Climate Sunday: The Last of Us

 

My spouse has given me an identity crisis: I am his farfalla, his ucchellina, his angelina, but he called me his "little mushroom" tonight, and since we just saw The Last of Us second episode, I was not really feeling that sobriquet.  Do you want me to consider you a fun guy? I demanded. 

Alas, he thinks this is amusing. Me? It isn't. The problem with climate change is that simpler genomes are going to rise up to the climatic challenges fairly quickly because of their lifespan and the nature of their generativity, and we, plodding long-lived things, have to use our biggie ol' brains to adapt. And I've been watching us deal with race and gender and sexuality issues and have discovered we are as a species only selectively capable of adapting to rapid change. and the people who cope worst, try to enforce failure to adapt. Which is to say, in case of epidemic, you get antivaxxers and antimaskers and the lot we've already been dealing with, who don't only reject precautions for themselves, but want to enforce that for others. 

The folks who are likely to do survival things are held back by asshats who don't understand how anything under the sun works. And are also improbably bad communicators, for the most part. 

I'd like to say Greta is a better communicator than most, actually:

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But it would be better if people generally understood that the changes in the climate are just a world they have never seen before. Any number of diseases will be worse than they were before.  We will see food insecurity.  But also people sickened because food supplies will be more likely to be rotted, fungused, not acceptable to eat. We could forestall some of these changes, if we accepted the science. 

We failed to do the right thing about COVID 19, and we think we can soldier on with the other crises, the climate crisis, to come? It's abominably stupid. We need to take all Covid -19 lessons as our pre-view of disaster.

But another disaster is coming. And another.