Global Warming

 

The planet is on fire, and now, sports!

Every now and then, something completely unremarkable jumps up and grabs your attention. This happened to me the other day when I was watching the tail end of a local TV newscast. The anchor was reporting a fairly important piece of news about something called global warming, and the latest WMO report which concluded that the greenhouse gases responsible for it reached record levels in 2010. Despite the gravity of this grim news, the reporter didn’t bat an eye, reporting on it in the same manner as he might have reported on a local Christmas tree lighting. It certainly wasn’t the focus of the newscast or the item mentioned before commercial breaks to entice viewers to stick around. It was just an obligatory stat stuffed in at the end right before kicking it to, you guessed it, sports.

It’s Zen moments like this that continue to reinforce in my mind that if we fail to act on global warming, and the planet does in fact lose its ability to support life in the not too distant future, it will be because of this kind of rote apathy. It’s not that we’re lazy, we’re just locked in our routines – unwittingly serving the economic machine with the same tunnel vision as an ant serving its colony, too busy with more important matters, like sports. We’ve heard about global warming. It sounds important. But the air feels clean enough to us, and until it starts affecting our day-to-day, we’ll stick to football.

Source: Primitive Times