Litter & the Ozone Hole: the Good Old Days

Remember when our biggest environmental worries were littering and recycling?  I do.  As an '80s baby and a '90s child, I really believed we could make a difference as individuals.  Boy, how naive and simple-minded THAT turned out to be.  But in my defense, we did manage to tackle a very real and imminent threat in those days:  the gaping hole in the ozone layer.  Rather than protest and deny reality until it was too late, world leaders got together with scientists to quickly phase out chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and replace them with substances that didn't destroy this vital barrier between the sun and the Earth.  I shudder to think how this would've gone if it happened in the internet age, when denialism is rampant.  We'd probably be burnt to a crisp right now.  In late 1999, the world pulled off another herculean feat when tech experts got together to address the Y2K computer crash scare juuuust in the nick of time.  Whew.  

Ahh, the good old ozone hole.  A simpler time.

But somewhere along the way, the rise of the internet in American homes complicated things.  Rather than making people more enlightened by making information available for free at the click of a button, it served to confuse fact with opinion to the point we can hardly tell the difference between the two.  Rather than asking good faith questions and using the internet to follow the evidence wherever it leads, people go backwards, starting with a conclusion already in mind and seeking out evidence to support it while discarding anything that doesn't.  This is called confirmation bias and we've all been guilty of it at times.  Echo chambers on social media make it almost impossible to avoid because they're tailor made to show us only the information we like & interact with regardless of any factual merit.  This has caused civil wars in Myanmar, major election scandals here in 2016 and a COVID disinformation campaign in 2020 that caused untold deaths & suffering.  

We're now so far into the climate change and aridification danger zone that death and destruction are almost guaranteed within my lifetime if I live to be older than 60.  Water wars, extreme storms, heat waves, mass extinctions of beneficial insects and aquatic species, the spread of vector-borne and other diseases, rising sea levels and sinking cities... these are very real threats, and to accelerate the destruction, we're building data centers on top of our aging power grids right in the middle of residential neighborhoods.  Unlike in the '80s with the ozone hole, the oil companies have so infiltrated the cultural conversation that about half the population refuses to believe man-made climate change is real, let alone an existential threat. 

Even though everyone from Gen X onward learned about greenhouse gases and "global warming" starting in elementary school, people remain in denial.  Even as half the country deals with rampant wildfires while the other half is under water and Tornado Alley shifted to the East, producing record numbers of deadly night time storms.  Even as capital cities like Jakarta, Indonesia (population: 1 billion+) are so far underwater they had to move the capital elsewhere and the Marshall Islands have sunken completely & had to be evacuated forever.  

This is the part in the Rat Utopia study when all Hell broke loose and the rats started raping, killing and brutalizing each other, then stopped reproducing altogether.  When a portion of males stayed indoors and obsessively groomed themselves 24/7 and the females became aggressive and killed their young as the carnage carried on outside.  When the remaining young generation had no "normal" adults to teach them how to be functioning adult mice, so they just froze in place and failed to reproduce or do anything else normal, causing the entire population to die out.  Mice are a great, if imperfect predictor of human biology & behavior, which is why we use them in so many animal studies.  The males typically act as "protectors" of the females and young just like most primates (including humans) do... at least when their colonies are functioning properly. 

We are here.

In Rat Utopia, it was overpopulation that triggered the downward spiral of death and destruction, and that is exactly what's led to the rise of problems here in Human Utopia as well.  We know that climate change is man-made, as are deforestation, extinction of wildlife species (caused by our ever expanding development of land, aka "habitat loss"), pollution of the air/water/Earth, the hole in the ozone layer which is still healing, radioactive waste disposal, over-consumption of resources like oil & gas that took millions of years to form & more.  As science allows us to live longer, we'll have to limit the sheer number of people being born or nature will do it for us, and it won't be pretty.  Americans are already having fewer children due to the cost of living and quality of life issues like uncontrolled pandemics and violent culture wars.  If this alarms you, don't pressure people to have more babies, pressure politicians and community leaders to make this country livable again & stop destroying the planet for future generations. 

Would YOU want to be born, helpless and screaming, into today's world exactly as it is?  I wouldn't.  Somebody's gotta be that last generation of young mice with no normal role models and no future, and I sure wouldn't want it to be me.