On Being Scared of Global Warming

Campaigners for cutting greenhouse emissions scare us by proclaiming that a warmer world is a worse world. My dangerous idea is that it probably won't be...we will have to adjust, and adjustment is always painful. Poupulations will have to move...and no, it doesn't imply Armageddon.

Paul Davies, Physicist (2007)

Sometimes the best way to appreciate the earth we walk on is to envision it destroyed. We would miss the tall oaks winding along a crunchy streambed. We would miss the movement of the sky; clouds morphing, coming and going. We would miss the croaking frog chorus at the pond in springtime. Then we would stop the missing and take in the scenes anew. We know nothing ever stays the same. Nothing. So we focus on today. We don't drop our empty coffee cup on the dirt road, we don't drive cars that smoke, and we don't dump engine oil in the toilet.



Clean living is good, for now and for the future. In the 1960's Lady Bird Johnson changed Washington D.C.'s parks and greenways and the country's highways by adding beauty. Grass seeds were spread, flowers were planted and foreign countries sent green gifts to beautify the United States. Children were not frightened with promises of mass extinctions. Instead beauty spread because one person wanted to make the world more beautiful.



Sparkling water, healthy trees and dark-brown, rich dirt are beautiful.
We've put in time imagining the world's demise by polution, we know what we would miss. Instead of fretting ourselves to inaction, let's each find ways to beautify our world, for today and our grandchildren. Let's keep our corner of the Universe clean and shiny because we love what is beautiful, not because we are scared of a hot, resource-poor, future.