The Face of Climate Change

I don't know about you, but I find it easier to locate flaws and conceits, honor and values in someone when I can see their face. That may sound horrible, but the whole "you can tell a person's soul by their eyes" thing is partially true. A human face has so many different expressions and our brains convey so many different emotions that we can make half of our face say one thing and the other half say something completely different. Some of us are better than others, admittedly, at conveying our emotions (or hiding them)...and some of us are better at reading those emotions, those character traits, hidden or not. But having a face, for good or for bad, to imagine makes it so much easier to make a decision or strive towards a goal.

What's the face of environmental damage? Maniates says, "the knotty, vexing challenges...have fired our individual and communal imagination, creativity and commitment." And climate change and environmental damage are indeed knotty, vexing challenges. But what image do I call to mind when I think of climate change? Polar bears? Greenhouse gases? Pollutants being churned into the air? Droughts/floods/hurricanes/fires? Not many of those (ignoring the polar bears) have an actual face my human mind can attach onto and find some resemblance in. And while I could look at the faces of the people who have been affected by all the myriad things that climate change has wrought...good lord, that's the entire planet.

I can't imagine 6.8 billion faces.

It's too much. Climate change is too much. I will fully admit I don't have a brain large enough to imagine the capacity for all of the things that are happening to this beaten, bruised, striving, fighting planet of ours. I know that it is happening, I know that it is bad, but in its entirety, in both space and time, I can't put something my brain can measure on it.

I am not disagreeing with Maniates, I agree we can do more than simply the "easy" things. But I feel as though until we have a face to place on climate change, something to rally us, either because we vilify it or idolize it, it becomes that much harder to say, "This is what you must strive for."

It's like trying to imagine our place in the universe...I start thinking about how I am in an apartment, in a city, in a state (alright a district whatever), in a nation, in a continent, in a hemisphere, on a planet, in a solar system, in a galaxy, in a universe...then what? I am lost in the hugeness of it all.

Give me something to grasp on to, give me a face to see and know and fight against or fight with. I want to do more, but I can only see so far out into the future.