Donald Worster’s desert—and ours

Donald Worster came to town recently. Some of us haven’t been the same since.

More kindly grandfather than Paul Revere, the KU Hall Center Distinguished Professor of Environmental History rode no horse through town, just spoke at the Art Center. Yet some in his audience were as galvanized as Lexington patriots of 1775.

What’s coming now is not the British, but rapid climate change. These ever redder red zones will be far more persistent than redcoats. To drive these off will require us to muster much more than muskets. Strangely though, many in our town, state, and legislature remain asleep, their daily lives a Green Zone half-conscious cocoon, shutting out incoming, unwelcome news.

Perhaps we can’t be blamed for our lack of preparation. The real costs of our industrial lifestyle have remained hidden for years. But the rising costs of our ignorance now mirror the costs on gas station marquees. Recent memory gas prices of $1.69 now whir upward like miles on a road trip odometer to $3.69, soon to be $4.69, $5.69, $6.69.... Things are changing, and fast.

Gas price rises, distressing as they are, will be tea parties compared to temperature rises. Here Worster warms to his subject. It’s gonna get hotter and hotter and hotter. And drier, and drier, and drier. Far from being a thing of the past, the dust bowl storms will return. This spring’s grass-blade and tree-leaf greens, splashed with white fountain spirea sprays and rainbow canvases of petunia/pansy purples will soon wither to hot, dry dirt—and desert.

One Worster graphic stands out. The Climate Modeling Center at Canada’s University of Victoria shows the projected “mean temperature change” of Earth’s atmosphere, and especially of the Northern Plains. Red marks the 2040-2060 temps.

Picture a fiery, yellow-edged red bull’s-eye in mid-US, hovering over the high plains, five to seven states wide. Picture the center of this zone over the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma, but reaching beyond Salina. Picture Salina suffering a precipitation decline of 20%-40%. Picture an older you, with your children and grandchildren, seeking whatever shelter you can with air conditioning non-existent or at a premium in a 2050 eight-degree hotter Salina, sand blowing bleakly past dead tree skeletons hovering over brown stick-figure fingers of expired spirea and roses, now graveled and cactused all the way out to little-traveled interstates. That is our future, unless something is done.

The most chilling part of this picture? We haven’t yet gotten it. And, following us, our leaders haven’t either. A legislature peopled well more than half with business-as-usual folk who either champion or roll over for coal-fired generation plants are our own local example. However, this trickle-up blindness, mirroring our economics, infests the highest offices in the land.

Case in point: On May 15, a Journal front-page story featured Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne declaring the polar bear an endangered species because of melting ice caps. So far, so good.

But then he said it would be “wholly inappropriate” to use his proclamation to reduce greenhouse gases or to “broadly address climate change.” Why no, we’ll just get GE or Halliburton to build big freezers and recreate the ice caps. And in the meantime, the oil-cartel administration he so slavishly represents continue their plans to drill underneath the feet of polar bears, and closer to home, to destroy 11 million acres of pristine public land in the Utah Red Rocks Wilderness.

Whatever planet Kempthorne lives on, it isn’t the place I plant my feet each morning.

This denial must be removed from public office, but first from our own minds. We can no longer afford those rose-colored glasses which blind us to the necessity of climate action. Until we shed them, Mr. Kempthorne might as well list our endangered ag economy and environment side by side with the polar bears.