Hurricanes are more powerful; droughts linger longer and wildfires rage uncontrollably across the landscape. I have a second climate change comedy screenplay under construction.
The best way to think about the climate is to laugh about our predicament and then because we can see for ourselves the impact our runaway climate is having on our lives, we can do something about it. We need to respond—
Laughter they say is the best medicine. OK, sure maybe. Hard to take medicine if you no longer are alive to take it. The loss of life in North Carolina has been an emphatic exclamation point— there is nowhere to go-there is nothing to do-the climate emergency is coming for all of us.
I have this persistent delusion that the trees in our neighborhood can’t possibly catch fire spiral out of control and burn our homes on our block to the ground. Allstate Insurance Company begs to differ. Insurance companies are pretty much done with all of us. They know the score.
While I have been worried about sea level rise (we live some 250 feet above the water line) I never imagined I’d be facing a pincer movement, flooding from below with wildfire from on high each natural disaster becoming a growing threat to all our lives.
Writing climate change comedy is about fortifying our collective perspective muscle. Doom loop energy can be so draining. Opposite falling into despair is gathering the will to respond. Yeah, it is no easy thing because the size of this monster we face is global in scale, but we do live in a world inhabited by superhero’s— and we are nothing if not tenacious leaper’s over the tallest buildings.
Leadership includes laughter. Politics we have learned from the Vice President can possess a certain degree of joy, all well and good to a point. Harder is responding to our challenges because we soon learn that there are homeowners living along a river that don’t want to move, residents living near a forested mountain don’t want to leave the land they love.
Closing a coal fired power station, adapting to driving an electric car, looking to our state regulators to fix the affordability crisis for the homeowner insurance market— these are consequential life changing events, okay well a high car payment can be quite the threat.
The way out isn’t to stricken the term climate emergency from our vocabulary. That’s like up there with head in sand thinking.
Most of us do not think obsessively over the impact our changing climate is having on us. We don’t fully appreciate how deadly wildfire smoke can be to our health. We take off on a hike and may not have checked how hot it will be. We might forget our sunscreen and put that exposure on our dermatologist’s tab, you know— we’ll deal with our skin damage in due course— not right now.
Two plots to two screenplays. First, I set the problems along the Colorado River into one story, the threat of atmospheric river fed landslides in another. I’ve still a good deal of work to do on the second script, but it is this next climate related event, this third plot I’m beginning to think through, and can I find the comedy in the climate disruption.
So far the answer is yes I can—
To those out there that have lost a loved one because of Helene— I am sorry for your loss. The right thing for all of us to do, out of respect for those climate emergency victims is to make our way through, to find that capacity within ourselves to respond to events overtaking us all. Part of what we face is no laughing matter, the pieces I might manipulate to humors end is premised on the fact that the creative arts can make a life saving difference, that we will prevail over what is the world’s most urgent challenge.
