Bill McKibben, one of Those Who Must Be Read, in my opinion, has a thoughtful, moving piece up at Orion Magazine’s site, “When Words Fail” (emphasis added):

I almost never write about writing—in my aesthetic, the writing should disappear, the thought linger. But the longer I’ve spent working on global warming—the greatest challenge humans have ever faced—the more I’ve come to see it as essentially a literary problem. A technological and scientific challenge, yes; an economic quandary, yes; a political dilemma, surely. But centrally? A crisis in metaphor, in analogy, in understanding. We haven’t come up with words big enough to communicate the magnitude of what we’re doing. How do you say: the world you know today, the world you were born into, the world that has remained essentially the same for all of human civilization, that has birthed every play and poem and novel and essay, every painting and photograph, every invention and economy, every spiritual system (and every turn of phrase) is about to be . . . something so different? Somehow “global warming” barely hints at it. The same goes for any of the other locutions, including “climate chaos.” And if we do come up with adequate words in one culture, they won’t necessarily translate into all the other languages whose speakers must collaborate to somehow solve this problem.

…

In a PowerPoint presentation [James Hansen] gave at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco last December, he named a number: 350 parts per million carbon dioxide. That, he said, was the absolute upper bound of anything like safety—above it and the planet would be unraveling. Is unraveling, because we’re already at 385 parts per million. And so it’s a daring number, a politically unwelcome one. It means, in shorthand, that this generation of people—politicians especially—can’t pass the problem down to their successors. We’re like patients who’ve been to the doctor and found out that our cholesterol is too high. We’re in the danger zone. Time to cut back now, and hope that we do it fast enough so we don’t have a stroke in the meantime. So that Greenland doesn’t melt in the meantime and raise the ocean twenty-five feet.

…

But a number works. And this is a good one. Arcane, yes—parts per million CO2 in the atmosphere. But at least it means the same thing in every tongue, and it even bridges the gap between English and metric. And so we secured the all-important URL: 350.org. (Easier said than done.) And we settled on our mission: To tattoo that number into every human brain. To make every person on Planet Earth aware of it, in the same way that most of them know the length of a soccer field (even though they call it a football pitch or a voetbal gebied). If we are able to make that happen, then the negotiations now under way, and due to conclude in Copenhagen in December of 2009, will be pulled as if by a kind of rough and opaque magic toward that goal. It will become the definition of success or of failure. It will set the climate for talking about climate.

This basic issue: How do you get the enormity of the problems we’re facing, including global warming and peak oil, across to enough people and at a sufficiently visceral level that they realize “this time it’s different”, is one that I, also, wrestle with constantly. We’ve all grown jaded over the years, those of us over about the age of 30, and most would say with good reason. We’ve all seen countless examples of Really Serious Problems hyped to death in the media and by people selling books or with some other, less obvious agenda, only to see those world-changing threats turn out to be wrong (i.e. the problem never really was a problem) or self-correcting or easily solved with a minor public policy adjustment or solved with a big, concentrated effort that didn’t hurt us (Y2k, anyone?). We’re lucky enough, most of us and most of the time, that a high percentage of the horror stories about the monsters under our beds dissolved into nothing more than harmless noise in our mental bandwidth that dissipates after a while, leaving us to go about our lives.

Another factor is the defense mechanism of proximity. You hear a news report of a bad chain reaction accident on a fog-obscured highway that you drive several times a week, and you have the typical human reaction–you’re sorry to hear about those 35 drivers, and you feel a momentary twinge of sympathy for the three people who died and the couple of dozen who were sent to various local hospitals. But just as quickly you move on to the next story or some errand you have to run, at least until you find out later that day that a good friend was in that accident and had to be cut out of the twisted shell of his totaled car and air lifted to a hospital, where he’s still in guarded condition. You’re suddenly focused on the house painting party he had planned to host this weekend, and how you and some other friends were planning to play a trick on him by bringing a can of paint in a conspicuously wrong color and telling him one of the rooms had been finished in that color. It’s no longer a two-minute local news item but a personal tragedy; you’re gripped by the nearness of the accident, the “there but for the grace of God go I” mix of genuine sorrow that such a good person was so seriously and needlessly injured, and embarrassed thankfulness that it wasn’t someone even closer to you, or you yourself struck by this random tragedy.

And right now, as you read this, you’re wondering about these specific details–is this just a fabricated example or did this really happen? You’re balanced on the razor’s edge between dismissing the story or surrendering to even momentary emotional investment; does Lou have a close friend clinging to life? Is he callous enough to use it as an example on his web site?

The answer is another question: Why does it matter? Why do you care any more or less about highway safety or how safely you drive depending on whether you know someone who was injured in an accident? Why does it have to be “personal” for us to care? Why do so many people assume that only parents care enough about humanity’s future to try to reverse our behaviors that exacerbate the effects of global warming and peak oil? Isn’t it enough to say that all the children of the world belong to all of us, whether or not they share our DNA?

Will the 350.org campaign be successful at breaking the conceptual logjam and globalizing our world view enough that many more of us “get” it? I don’t know, but it’s certainly worth the effort to find out.