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Climate Change is the New Evolution
Last week, during his State of the Union Address, President Obama boldly stated, “No challenge poses a greater threat to future generations than climate change.” He continued, noting that 2014 was the planet’s warmest year on record, and that 14 of the 15 warmest years on record have fallen in the first 15 years of this century.
Critics have been swift to attack. Oh no, there’s too much uncertainty to call 2014 the warmest year. It may have been one of the warmest, but not definitively the warmest — a brand of diversion politics frequently employed by climate-change deniers, and a strategy with which we more scientifically-minded Americans have become all too familiar.
Mike Huckabee, former governor of Arkansas and creationist presidential wannabee, had the most loaded response: “Not to diminish anything about the climate, but Mr. President, I believe that most of us would think that [an ISIS] beheading is a far greater threat to an American than a sunburn.” Implying, of course, that the potential for climate change to trigger large scale injury and loss of property and life, as well as significant changes in global migration patterns due to catastrophic weather events and drought-related social conflict, is no more risky than the dark side of a day at the beach.
But this resistance to the science shouldn’t surprise us, because in truth, it isn’t about the science at all. Nor is it about the accuracy of scientifically-based predictions. This resistance is about culture. A dogma. It’s about a way of life.
Huckabee’s new book, God, Guns, Grits, and Gravy, proclaims that American culture is divided into two sects: “Bubble-ville” (representing the out-of-touch urban centers of finance, politics, and entertainment, like New York, Washington, and L.A.) and “Bubba-ville” (the American South and Heartland regions, representing real American values). He writes:
This is a book about God, guns, grits, and gravy. It’s not a recipe book for Southern cuisine, nor a collection of religious devotionals, nor a manual on how to properly load a semiautomatic shotgun. It’s a book about what’s commonly referred to as “flyover country,” the vast portion of real estate that sits between the East Coast and the West Coast and which more often than not votes red instead of blue, roots for the Cowboys in the NFL and the Cardinals in the National League, and has three or more Bibles in every house. It’s where there’s nothing unusual at about about God, guns, grits, or gravy. It’s not a novelty; it’s not strange or weird. It’s a way of life.
Notwithstanding his tired, ironic use of stereotypes to challenge stereotypes, and despite the xenophobia underlying his division of our ethnically and racially diverse country into “us” (the meat-and-potatoes real Americans) and “them” (the spices in the melting pot, who don’t keep Bibles in their homes) — despite all this, I think Huckabee has done us a favor. Because what he’s done is reveal his resistance for what it really is: not legitimate scientific doubt, but a culture war between the fundamentalist Christian value system and everything in between.
A recurrent theme, this conflict. I was in the eighth grade when I read the play, Inherit the Wind, for school. Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee wrote the play in 1955, in response to the irrational climate of fear surrounding McCarthy-era censorship, and is largely based upon the 1925 Scopes “Monkey Trial” — in which Tennessee high school teacher John Scopes was prosecuted and convicted for teaching evolution in his classroom, a violation of the state’s (now defunct) Butler Act. The trial was one of the biggest of the century, and though its intent was to examine whether a teacher was guilty of violating state law, the real issue on the stand (we eighth-graders were encouraged to note) was the growing tension between fundamentalist Christian society and the influence of industrialization, urbanization, higher education, and immigration on that traditional way of life.
Fast forward 90 years, and we’re seeing the same stubborn resistance to science in the face of similar societal pressures on this blessed “way of life.” The science is uncertain, they say. An unproven theory. The issue is too controversial to require our response.
Climate change is the new evolution — not because the science is controversial, but because this issue, like evolution, threatens the very foundation of traditional rural American culture. It challenges the Manifest Destiny doctrine upon which this country was based, threatens a standard of living to which we’ve become accustomed, and —like children first the leaving the nest— requires us to accept that we, as humans, are responsible for the consequences of our actions.
I’m not the first one to notice this parallel between the lingering anti-evolution movement and the persistence of current-day climate-change deniers. Andrew Cohen’s “What the Scopes Trial Teaches Us About Climate-Change Denial” provides a thorough examination of the phenomenon, as well as the fear beneath it all.
And let’s face it: confronting the large-scale, potentially catastrophic consequences of human-caused climate change IS scary, especially when the science shows that those of us not well adapted to the environmental struggle are at risk of becoming extinct — whether or not we are in favor with God. Much easier to stick our heads in the sand, or suggest that evolution and climate change are —as Cohen reports— simply “wild guesses dressed up as scientific proof.”
But here’s the terrifying irony: science, unlike fundamentalist religion, is indifferent to that fear. Bubba-ville’s failure to accept and address this threat may just become the most convincing illustration of evolution yet.
photo credits:
President Obama from whitehouse.gov
Mike Huckabee from thinkprogress.org
Evolution image from whenintime.com
Scientific Method verses Creationist Method comic from pinterest.com
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