“Code Red for Humanity”: How Do We Cope?

A week ago Saturday was the first time I can remember in my 63 years in New Mexico that I couldn’t see the Sandia Mountains all day long. They’d simply vanished in a continental-sized cloud of smoke from the Dixie and other wildfires burning nearly a thousand miles away in California. As I ran my errands, it was all too obvious to me, as it has been for years now, that climate change was advancing steadily upon us.

And then less than a week later, a United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPPC) issued a dire and unequivocal report. Described by the UN Secretary-General as a “code red for humanity,” the report lays bare the virtual irreversibility of current extreme changes in the world’s climate. The 3,000-page report makes it clear that nothing’s going to get better in anyone’s lifetime, but could get a whole lot worse if we don’t eliminate releases of carbon dioxide from fossil fuels into our atmosphere.

If the IPCC report “doesn’t shock you into action, it should,” Helen Mountford of the World Resources Institute told USA Today. “The report paints a very sobering picture of the unforgiving, unimaginable world we have in store if our addiction to burning fossil fuels and destroying forests continues.”

The smoke cloud hiding the Sandias was not merely an aesthetic monstrosity. I could feel it in my throat after a few minutes out of the car. I could imagine what farm workers would feel in 115 degree heat breathing smoke from fires far closer to them than they are to us. Surviving a childhood of smog, hay fever and asthma in 1950’s Los Angeles, I dread what our air will be like here after more years of lackadaisical in-action and denial.

The code red report urges immediate action by governments worldwide. But what are individual human beings to do, particularly here in the privileged Northern Hemisphere? Part of the answer is comprehending the magnitude of what is happening. As Canadian author Margaret Atwood said almost decade ago in an interview on Slate, “I think calling it climate change is rather limiting. I would rather call it the everything change because when people think climate change, they think maybe it’s going to rain more or something like that. It’s much more extensive a change than that because when you change patterns of where it rains and how much and where it doesn’t rain, you’re also affecting just about everything. You’re affecting what you can grow in those places. You’re affecting whether you can live there. You’re affecting all of the species that are currently there because we are very water dependent. We’re water dependent and oxygen dependent.”

Editor John Freeman, in his deeply moving 2020 book, “Tales of Two Planets: Stories of Climate Change and Inequality in a Divided World,” wrote, “For two centuries, by taking and taking from the earth, we have rendered our ability to live here an open question. Burning fossil fuels has heated the planet. How much and how fast the temperature rises in a matter of debate. That it’s happening, and why, is not. Ninety-nine percent of scientists believe that this warming has been caused by human activity. We call this development climate change, a term that doesn’t describe the violence of what is happening. Earthquakes, fires, floods, die-offs of species. Sinkholes, tornadoes, tsunamis, and volcanic eruptions.”

“To turn away from the greatest threat humankind has ever faced has required,” Freeman writes, “a staggering dedication to distraction and lack of empathy for the suffering of others.”

How do we keep hopeful and realistic in a time like this?

We battle certain structural obstacles, beyond the disbelief and denial of many around the world and in our country. Perhaps for individuals, the most difficult hurdle is having vast amounts of information with no equivalent power. If we believe 99 percent of scientists, how do we overcome the debilitating sense of personal and local impotence in the face of global catastrophe?

First, I think, we have to give up the privileging of “dramatic success and achievement.” This means cutting out the weeds of hubris which prevent us from doing anything if we think we won’t have a meaningful, that is a big, impact as individual people. That frees us up for all kinds of action. It allows us to give what drops of effort and restraint we can muster, adding what we can little bit by little bit to the ocean of good will and effort around us.

Jeff Brown, in his beautiful book, “Love It Forward,” writes that “most of the great achievements on the planet are unknown to others — private overcomings, silent attempts at belief, reopening a shattered heart.” And now, in the face of an already overheated world, finding the hope within us that allows us to contribute, invisibly, to the survival of the world, in whatever ways we can, to join the ranks of the drops of effort that might add up something useful, even if we’ll never know what it is.

We might add to our calendars fifteen minutes a day to become citizen lobbyists and call or write someone with vested power in support of any effort we find commendable that contributes to the lessening of the impact of global warming. Even 15 minutes a week is better than nothing.

We might decide to try to become an “expert” in some aspect of the immensely complicated processes that intensify the overheating of our atmosphere, or that have some connection with drought or flooding or heat stroke among the homeless or those without adequate cooling in their homes. Such a list of issues appears to be virtually endless. To be able to speak with some authority because of your own diligence, might help others to try to become drops of effort too. Who knows?

Perhaps you could put away a small amount of money every week to give to the programs run by PNM, NM Gas Co, and the city/county water authority to help less well-to-do people pay their utility bills.

Perhaps we could all do more brainstorming with our families and friends about what we might do to be more helpful.

We don’t have to make a big deal out of it. Whatever it is, the less special it is the more we’ll do it. As folks with cardboard signs remind us from time to time, “anything helps.”

*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it