Climate Change and The Sleep of Reason: A Book Club Discussion

Thomas Jefferson helped invent modern agricultural science. Lincoln invented and patented a navigation device. Theodore Roosevelt is the father of the modern conservation movement. John F Kennedy helped us land a man on the moon. Long before Obama held SXSL, a party for inventors on the White House Lawn, Yankee Ingenuity made the impossible, possible.

But with the 2016 election, our country has taken a strong right turn. We elected a man who suggested the “concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.” With that as our beginning, we have pulled out of the Paris Climate Accord, begun drilling in the Arctic, disbanded the EPA Air Pollution review panel, repealed rules about methane releases, and ended NASAs Climate Monitoring Program--the list goes on and on and on.

And yet, the most recent scientific study says between 2006 and 2015, the earth has *already* warmed 0.87℃, and that we are already seeing the effects. From the people in Kiribati who are losing their islands to the rising seas, to the new kind of faster-moving, increasingly aggressive California wildfires, to the devastation of the Gulf Coast by Hurricane Michael, we are already in the middle of the apocalypse we are creating for ourselves. And even if we create the change we need tomorrow, the effects we are now seeing will persist for centuries, potentially even millennia. 

In this way, SLEEP OF REASON is a call to arms. In a reader-friendly way, it shows that the changes we carelessly wreak upon the Earth can come back to bite us in ways we don’t even begin to comprehend.
 

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