The Summer We Just Carried On With The Shifting Baseline

Graphic from Airnow.gov website showing the air on this day last summer. Though we have had fewer smoky days here this year than last (so far) it is a reality that has become the new normal in the past few years.

To paraphrase Dostoyevsky and Victor Frankl: people can get used to anything as being normal. The new normal is that I check the heat index and the smoke map every day and plan everyday activities around things that only a few years ago were not normal. The "shifting baseline" phenomenon means it is easy to adjust, move on, and forget how things were just a few years ago. The disaster-filled news, instead of spurring action, seems to spur either an apathy that just adjusts, sighs, and moves on, or a doubling down that ignores reality, like the evils of windmills.

Most of us are just adjusting to the new normal while our leaders dish out daily absurdity that has nothing to do with facing reality. Most of us are stuck in a system that we can do little to get out of without leadership. The emperor has no clothes and is on fire and glowing, but you would only know that unless you pay attention to certain corners of the mediaverse that focus on reality. Many of the ideas we need to be mainstream right now are still considered "on the left" and suspect in part because of the most successful disinformation campaign in history focused on convincing people to ignore reality on several levels.

Relative contemporaries of mine like environmentalist Bill McKibben and climate scientist Kevin Anderson write, speak, and lament the lost opportunities of the past four decades as I do. Things could have been very different. Working with kids, I think about what life will be like when (and if) they reach my age. For at least thirty-five years I have been waiting for the call to arms to sacrifice our present for that of the future, similar to how our forebears did in World War Two, and I am still waiting. I've been waiting for the Churchillian "I have nothing to offer but blood, sweat and tears" and a Hitler mustache on the climate emergency to spur us to action, but I realize it will never come. Part of the irony is that we avoided an economic downturn after the war by shifting the manufacturing that won the war into a type of mass consumption like the world has never seen. That system, which still holds up our economy today, defies change because it keeps a system we all depend on going.

I've been an environmentalist since at least the early 90s, when, as a young person in college, I paid attention to the landmark 1992 Earth Summit and read the visionary Al Gore book Earth in the Balance. It seemed at that time that a new age was dawning and business as usual would shift.  After the brief hiatus since the more earth-centered thinking of the 1970s, we would push new technologies forward and make the sacrifices needed to lead the world by shifting an unsustainable society to one that would lead the world with nascent technologies that would shift our way of life. To me the most powerful statement of the 1992 Earth Summit was that of then President George HW Bush: "the American way of life is nonnegotiable", Instead of developing a sustainability revolution and exporting it to the world as Bill McKibben laments, we exported the high consumption and unsustainable living that Americans have long felt entitled to and most don't question. The American way of life of mass consumption and mass waste has rolled on and been exported to the rest of the world putting a consumption engine that thinker Nate Hagens calls the "Economic Superorganism" into hyperdrive towards what he also terms the "Mordor Economy" of consuming the earth similar to Tolkien's fictional wasteland. While Hagens ' economic superorganism continues to consume the earth, the fires of Mordor continue to make everything hotter and smokier. One day, the shifting baseline may make living in the burned wastes of Mordor normal, and we will have forgotten the green hills of the Shire that we once took for granted.