I’m the twenty-seventh through twenty-ninth chapter of The Science of Discworld, climate change is real, motherfuckers. Intrigued? Then it’s time for Mark to read Discworld.Â
Oh, what a strange time to be reading about global climate trends.
I grew up with Captain Planet. With nationwide, statewide, and local initiatives to recycle. I remember when we first got the blue bins meant entirely for recyclable goods, like aluminum, plastic, and paper. Pollution disasters were on the news; I distinctly recall the horrifying images from that big Exxon spill, too. And I lived behind a wildlife preserve, one that the city tried to take care of, but which grew intermittently smaller as pieces of it were sold off and developed into tracts of identically designed homes.
Which isn’t to say that I’ve always been aware of environmental issues, but it was hard to ignore them. And when the siren calls started going off twenty years ago, when there were very public blowouts over whether or not greenhouse gases were negatively affecting our world, I was paranoid and anxious about the possibility that we were going to ignore something that would later come to greatly affect us.
My love for the environment was mostly due to my upbringing, specifically my father’s side of the family. I spoke about this (sort of) when I was discussing the ocean and my relation to it. I hiked a lot as a kid, and my dad loved to take us on camping trips for the short period of time when we lived in Idaho. He was interested in sustainable hunting, and he taught us to never take more than we needed, to never treat the forest or the river as a trash receptacle, and to respect the sheer beauty of the natural world. It’s perhaps the most meaningful thing that my father instilled in me, especially given that we were never terribly close. Despite that I have long gravitated towards large cities, I need to be in nature regularly, and I know that’s in part because I was lucky enough to spend so much time in the wilderness as a kid.
So it’s hard not to worry about what we’re doing to the planet, and I do include myself in that. I try to do my best to think about my footprint and what I’m consuming, but it’s probably not good enough. But what if the larger entities in our society? The ones who pollute without recourse. Those who tear resources out of this earth without a care for what they’re leaving for future generations. Those who lobby for relaxed regulations and punishments because all they care about is that wretched bottom line. Sometimes, I feel just as helpless about them, too. And it certainly doesn’t help that the past couple years have been increasingly disturbing in terms of the weather phenomena that we’ve been experiencing. That long drought in California was pretty scary, y’all! And that’s the only one I’ve experienced personally, you know? What if this keeps getting worse and worse? Are we, as a collective, going to take too long to actually care about this?
I hope not.
In the efforts of not making this a giant, doom-inducing review, I AM VERY INVESTED IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF LIFE IN THE ROUNDWORLD EXPERIMENT. Both of the chapters here were surprisingly tense??? I didn’t know that colorful blobs would be entertaining??? And I really want to know what these blobs are turning into? Hopefully Rincewind is okay, but also… please stay in the Roundworld I NEED TO KNOW MORE.
https://youtu.be/n-7PMf1jOHs
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