Gimme Fever!

     "Earth on brink of hundred thousand year fever". So goes the headline of a recent column by Gwynne Dyer.

     Mr. Dyer is quoting James Lovelock, an environmental scientist who has spent the last thirty years or so expounding his theory that the Earth acts like a giant living organism. Like other living organisms, humans included, Lovelock believes that the Earth regulates its own temperature. I won’t bore you with the details. The upshot is that he has a model that he believes offers a clear picture of the future of our planet.

It's gonna get hot. The planet has a fever.

     I can remember when I was a wee lad we used to talk about the end of the world (no, really, we did too). Since God had promised not to drown everything again, speculation focused on the prediction that things were going to burn up. Now, if you recall, the sixties were a time of rampant scientific optimism (remember those flying cars and 20 hour work weeks we were going to have by now?). We even thought that science and theology should be in sync. Since science held that the sun would eventually get really big, really hot, and barbeque our little blue orb, it seemed natural to conclude that this was the how the prophesied event would unfold.

     It may seem simplistic now, but at the time this was a comforting thought. It'll be many many millions of years before the sun becomes a red giant. Phew.

     Lovelock, however, is a lot more depressing. He proposes that we'll turn the place into a global clambake in the next hundred years or less. Not only that, he says that when the fever hits, it's only going to take weeks to make us sweat. Weeks. Holy heat wave Batman! And to add insult to injury, he says it's too late to change anything. I hope the government is still working on those secret rocketships that were the mainstay of science fiction movies in the fifties. We may need them soon.

     I'm not quite as pessimistic as Lovelock. When it comes to prophets, I rather prefer the Jonah model. His prophecy was averted by a sincere change of heart on the part of the people he was sent to proclaim doom and gloom to. He must have been a convincing talker. Of course, climbing out of the belly of a whale does give one a certain credibility. Talk about an entrance. Don't forget though, ALL of Nineveh had to change. I'm not at all sure that we can get a whole planet full of stiff necked skeptics to don sackcloth and ashes.

     Especially since our particular sackcloth would include giving up our SUVs, our voracious appetite for electricity, and our fondness for letting our waste products flow downstream to the sea.

     It would also involve convincing global economies in places like China and India that their people are better off in poverty. I doubt that even Jonah could pull that off.

     However, as Jesus was fond of saying, with God all things are possible.

     On the up side, there's a general acceptance that we're in trouble.

     And despite what governments and multinational businesses would have us believe, its really ordinary people like you and me who decide if we're going to make change happen.

     If we don't buy SUVs, it really doesn’t matter how many are built. And if we buy fuel efficient vehicles, those of us who no longer build SUVs will get jobs building fuel efficient vehicles.

     It's our choice. Jonah made sure the folks in Nineveh realized their survival was up to them.

     Just as ours is up to us today.