The climate crisis remains with us. A series of news articles reported stresses on Earth to which climate change contributed or caused: Canadian wildfires, heated ocean temperatures off the coast of Florida, the failure of a generation of Emperor Penguin fledglings to survive because of melting sea ice, Hurricane Hilary in California, Maui wildfires, and others come across our news feeds like we are live blogging the end times. Climate change made each of these disasters worse. These stories are likely the tip of the iceberg.

I don’t need a news feed to know our community is at risk due to climate change. Our subdivision is conserving water on our public well because the Silurian Aquifer is faltering with increased usage. A deep and extended drought, combined with a lack of rainfall means surface waters have not been able to recharge the aquifer to keep up with water demand. I don’t mind conserving water. There is not an endless supply. It’s worse when generational expectations are not met.

Local environmental activists continue to remind us there is a climate crisis and the time for action to mitigate its worst effects is now. It will take all of us to address the climate crisis, especially our elected officials.

Here’s the rub. People enjoy our current life in society so much we don’t want to change it, even when inconvenienced by the impact of the climate crisis. Even when the inconvenience takes the form of the current extended drought and we don’t have access to the same amount of water coming from our faucet we did a few months ago.

In his 2017 book, Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and other Essays, Paul Kingsnorth captured this notion:

For most of my twenties, I had put a lot of my energy into environmental activism, because I thought that activism could save, or at least change the world. By 2008 I had stopped believing this. Now I felt that resistance was futile, at least on the grand, global scale on which I’d always assumed it would occur. I knew what was already up in the atmosphere and in the oceans, working its way through the mysterious connections of the living Earth, beginning to change everything. I saw that the momentum of the human machine — all its cogs and wheels, its production and consumption, the way it turned nature into money and called the process growth — was not going to be turned around now. Most people didn’t want it to be, they were enjoying it.

Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and other Essays, Paul Kingsnorth.

Kirkpatrick Sale lays bare the connection between climate and society in a recent issue of Counterpunch, “All the talk about ‘climate change’ directs the world’s attention away from what is the real central problem: the effect of unmitigated capitalist growth ravaging the resources and systems of the earth and its atmosphere.”

They both make a point.

I can’t recall how many times I heard Al Gore mention the pollution we dump into the atmosphere. “Every day we’re continuing to pump 162 million tons of global warming pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, into the atmosphere, as if the atmosphere was an open sewer,” Gore said everywhere during the last ten years. While some of this is caused naturally, most of it is a result of humans, that is, the unmitigated capitalist growth and exploitation of resources and systems Sale mentioned.

I joined the Climate Reality Project in August 2013 in Chicago. Gore’s training came at a time I needed it. I had just retired from my big job in 2009, and had seen the film, An Inconvenient Truth. I intended to work on climate change during my retirement years. Gore explained the impact of greenhouse gases on the atmosphere and oceans in clear, concise terms. The training was more than useful. There are now 50,000 trained climate activists like me. It may not be enough.

The issue mostly omitted during discussion of climate change is how it permeates everything in society. In Iowa there is no going back to the way the land and water was before the Black Hawk War in 1832. The environment has been completely re-worked to accommodate what is now conventional farming. We take what has become known as industrial agriculture for granted.

Are we living in the end times? I don’t know, and don’t believe we can know. What is known is there are solutions to the climate crisis if only we would apply them to the problem. This can be done without major disruption to our way of life.

If you are interested in a just and sustainable future that addresses the climate crisis, visit The Climate Reality Project at this website.