Americans, especially conservatives, commonly tell each other that we can cross whatever bridge when we get there. Republicans label planning as – can you stand it – SOCIALISM – applying a nasty-sounding word to cover lack of concern over what will happen to ordinary Americans. Now they’re trying to block investors who take account of environmental implications of corporate behavior from doing business with states.
I see failure to plan as a costly error. Liberals look ahead. We can’t cross a bridge that hasn’t been built. So we plan for the future. Some have described that as a middle-class value – planning for college, retirement and various contingencies.
Science is part of that mindset. The job of scientists is to identify what’s coming and plan for it – with such measures as health care, vaccines, and weather predictions. It’s too late to develop a vaccine after you’ve been bitten by a rabid animal. It’s too late to design a weather prediction service after the hurricane hits. Good management is about planning ahead. That’s certainly what successful businesses do. You can’t take advantage of a market without the goods, services, purchase and delivery systems needed.
The same is true of environmental issues. People who planned to build their bridges when they had the problem have been finding themselves burned out by forest fires, flooded out by sea rise and major storms, and run out of homes and businesses by major droughts. It’s too late to stop warming the globe for those who’ve already been killed or run out by disasters. It’s too late to take the polio or monkey pox vaccine after you have the disease. As a young boy I saw pictures of children in steel cigar tubes they called iron lungs so I had no desire to wait to see if I’d get polio before taking the vaccine. The vaccine was my insurance policy, one of the most valuable I’ve ever had.
The environment has many of us looking at the future. But it doesn’t look far off to make sure my granddaughters are safe. It isn’t far in the future for people from the ironically named Paradise who lost their homes, towns, friends and families from what has been named the Camp wildfire in 2018, among other recent deadly blazes. It isn’t far in the future for the 1,200 people drowned or killed in the Gulf states by Katrina, for those who had to be evacuated from their homes and those who lost everything from other recent storms. It isn’t far into the future for the people suffering from the great drought in the southwest. Whether or not you believe in science, you can’t avoid the damage and you’ll lose everything if we’re not prepared.
Let’s add that most of the world has been shaped by hordes of refugees fleeing from doughts, floods and famine to find better places to live – we’ve called them barbarians and some were but many were just desperate. Whatever their motives, many subjugated native populations – Huns in Germany, Mongols in Asia, palefaces in America – the pattern is world wide. And one of the fundamental sources of such population movement is their inability to stay where they were. In that way climate change is coming for us all unless we stop it, build the bridge to a better climate and build it now.
Let me also point out that to do nothing is to invite change by successive disasters. That’s a form of planning too. We can’t avoid responsibility but we could mitigate the damage.
Steve Gottlieb’s latest book is Unfit for Democracy: The Roberts Court and The Breakdown of American Politics. He is the Jay and Ruth Caplan Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Albany Law School, served on the New York Civil Liberties Union board, on the New York Advisory Committee to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, and as a US Peace Corps Volunteer in Iran.
The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.