An uphill battle

We had great company for the weekend. We went with them to a local tourist trap called African Lion Safari. It's one of those places where you can drive through huge pens of animals and get some small idea of what it is like to be on safari (though when I was on safari in Africa, I don't remember seeing many places where buffalo, bears and monkeys got tangled up together). If you're smart at this place, you pay the extra few dollars to ride the bus through the pens rather than take your own vehicle. Those bored monkeys can strip down a decent sedan in a matter of five minutes. Every few years, some Darwin Award winner decides to roll down their car window to commune with the animals. Sometimes they live, and actually prosper. I was feeling slightly queasy (still suffering, I think, from a fair amount of immune system devastation caused by the stress of a whiff of literary success) so forewent the bus ride and waited on a blanket and under a tree for the rest of the gang to return.

There is a point to this little bit of boring travelogue. African Lion Safari is a great place to people watch. I saw women in burkas, massive familes of Tamils, Sikh clans with very majestic looking men coasting regally along the pathways with their massive turbans, followed by happy squealing masses of kids with those cute little mini-turban topknots. Everyone had spread large picnics out on the grass, and their blankets were overflowing with interesting pots of food both hot and cold, all combining to make a fantastic sight and smell. Looking around, we certainly didn't seem like we were a species on the threshold of extinction. It seemed like a huge celebration of life. The weather was perfect, and the air seemed surprisingly clean and fresh. When I see a scene like that, I get a confusing tangle of feelings. Could my anxiety just be a huge overrreaction? Will everything be ok? And if I'm not wrong, then what will it take to wake us up? In the face of beautiful, perfect days like that, will enough of us be able to muster the will to make those deep cuts to our lifestyle that our kids are depending on us to make ? I've written about this preoccupation before. How does one strike that balance between preserving enough of the happy stuff of life to remind one of why life is even worth worrying about, yet at the same time do enough to reverse the trend that will sweep us off the planet? How do we have our cake and eat it too?

I had a long talk with a friend about all of this today. He does think I'm overreacting. He does think everything will be ok. He's a pretty smart fellow -- a science teacher who knows quite a few of the relevant facts about climate change and he's just not that worried. He hasn't read the same books that I have, but he's seen some of the same things that I have. In fact, having lived in the Arctic for a number of years, he's seen quite a few of the effects of climate change first hand. And he still thinks we've got a good, long time before we see any kind of change that will affect our everday lives, and that before that happens, the economic benefits of living sustainably will do their work and motivate us to live differently. He argued, somewhat persuasively, that for all of my anxieties, my behaviour suggested that I felt the same way. I wasn't carbon neutral. I hadn't drained my hot tub. I still used my car. I had talked about pulling up stakes and moving to a few self-sufficient permacultured acres in the wilderness, but what I had actually done was to buy a new minivan and a house in the city with a massive mortgage. Does that make me a hypocrite, an optimist, or just a confused idiot?