We can't solve climate change

This entry is part of my journal from Semester in the West. For all SITW journal entries, click here. For all SITW posts, including blog posts I wrote while on the program, click here. To learn more about the program, click here.

camp: Back of Beyond, the Known Universe, Utah

context: We had just come from Aspen, Colorado, where the Auden Schendler, who’s the VP of Sustainability for the Aspen Ski Company, told us that we can’t possibly solve climate change and that we need to try as hard as we can anyway.

Auden Schendler is absolutely right, and I needed to hear what he said. Because we’re absolutely going to fail. We can’t fix this problem in the time we need to. We’re up against Exxon-Mobil, Citizens United vs. FEC, the competing attention the recession is getting, a half-Republican Congress, CleanCoal^TM and the Tea Party. We’re going down in flames. And that’s exactly why we need to fight. We have nothing to lose by trying. We have a moral imperative to try as hard as we possibly can. We can slow our defeat or lessen its magnitude, but it is coming. So we sigh, relieved—we know our destiny. It’s a march to the gallows with heads held high, a fight to the death, and you can’t give up until you’re lying face down in a pool of your own blood with seventeen bullets in your back. Until then, we keep fighting. We fight with the urgency this problem deserves, willing to push the envelope, willing to try anything to delay facing death a little longer. We fight as long as there is breath in us. We fight.