Essay- Are We Missing the Big Picture on Climate Change

NY Times Magazine Essay 12/7/2014

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/07/magazine/are-we-missing-the-big-picture-on-climate-change.html?_r=0

Are We Missing the Big Picture on Climate Change?

Summary

Climate change is everything, a story and a calamity bigger than any other. It’s the whole planet for the whole foreseeable future, the entire atmosphere, all the oceans, the poles; it’s weather and crop failure and famine and tropical diseases heading north and desertification and the uncertain fate of a great majority of species on earth. The stories about individual birds can distract us from the slow-motion calamity that will eventually threaten every bird.

And so we should seek out new kinds of stories — stories that make us more alarmed about our conventional energy sources than the alternatives, that provide context, that show us the future as well as the past, that make us see past the death of a sparrow or a swallow to the systems of survival for whole species and the nature of the planet we leave to the future.