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Human Nature's three-person comedy review, What's Funny About Climate Change? continues to dine altogether too cheerily on such grim fodder, and the show evolves. A two-week run in the Los Angeles area was especially appropriate for two reasons. The first was the performance space--the Electric Lodge in Venice is North America's first all-solar theater. The second was the opportunity to witness first-hand the enhanced lunacy of our car culture at this moment in time.
The proliferation of huge tank-like luxury SUV's--the Hummers, the Escalades, the Navigators and Lexus (Lexi?)--was staggering if one kept in mind the14,000 people just then dying in France in the worst heat wave Europe has ever known and that 50,000,000 people in the eastern US. had been without power for days.
If ever there ever was a wake-up call to the precariousness of our situation, it was these twinned events. The European press caught it. Every report on the brutal month-long heat wave included some discussion about the role of global warming. The American media, meanwhile, was entirely mum about the potential link. Refusing by silence to draw attention to the current condition of the planet is the latest form of denial and obfuscation.
Meanwhile, locally, we may have been saved from much more disastrous fires this September only by the fluke of record rainfall last April. The combination of fuel buildups in the woods and increasing likelihood of drought in a global warming scenario puts us here in Humboldt four-square into the new planetary dispensation. Everywhere, people live in severely disturbed landscapes and face, at the same time, an increasingly unstable climate. The job of restoration of healthy forest and rangeland ecosystems becomes in this scenario ever more important. Human Nature plans to continue to do everything in its power to use humor as a weapon against denial and to help point us toward a sustainable future. Always with the jokes!
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