Climate Change PLUS

So thanks to Al Gore more people are interested in our response to climate change. As The Inconvenient Truth hits the Lansing area next week (fundraiser at Celebration Cinema on the 29th, show opens to the public on the 30th) as folks leave the theater with hopefully a better understanding of what we know and don't know, how will we respond?

My fear is that we will run forward to latch on to the latest technical fixes. Hopefully more people will buy compact flurorescent lights (cfl's) and install them for example. This is a good thing as electricity use will be cut 75% by a switch from incandescent bulbs which use 90% of their energy to give off heat, not light. But I want to suggest that we strive to think about climate change in more connected ways. and not as some disconnected challenge from all the others we face. So perhaps one better question to address is how do we use less energy while simultaneously diminishing the gulf between rich and the poor. For we can surely do this in a way where we keep helping the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. One consideration therefore might be, where do we buy the bulbs? If we can get them cheaper at Home Depot or WalMart is that the best deal for our community? Remember much of the profit from those global giants does not remain in our community but leaves immediately to corporate headquarters and into the hands of some of the wealthiest people on the planet - not all stakeholders share in the wealth.

This isn't the only connection we should try to make as we rush to slow the climate disruptions we know we are causing. Sustainability, if it does anything, should help us consider how things are connected - local to global, economic-to-social-environmental, personal-to-community. present-to-future. We need each other to help us think about what costs we externalize when we propose a solution. If we can think of the reverberations of those choices across a wide array of connections we are more like to minimalize unintended consequences and grow in our communities what we truly value.