This island Earth

As ecological anxiety increases, the search for radical solutions begins

On a freezing night last November, a crush of concerned citizens packed into the General Store Cafe in Pittsboro for a special screening by Chatham County documentarians Tim Bennett and Sally Erickson. What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire, a bleak, relentless, ecological horror film, played to a rapt house. While most Americans shrug off global warming as somebody else’s problem, at this film’s conclusion the viewers sat in a circle to discuss the inconvenient truths it raised. If Bennett and Erickson were recruiting fellow foot soldiers in the battle for our planet’s future, we were a Coalition of the Willing. But after the show the practical obstacles to saving the planet were all too clear: We all strapped ourselves to thousands of pounds of steel, fired up noxious internal combustion engines, and drove off into the night.

Judging solely by the increased media attention, people are finally starting to confront the implications of a damaged planet (global warming was even the cover story of the March 12 issue of Sports Illustrated). On Feb. 2, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its most strongly worded warning to date, telling us that it is now a near certainty that human activity is responsible for the rise in world temperatures.

The greater American populace is ready to respond to the panel’s increasingly dire warnings the same way it’s responded in the past