Work. Rest. Repeat: Faced with climate change, we compartmentalize ourselves to death

By Tom Krattenmaker
USA TODAY, October 29, 2021

As next week’s Unite Nations climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland, trains the world’s attention on the increasingly hostile climate that humans created and that only we can solve, everyday people go on with our everyday lives. Commute. Work. Rest. Repeat.

We do it in the shadow of a crisis that foretells the eventual end of our same old, same old, whether that happens sooner, by our own agency, or later, with the crisis dictating the apocalyptic terms.

Yet, for now, we live the day that’s in front of us. We continue the unsustainable. We compartmentalize.

We are compartmentalizing ourselves to death.

The issues with which they will grapple in Glasgow are almost too much to wrap our minds around. News coverage speaks of disastrous temperature rises, the threat of ever more extreme storms and fires, human migrations that make today’s already-intractable conflicts seem like child’s play, references to a “point of no return.”

Oceanographers tell us, for instance, that the Gulf Stream could collapse because of climate change. Put that in perspective. A reason that northern Europe is warmer than you’d expect for such a high-latitude region is that the Gulf Stream brings warm air from the south. Human population development patterns going back many millennia have been based at least partly on this given. 

Yet this and many other civilizational “givens” are no longer givens. How do we face such gargantuan global shocks while still getting through our day?

Pushing the urgent questions away

The Glasgow summit forces urgent ethical questions whose answers don’t come naturally to our limited brains and imaginations. What obligation do we have to our fellow human beings and other biological life – not just today and tomorrow but decades from now? To beings yet unborn?

What is our culpability if we participate in, and benefit from, the payouts from today’s carbon-pumping capitalism? I am not the one – you are not the one – who invented this way of life. To forgo its benefits and conveniences seems to ask too much, especially if most other people are going to stay the unsustainable course.

Compartmentalizing is a practical necessity, of course, whether you’re talking about climate change or other potentially paralyzing realities (very much including the fact that our biological death is inevitable). We push the dread to the back of our mind and focus on the immediate.

But compartmentalizing can itself become paralyzing if we allow it to steer us away from the urgent global challenge of climate change.

When everything seems normal 

There is something weirdly incoherent about the climate compartmentalizing that is such a part of life today. It was brought vividly to light by the recent Vice news exposé about Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. One side of the company has been facing the reality of climate change square in the face and taking prudent measures to mitigate the company’s risk. Another side – Fox News – keeps promoting climate change denialism on cable television, thus contributing to the feebleness of the global response and making the risk mitigators’ job that much more impossible.

Absurd. Unconscionable. Yet am I not doing much the same – pontificating about the need to address the climate crisis out of one side of my mouth while justifying, out of the other, why I must drive my car to complete my errands today and take that flight to see my mother next month?

Unless you’re smelling wildfire smoke or battling flood waters, it can become disturbingly easy from moment to moment to get the sense that all is normal. The culture – the TV commercials – assure you that all is fine. Beaming into our living rooms are images of people laughing with their families. Finding the cure for every ill in this product or that. Racing off to adventures in beautiful wild areas in vehicles whose combustion methods make it less likely that your grandkids and their grandkids will have any such areas to enjoy – whose combustion methods might have helped ruin your own vacation this past summer.

All is not fine. It’s time to challenge what’s fine, what’s normal.

In the midst of our slow-moving five-alarm fire, who’s crazy? People from activist groups like Extinction Rebellion who glue themselves to buildings and block traffic to disrupt complacency and sound the alarm? Or the rest of us, who pay lip service to the need for change, who promise to go hybrid next time we buy a car, and then shift our focus back to what we must do today for our employer or household?

In the shadow of the frightening future, compartmentalizing is our daily survival strategy. Our prospects for long-term surviving and thriving demand that we stop compartmentalizing so much.

Tom Krattenmaker, a member of USA TODAY’s Board of Contributors, writes on religion and values in public life and directs communications at Yale Divinity School. He is the author of “Confessions of a Secular Jesus Follower.”  Follow him on Twitter: @krattenmaker