Burning Up the Middle East
My mother and her friends are all scientists. I grew up knowing about climate change and sustainability, even though I was never too ecologically minded.
Recently some troubling studies have come out about the increasing temperature. Scientists predict that by the end of the century the Middle East will be so hot and humid it will uninhabitable. My godmother, an ecological scientist, says that if we keep increasing our fossil fuel consumption at the current rate, the timeline may well be more like fifteen to twenty years.
At the same time, some experts on climate and security are linking the current war in Syria with climate change. The political unrest in Syria that precipitated the war was preceded by the worst drought in memory, depriving some 800,000 Syrians of their livelihoods.
This is not something that has gotten a lot of media attention, partly because it is so hard to grasp. Even if we understand it intellectually, it is so hard to link filling up my car's gas tank with the fate of Syrian refugees halfway around the world. That dangerous disconnect is something I am trying to explore.
This is a much younger me. Lately I have been wondering about the way contemporary companies seek to create needs to fill, rather than meeting existing needs. I think such business models are dangerously unsustainable and have made our society unhealthily dependent on consumption, a consumption that often has a significant carbon footprint. I myself am certainly not immune to this.
It seems like almost too much effort to worry about these things. Yet they have take a real human toll.
I am still struggling to see my own hand in these tragedies.
