We navigate tricky waters
Anyone who writes for the general public is used to their work being used by others to further their various agendas. Over the years, I've suffered my fill, on such varied topics as the first Americans (where people wanted me to take sides), archaeological theory (ditto), the role of women in prehistory (my writing was interpreted as "somewhat androcentric", and, of course, climate change. My books on the latter have been used by opponents of anthropogenic global warming, by advocates of anthropogenic global warming, and by those who say we should just live with it. This I am used to, culminating in an op-ed piece I wrote for the New York Times some years ago during a heat wave, when I basically told people to relax and suffer through it, citing a well-known heat wave from the 1880s where people suffered even more. This, I said, was weather, not climate change. Furious e-mails descended on my head, from people who asked me why I had the temerity to suggest that a heat wave was not the direct cause of global warming.
All one can do is laugh, shrug one's shoulders, and move on. You'll never change peoples' minds if they believe passionately in something.
This has worked for me, until I wrote another op-ed article, this time for the Los Angeles Times last week on drought. This prompted a tirade from a certain Mark Cromer, senior writing fellow for "Californians for Population Stabilization," an anti-immigration organization. My article was about drought, but he accuses me of "an act of self-preservation" because I didn't mention the subject of population except in passing. Apparently I am"intellectually dishonest" because I say that adapting to the reality of prolonged drought is a potential solution without mentioning the problem of population growth. So this time I'm dragged into the immigration debate, when my article was about climate change, not population or immigration. Of course population growth is an important factor in the drought equation, that's a no-brainer, but the purpose of my article was to increase awareness of droughts a thousand years ago as possible signposts for a future when we are going to have to adapt to new water use practices--that's all. But quite what I want to preserve myself against, I don't know! Ah, people with agendas . . . .
What it all comes down to is people choosing to believe what they want to believe in and to hell with other peoples' integrity and motives. The only kind of self-preservation I am going to indulge in is a good laugh. It's flattering that archaeology is taken seriously as part of someone's political agenda!
Brian, I too have a personal agenda. It is to stay alive long enough to observe where folks who have homes on beaches overlooking the ocean are going to move when the water rises and how where folks who live in the western part of our country are going to get water when the draught comes in earnest. There's a man standing at a dam with his finger in a crack but the dam isn't going to leak this time. There is no water. There's a man standing in a dusty field surrounded by dust devils as far as the eye can see exclaiming, "a drought is coming. Let's get prepared." No one is listening. No one wants to hear it.
Today IT'S ALL ABOUT MONEY! In the not-too-distant future, it will be all about survival but only those who have money will survive. This is not a gloom and dome prediction, it's an unfortunate unavoidable fact.
Water for sale. Only $9.50 a gallon at your friendly Exxon Mobil station.
Maybe the scenario put forth in that old 1960's movie, Soilet Green, wasn't such a bad idea. Did Charlton Heston end up eating Edward G. Robinson? I can't remember. Question: If a billion or more human beings were to die, should they be buried or eaten? (My apologies for that thought. I'm only thinking out loud.)
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