Nubar Alexanian

On a cold wet day in 1997 I stood beside a retired fisherman on the end of a long wooden pier in Gloucester, Massachusetts, where, since 1623, fishermen had departed and returned with the north Atlantic bounty in the holds of their vessels. In its time, Gloucester was among the world's greatest fishing ports. Now we gazed out at the nearly empty Gloucester inner harbor. The old fisherman looked at me, frowning, and asked, to himself as much as to me: "What happened?"

What happened? The Gloucestermen took too much. They saw the warning signs but mistrusted the messenger, who usually came in the form of a clipboard-carrying U.S. government biologist. For decades the Gloucestermen fought every restriction until there was virtually nothing left to defend. As the numbers dwindled, the fishermen rushed back to sea, competing with their neighbors to harvest what was left. It was a classic battle over the commons-and in terms of its behavioral roots, its cultural and economic consequences, and its sheer preventability, the Gloucesterman's predicament mirrors that of all of us in the unfolding crisis of climate change.

Like the early data on the decline of George's Bank, where generations of Gloucestermen set their nets, the signals of a growing climate problem have been steady-faint at first but increasingly clear, and now joined in a unified scientific voice with growing evidence to accelerate their concern.

Early signals of the consequences of global warming are beginning to come in from every part of the planet. An examination of such signs was at the heart of an eight-month Graduate School of Journalism investigation overseen by Professor John Harte of Berkeley's Energy and Resources Group and me. Eleven students traveled from the South Pacific to the edge of the Arctic, documenting climate-change impacts that are already evident. Yet even with these and many other reports, the problem is still not understood as real enough to provoke dramatic action at home. For most of us, it seems, the water hasn't risen high enough, and the ice hasn't melted fast enough, to grab our attention. Like the frog in a slowly heating pan of water, we remain immersed-unready, or maybe unable, to leap to new circumstances.

Why is this so? How much has to do with culture, particularly American culture and the lifestyle it makes possible, and how much with human nature-specifically with the limitations of the human mind?

The abundant way of life afforded by technology and by generations of cheap energy no doubt contributes to a sense of complacency. If emerging problems seem theoretical or distant, then change-or worse, actual sacrifice-seems downright ludicrous. If up to now the gravity of the problem has seemed unclear, and the solutions too expensive, business as usual is the natural response. Who, from any culture, would want to give up their hard-won acquisitions voluntarily? And what's the point of sacrificing what seem to be little pieces of comfort, when no one else is?

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