The Frog and the Iceberg
This morning I walked among icebergs… in Paris. It was early. The city was sleeping, but my jet lag, likely compounded by a bit too much good wine in great company last night had me up and out while it was still dark.
It was my fourth visit to the icebergs of Paris in six days. I’ve been at midnight, I’ve been mid-day, I’ve visited during the early evening and now at the crack of dawn. Today’s visit was a favorite. It was quiet except for the occasional early morning jogger slowing down to a fast gait to briefly detour through the blocks of ice, and a few jet lagged zombie tourists stopping to touch the cold orbs with a look of wonder, before snapping the requisite selfie.
Olafur Eliasson, the Danish-Icelandic conceptual artist, captured a small-ish iceberg off the coast of Greenland and brought it to Paris. He broke it into twelve chunks and organized them in a circle, signifying perhaps the twelve hours on the dial of a clock. They sit in front of the Panthéon in the Latin Quarter of Paris. Every day during the global climate summit, the icebergs melt away — the clock ticks. They’re likely to be all but gone by week’s end. A potent and visual reminder of why negotiators are toiling a few miles north west of the city center, trying to reach yet another agreement to curb our carbon addiction.
I feel a slight cooling against my cheeks as the morning breeze blows across the melting chunks of ice. Puddles form and turn into a small stream running down along the sidewalk of the rue Soufflot. Perhaps it is the quiet. Perhaps the sliver of a waning moon over the Pantheon. Perhaps being all alone with the twelve mini icebergs. Yet this morning I have an new sensation while walking amongst the glowing white-blue orbs. I feel oddly protective and sad. Do not want to see them go. In spite of my weather app informing me of the opposite, I find myself hoping that it would suddenly turn cold and we might even see snow, extending their life a few more months. I study the intricate, beautiful ice crystals and wonder how long that water had been locked up in there. The symbolism is clear, yet it is more than symbolic. This is real. The ice is melting.
That’s when the image of the proverbial frog in a warming pot of water revealed itself to me again. You know the anecdote: drop a frog in a boiling pot of water and it will naturally panic, trying to escape before it quickly dies. Put a frog in water and slowly increase the temperature until the water is boiling and the frog will never try to escape, not noticing the gradual increase.
Eliasson’s iceberg sculpture represent the slow boil. The climate is going to change dramatically during this century and the effects will be far reaching and devastating. With more than seven billion people on our little planet, and growing, hundreds of millions will be displaced by rising sea levels. Storms and more extreme weather patterns will impact the lives of billions. Changes in food production, acidification of the oceans, entire eco systems in crisis, and many, many other implications of the rise of carbon is our proverbial slow boiling pot of water. Very likely tens of millions, perhaps hundreds of millions of people will die and many more will suffer greatly from the direct and indirect effects of global warming during this century.
Yesterday, while walking around in Le Marais, I stumbled upon Le Bataclan, the concert venue where one of the terror attacks occured a few weeks ago. It was a solemn and tragic reminder of the senseless nature of such callous and meaningless acts of violence. Bombings in Iraq, Lebanon and Afghanistan kill and injure hundreds of innocent people weekly. The almost daily random killings in the US are not much different. A work holiday party in San Bernadino California, an abortion clinic in Colorado, a school or drive-by shooting or the 350 other mass shootings that have occured this year in the US alone, are all random acts of terror towards the victims.
The extreme and unexpected nature of such heinous crimes tend to galvanize us and turn our attention to the potential threat posed by radicalized and marginalized people in our society. We react like the frog dropped in a boiling pot of water. We jump up and down and demand understanding, safety, security. We unfairly target ethnic or minority groups, directing our fear and anger at them. We want to know it won’t happen to us or our loved ones and we act irrationally to try to assuage our fears that it might.
Terror attacks of all forms — including every one of the daily mass shootings — and the senseless loss of lives they cause is terrible and utterly meaningless. Nevertheless, the threat of terror to our way of life and perhaps most important to our childrens’ well being and even survival, pales against the threat of climate change.
Yet predictably our reaction to acts of random violence is panic and to demand action. Invest in more weapons. Order more military strikes. Reduce civil liberties. Play politics with our fears. We spend hundreds of billions of dollars on “security” measures in response to what is seen as a clear and immediate danger.
Statistics mostly fall flat when there are strong feelings and emotions involved, especially when the primary emotion is fear. So let’s return to the image of the frog. The chance that any one of us, with some exceptions if you live in a few violent neighborhoods around the planet, Palestine, Syria or parts of Iraq and Afghanistan, will end up in a proverbial boiling pot of water — become a victim of a random act of terrorism — is very small. This reality sits alongside the simple fact that the climate change pot is getting hotter and hotter every day. The single biggest threat we face as a species today is the slow-boil threat of climate change. Terrorist attacks (statistically) only impact a very small group of people. Global warming impacts everyone. Not a single frog is getting out of the climate change pot.
My wish is that we would spend less on responding to terror with bombs and guns and more thinking about and investing in how we save the planet. It would be a win-win: Invest in carbon free sources of energy. Reduce dislocation and disruption to hundreds of millions. Create new economic opportunities globally through energy renewal. And guess what, fewer people will feel disenfranchised and become radicalized. The crazies who feed on the disenfrachised to support their own political agendas will have less fodder to fuel their hateful actions. We will see less terror.
My wish is that the melting icebergs in Paris this week be a symbol of hope. My wish is that we stop ignoring our melting ice while directing our misguided attention towards keeping religious or ethnic groups out of our of countries. My wish is that we elect politicians who focus on accellerating fundamental R&D in order to solve our energy needs and drastically reduce our addiction to carbon. My wish is that we will all have the courage and resolve to make the difficult but critical choices that will allow our children and grandchildren to live on a beautiful planet with lots of big icebergs.
