Tuesday evening I attended a fascinating lecture by Steven Gardiner, author of A Perfect Moral Storm: the Ethical Tragedy of Climate Change (Oxford University Press, 2011). Professor of Philosophy and Ben Rabinowitz Professor of Human Dimensions of the Environment at the University of Washington (where my husband teaches), he has written extensively on ethics and climate. Discussing how to weigh the future world versus the present world when considering the impact of our carbon emissions, he suggested that two hundred years from now, people will probably view us and our culture of consumption much like we view slaveholders in the American south.
This got me thinking. Family history is a huge hobby of mine, and my husband’s ancestors prove to have been small-time slave owners in Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, and Louisiana. They also followed the typical pattern of colonial invaders from the British Isles: buying land, clearing and depleting it, moving south and west, buying more land, clearing and depleting it, and so on in segments of twenty to fifty years. Throughout the 225 years of their pre-Civil War history on this continent, the probate inventories of their personal estates contained more and more stuff as time went on: more livestock, more furniture, more luxuries. As did the inventories of everyone around them. You had to consume more and more to be average, if you were white.
Reading those ancestors’ handwritten inventories, which often included slaves, and reading handwritten records from the church they and their slaves attended from 1800 to 1833, where white male elders (females and blacks couldn’t vote) excommunicated a member for playing the violin but merely censured a member who killed one of his slaves, I would ask myself, “How could they do this?! How could this seem normal?! What were they thinking?!”
Well, previously I was in medical practice with a woman whose feminism and liberal political views didn’t prevent her from trying to engineer better benefits - retirement, maternity leave etc - for the doctors than for our employees. (Thankfully, we were informed that this was illegal.) At the outset she refused to allow pharmaceutical reps inside our office; by the time I bailed, she was conducting pharmaceutical research on her patients without informing them that she received a kickback for every patient she enrolled in the study. She bought a house so grand, mine would have fit inside her living room (just a slight exaggeration), and in my presence she and our practice attorney (also her friend and patient) agreed that it was impossible to imagine how anyone could stand living in a smaller house. I have no doubt that if we were in Georgia in 1850, both of them would have been slaveholders.
Which brings me to the present contest for the Democratic presidential nomination. Climate change is of course a survival issue. What we do now will determine whether our grandchildren face starvation, even here in the US, given that higher heat tolerance has so far proved impossible to breed into plants like wheat and corn (not to mention broccoli and lettuce), and moving agriculture into northern Canada is not an option because there’s no soil there. (My source on this is climate expert Professor David Battisti at the University of Washington, who last month gave a lecture at our church on climate change and global food security.) Consider the carbon footprints of our two remaining candidates: Hillary with her mansions, her limousines, her ridiculously large wardrobe of pantsuits, her easy acceptance of six-figure speaking fees, versus Bernie with his… house?
Unlike the Republican pack of climate change deniers, both Hillary and Bernie at least acknowledge the problem. Bernie took heat for calling it the greatest threat to our national security in the first debate.
No doubt Hillary’s commitment to reducing greenhouse gases is sincere: after all, even US energy corporations are ahead of Republican politicians on this issue. But just as it seems crazy to expect a recipient of millions of dollars from Wall Street to do everything possible to rein in Wall Street, it seems crazy to expect someone who has eagerly acquired a carbon footprint probably a hundred times as big as the average American’s (America’s being twenty times too big already) to do everything possible to rein in the overconsumption underlying our excessive carbon emissions.
Pope Francis leads by example on climate change and economic justice. Jimmy Carter does the same. So can Bernie, I believe. You can probably guess which of our candidates I imagine would have been a slaveholder during the 1850’s.