Losing \u2013 and Finding — Our Balance<\/p>\n
My daughter is a gymnast, and like many of her compatriots, her least favorite event, hands down, is the balance beam.\u00a0 Gymnasts may have a wonderful meet, reach the beam, and then a tiny mistake for a split second and boom \u2013 a fall and loss of a medal position is a reality.<\/p>\n
One of the earliest tricks a gymnast learns to stay on the beam is to tighten up, in order to stay on that cursed 4-inch width of wood.\u00a0 If you feel wobbly, the way to stay on is simply to tighten every muscle and straighten up, looking straight ahead and ignoring everything else.\u00a0 This extreme concentration to the exclusion of anything else is part of what sets a champion gymnast apart from the crowd.<\/p>\n
I was struck by this analogy when the news of a record sea ice minimum reached the media last summer.\u00a0 Such an unprecedented development, reached not towards the end of September at the equinox but a full month earlier, is as clear a signal of unbalance in our global environment as one could imagine.\u00a0 At the same time, most of the stories tried to \u201cbalance\u201d what is so clearly a sign of radical unbalance with some \u201cother side.\u201d A special favorite seemed to be reporting (in the same article) a study showing Antarctic sea ice is actually \u201cgrowing\u201d as the Arctic shrinks.<\/p>\n
Balance: tighten those muscles, keep your position and try to stay on.\u00a0 But sadly, there is no real comparison between the two seas.\u00a0\u00a0 One encircles a massive continent; the other comprises vast open waters almost entirely surrounded by land.\u00a0\u00a0 Very different dynamics control the sea ice at the north and south poles. \u00a0\u00a0More to the point, Antarctic sea ice has \u201cgrown\u201d by a mere one percent during a 30-year period, while Arctic sea ice lost nearly 50 percent of its extent \u2013 and even more of its mass \u2013 in that same period.<\/p>\n
Tighten your position.\u00a0 Stay on that line and ignore everything else.<\/p>\n
I once accompanied one of most respected, brilliant diplomats I have ever known, a senior arms control expert, on a visit to Svalbard, the Norwegian territory far above the Arctic circle.\u00a0 Hard-nosed in dealing with the pluses and minuses of nuclear weapons, this diplomat dealt in the hard and difficult facts of throw-weights and weapons of mass destruction on a daily basis, not blinking in the face of the difficult reality facing a world able to destroy itself many times over.\u00a0 Yet when it came to climate change, and the extreme changes we were seeing in the current reality of receding glaciers and ice all around us, those same qualities abandoned him.\u00a0 \u201cThe Earth is a resilient place,\u201d he told at one point, looking out at the receding xx glacier near Ny \u00c5lesund.\u00a0 \u201cI just cannot believe we humans can do anything to really harm it.\u00a0 Nature will find a way to adjust.\u201d<\/p>\n
This skilled senior negotiator would never have accepted anything but the facts when it came to arms control. Yet when it came to climate change, he suddenly resorted to a leap of faith.<\/p>\n
He is not the only one:\u00a0 especially in the U.S., issues such as climate change are seen as \u201csoft\u201d issues, not the place of focus for our most senior and seasoned diplomats.<\/p>\n
Perhaps this story occurred to me also because the threat of nuclear annihilation was what we both had grown up with as a terrible threat to out own existence in the 1960\u2019s.\u00a0 I have often thought that climate change represents that kind of threat for our own children.\u00a0 The difference is that climate change is happening, and will continue to happen unless we act \u2013 soon.\u00a0 Yet we try to stay on the balance beam of our past reality.\u00a0 Tighten up, just focus ahead, ignore the fact that you are falling.<\/p>\n
But life in a changing world is not a balance beam, and ignoring our imbalance and tightening our positions is not going to help us stay on a world that is tipping to extremes.\u00a0 The global climate system is moving and shifting as we continue to impact it with ever-greater amounts of carbon dioxide, with no end of the \u201cbeam\u201d in sight.<\/p>\n
On this beam, there is no balance to be had, no matter how hard we adhere to the past.\u00a0 We need to accept a word of radical imbalance before we can possibly begin to address it with the urgency required: the same urgency given threats to our existence of the past.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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