Elephants Declare War on People

So my inspirational source this week was an article in the New York Times Magazine about how all across Africa and India and Indonesia, elephants are basically going postal and attacking humans and gang-raping rhinos.   It’s because elephant society is naturally close-knit and complex, and by killing tons of elephants, we have decimated their social structure.  And while it may be a fallacy that elephants are afraid of mice, it’s true that elephants have a very long memory – they have the memory of, well, an elephant – and now they’re mad as hell and they’re not going to take it anymore.

I didn’t really want to talk about this.  I wanted to publicly declare my undying love for George Clooney (who just won the American Cinemathique award), and reveal my plans to become a movie star so that I can buy a small island in the South Pacific, kidnap George Clooney (and Bono), and have a righteous lefty love triangle in my hideaway island paradise. 

Of course, that’s only going to work until my island – like the tiny island nation of Tuvalu – gets inundated by rising water levels and absorbed back into the sea, and we have to relocate, which is what all the Tuvalans are currently doing. 

Which is really the problem here.  Elephants going apeshit is just the symptom.  Fucking up the planet is the problem.  Causing 20,000 species a year to go extinct and CO2 levels to rise higher than they’ve been in the last million years and melting ice caps and increasing the number of dead zones in the world’s oceans and slaughtering half the hippos in the Congo in the last two weeks alone is the problem.  

And even though climate change is a totally accepted fact worldwide (except by Senator Inhofe of Oklahoma who chairs the Committee on Environment and Public Works and thinks global warming is a communist conspiracy), and even though general scientific consensus is that we have about ten years – max – to really address these problems before everything goes to utter hell…

Well, actually, maybe everyone doesn’t know all this.  Maybe some of you haven’t heard or aren’t convinced or think that Al Gore made it all up to elbow his way back into public life.  Maybe some of you wonder, “Hey, hasn’t the earth’s climate always varied incredibly widely?  What about the ice ages?  And weren’t things all steamy and palm-covered and Florida-like during the age of the dinosaurs? 

Well, look kids, in 1988, the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environmental Programme created the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to evaluate the state of climate science.  In its most recent how-we-doin’ assessment, the IPCC unequivocally stated that human activity is drastically altering the world’s climate.

And, all the major scientific organizations in the US whose members work directly on these issues: the National Academy of Sciences, The American Meteorological Society, the American Geophysical Union, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) – they all agree with those conclusions.

Now the naysayers say, “Hold on a sec, we don’t understand all the mechanisms and feedback loops and all the important details about this global warming “controversy.”

Well, first off, the word controversy is just crazy-denier marketing language.  Like the timber industry calling an old growth forest “over-mature” and referring to clear-cutting as “tree density reduction” in order to create a “temporary meadow.” 

Maybe we don’t know every single last detail about global warming, but brain surgeons don’t know everything about the brain, and they seem to be doing ok.

And the truth is, there’s no controversy among all the people who study this.  All of them say that the atmosphere is heating up because over the last 150 or so years, human beings have been burning fossil fuels and increasing the atmospheric load of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses, and exacerbating things by doing an awful lot of tree density reduction.  

One more thing about the deniers.  Britain’s national academy of science actually sent a cease and desist letter to a certain corporation responsible for giving $2.9 million to 39 different groups who work to deny the science of climate change.  Who is that corporation?  Our old pals at ExxonMobil, who’ve been nailing over $5 billion in quarterly profits from the sale of what?  Oil!

So naturally, I am just a little tweaked about all this.  I feel like Frodo in Lord of the Rings.  And you know, now that we’re talking LOTR, Viggo Mortensen can come to my little island love nation, too. 

Anyway, Frodo didn’t want to get sent off to save Middle Earth.  He didn’t ask for that responsibility.

And that’s how I feel!  But the truth is I’m a very ambitious woman and worldwide ecological collapse would totally blow my chances at becoming a movie star. 

Which is why we gotta fix this.  It’s why we gotta protest the fact that our Energy Secretary just picked the former CEO of ExxonMobil to develop solutions to America's energy crisis.

Which is why we’ve all got to find a way, like Frodo, to accept the truth of what’s been handed down to us by our dear Uncle Bilbo.  We have to face the fact that drastic climate change is really happening – fast – and we’re causing it.  We have to find a way to say, “Ok, I get it, and I’m going to help solve the problem.”

And it’s got to be all of us.  From the commie tree-huggers to the right-wing nutjobs, and everyone in between.  Because this is not a partisan issue.  It’s not a political issue.  It’s an issue of planetary preservation.  No controversy, no more argument, end of story.

Though if any right-wing nutjobs here happen to have George Clooney’s phone number, I’ll let you argue with me just a little bit more.