorrow, on the 25th, don’t sit back down. Keep to your feet, and take up your shovels, your pyrolysis kilns, your seeds and your saplings, and take the war for the future in your own hands. Do it for your descendants, do it for the wild world, do it for yourself. You, a normal person, can shape the future.
Mister Goose, it is time to wake up. We can keep the world from being cooked, but we need your help.
