Orion > Curmudgeon in the Wild > Lou Bendrick

N THE DAY THAT I READ about thousands of giant jellyfish invading the coastal waters of Japan , I rushed out to the drug store and bought myself an issue of People. On top of worrying about war, real estate bubbles, and choosing the right preschool, I had to worry that warmer ocean temperatures were creating something out of, well, a Japanese monster movie. In comparison, Jennifer Anniston’s heartache seemed like a soothing balm. For a while my husband bought People for me, but then he patently refused. Now celebrity confections such as Us are smuggled into our house like contraband and shoved under the mattress.


	Images: details from Love Poem: Ten Minutes After the End of Gravity, 2005, Adam Cvijanovic, courtesy of the artist.

When the world is in an express hand basket to you-know-where, mindless escapism might seem irresponsible, especially when committed by a mother. But let me assure you that I know global warming is a problem, and I’m going to get to it right after I take the dog to vet and throw in another load of laundry. I swear.

Since the 2004 election, environmentalists have been wondering where the hell I’ve been. Or, more generally, where all the moms have gone. We certainly aren’t marching on Washington, giant jellyfish banners in hand. Those of us known for our nurturing and child-protective instincts seem to have turned a blind eye to the great, hot-earth threat to their now and future health and safety. Of course, some women—mother-producer-activist Laurie David springs to mind—are working tirelessly to fight “climate change” (a nice mainstream media euphemism, out of the Karl Rove playbook no doubt, for some really nasty diseases, droughts, floods, starvation, and other unpleasantness), but it seems as if the vast majority of mothers fret more about birthday party themes (Disney Princess or Little Lulau?) than the temperature of the oceans.

Some analyses show that John Kerry lost the 2004 election because of decreased support among my gender. This means that women, many of them undoubtedly mothers, were responsible for the election of a president who already had the worst environmental record in history.

Women, it is said, are a mystery.

Let me cultivate my personal female mystique by disclosing that I am the environmental media and I also loathe the environmental media. Just say “photovoltaic” and my eyes start to get heavy; start in about polar bears drowning and I have to go to the happy place in my head that involves ponies, chocolate, and George Clooney. Add to this the typical dose of future pessimism found in most environmental reportage (we’ll soon be digging for grubs with a stone spear, you just wait and see!) and blame (that un-recycled peanut butter jar just killed a polar bear cub, damn you!), and you’ll discover that I’m headed to the grocery store to see who made the worst-dressed list at the Oscars.

My antipathy for bad environmental news is so acute that I’ve developed a Suicide Index for how I feel after reading an environmental publication (even a certain intellectually rigorous one that I’ll call Dirge to protect the guilty). If I read a relatively puffy piece about, say, frog mutations, I might merely feel like mixing up a Marilyn Monroe-style cocktail of champagne and pills (a level one). But if the article is blame-heavy—my last Wal-Mart purchase caused the extinction of an entire Amazon tribe—then seppuku with a dull sword is in order: across the abdomen and up the right side (level nine).

“What did you think of that piece on industrial pollutants in breast milk?” my husband will ask me.

“Oh,” I’ll sigh, “That was a four: Shooting myself in the head at a seedy motel while sitting up in bed watching Survivor.”

I can only take so much bad news before I tune out. But reading People is just the tip of the (melting) iceberg when it comes to my denial. Despite the fact that I know that Greenland’s ice sheet is a goner, I burn jet fuel willy-nilly on vacation. Despite the fact that warmer temperatures will put coastal cities in peril and foment itchy, deadly diseases, I’m not retrofitting my sprawling American home with solar panels or converting my station wagon to biodiesel. Despite the fact that blobby plankton killers are terrorizing Japanese fisherpersons, I’m not threatening to immolate myself as a way of forcing U.S. ratification of the Kyoto Protocol.

Of course, I fully understand that denial about global warming is the ultimate act of bad mothering. Today’s parents no longer worry about whether we can give our children a better life, as our parents did, and theirs before them; we worry about their very survival. But how do you gird for a colossal battle when you’re already fighting for your very sanity?

One way to help even mothers swallow the hard truth about global warming is to wrap it in humor (eco-warriors might want to pull out their recycled notepads and soy ink pens right about now). Grist, an online environmental magazine that touts itself as a “beacon in the smog” has had success with its gloom-and-doom-with-a-sense-of-humor strategy.

“If we can make people laugh, they hang around the site longer,” founder Chip Giller told me by e-mail. “They discover the high-quality reporting beneath the punny headlines, and that brings them back again and again.”

Grist reaches 600,000 readers per month; but more impressive in my book is that they’re not just preaching to an eco-choir. According to a survey, fifty percent of Grist’s readers are not affiliated with any particular environmental group. It’s a publication I can, and do, read every day without feeling I need to run to my enclosed garage and let the car run for a while (a level three).

If humor doesn’t work, harried moms might consider tuning out altogether—at least periodically. Health expert and best-selling author Andrew Weil advocates news fasts, avoiding news one day a week, then increasing the fast until you can go a week without. “The purpose is to discover that you have a choice over how much of this enters your consciousness,” he told me recently. “Afterward you can let as much back in as you want.” He also pointed out that news fasting does not lead to ignorance of world events. “You'll learn about anything important. It does reduce stress caused by upsetting stories that predominate in the news.” I’ve practiced news fasts, which are far easier than juice fasts (all that messy pulp!), but just as refreshing.

As it turns out, denial isn’t so bad, either. It doesn’t mean you’re mentally deficient or a bad person. As mothers have known all along, denial is an act of self-preservation. “A person can’t possibly react to or absorb every bit of news and stay sane,” says Stanley Cohen, author of States of Denial: Knowing About Atrocities and Suffering. “Denial is a normal state of affairs. None of us likes to face up to information that is threatening or disturbing,” he told me by phone. “The typical reaction is to shut it out.”

Cohen, a professor of sociology at the London School of Economics, agreed with me that global warming seems to be the perfect thing to ignore. “It’s something that, at least on the surface, is quite easy to deny because global warming doesn’t intrude on your personal life.”

So when you see a mom zipping around in her SUV, you’re not necessarily seeing apathy toward the Earth. Rather, you’re witnessing a woman who has resorted to triage to meet all of the demands in her life. She has chosen to focus on solving the problem of getting her daughter to soccer practice rather than the problems of diminishing natural resources, rising seas, and likely economic collapse that lie in her daughter’s future. Because global warming lacks the immediacy of giant jellyfish ruining her Cape Cod vacation, it gets a lower priority.

Nancy, a high-powered career mom in New York City, recently admitted to me that, when it comes to her children, she’s universally afraid. "The only things distracting me from my fear of environmental catastrophe are my myriad other fears—terrorism, diseases, child predators. I don’t even read The New York Times anymore. It’s too terrifying.” Jan, a mom I know who has a Ph.D., ranks global warming as a high priority but admits that she too worries more about child predators, as well as toxins in food.

So what’s the key to getting “security moms” to bring global warming to the security front burner, so to speak?

The biggest obstacle to getting over global warming denial, says Cohen, is not people’s ability to understand the problem; it’s the ability to understand what to do.

“How much can I really process at this point, as an individual?” asks Nancy. “The damage is so extensive, it’s so global. I simply don’t know what I can do on the level of being a mother and being a citizen to reverse anything.”

“Although it's important to be an educated citizen," Cohen says, "no amount of information is going to mobilize them if they can't see the connection between their action and the end result." Without a clear path to action—something a mom can actually do to slow the juggernaut of global warming—it's easy to get overwhelmed. That said, leadership toward such action is not coming any time soon from an administration that barely acknowledges Darwin, let alone global warming and our starring role in it. This means that moms will have to roll up their sleeves and do something—anything—to save our little ones from the steamy peril.

To ward off the jellyfish of my future, I recycle, compost, and eat organic foods when possible. Mine is a one-car family and that car is not, nor will it ever be, an SUV. Nancy doesn’t have a car at all, and tries not to use her air-conditioning. Jan recycles, changed all the light bulbs in her house to the energy-saving ones, and conserves fossil fuel wherever and whenever possible.

In addition to keeping up on Brad and Angelina, I also cope by remembering that every generation felt doomed. Mothers before me have fretted about saber tooth tigers and plagues. It’s my lot to worry about sexual predators, AIDS, and environmental degradation (and that perennial favorite, war). This doesn’t mean I get to be fatalistic and relax—I can’t ignore the saber tooth tiger or giant jellyfish at my door, especially if I invited him. A little perspective, though, helps me keep at bay the darkest (level ten) Suicide Index scenario involving a head-first high-dive into an empty pool.

“I just think day to day. I try to keep really focused on the present. I found that for me, it’s the best way to cope,” says Nancy . “I throw myself into the now.”

“I can easily see us cannibalizing our environment with remarkable and exponential speed,” says Jan. “That being said, despair is not a choice that facilitates the raising of healthy children. So I choose to remain realistically hopeful, and to encourage my daughter to embrace values of conservation, preservation, and activism regarding the fate of the planet.”

With leadership, ingenuity, and a plan, even I can be fueled by hope. But I’m also fueled by some anger: Moms simply cannot tolerate a world where it’s no longer safe to tell our kids to go play outside. I’m also angry at myself because the environmental media are telling the truth: blame is ours. My over-consumption is destroying my daughter’s American Dream, if not the dreams of humankind.

With a little rest, and a little humor, I know the mothers of America will join me in doing something even more effective than recycling peanut butter jars and buying phosphate-free dish soap. Together we can rise up against (rather than elect) the evil-doers who do nothing in the face of gargantuan invertebrates, and who in some cases even appoint gargantuan invertebrates (such as the aforementioned Rove) to positions of power and influence.

We’ll vote differently next time. And yes, we’ll do it for the children.