Repost from normablog 6/17: fireflies.

Tonight my boyfriend and I went to the Johns Hopkins library and hung around C floor, where stuff that interested both of us happened to be. I found a copy of a global change journal from 1993 and read the introduction. It was about how we had no capacity to predict the future of the global climate. We didn't have a holistic enough understanding of Earth systems. We couldn't provide the answers policymakers were looking for. More or less exactly that.

And the solution, the authors said, was to foster interdisciplinarity, a Science with a capital S. It was to learn all the details and to connect them to the gestalt of the Earth so that we could understand the atmosphere as well as we understand the cell. And they emphasized that we weren't there yet. That we needed to go further.

And I read that intro, and I started reading one of the articles, but I kept getting distracted, drifting, and I remembered a conversation I had earlier in the afternoon with someone who, despite being intelligent and compassionate, didn't believe in climate change, and I heard the bars of a Jack Johnson song in my head:

"Plexi, plexi, bend, don't shatter - once you're broken, shape don't matter."

We still don't understand perfectly, but we're no longer willing to admit it. We understand too well the risk that we understand well enough. And that hubris hurts us - intrinsically, purely, truly, as scientists. We fail to find the truth of how little we know, so what little we know may be more refined, truer.

And it hurts our "cause." If we are right - and we are probably right, or even not going far enough, based on how knowledge has been rolling (pushing and pulling) - then the cause is vitally important. And if we are uncertain, and show ourselves to be uncertain and overcompensating and nervous and uncertain even of our uncertainty, we will lose the trust of those whose trust we absolutely need - that is to say, everyone. The parents of the children who will have the children who will live through the most extraordinary catastrophe our species has ever witnessed.

Those people, those people whose grandchildren we want to save from suffering, don't understand uncertainty. They don't understand interconnectedness. They are afraid and confused and certain that they are certain and no one else knows or understands anything. This is hyperbole, of course, but it is the problem writ large. Not enough has changed - in both our experts and our laypeople. Neither group can think the right way. Neither group, despite knowing better at least amongst experts, can free itself of familiar, reflexive patterns.

And now, on the TV behind me: pledges to energy independence from three decades ago. And more. And more. From everyone. And never accomplished, and still so far from being accomplished, as the Gulf's surface takes up the appearance of "bruised organs in a human body."

And a few minutes ago, in the lobby, walking inside from an enchanted night in Baltimore, with the fireflies glowing in the twilight of the gorgeous Hopkins campus, I felt a flicker on my arm. Without thinking, without a moment's hesitation, I swatted it away, and felt the wet crush of it on my fingers, and when I turned to see the carpet where it fell, I saw a fading yellow glow there.

How do we break the part of us that will break us?

One wing isn't even enough to leave.

Do any of my fellow enviros - blaggers, teachers, rabble-rousers, and "doomsayers" especially - get the sense that it's too late to convince people of, say, anthropogenic climate change? That all of this educating, this press, is working on a generation that needs to be green already, or we're done for?

I don't know that I'd be much good in the arena we most need to fill now, but there it is, almost empty, only the unusual living and shadows of the unborn starved sitting in the stands, new and strange obstacles cropping up all the time.

Push it, enviros. Get in the arena. In general, I believe in "mainstreaming" green - in making it easy, reflexive, the natural thing to do for us unnaturally inclined humans - but we ought to be better. More of us have to be, before everyone is, and before we have a shred of hope to avert catastrophe.