Build your (In)tolerance

Steven D. Low

Good news! Did you know you can build up your physiological tolerance to hot weather? According to a recent New York Times article, “How Our Bodies Can Adapt to Heat,” by gradually increasing your exposure to summer temperatures, you can optimize your body to adapt to 115°F weather.

In a 1967 speech to the American Psychological Association, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. expanded on the concept of being “well-adjusted.” In the face of injustice and inequity, Dr. King urged a “creative maladjustment.”

If he were with us today, I think he’d similarly advise us to maladjust ourselves – he might even say to become intolerant to living on an increasingly unlivable planet.

Trigger warning: you’re being stabbed by Big Oil

The New York Times article is a bit myopic, perhaps even absurd given the current context. The following scenario may help illustrate my point.

Imagine: a gang of psychopaths has trapped you in an alleyway. They’re beating you and stabbing you in the back.

Enter the hero… me.

Standing over an increasingly desperate scene, I courageously intervene. I offer to teach you how to stitch up your own wounds. What’s that saying? “Teach a person to fish…” This way, the next time you’re stabbed by psychopaths or when the current posse breaks for lunch, you can pull yourself up by the bootstraps and heal yourself.

In this scenario we, humanity, are in the role of victim and the oil industry is the gang.

The oil industry has been stabbing me, you, even your grandmother in the back for decades. It has increased its assault over the last twenty years by thwarting meaningful environmental regulation – policies which might’ve curbed the pollutants that cause global warming and poison people’s bodies.

The assault plays out partly through our health.

Global warming means more extreme summers, leading to heat stroke and damage to organs for people who work outdoors or who cannot afford air conditioning. Breathing in the varieties of pollutants born of petroleum products (production and it’s use) means increased asthma, cancer, dementia and so on to those populations who are over exposed.

The assault also plays out onto our future: your children’s future, their livelihoods, their quality of life and how long they can expect to live – these things are being assaulted.

Each time the oil industry makes a political donation, builds another pipeline or sabotages another piece of climate legislation, your next thought should be: I’m being stabbed in the back by psychopaths; my child is being stabbed in the back by psychopaths.

The Corporation

In Joel Bakan’s book “The Corporation,” Bakan compares the behavior of a typical bad corporate actor against the Hare Psychopathy Checklist, a clinical diagnostic used to determine psychopathy. The Hare score for the typical slate of bad corporate behavior is nearly 100%. For example, frequent and willful deceit, the absence of empathy and constant gaslighting, among other harmful behaviors. These behaviors are modeled well by the oil sector.

The fossil fuel industry has known for over 40 years, partly through its own research, that the production and use of its product would disrupt our climate.

Despite this, it sows doubt about climate change and its varied effects such as extreme weather that transforms streets into convection ovens; paradoxically, it has convinced us that our  individual consumer behavior drives climate change and it undermines policies and public investments that might hasten a green economic transition and thus help end global warming.

A new, new norm

Some people may indeed find it helpful to spend a few minutes a day in 115°F weather to build their heat resilience. Unfortunately, such advice seems hollow. Every year more regions of the world will simply become too hot for human habitation, regardless of how much DIY heat tolerance one has developed.

Yes, likening the machinations of faceless businessmen to stabbing people may seem ridiculous and perhaps a bit graphic. Unfortunately, the image still fails to fully convey the violence of witnessing your neighborhood engulfed by fire; looking on powerlessly while loved ones wither away from chronic disease triggered by pollution; watching your future drown in a rising tide of despair.

These disfigured variations of the ‘new normal’ are brought to you by global warming. And the violence of global warming is visited upon humanity by the fossil fuel industry and the inherent toxicity of their product.

From the point of view of today’s and tomorrow’s victims, this reality is immeasurably more graphic.

Build your intolerance today!

So, the next time you find yourself in the unfortunate situation of being knifed by psychopaths (or come to the realization that it’s occurring in real-time), remember you have two possible courses of action:

• Option one: hope you can find your sewing kit somewhere in the garage, assuming of course the psychopaths pause their attack long enough for you to search your belongings for it; or
• option two: get up off the ground and defend yourself.

What might defending ourselves collectively look like?

One place to start would be to fight for an equitable tax system. The current regressive tax structure has deprived the state of the resources required to regulate polluters and finance the transition toward a green economy.

Progressive taxation also supports public infrastructure – infrastructure that all our lives depend on: water treatment plants to guarantee every glass of water nourishes; regulatory agencies to police polluters so our air is easy to breathe; cheap and convenient public transit; streets and sidewalks designed to provide cooling shade in the summer. The list goes on.

These are the enjoyables of the commons – necessary ingredients for a modern society to flourish. In other countries untainted by creeping fascism and the hoarding of economic progress such enjoyables are taken as a given.

Now would be a good time to heed Dr. King’s words.

Instead of building up our tolerance to an environment becoming ever more hostile to human life, I suggest we urgently become intolerant to our shared circumstances. I recommend we rise from the ground to collectively maladjust ourselves to those who sacrifice our future.

Thus, I humbly suggest option two.