When I moved into my apartment sixteen years ago, my new abode
looked as virginal and full of promise as Massachusetts must have
looked to the Pilgrims. I took pleasure and pride in the
clean white walls, the polished walnut floor, the ample expanse of
windows, light, and living space. Then I began to put my personal
imprint on it: rugs, furniture, books and bookcases, brass lamps,
art and artifacts, a few wheezing houseplants. I beheld my world and
it was good. But I kept adding to it, stuffing it beyond its
capacity to be stuffed. A steady influx of possessions into a finite
space tends to create terminal clutter.
Today my place looks as seedy and bloated as a former movie idol
who aged badly. I gaze around at the flopping piles of books and
half-read magazines, the collections of dusty objects occupying
nearly every square inch of horizontal space, the storage boxes
piled on top of other storage boxes, the faint trails of crumbs and
cat litter on the floor, the powdery residue of numerous swatted
moths still stubbornly visible on the walls.
It’s all my fault, this intolerable mess. Somewhere along the
way, probably within the past two years, I lost the long war against
the malign forces of domestic disarray. I could no longer subdue the
foe; dust and clutter now reigned triumphant. My belongings seemed
to propagate themselves by a reproductive process unknown to
science, and they began to intrude upon areas originally designed
for actual living, like sofas and chairs and tabletops. As boxes and
books began to expand outward from the baseboards, the paths that
led from room to room grew steadily narrower like diseased arteries
ripe for a fatal thrombosis. In short, I was defeated. My place was
finally, miserably uninhabitable, and I could save myself only by
sounding a retreat: I’d have to move out.
I was fortunate. My upcoming marriage meant that I’d be moving
into a new house anyway, a clean world full of open space and fresh
possibilities for creating disorder. Homes are nice that way:
when you reach terminal clutter, when you run out of room, when
your environment becomes malevolent with self-replicating crumbs and
periodicals, you can always abandon it and move to the next place.
You can’t do that with a planet. Our own perpetually twirling
Earth is beginning to show signs of irreversible breakdown, much
like my apartment. We’ve already cluttered it with the unwholesome
debris of careless enterprise: cities spreading like malignant
tumors, vast ungainly housing tracts, shopping malls, power lines,
industrial parks. We’ve crisscrossed its surface with endless
bands of asphalt. We’ve slowly fouled the air with the noxious
exhalations of a billion chimneys and exhaust pipes. You’ve heard
about the "greenhouse effect" and the resultant global
warming. This is not a myth perpetrated by sandal-shod liberal
tree-huggers who listen to NPR and vote for Ralph Nader. Gases like
carbon dioxide and methane are being released into the atmosphere at
potentially catastrophic rates, and they’re trapping heat like the
glass panes of a greenhouse. The pace of warming, compressed into
just a few short decades, has reached a level unseen on this planet
during the past hundred million years. The last inhabitants of Earth
that had to cope with a comparable crisis are now on display in
natural history museums.
Along with the obvious effects of heat, our greenhouse planet has
been prey to wild extremes of weather: pounding rains, floods,
droughts, fires and hurricanes. It’s beginning to look like a
biblical prophecy of the difficult last days, a nightmare vision
from the mind of Hieronymus Bosch: hellish landscapes and
erupting flames, tortured multitudes and grinning demons with evil
instruments. As the atmosphere thickens with odious fumes, you have to
wonder if we’ll be among the last generations to see the stars in
the night sky.
An international panel sponsored by the United Nations recently
predicted that by the year 2100, average temperatures on our planet
will have risen anywhere from 2.5 to 10.4 degrees Fahrenheit. (For
perspective, you should know that a gradual nine-degree upswing was
sufficient to end the last Ice Age.) No sweat, you say? If
temperatures rise, can’t we just sit back in our hammocks and
watch the palm trees sprout in New Jersey or Indiana or wherever we
happen to be living? Places like Tulsa and Kansas City could
certainly benefit from a touch of the tropics. I probably wouldn’t
mind a chance to swim off Cape Cod in November. And if temperatures
really became unbearable, we could all move up to Canada, couldn’t
we? We could put down roots in Manitoba and teach the natives how to
make Southern-fried chicken. We’d find plenty of room in Siberia,
too, now that it’s no longer being used for Soviet detention
camps. Americans settling in a warmed-up Siberia could build Dr.
Zhivago water-slide parks and create a new form of pop music based
on the electric balalaika.
But naturally it’s not that simple; it never is. The
international panel asserts that a mean temperature rise of more
than three degrees would cause dramatic drop-offs in crop yields
around the world. That means less grain to make bread and pizza,
less feed for the cattle we ultimately consume as burgers. It means
less fuel for our rollerblading bodies and video-gaming minds. We
could just about write off the entire Third World as a planetary tax
loss; its emerald-colored croplands would turn to deserts and its
inhabitants would either starve or move to Los Angeles.
If temperatures reach the worst-case scenario by rising 10
degrees and staying there indefinitely, the polar icecaps would melt
and raise sea levels by about thirty feet, enough to submerge most
of Florida, Bangladesh and, for that matter, just about every port
city around the globe. New York would look like a high-rise
Venice; you could finally ride across Canal Street in a checkered
yellow gondola. New Orleans, already below sea level, would look
more like Atlantis, a treat for scuba divers and tour operators with
glass-bottomed boats. A few hilly West Coast burgs like San
Francisco and Seattle might survive the floodwaters, assuming they
haven’t already been obliterated by earthquakes or volcanos. But
you could bid farewell to your beach house at the Jersey shore;
maybe you’d have better luck with beachfront property in
Pennsylvania.
These aren’t just idle predictions; the planet is already
showing early signs of overheating. Here’s some hard evidence that
we’re not making this up, according to the virtually omniscient
editors of Time magazine: The past decade was the hottest
since we started keeping score... Sections of the Antarctic ice
shelf are breaking loose and drifting out to sea, where they’ll
melt and contribute to higher sea levels... The fabled snows of
Kilimanjaro have retreated 75 percent since 1912, and at the current
melting rate they could be history in fifteen years... Our own
Glacier National Park might have to find itself a new name by
2070... Pestilent tropical diseases like dengue fever are inching
northward toward our once-temperate republic... Washington’s
cherry trees are blossoming a full week earlier than they did just
thirty years ago... Coral reefs and Pacific salmon are being hit
hard by rising water temperatures... One section of the Brazilian
shoreline has been retreating eight feet a year since 1985.
Even the northern permafrost is starting to melt, making it
easier to dig up long-frozen mammoths and grill them for dinner. So
what’s wrong with that? In addition to yielding mammoth carcasses,
the melting sod is releasing vast quantities of methane into the
atmosphere. Methane, a noxious gas produced by decaying plants and
flatulent cows, also happens to be one of those troublesome
greenhouse gases. The more the earth heats up, the more methane will
be released. The more methane that’s released, the more the earth
will heat up. Are you starting to see the problem?
The jury is still out as to whether the warming trend can be
blamed exclusively on the greed and gluttony of humankind. After
all, the Earth underwent previous catastrophic changes in climate
without our help, eons before we built our first fireplace. Couldn’t
it be a coincidence that the planet has been heating up ominously
during the spread of industrialization? And couldn’t it be a
coincidence that George W. Bush and his father are both Republicans?
The prevailing wisdom points the finger directly at the escalating
emission of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. America isn’t
solely to blame, since we produce just 25 percent of the world’s
carbon dioxide emissions. But then, we’re only four percent of the
world’s population. We should be able to do the math.
When you think about it, you have to marvel at the ability of one
lousy species to ransack an entire planet. A glorified ape, no less.
We started gradually, with our fires and farming, our gleeful
obliteration of forests and grasslands. We added factories,
highways, strip malls and megaplexes. Now, in just the past few
decades, our energy-consuming enterprises have tilted the fortunes
of the planet toward eventual ruin. What’s especially alarming is
that even if we stopped belching greenhouse gases into the atmosphere
tomorrow, the Earth would continue to heat up for several more
decades.
It sounds hopeless, doesn’t it? Sort of like my apartment. The
only problem is that when conditions become intolerable on this
blue-green planet of ours, we won’t
be able to move out.
