By Michael Beck

An Echo of Silent Spring? You Bet!
2010 has already chalked up more than the hottest spring ever: it’s given us the hottest January through August of any year since global records began in the late 1800’s. Just the way Rachel Carson’s book alerted us to pesticides, the warning symptoms of soaring CO2 (see photo) are breaking out all over the world:
• The ten hottest years on record have all occurred since 1998.
• Rising CO2 is acidifying the world’s oceans.
• The Arctic Ocean ice cover has lost half of its mass (see graph).
• Virtually every glacier on the planet is retreating.
Then let’s not forget all those related symptoms, stuff like dying coral reefs, vanishing polar bears, hurricanes on steroids, island nations going under – well, you get the picture. (Scientists have listed dozens of major trends like these.)

Inconvenient Truth? You Be the Judge
Skyrocketing CO2 is the legendary irresistible force colliding with an immovable object (consumerism). It’s not just that present energy use is cooking the planet, it’s that most governments are anxious to stoke further consumption (and energy use). They may be dead-set on it (emphasis on dead), but it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know something’s got to give. When massive forces of nature gather for a face-down with uncompromising human economic policy, it is – as the saying goes – a time to worry.

So Why Not Have a Cow?
…Basically, because the climate-change deniers are already having one. Look at how they thunder about environmentalists, scientists, and all those other unpatriotic socialists conspiring to restrict energy and rob us of our American Way of Life. Faced with massive – but inconvenient – evidence, they simply shout it down, deride and distort it. And why not? This approach worked great for Big Tobacco for decades.

There’s Gotta Be a Real Answer
A good place to check is with serious scientists rather than political ax-grinders. Climate scientists will mostly tell you there’s no need to panic yet, provided that serious investment in clean energy, funded by a price on carbon, quickly begins to ease the transition to a new economy. Yes, it will cost. But that’s better than you and your children basking in a globally ravaged ecology, courtesy of Big Oil & Coal. Even though these industries are now having a feeding frenzy on people’s fear of the unknown, they’re only delaying the unavoidable; Mother Nature’s increasingly blunt warning will eventually bring people to their senses.

In the Meantime, Postconsumers to the Rescue
The current recession along with the inevitable higher prices for energy (and stuff in general) will hardly increase the damage that consumerism is already doing to our culture. For many years now the psychic toll of the American Dream has steadily ratcheted up with job insecurity, personal indebtedness, and related stressors. Yet these latest crises do offer extra inducements to reexamine our lives. Think about it: global forces are relentlessly undermining access to a lot of stuff the media tell us we have to have to be happy.

What are we going to do about it?
Plan A: Get so riled up over what we can’t control that we do have a cow. Or…
Plan B: Forget the media. Go with our inner values and discover the many ways we can find enough to be satisfied. It’s the wave of the future. It’s the way to preserve the balance of nature – and to keep the global environment from having a cow!

We like to call it the Postconsumers mindset.

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Photo: Red Square in Moscow reels from all-time record heat (over 100 degrees F), drought, and smoke from hundreds of wildfires.

Graph: The area of the Arctic ice cover has shrunk by 20% in the last forty years. Worse, the ice that is left has thinned 30 to 40%, so that total volume is down by more than half.
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