Today is unusual this season. Waking up to an overcast sky, and the warm cold glow of fresh fallen snow replaces the sunshine that would usually stir me on Sunday; it’s been falling for over two hours now. In the past two decades of my life this would be considered normal Minnesota winter weather, but right now it seems like a friend you’ve lost touch with dropping in unexpectedly. Very familiar but oddly unsettling, owing to the uncertainty about how you came apart in the first place.
The past three years winters have been noticeably milder, at first less snowy, and now less cold all together. Passing news reports about regions in the southern United States (where they are not used to much cold or snow) getting unexpected blizzards - for which they are not nearly as prepared to cope as us northerners. It’s not shocking, but quietly disconcerting, especially in light of Al Gore’s new movie – amongst other things – the image of the last 400 years of temperature change sticks in my mind.
Around here, we’ve been known to jokingly thank global warming for any unseasonably warm weather, I think some with a bit more irony than naivety. In the past five years the sort of ominous overtones of such glib remarks seeming less and less… timely.
Of course it’s wrong to justify a belief based on the small sampling of my own personal experience – weather systems are far more complicated than the faculties of my casual observation can coordinate – but the experience of the possible baby steps towards cataclysmic weather shifts has made the looming specter of Global Warming actually tangible in a way that is making it harder and harder to deny. It causes me to silently sigh and mutter “I told you so”.
Growing up and attending public school in the early 90s I was exposed to a flurry of environmental ideas that had broken into the mainstream. I can remember in kindergarten learning about pollution, and this image of giant heaps of trash piling up in a landfill became categorically wrong in my small mind. As I progressed through school I was surprised by how many of my peers, and the society in general, seemed entirely skeptical of the need to be concerned with recycling, greenhouse gas emissions, conservation and other mainstay environmental initiatives.
I always had an oddball passion for environmentally soundness, often running up against surprising resilience or indifference in others concerning the potential doom of the planet. I’ll admit I may have indulged the whiny-bleeding-heart-liberal-sob-story a bit, but for the most part I wasn’t a cawing crow. In my mind the aesthetic & ethic (elegance, efficiency, sustainability) of environmentalism were just as desirable, as the outcome. Over time I just became used to letting people become set in their ways, but as the convergence of public opinion and the escalation of circumstances comes to a head I am hopeful that people will do the right thing when it matters. Or future generations of Minnesotans will probably learn about the hazards of heavy snowfall in kindergarten instead of on their way to the busstop.