Last summer I heard an NPR story about the Ganges River in India. The story explained that since the Ganges has so long been the spiritual, cultural and economic nerve center of Indian society, it has naturally become very polluted. Face it, you just can't use a river for unregulated drinking, bathing, traveling, tourism, disposal of your dead, and especially dumping of your toxic waste (among many other things) and not have pollution.

But in India, the Ganges' polluted state is not a universally accepted truth. Far from arguing about how to clean it up, many Indians are still arguing about whether or not it is, in fact, polluted at all.



This is incredible: Imagine standing waist deep in putrid water as garbage floats by and insisting that the water is safe and clean enough for your child to drink. It is denial in its purest form.

Why do so many Indians refuse to believe their precious Ganges River is polluted in spite of clear and tangible evidence that it is? Precisely because of that word: precious. Indians believe the Ganges is a goddess. They hold the river in such high esteem, that to declare that it is in any way imperfect is unconscionable. Saying the Ganges is polluted, in their minds therefore, is blasphemy.

Moreover, if they admitted it was polluted they would not be able to drink from it, bathe in it or bury their dead in it. All those activities, vital to their everyday life, would become impure acts, acts of violation of themselves and their ancestors. To accept such a possibility is horrifying beyond measure.

And so it must be with the climate change deniers. No matter the science, no matter the weather, no matter every single worldwide or local event that daily screams "Climate change is real!" in their faces, climate change deniers cannot accept that their precious world is going haywire. They can sit in their living rooms and watch on their TVs as major US cities get swamped by a extreme weather and still contend that it's a mere coincidence.

Because deniers simply will not concede that their world, which encompasses and makes possible all the human practices they have become so familiar with and so utterly dependent upon, is flawed. They cannot believe, even as the garbage swirls around their feet, that their source of spiritual fulfillment in all of its many forms, is deficient. And of course, in America, chief among those spiritual fulfillments is a love of money. That is what makes people like the state legislators in North Carolina consider making it illegal to even talk about what scientists say is real.

The needs that drive the denial are so strong that the deniers even shy away from acknowledging the potential: that this thing, this alcohol/religion/nation/lifestyle, is even fallible. It simply cannot be. For if it is, nothing in their world is secure anymore.

Many deniers go halfway: they'll admit the world is warming, but they won't accept that man is the cause. These folks are like alcoholics stuck on step one of the 12-step process: they believe the problem exists, but they cling to the concept that they are truly powerless to change it.

And so they conveniently never get around to accepting responsibility for, much less taking action to correct, the problem. These people are not candidates for recovery.

So what do we do with the hopelessly addicted, the fanatical, the perversely illogical and hypocritical people in our lives? Ignore them? Avoid them? Avoid contexts that involve their fanaticism? Most of us take the latter approach. And so it must be with the climate change deniers.

The next time you hear a climate change denier voice their ludicrous claims, just shrug them off. If you must say something to them, tell them they are in the minority, that no one believes that way anymore. Ignore them as you would any distractions from vital work toward the common good.



We have to just stop trying to get the deniers to understand, believe, or buy into the solution, because they simply aren't going to get there. Let's just abandon that discussion altogether.

We need to simply and boldly go ahead with what we know we must do about global climate change regardless of the deniers. We cannot afford to allow a minority of unenlightened to hold society hostage to their fanaticism.

Because the alternative is equally unacceptable for us: providing our children with poison and calling it sustenance.