Huffington Magazine Issue 20 | Page 33

Voices the big picture year after year. The same is true of the damage we are doing to the planet. You may already know that climate change is real, due to our activities, far advanced and an imminent peril of the first order. If you don’t know or believe any of this, consider asking yourself: what, exactly, would it take to convince you this were true? If you can’t answer the question, that tells you something; maybe there is no evidence you would accept. If you can answer the question, then ask yourself another: do you really want to be there before we do something to defend ourselves? Once jaws clamp shut on our throats, we’re pretty much out of options. Climate change and environmental degradation are too slow for us to take the menace seriously. It just doesn’t resonate with our Stone Age perceptions. And when something acute does happen—like the BP disaster—our Stone Age mindset invites us to forget about it as soon as it stops biting us in the backside. But these choices to ignore, neglect and deny are not choices at all—unless we make them so. We may think it puts us in the DAVID KATZ HUFFINGTON 10.28.12 driver’s seat to “choose” to ignore the threats of fast food or climate change. But in fact, we are entirely subservient to brute biology—to our ancestors’ genes. If we really want to be in the driver’s seat, we need to choose to care about the world we leave behind. As long as the immediate gratifications of runnin’ on Dunkin and the stock market define our time horizon, we are living on the modern savannah. Do we really think our kids will thank us In fact, for bequeathing them we are a pile of cash along entirely with no viable planet subservient on which to spend it? to brute Or for endowing them biology— with more obesity to our and chronic disease ancestors’ at ever younger age genes.” than ever before seen in human history? I anticipate we will all be beneficiaries of the same basic eulogy: “F$@# you guys!” This will be the case unless we act on what we see, and see what requires action—with eyes adapted to modern context. I hope it’s soon—because we seem to be running out of time.