The Third Ten Million Years is a weekly Precipitate feature exploring the mysteries of life on a single planet, as seen through a single pair of eyes in a single body composed of the same fine material as the deserts of Mars.
Image Credit: Fox News
I apologize for my extended absence from the blog. I have been busy immersing myself in Summer 2012. A remarkable period, personally, as my wife and I recently returned from a wonderful extended trip to Tennessee. We saw Nashville, or at least an apartment in Nashville, and we saw the Great Smoky Mountain National Park, which was glorious and hot. Even more glorious was the landing of Curiosity on Mars. About as significant a technological and scientific achievement as human ingenuity has mustered. To revel in NASA’s accomplishment pushes the limits of my human understanding, which is the purpose of this blog (more on this in another post). But Summer 2012 has been notable beyond personal reflection. It has been a busy, and strange, summer.
It seems to me Summer 2012 has borne two very disparate yet defining characteristics. Both have caused brief but palpable ripples in the national consciousness. The first is the weather, primarily the protracted heat and drought that has lingered over most of the United States. A scorching July led to lost crop yields, drought, and just bad weather. The second characteristic is horrendous acts of violence, marked by multiple public shootings. The two are unrelated, and I will make no grand attempt to bring a metaphorical or literal link between the two. It’s just interesting. Especially for a nation, and a national media, that prefers traditional narratives, like beautiful American athletes in competition, over complicated ones, like the murder of Sikhs in a temple that was carried out by a White Supremacist. But this post is about stories, not about murders.
One traditional media story: climate change is a debate, yet to be resolved. Now, to be sure, this is not the case with all media sources. There are reputable science-acknowledging media sources that deserve praise. But even these sources engage in the debate over climate change. Not to, of course, would concede the very argument we are trying to move beyond. And thus they are forced to participate in the conversation they view as unnecessary, while individual incidents that fit the overarching narrative receive coverage that far outweighs significance. Conundrum. Anyway.
Image Credit: Econintersect.
Prolonged heat and drought of the like we have seen this summer makes it difficult for the media and Americans at large to pretend like climate change is not already occurring. I think in general it is safe to assume that most Americans don’t like the idea that humans have already altered our climate systems to the point of causing this summer’s weather. Sure, we admit there may be a problem, and maybe that problem will affect our children or theirs. But already here? That is totally different. In fact, now that you mention it, I’m not sure it’s actually happening at all.
Do you believe it or not? Should you believe it or not? That’s the question. This is the story the media prefers. If the problem is potentially catastrophic at some time in the uncertain future, then media outlets are perfectly content to drum up a fight about the science of climate change. This is on both sides, remember. We are content to publicly decry the saps who “believe” the science, or smugly rebuke those who deny the science. As though science requires belief, or smug rejection helps the cause.
If climate change is already here, however, it’s far more problematic. If it’s already here, the media must transition to that which it hates doing: reporting facts instead of the story they’ve preferred. Everyone loves a fight; no one loves to hear about the tonnage of CO2 that has been released into the atmosphere, how the sources of that CO2 afford us our current high standard of living, and how that CO2 changes the long-term climate, which, in turn, eventually changes our short-term weather. That’s just depressing. We all prefer the fight. And if climate change is already here, then climate change will quickly disappear from our conversation. That’s what happens when the traditional narrative is overcome with a more complicated story. That’s what happened to the other story of the summer.
Image credit unknown.
This other more delicate, and difficult story has no place in a blog post like this. It has no easy media narrative like debate over science. We have seen now two mass-fatality shootings this summer, and another shooting at a conservative Christian organization. All senseless acts of murder against unsuspecting victims. I have little to say about the tragedies except to remind you that they were tragedies, that they did indeed happen, and that such loss of human life must always be treated as such.
What the actions of these individual killers mean about our society and its laws can, and should, be debated in the public forums of our media. And they have been. At least, for a while. For a short time, we will hear about gun rights, the NRA, the Second Amendment, and detail after detail after detail of the disturbing events and the lives of the men who carried out these acts of violence. The narrative of this violence will focus on many things. There will be constant and over-saturated treatments of the shootings as they unfolded. But too soon they will fade into the background of our culture, affecting little or no change, shining too little light on the lives lost, too little light on mental illness and treatment, and too much on meaningless gun talk and profiles of disturbed men. And then even that will disappear into the background for a more appealing story: sports, for example, or Kristen Stewart. Or so it seems to me.
Be it gun violence or climate change, we gather as much information as we can about what has happened, and do everything we can to ignore how it might have been caused. Rarely do we move to ensure it doesn’t happen again. How can we? Our media can’t get past a simple dispute about the weather, let alone a national crisis like gun violence. What a sad, and strange summer.
There is always the Olympics.
Christopher Zumski Finke, Staff Blogger