In her article It’s Not Climate Change, It’s Everything Change, Margaret Atwood discusses major issues in today’s environmental movement and actions that continue to revolve back on a few major powers: businesses and governments. She rightly argues that with “no clear benefit” to changing their consumption of resources to conserve energy, businesses and corporations driven by capital have zero incentive to limit their extraction of resources, an example of the economic “tragedy of the commons”. Although industrial corporations have greatly increased global carbon emissions and waste, their profits seem to somehow outweigh these negative impacts on the globe. Even more detrimental than passing on the responsibility of acting sustainably is the way that certain governments and politicians still refuse to accept the reality and gravity of our environmental condition, which depends hugely on their actions and policies.
The government actions that Margaret Atwood exposes are simply laughable. Rick Scott forbidding the use of terms like “climate change” and “global warming” and Canada “tricking” its citizens with maps of the increasing size of icecaps are only two examples of such foolish acts. After Trump entered office, many US government sites similarly deleted such terms from their search engines. By doing so, our government is only encouraging ignorance by suppressing conversation and education on pressing matters for current and future generations. These actions also illuminate our privilege as country, since many poorer and less fortunate areas of the world already experience the “picture 2” effects Atwood discusses. For example, Atwood imagines a world where people must “fill their bathtubs with water” and where “their toilets would no longer flush” beneath a picture of long lines where people wait to buy food in bulk. This so-called imagined water shortage and inefficient lines are a reality in Cape Town, caused by a combination of factors: wealthier people failing to limit their water usage even after multiple warning, a growing 4 million population, and a 3 year drought no one expected to last this long.
I would argue that politicians and people who resist the facts of climate change merely have not seen or lived through the effects. They do not realize that their words, policies, and actions affect people around the world. Yet, I do not understand how people can see the increase of flooding, forest fires, droughts, sea levels, etc and still refuse to accept these occurrences as evidence for climate change and global warming.
On a final and different note, I would like to share an artist whose chalk pastel drawings, inspired by photographs of real ice caps and oceans, inspires to share the threatened beauty of nature. I was reminded of this artist, Zaria Forman, after reading Barry Lord’s theory on society’s relationship between art and energy.
