carved into the stonework of every govern-
ment building in the world:The state of the planet provides the
context within which all politicians
operate. Yet the vast majority of them
remain oblivious of that context, or
choose to ignore it.B
The indoor environments so many of us
inhabit may be like the milieu Lucy Honey-
church imagined for Cecil—rooms without
a view—but that doesn’t mean we see noth-
ing from them. Computers, phones, TV,
radio—all the portals of our media—pro-
vide an incessant buzz of input. We have
access to a wealth of information previous
generations would have been amazed by.
Some of it may prompt a sense of environ-
mental awareness. There are, for example,
nature documentaries that flag up with
potent visual fluency the problems we’re
facing and creating. But much of what
we view through our sophisticated media
portals is just titillation or distraction. In
fact, the way in which the profound and the
trifling stand in relation to each other, and
how easily the latter can eclipse the former,
has potentially devastating implications for
the way in which we think about climate
change. According to the historian Theo-
dore Zeldin, “What to do with too much
information is the great riddle of the age.” A
more urgent riddle, I would argue, is to find
a way, moment by moment, day by day, of
parsing that information so that what’s vital
reaches us, is absorbed and acted on, and
we’re not distracted by what, in comparison,
simply doesn’t matter.
David Orr gives a good example of how
easily the momentous can be obscured by a
scrim of trivia:In Our Final Hour, Cambridge Uni-
versity astronomer Martin Rees
concluded that the odds of global
civilization surviving to the year
2100 are no better than one in two.
His assessment of threats to human-
kind ranging from climate changeto collision of earth with an asteroid
received good reviews in the science
press, but not a peep from any politi-
cal leader and scant notice from the
media. Compare that non-response
to a hypothetical story reporting,
say, that the President had had an
affair. The blow-dried electronic
pundits, along with politicians of all
kinds, would have spared no effort
to expose and analyze the situation
down to parts per million.The fact that our indoor world is one where
“blow-dried electronic pundits” set the
agenda of media coverage, rather than those
with the integrity and intellectual clout of Sir
Martin Rees, means that public conscious-
ness is daily fed a diet rich in priority-toxins.
Saturated with a stifling blanket of advertis-
ing, glitz, and gossip, we’re prevented from
seeing—or seeing clearly—what desperately
needs to be seen.B
MUCH OF THE FLOOD of information
that washes over us in our indoor world
comes in the form of images, and, as Susan
D. Moeller has pointed out, images “cannot
help but simplify the world.” The simplifica-
tions they offer can be constructive—educa-
tive—helping us to grasp new ideas and see
a way through complexities that might oth-erwise leave us stalled and baffled. There’s
nothing intrinsically wrong with simplifica-
tion; indeed we rely on it all the time. As
Karl Popper said, “Science may be described
as the art of systematic over-simplification.”
But images and their persuasive simplifica-
tions can also distort and distract. The rea-
son images are so important is because they
have what Moeller calls “authority over the
imagination.” What matters is not that these
authoritative devices simplify—that’s inevi-
table—but the quality of the simplifications
they put before us.
At this point in the twenty-first century,
what sort of images should we allow our
imaginations to be governed by? This is
a crucially important question since the
choices we make will do much to mold the
inner topography of the psyche and thus
determine how we act. Our attention is
jostled by scores of competing candidates—
scientific, religious, commercial, political,
artistic. Whatever we select out of this hub-
bub is of course a personal choice. For my
own part, one image has come to have a
particularly disturbing resonance.
Although I’m not a Buddhist, the image
has a Buddhist source, the so-called Parable
of the Poisoned Arrow. This tells of a man
who falls victim to an unknown assailant—
someone shoots an arrow at him when he’s
out walking. It hits him in the abdomen.
After the first shock of impact and injury,
the man puzzles over the likely identity of
the unseen archer. What has he done to
provoke this attack? He reviews possible
culprits—people to whom he might have
given offense. Was it a neighbor he’d insult-
ed, a family member who felt slighted, a
political opponent, a rival in love? He looks
at the arrow for clues. Perhaps the type of
wood used for the shaft will reveal some-
thing since people in some locales make
their arrows from oak or ironwood, while
elsewhere pipal is preferred. The staining at
the end suggests poison. Running his finger
over it and smelling the sticky residue he
tries to identify the type of plant material
used, knowing that some villages use one
type of berry, others opt for concoctions of
bark or fungus. Then he turns his attentionCOVER FEATURE CLIMATE CHANGE | ESSAY
We – as a species, as a
planet – are grievously
injured by the arrows
of carbon emission, yet
much of our energy
is taken up with the
equivalent of examining
the feathers on the
flights of the arrows
that afflict us.62 W LT SUMMER 2019