The glo­ries of Nature and a lit­er­ary giant may seem an odd com­bi­na­tion to help slow cli­mate change, but in fact, they’re a per­fect match. Nature pro­vides the encour­age­ment, the great Russ­ian writer Leo Tol­stoy penned the wis­dom: “Every­one thinks of chang­ing the world, but no one thinks of chang­ing himself.”

 The insight of that is borne out by ever-more con­spic­u­ous evi­dence of how rapid­ly things are hurtling from bad to worse: mas­sive flood­ing in Asia, heat­waves scorch­ing North Amer­i­ca, wild­fires ram­pant in Europe.
To mit­i­gate such cat­a­stro­phes while solu­tions are being pur­sued, Tolstoy’s dic­tum is an ide­al guide­line. A use­ful exam­ple is cat­tle ranch­ers who once blew up beaver dams and have learned to pro­tect them instead. Beaver ponds now slake thirsty cat­tle in times of drought, slow tor­rents when there’s too much rain, widen wet­lands that help cre­ate new mead­ows and buffers against wildfires.
Nature is replete with exam­ples of sur­vival by adapt­ing, and while humans don’t have the advan­tage of evo­lu­tion, we can take heart from evi­dence that adapt­ing works.

Against seem­ing­ly impos­si­ble odds, pine trees can alter their roots to cling onto rocks gouged and shaped by the mil­len­ni­um-slow retreat of glac­i­ers. The rate at which the rivers of ice are dis­ap­pear­ing today is erod­ing our chances of avoid­ing disaster.
One way to help is adapt­ing how we choose the arch ene­mies of sen­si­ble change; politi­cians. It won’t be easy.
                                         SHORT-CHANGED

  Albert Ein­stein believed that “The mea­sure of intel­li­gence is the abil­i­ty to change.” But then, he was a genius. We’ve stuck our­selves with polit­i­cal lead­ers more wed­ded to mon­ey than moral­i­ty and in some cas­es even com­mon sense. It’s as much our own doing as cli­mate change, because we have failed to insist on bet­ter ways to elect them.
The U.S. sys­tem demands and exalts mas­sive amounts of lucre – cliché-dubbed by polit­i­cal writ­ers as “war chests” — for cam­paigns that are sup­pos­ed­ly to help can­di­dates get elect­ed to meet promis­es that will serve the vot­ers. In real­i­ty, the biggest dona­tions are down pay­ments for back­ing the agen­das of the con­trib­u­tors, which as often as not rate prof­it over the com­mon good.
One of new­ly select­ed (NOTE: not ‘elect­ed’) British Prime Min­is­ter Liz Truss’ first “promis­es” was not to pur­sue the idea of a “wind­fall tax” on ener­gy pro­duc­ers. Giv­en that they not only con­tribute mas­sive­ly to green­house gasses, but have been more than reluc­tant to offer exper­tise that can play a piv­otal role in find­ing ways to cut them, that’s adapt­ing to avarice over need.
Before Truss wrote her speech, BP post­ed sec­ond-quar­ter prof­its worth $8.5 bil­lion, its biggest wind­fall in 14 years,. ExxonMobil’s $17.9 bil­lion in net income was its largest-ever quar­ter­ly prof­it. Add in the bal­ance sheets of Chevron, Shell and Total­En­er­gies and the five major oil com­pa­nies made $55 bil­lion this past quar­ter. Mean­while, hun­dreds of mil­lions of peo­ple around the world bear the brunt of surg­ing ener­gy and gaso­line prices.
UN Sec­re­tary-Gen­er­al Anto­nio Guter­res apt­ly called it “grotesque greed”.
If we actu­al­ly do end up adapt­ing enough to curb cli­mate change, hope­ful­ly jus­tice will be served and ener­gy com­pa­ny CEOs will end up with beg­ging bowls instead of bonuses.

                           “A BETTER MOUSETRAP”

To help that along, we can build bet­ter tools to adapt our lifestyles to the neces­si­ties of long-term sur­vival. Again, Nature pro­vides a fine example.
Among the most per­fect own­ers of adapt­ed “tools” is one reg­u­lar Perch read­ers will not find sur­pris­ing: loons.

Loon’s legs are placed far back on their body, mak­ing it dif­fi­cult for them to walk on land, which might seem a draw­back. But the posi­tion, and their large webbed feet, pro­vide superb propul­sion and steer­ing to make them world-class under­wa­ter hunters.
The human equiv­a­lent is adapt­ing a foot that eas­es up on the accel­er­a­tor ped­al. Not speed­ing or blast­ing away way from stop lights only to wait longer at the next one is an obvi­ous “twofer”. It saves gas and deprives the oil com­pa­nies of exces­sive prof­its to dole out bonus­es and div­i­dends instead of cre­at­ing alter­nate ener­gy sources.|
But then, the rest of us are hard­ly exem­plary. If as much atten­tion was paid to adapt­ing our con­sump­tion lifestyles as is focused on re-work­ing soci­etal norms by inter­pret­ing the past through the prism of our own times (book-ban­ning, ‘can­celling’ and var­i­ous oth­er ‘wokisms’ spring to mind), the world could be a cool­er place in tem­pera­ment, as well as temperature.
The Dar­win­ian phrase “adapt or die” was used by apartheid-era South African Pres­i­dent P.W. to con­vince Whites the odi­ous sys­tem must end.
It is an apt one for the cam­paign – if such a word applies – to con­vince humans to change our­selves to help slow what at the moment feels like a hell-bent race to self-destruction.

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