The Election, The Environment, and The Zombie Apocolypse

I've lived in the south long enough to know that a pro environment platform is not one that southern politicians will jump to first when planning their campaign. However I was a bit disconcerted to find that Americans ranked the environment almost lowest in issues of importance for the nation. Still, with the release of an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report that stated in the most definitive language so far that global warming is human caused, and that it is rapidly reaching a point of crisis, and with the citizens of Denton, a small town in Texas, shining a spotlight on the health and environmental problems caused by fracking in their vote to ban it, I had hope that this midterm election would not be the total washout for the environment that it proved to be.

What is particularly confusing to me is that while the environment factored very little in these elections, polls indicate that roughly half of Americans believe that climate change is human caused, and over half believe that it is or will have a serious impact on our planet. How do we decipher this disconnect? The climate change deniers may be the easiest to explain. Corporations that exploit the environment, energy producers in particular, have the most to lose financially from tighter environmental restrictions and regulations and are willing and able to use their influence in politics and propaganda to convince those most amenable that evidence for human caused climate change is dubious, if not a plot by leftists. 

Then there is a portion of the electorate that has a notion that the environment is in some state of disrepair, is being abused to some extent, but that this is some long term and far off problem yet to reach the crisis point, who believe that we will figure our way out of in the long run, perhaps with new technology and some greater wisdom that our descendants are sure to hold. For now the band aids for the symptoms of environmental problems: disease, unrest, the economic slowdown from increasing population pressures on scarcer and more degraded resources, will suffice.

Finally, I suspect there may be a portion of the population with a more exotic excuse for reticence on environmental issues. While the former group focuses on short term issues rather than long term environmental issues because they are too nebulous or difficult to solve, this group may focus only on the short term because they believe there is no long term, or at least not one where anything beyond the necessities of survival matter. What evidence is there for such a group? I would point to the increasing popularity of dystopian themed books and movies, shows like "Dooms Day Preppers", and the popularity of the whole zombie genre in pop culture. All of these are more or less reverberations of The Book of Revelations from the New Testament, and while there has long been a smattering of end of the world type movies, the current fixation on these themes maybe indicates some collective consciousness on the idea.  Perhaps they embrace climate change as a harbinger of the rapture, a necessary component of the end times, or perhaps they feel we've messed thing up so much it's time to hit the reset button. Seal off the borders, stock up, arm up, and wait, hell or high water. How simple, how liberating it must be for this group to not have to worry about the future, about anything but themselves.

I write this post somewhat tongue in cheek, but as I think about it, I'm not sure to what extent. It would help explain the conundrum of this election.


http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/23/science/global-warming-concerns-grow.html

http://www.pewresearch.org/key-data-points/climate-change-key-data-points-from-pew-research/

http://www.nbcnews.com/science/environment/why-un-report-so-certain-humans-caused-climate-change-n240336