The Mighty Armadillo

Bob and I had the good fortune to attend an environmental broadcast news summit on Friday. One of the speakers at this summit was James Hansen, an expert on climate change from NASA, who presented us with a very gloomy picture of the state of the world in light of global warming. He had many slides, most of which were bar graphs, charts, and maps to help depict all this doom and gloom, but the one slide that stuck out in my mind was the one of the “lowly” little armadillo, whom most humans would probably consider to be a very pea-brained and insignificant little species.

But you see, the armadillo apparently doesn’t need all these charts and graphs to understand that the temperature is rising in the world. He’s already figured that out, and you know what he’s doing about it? He’s migrating. That means he’s showing up in places in Arkansas where people are not used to seeing armadillos, because it’s getting too hot in the places he used to call “home.” One day, if things don’t change, we may be seeing armadillos in the Northeast.

Meanwhile, we human beings, with our big brains and supposed intelligence, first of all, need someone else to tell us how our climate is changing, because despite the fact we’re all sweltering in record-breaking heat waves all over the world this summer, we can’t really tell to what degree things have changed. And, when someone else does tell us what’s going on and how we’d better make some changes fast (Hansen says within ten years), many of us decide to pretend those people are wrong. We go out and buy bigger brand new S.U.V.’s to replace the ones we just bought three years ago; we want to “keep our standard of living” just as is, and don’t want to make any sacrifices in order to reduce carbon dioxide emissions; because we're suckers for their advertising, we support the big businesses that are doing everything they can to get around energy-saving laws; and we lie around with our air conditioners set on “maximum” bitching about the heat this summer.

If the oceans keep rising at the rates at which they’re currently doing so, due to climate changes, huge portions of countries like Bangladesh may very well be under water within the next century. The next century. We’re not talking millions of years here. Yet, is anyone really doing anything about it? Is anyone even being as smart as the mighty armadillo and migrating to higher ground? No wonder armadillos have been around longer than humans. My bet is that they’ll still be around long after this brilliant, superior, and extraordinarily arrogant species known as homo sapiens has brought about its own demise.