If there's any truth in today's headlines, America is currently clashing with every axis of evil on the planet, and it seems that rising temperatures are our latest enemy on this never-ending list of evildoers. According to the cover of Time Magazine, "How We Can Win the War on Global Warming" is by following a detailed battle plan laid out in the pages of its latest issue. This is, of course, a flawless concept, seeing as every other time we've declared war on non-recognizable entities without real governments and armies to fight (see also: War on Drugs, War on Terror) things have gone remarkably well.
Even in the hypothetical version of America where these wars are successful, there are still major problems with declaring war on global warming. Number one, it isn't a war. And two, the fighting style of a war - the mentality and brutality that war demands - is exactly the opposite of the solution to the situation we face.
A war is, so I've heard, a finite fight. We declare, we clash, we complete. When the bullets finally stop flying, our troops come home and we go back to our everyday lives. Contrary to this model, global warming requires a completely different set of circumstances in which our everyday lives are the problem. The enemy isn't a Them - distant, separate, foreign - but is in fact a deeper part of ourselves: how we live in, and think about, the world.
In a war on global warming, we would need to defeat an opponent whose outposts lurk in our habits, our lifestyles, our dependencies and our consumerism. To stop this climate crisis (to truly undo the massive damage we've done to this Earth) would take an ongoing effort to change some fundamental part of who we are. Those aren't changes we can discard once the "war on global warming" is "over," because it's never over. (Actually, this does sound eerily similar to another war I know.)
In our generation, war also implies selective service. We send people to war - and the vast majority of us send other people to war while we stay here. You can't phone in environmentalism, and we can't ship off a bunch of troops to do battle in our stead when the proverbial trenches are in our own light fixtures, fuel tanks and garbage cans.
Since the situation in which we find ourselves in no way resembles combat, one has to question why Time felt the need to so inaccurately label their "green issue." Choosing such a charged word for a headline is not a casual decision; the power of the placement is too intense. When "war" is on the cover of a news magazine, it's not just war. It's WAR! It inspires action, heroism, outrage and most of all, fear. Yet, in a nation where media uses our own terror to promote attacks on terrorism, it's actually not a huge surprise that they hope our panic will scare us into saving the planet. Media today is so used to fear-mongering that they've forgotten they're capable of doing anything else, like, say, practicing ethical journalism.
Time has the right intentions: increase awareness about global warming and urge us to act before it's too late. But as much as Americans love a battle cry, we're going to have to do something much harder than wage war with the atmosphere. We are our own adversary, and nothing can change until we do.
