Americans commonly tell each other we don’t have to worry about problems in advance, we can cross whatever bridge when we get there. Republicans label planning as socialism – applying a nasty-sounding word to concern over what will happen to ordinary Americans. Some states are trying to block investors from taking account of the environmental implications of corporate behavior.
I see failure to plan as a costly error. Liberals look ahead. We can’t cross a bridge that isn’t there. So we plan for it. Some describe that as a middle-class value – planning for college, retirement and various contingencies. But it helps.
Science is part of that mindset. A job of scientists is to identify what’s coming and plan for it – with such measures as health care, vaccines, and weather predictions. It’s too late to develop a vaccine after you’ve been bitten by a rabid animal. It’s too late to design a weather prediction service after the hurricane hits. Good management is about planning ahead. That’s certainly what successful businesses do. You can’t take advantage of a market without the goods, services, purchase and delivery systems needed.
The same is true of environmental issues. People who planned to build their bridges when they faced the problem have been finding themselves burned out by forest fires, flooded out by sea rise and major storms, and run out of homes and businesses by major droughts. It’s too late to stop warming the globe for those who’ve already been killed or run out by disasters. It’s too late to take the polio or monkey pox vaccine after you have the disease. As a young boy I saw pictures of children in steel cigar tubes they called iron lungs so I had no desire to wait to see if I’d get polio before taking the vaccine. The vaccine was my insurance policy, one of the most valuable I’ve ever had.
The environment has many of us looking at the future. But it’s not far off to make sure my granddaughters are safe. It’s too late for people from the ironically named Paradise who lost their homes, towns, friends and families from what has been named the Camp wildfire in 2018, among recent deadly blazes. It’s too late for the 1,200 people drowned or killed in the Gulf states by Katrina, for those who had to be evacuated from their homes or who lost everything from recent storms. It isn’t far into the future for the people suffering from the great drought in the southwest. Whether or not you believe in science, you can’t avoid the damage and you’ll lose everything if we’re not prepared.
Let’s add that most of the world has been shaped by hordes of refugees fleeing from droughts, floods and famine to find better places to live – we’ve called them barbarians and some were but many were just desperate. Whatever their motives, many subjugated native populations – Huns in Germany, Mongols in Asia, palefaces in America, even the ‘49ers in the Gold Rush overran pre-existing communities – the pattern is world wide. One of the fundamental sources of such population movement is inability to stay where they were. In that way climate change is coming for us all, one way or the other, unless we stop it, build the bridge to a better climate and build it now.
So doing nothing plans for change by inviting disasters. Doing nothing is a form of planning. We can’t avoid responsibility but we could mitigate the damage.
Constitutionalism and Democracy 