A World of Pure Imagination

People still crave the American Dream. But that dream is killing our comrades, our planet, and our future.

A couple years back, I sat with a friend of mine discussing the future. For some reason, the topic turned to retirement (dare to dream), and my friend professed that she planned to retire to Arizona. I laughed.

“What,” she asked me, confused.

“Well it’s just- Arizona- it’s not going to exist by the time we retire,” I replied, equally confused, “I mean, it’s not going to be inhabitable?” I’d only recently seen photos of people’s mailboxes melting in the Mesa summer heat. The idea that people might still move there in thirty years- with climate change not only not slowing but intensifying more rapidly than predicted- seemed wildly detached from reality to me. My friend didn’t like this reply.

“Why would you bring that up,” she huffed. “We’re just imagining the future.”

To me this interaction is a microcosm of the social attitude of climate denial that makes it impossible for us to properly address climate change. My friend grew up as a liberal Democrat, “believes” in climate change, yet when thinking about her own future, the climate catastrophe is not in the picture. It will affect others, surely, but it won’t impinge on our own lives. It’s as though climate, like COVID, like other catastrophes, is simply a rhetorical battleground, nothing more than an academic debate or the fifth-most-important issue on Election Day. It does not exist in our collective imagination; how can we deal with a problem we can’t see?