In ancient times, a natural disaster was often thought of as a collective punishment from the gods. Whether that punishment was just was irrelevant. It was served.
Mankind today is an Olympian force of 6.9 billion strong and growing. Climate scientists tell us we are the cause of massive changes in the gaseous makeup of our atmosphere, a shift that will cause the natural world to change in drastic and often unpredictable ways. One such shift is the rise in ocean temperatures that have led and will continue to produce more frequent and more severe hurricanes.
The climate change movement enjoyed a brief heyday in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, only to be largely forced off the agenda after the 2008 recession. Now, Hurricane Sandy has reintroduced the vocabulary of climate change to the political sphere. Environmentalists grab hold of Sandy in an attempt to convince people to fight the good fight — to remind us that despite all the wonders of human genius and innovation we fundamentally depend on our natural environment for survival.
They show us human suffering — the dead, the homeless and the misplaced. Congress shakes its fists at the billions of dollars worth of damage and devastation.
Yet in this political moment, it is the tragedy at Newtown and the battle for gun control that has riled Americans and resulted in immediate action from the Obama White House and New York State. So what is the difference between the fight for gun control and the fight for climate change legislation? A carbon tax won’t stop a hurricane any sooner than stricter gun laws will stop a mentally unstable person from killing innocent strangers.
The tragedy at Newtown shattered the false sense of security enjoyed by those of us who live in quiet suburban neighborhoods surrounded by people who seem just like us. Hurricane Sandy was a violent wake up call for those of us who live cradled in the crib of technological innovation, apart from the chaos of the natural world. Both call for political action, but the action we will see is unlikely to be the action we really need.
The difference between the easy fixes and the legislation worth fighting for rest in what these solutions demand from us as a country. Gun control is solely a political issue. The debate going forward is practical, not about ideology but about the present realities of guns in America and their role in everyday life. Therefore greater gun restrictions are probably in our future.
Likewise, the solution we will probably see to address climate change — the very useful and necessary carbon tax — appeals to self-interest. The economic incentives it will apply to decrease pollution will also reduce our national deficit.
What is not so readily addressed about gun violence and climate change are how these two issues are caught up with our notions of community, and whom we want to include in that community. Mass shootings such as those in Newton and Aurora pose the challenge of how to care for the mentally ill. They force us to address the terror of gang violence in our nation’s cities perpetuated by those driven by desperation and economic necessity. The dangers of climate change force us to consider ourselves part of a global community in which we are inextricably linked to one another by shared resources, atmosphere and oceans.
These are moral issues — demanding on our consciences and habits and perhaps even require some self-sacrifice. So the progress is sluggish at best.
This is precisely why it is easier to legislate about gun control rather than the structural deprivation of the mentally ill and the urban poor. It is also why it is so effective to point to China’s monstrously high carbon dioxide emissions to justify the United States’ status as the world’s largest polluter.
We can no longer afford a false sense of security. You may not live in a community ravaged by natural disaster, industrial pollution or unremitting gun violence. But that does not mean you are out of harm’s way, or that you are free of any responsibility for it.
Whomever we may blame for catastrophe, when it strikes the punishment is collective. The only way to cope with that is as a community, invested in each other’s well being.
Claire Gianotti ’13 can be reached at claire_gianotti@brown.edu.
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