MONTPELIER, Vermont. When Washington County Game Warden Del Donelan first caught a glimpse of the “new normal” in his neck of the woods, he did a double-take worthy of old-time comedian Jack Oakie. “I knew we had moved on from ‘global warming’ to ‘climate change,’” he says with a note of contempt in his voice for the shifting theories of environmentalists working in cozy offices. “But I have to say I was surprised to see a wooly mammoth rummaging through the garbage at a roadside picnic area.”
Jack Oakie
Donelan caught an image of the huge beast on his iPhone camera and is thankful he did so. “The last thing you want to happen to you as a game warden is to have to report a Bigfoot sighting,” he says, shaking his head. “That kind of thing can make people think you’ve gone crazy out in the woods, and if you get fired you lose your pension.”
Wooly mammoth: “Not another one!”
But with photographic evidence in his hand, Donelan has made believers out of many who assumed that all efforts to fight global warming were good, and the more the better. “I guess I’d have to say we went a little too far,” says Montpelier Town Clerk Ginny Overshaw. “Now you can’t find a parking place on Main Street for all the wooly mammoths squatting their derrieres in the handicapped spaces–and they never pay their fines!”
“Crap. Is it too late to stop recycling?”
“Overconfidence in limited knowledge is what got us into global warming in the first place,” says climate scientist Evelyn Fishbein of the University of Vermont. “I don’t know why people thought they’d be better at turning down the earth’s thermostat once it got too hot.” With recent news that the hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica has closed, Fishbein urges a dose of humility on the part of those who would dictate social norms in order to achieve far-off environmental goals. “My brother-in-law stopped using Right Guard spray because of the fluorocarbons,” she says. “My family paid for it at Thanksgiving dinners for years.”
Some have urged an accommodationist approach to a sixth ice age, in much the same manner that environmentalist counsel suburbanites to make peace with coyotes eating their pets. “Yes the wooly mammoth is a six-ton creature that can kill you with one teeny-tiny misstep,” says nature writer Ted Gormley. “But you have to remember it’s for a good cause.”