Alas, we can’t go on living this way

The end is inevitable: our glut of cars, our thriftless air travel, our food shipped thousands of miles, our single-family houses and strip malls, our endless electronic gadgets, our toxic lawns, our monocropped farms. Exporting damage to our own impoverished communities and to third-world countries, whether it’s in the form of pollution, resource depletion or the chronically unconscionable exploitation of human beings, is over.

The Earth cannot support such depletion and waste, and all of our rationalizations about “balancing” the environment and the economy are mere jabberings before the laws of nature, which always—absolutely always—prevail.

Our climate crusaders’ unthinkable thoughts

Why won’t global warming “thought leaders” tell us the extent of the crisis into which we have already plunged?

Perhaps it’s because such a permanent and far-reaching shift of gears is not in the category of what Noam Chomsky has called “thinkable thoughts.” Those of us who are on-the-ground global warming organizers routinely witness “concerned” people with “good” intentions replacing lightbulbs while the plasma TV babbles tripe to empty chairs, buying Priuses and driving more because it’s now fuel efficient to do so, flying thousands of miles across continents and oceans to conferences for good causes with stars and other important people, healthfully eating fish to extinction, using biofuels and destroying endless acres of farmland and tropical forest - the list of absurd and paradoxical behaviors is interminable.

The thought of life without what we take for granted is not a thinkable thought, which may be why Gore et al. can’t or won’t tell us about it. It may be why the mainstream media is doing such a miserable (but mildly improving) job covering climate change, the most important and compelling story in modern human history. But if we are to be serious about addressing the catastrophic effects of global warming (and to date that’s a questionable “if”) we need a massive and urgent change of consciousness, and an effort reminiscent of—but far more profound and permanent than—World War II’s Victory Gardens, rationing and Manhattan Project.

The surprise is that living differently could be a major improvement in our American lives, and in the lives of human beings and countless other species across the planet.

Can we think beyond the boundaries of the thinkable? ...

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Adam Sacks is a climate activist - and artist and writer - in Lexington.