Small Minds; Deep Thoughts

Last Saturday, due in large part to

1) a heady sense of freedom brought about by S.B.’s agreement to watch Mr. C

AND

2) the knowledge that it was only an hour and sixteen minutes long . . .

I imprudently agreed to accompany Bee on a last-minute “date” to see the documentary Chasing Ice.

Stupid, self-imposed IntelliQuest; now look what you’ve done.

I should have known better than to allow my first IntelliQuest documentary to be something other than a behind-the-scenes feature on a band or a hard-hitting exposé on the history of chocolate soufflés. Oh, no! I just had to pick something about the environment, which would only depress me.

Chasing Ice chronicles the multi-year project of James Balog, a photographer who decided to set up time-lapse cameras in Greenland, Iceland and Alaska so that he could photograph the growth and recession of glaciers. What the photos showed was that many of the world’s most famous and influential glaciers (yes, there is such a thing as an influential glacier) are melting at a shocking rate. There were cases, if I remember correctly, where it had taken only a few years for a glacier to recede the same distance it had previously taken 100. Core samples of the glaciers also showed how carbon dioxide amounts have increased on the planet within the last 100 years, and have skyrocketed within the last ten years. (Keep in mind that I may be way off on reporting these findings; I couldn’t take notes during the film because that would have gotten in the way of my popcorn-consumption.)

Conclusion: GLOBAL WARMING IS REAL; THE POLAR ICE CAPS ARE MELTING; WITHIN MY CHILD’S LIFETIME, THE OCEANS WILL RISE THREE FEET. Which is enough to make an impressive amount of shoreline non-existent, causing a disturbing amount of people to become homeless. The amount was so disturbing that neither Bee nor I can remember what it was. 150 million? The same as the entire population of France?? Anyway, a huge-enough number that I felt compelled to share it with you without bothering to first check my facts on it ('cause I’m smart like that.)

The Good News: Don’t sweat the small stuff. Your so-called “problems” at the office are nothing compared to the fact that the polar ice caps are melting. Why are you stressing about being a size six? The polar ice caps are melting! Go ahead and spend the money on that vacation; might as well live before the polar ice caps melt.

The Bad News:  Well, we covered that already.

(Another quandary: If the polar ice caps are melting anyway and I just need to live my life, is it OK for me to take that vacation to Paris that’ll dump that much more airline pollution into the skies?)

Walking out of the theater, I just felt powerless. Worse-yet, I was reminded of how small-minded I am, because I walked out STILL convinced that I’m powerless, and that very little that I do will make a difference, and that – most appalling – I’m just too damn lazy to try to do something drastic. I mean, I do a hundred tiny things to reduce my carbon footprint (of which I will brag about at some later time), but I don’t know that I'd ever be brave enough to take the big steps it would require to revert back to the land and live in harmony with nature.

And is it even possible to do that in this day and age? I mean, it takes space to be able to grow your own food and be self-sustaining; there’s just not that much space left in the world. And we don’t have enough trees for everyone in the world to go off electricity and heat their homes with wood. Do we go back to coal? But didn’t coal cause copious amounts of pollution? Do we do solar energy? But are solar energy factories pumping scary chemicals into the air and groundwater to produce those battery cells?

When I start debating these things with myself, I just start feeling that whole “damned if you do, damned if you don’t mentality”. So I figure there’s no point in me trying to take more steps than I’m currently taking to be more environmentally-friendly. And then I think about some theory I’d heard years ago that humans will always come up with a solution at the eleventh hour and fifty-ninth minute. And, besides, there are smarter people than me out there who are better-suited to finding the answers to these problems. Not to mention that people have – for thousands of years – always claimed that the world is coming to an end. Also, I am hampered by the fact that – as a semi-biologist – I often take the looooong view of ecology: so I wonder if we just happen to be living in an era when the Earth gradually (or not-so-gradually) warms. Dinosaurs had their day, then were wiped out; maybe (within the next few hundreds or thousands of years) it’s our turn to leave.

But what am I saying: the fact that humans are the cause of our own extinction makes it all OK?

(Which, actually, might not be so bad; except that we’re taking all the other species down with us.)

Sigh. It’s all too much for my small mind.

(See how I did that? See the way I belittled myself to excuse my lack of action? Methinks the lady doth need to grow a pair.)

Anyway, the point of the IntelliQuest is to make me a little more knowledgeable and intelligent. And – although I guess Chasing Ice made me more knowledgeable about melting glaciers – I really don’t feel more intelligent. The ramblings written above only serve to prove to me how small-minded and shallow I am. Facts that, as the movie’s end credits finally began, were only hammered in all the more viciously when I found myself most interested in the fact that Scarlett Johansson was singing the theme song and that she had a lovely, bluesy voice and I wonder why she and Ryan Reynolds divorced and is he really more-fulfilled now that he’s married to Blake Lively?

So, the first installment of my IntelliQuest was kind of a failure.

(Luckily for me, misery loves company, so I feel a little better now that I’ve thrown all my crap on you. You had no idea when I embarked on the IntelliQuest that you’d be dragged down this far, did you?)