Photo courtesy National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
This is written in the last week of the year 2006 from my home, which sits a hundred yards from the boundary of the Green Mountain National Forest.
Right before Thanksgiving, the U.S. Congress passed, and the president signed, new legislation creating more wilderness on our forest—better than 40,000 acres, much of it near my town. It was a red–letter day—it always is when people decide to take a step back, to relinquish control over a piece of land. To acknowledge, as Congress did in the 1964 Wilderness Act, in the most poetic words it ever wrote, that there’s something magnificent about “untrammeled” country.
But here’s the thing. By Thanksgiving it should have been getting cold, but it was the least snowy November in Vermont history. And each week since it’s only gotten warmer. Christmas followed two weeks of temperatures in the 40s and 50s; even at high elevations ponds are still unfrozen. The grass is green; there’s not a hint of frost on the ground. And that’s as true inside the new wilderness boundary as it is outside.
I’ve been writing about climate change for two decades. My book The End of Nature was the first volume for general readers about global warming. I should be more prepared than anyone in the country for a winter like this, but I’m as sad as anyone else. Sadder, probably, for I have fewer illusions that it might be a passing cycle, a natural hiccup. It’s not—it’s a foretaste of the world we’re building. A world that will be warmer, wetter, a world where it will be harder to grow food, where dangerous pests will spread more disease, where rising sea levels will create hundreds of millions of refugees, where everything will be turned upside down.
And a world where no place is untrammeled—where wilderness is, at best, relative.
How do we deal with that world? We aren’t going to prevent global warming; that horse is out of the barn and disappearing over the ridge. But we can keep it from getting worse than it has to be—keep it miserable instead of catastrophic. There are billions of words to be written (and many billions of dollars to be spent) on exactly how: wind farms and hybrid cars and nifty light bulbs and new tax schemes and so forth. We’ve actually got the scientists and economists and engineers that we need. But this movement still lacks something—and that’s a movement.
Last summer, at a U.S. Forest Service turnout about a mile from here that marks Robert Frost’s old writing cabin, a few hundred of us set out on a walk across Vermont to demand action on global warming. Five days and fifty miles later, a thousand strong, we reached Burlington, our biggest city. Here’s what’s sad: the newspapers said that 1,000 people represented the largest demonstration this country has yet seen against climate change. That’s got to change, because if it doesn’t we’ll never get action on the scale and in the short time window that the climatologists say the science demands.
The forces of inertia are the largest companies on earth—Exxon made more money last year than any company has ever made. The only possible way to challenge power like that is with commitment and passion, the same kind of commitment and passion that forty years ago ended the awful inertia of segregation. Individual action is wonderful—I drive a hybrid car, and I live in a house that won a prize as the most energy–efficient in the state. But it’s not adding up fast enough; only dramatic political action can turn our nation around and offer the kind of leadership that might move the rest of the world as well.
We need Congress to be poetic again, the way it was with the Wilderness Act. To realize that what’s at stake has nothing to do with next year’s budget, and everything to do with the next generation’s survival. A federal target of an 80 percent reduction in carbon emissions by 2050—2 percent a year—would be poetic indeed. It would transform our economy, and it would change our ways of life. And if we’re very lucky it would save something of the glory we’ve been privileged to live amidst. It’s the very least that we can do.