The signs are everywhere: These times are not your average crisis. It’s true there are those who say the economic indicators have pointed down like this before, only to be reversed in time by market ingenuity and core economic strengths. There may be endless wars now, others say, but their courses are turning the corner and given time and patience, all will return to peaceful productive order. Global warming, still others argue, is not so new to the planet and in any event evidence of it is unreliable, skewed even. Technology has before and will again solve whatever problems that may or may not exist. Nor is social malaise the bugaboo it’s made out to be, there are those who say, and figures concerning family break-ups, for example, are indicators not of trouble but of maturing, of liberty. Consumption rates, resource depletion, over population, untested food production technology—all these worries are really, some say, just the product of an overly hyperventilating media that lives on fear-mongering and must fill 24 hours of programming a day with it. There are those who firmly believe there are no problems that won’t work themselves out on their own, since that has always been the case in the past, and they trust there are people who know what to do, or will know what to do, and are already well-positioned to deliver the patches when the time comes. If we have to do something, someone will tell us when it’s time. Finally, there are a great many who are simply unaware there is a question to ask about whether any of these claims are true, a great many who are unaware there are problems or even rumours of them circulating around, or if they’ve heard, they understand intuitively they themselves can do nothing more than accept and accommodate whatever will be. They have a point. It’s true, isn’t it, that nothing in the whole lexicon of impending doom really spells the actual end of humanity. Things are not as serious as they were when the Soviet Union and the US had between them 80,000 nuclear missiles pointed at one another’s cities, all on hair trigger alert and nearly going off because a flock of birds cross a radar screen. What we face is less, surely, and what’s more, our threat is not instantaneous like that, but is far more gradual and cumulative. The nature of alarm is entirely different. At worst, what we face is a gradual rising of ocean levels over the course of 100 years, slowly inundating coastal cities. We face gradually shifting locations of food-producing climates and gradual decreases of overall food production and slowly tightening restrictions on distribution of food, but all in a context of well-established networks of aid for the most desperate. There won’t be sudden mass starvations of whole societies, just a growing proportion of humanity maintained on slowly declining levels of proteins and nourishment—not dying, but living ever diminished lives, a few more each passing year. The climate will heat up perhaps even noticeably in a year-over-year way, but not to such an extent that it won’t be regarded as anything more than increasing discomfort. There will be bigger more devastating storms and heat waves but these—though devastating for those caught directly inside them—will likely go on being regarded as accidents because they will always be specifically unpredictable, even if their rising number and severity overall is entirely predictable. There will be more wars to conquer diminishing resources, but patriotism and honour are so easily manufactured, each new war will always be accepted by enough people as justified, as a rational response to threats to peace, order, democracy, safety, whatever. Each war will always produce the same tiresome arguments about whether it’s about resources or about spreading democracy, human rights, education for girls, well-diggers, or liberty. Nothing that looms today really threatens to produce the end of the world or even to threaten the existence of mankind in it. And the gradualness of each threat promises that on a year-to-year basis, change will be reasonably accommodated as only a slight deviation from normal. Soon Canada fighting three or more offensive wars of aggression in regions of remaining resources will seem normal, just as one or two today seems normal where zero was the norm a few years ago. This year may be the hottest on record yet for the globe, but recent years have also, in their time, been the hottest on record, so even setting new records for heat has become an odd kind of normal, year after year. The sub-prime mortgage debacle is now spoken of in the business pages as normal, as yet another financial crisis that will go away as surely as Enron, dot.com and the oil crises of the 70s went away on their own, somehow. And yet, as normal as we make things appear, as resilient as humans seem to be, as accommodating as we seem to be to changing conditions, there are those who consider these changes, gradual as they are, less than totally devastating as they may be, as catastrophes all the same, and comprising a future that should be as strenuously avoided as possible. Theirs will always be an argument to take the issue more seriously, and they will always find the issue slipping to second place in the minds of the public, and in whose minds they will always appear to be fanatical zealots. Housing, jobs, abortion—these will always be more immediate, even if more transitory. So it’s an interesting time for these reasons: the crises of our times are slowly unfolding, unlike the instantaneous nature of most other crises, and they are little in immediate evidence, unlike the obvious, unarguable nature of other crises, and they are not totally catastrophic in their threats, unlike the gripping nature of other crises. Yet, in comparing today to 100 years from now, no other time will so utterly transform reality for nearly as many humans, and transform it for the worse, too, as our times are doing right now. The job in this time of crisis of raising the alarms and generating effective responses is unlike any other time of crisis. We’ll have to be more crafty than just screaming our heads off—the method that’s worked for most crises in the past.
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