The folks at Audubon Magazine, who recently sought my thoughts for a special issue on global warming, also asked me and six other people engaged on making progress on different facets of the issue what our “personal strategies are for keeping pessimism at bay.”
Click here for contributions from the others, including the long-distance climate campaigner Bill McKibben, the climate scientist Heidi Cullen and two biologists from the San Diego Zoo Institute for Conservation Research. Here’s my contribution (the version posted by Audubon was necessarily shortened to fit with the others):
The challenges ahead are truly daunting, but I see encouraging news on both social and ecological fronts. Here are just two. There’s a growing body of evidence that species in vulnerable situations are far more able to withstand or adjust to climate extremes than once thought — from California butterflies to Pacific corals, if given some space and limiting other pressures. The new International Union on Conservation of Nature report on Caribbean coral conservation described great opportunities to protect reefs with fairly simple steps, even as it found climate change to be less of a threat than some feared.
As for social progress, if a small Philippine island community can move ahead with family planning projects amid opposition from the Catholic Church, as Sam Eaton reported so effectively recently, anything is possible.
As for personal sustainability, I’m always “skating away on the thin ice of a new day,” as Jethro Tull so aptly put it way back when I was a freshman in college. It’s tough, particularly in the 24/7 media environment. For me, my music and songwriting are the main tonic, directing my energies to themes that journalism doesn’t cover much. But it’s hard to find time even for that these days. That’s when the walks in the woods out our door come in. But, of course, even there I end up stumbling on issues that must be blogged — like the new face of litter in the 21st century. Where’s my guitar?!