The Climate Crisis and Our Attachment to Comfort

As we continue to be mired in a polar vortex here in Minnesota, I have been considering how strong our human desire for comfort is.

Last year, I had a poem about Monsanto published at Turning Wheel Media. One of the things it speaks to is our human desire for comfort and ease, and how giant corporations like Monsanto thrive on that. In fact, some of us become so attached to their products that it’s akin to having another lover in your life.

I recall the mother of my sister’s childhood friend who drank a case of Diet Coke daily. You read that right. A case. Maybe not a full a case everyday, but she probably averaged that over the long run. She didn’t live to 50. And I’m guessing that even after she found out about the negative health impacts of soda pop, she kept on drinking it. Wedded to it, and the company that makes it. A familiar habit that helped her make it through the days.

There are so many Diet Cokes in the modern, post industrial world. Products of convenience in various forms sold to us as markers of “the good life,” but which actually tend to degrade our lives, both individually and collectively. Instead of experiencing uniqueness, we opt for sameness. Instead of embracing the sometimes uncomfortableness associated with not knowing, we opt for a familiar conformity that makes life easier to predict.

Think about the endless war on weeds for example. Weeds are the antithesis of ease and comfort. In the practical sense, their appearance mucks up uniform lawns and tenderly raised garden beds. Psychologically, weedy thoughts can stir up all sorts of emotions, from confusion to perverse desire. Spiritually, it is the lowly weed that frequently blows through the seemingly perfect answer we offer to life’s deepest questions. How often have you thought “I’ve finally got it,” only to have some simple and forgotten thing appear right along side the answer, almost as if in mocking.

The lowly dandelion, with its bright yellow head, can grow in almost any soil, thriving in some of lousiest conditions imaginable. Every spring, I’m amazed at its early appearance here in Minnesota, when the weather is still up and down, sometimes even poking through fallen snow from the tiniest cracks in sidewalks.

Eliminating weeds means destroying our toughness, tenacity, and flexibility. Whether we do it for profit or out of a mistaken sense that the best food comes from weed free conditions, the results are the same.

The same is true of trying to get rid of or avoid all elements of the weather we find uncomfortable. We exile that which makes us strong, often in favor of that which slowly kills us.

How might our climate crisis be different if we weren’t so attached to having comfort and relative ease most of the time? What if more of us not only made peace with discomfort, but in some way or another fell in love with it?

No doubt, the world would be a different place.

Photo Credit:

Dandelion Ground Level by Kleuske via Wikimedia Commons

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