Did you see the pictures of smog in Salt Lake City last week on the NBC Nightly News? They had one of those winter temperature inversions that traps all the air pollution that the city creates in the Salt Lake valley and the smog got really bad. It looked Beijing bad! Because I lived in the greater Salt Lake area for almost ten years back in the 70s and 80s my first reaction was to question, "how they could let things get so out of hand?" But the more I thought about it, I remembered that even back in the late 70s Salt Lake City had this same problem, just not as bad and I didn't do or say a word about it. I just drove my cars and went to work and ignored it like everyone else. I didn't write a letter to the editor or try to organize or donate money to organizations trying to cleanup the environment. Why was I so complacent?
That is real question at the heart of this problem, "why do we take the health of our environment for granted?" I know many people in Salt Lake and they are very involved in their community and care deeply about their families. They volunteer, donate to charities and get involved in their local government. These are good people, so why the blind spot on the environment? It is a blind spot that almost all of us seem to share but what is causing it?
Is it the old quasi-religious belief that God gave the planet and all nature to man to have dominion over so we can do whatever we want with it? Or could it be an Industrial Revolution era faith in unrestrained capitalism? Sort of an economic Darwinist point of view where the markets will sort out what species survive, which ones don't and technology will pull us through the bad spots. Perhaps, it is just a form of following the path of least resistance until the situation gets so bad that we can't ignore it anymore. From the look of the pictures on TV Salt Lake City maybe at that point.
What do you think will shake us out of our complacency on global warming?
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