It is said that there are five stages most people go through when grieving a loss. The first is denial, then anger, bargaining, depression, and finally, acceptance. Different people advance through these stages of grief at differing rates, some taking longer with certain stages than others.

No, I’m not saying the world is dead, nor am I claiming that humankind is doomed and we just have to deal with it. To say that is horribly pessimistic, lazy, and just plain presumptuous. I’m not dealing in fortune telling; I’m dealing in reality. Funny thing is, the five stages of grief can be applied beyond loss to reality in general, and the grief experienced when reality is something that’s hard to deal with.

The reality is, we’re doing a very good job of making our environment less inhabitable. We’ve been doing this for a while. Ever since the industrial revolution and the population explosion that followed, we’ve shifted into overdrive, and all of that inertia from more than a hundred years of consumption and pollution is not easy to slow down, let alone stop and reverse.

It’s a hard pill to swallow, I know. That’s why most people are stuck in the earlier of the five stages. There are plenty in denial, looking at selective and short-range data in order to comfort themselves with the belief that everything is okay. It’s perfectly understandable. These are the same people who need the comfort given by the idea of an afterlife to combat their fear of death.

Then there are those who have just finished watching An Inconvenient Truth, and are ready to take drastic action against those they believe are most at fault for global warming. These angry reactionary activists are just as short-sighted as those in denial, because they fail to acknowledge that the true problem is bigger than one corporation or one politician, or one corporate politician. The irrational rage of those stuck in the anger stage does nothing but turn global warming into a pop-politics spin game. In Left vs. Right, ideology trumps facts, and nobody gets anywhere.

But not everyone gets angry at global warming. Some move through that stage very quickly, and proceed to depression. They give up. These are the doomsday preachers and bottled water hoarders; the ones who have lost all hope because it’s easier than working to change things. Again, like denial and anger, depression doesn’t really do anything. Sulking doesn’t reduce greenhouse gas emissions as much as you might think.

It would seem, from the descriptions of denial, anger, and depression, the people stuck in these stages are doing the most harm to the process of saving our asses from ourselves, but they aren’t. By far, the most harmful and annoying stage for people to get stuck in is bargaining, because bargainers believe they’ve reached the finish line. They are the type of people who buy a Prius, express their support for whichever environment-savvy candidate is in the news that week, and proceed to stick their nose so high in the air it should have airplane warning lights on it. It’s incredibly difficult to talk about global warming with bargainers, because they truly believe that the problem can be solved if everyone buys a hybrid like they just did, or installs some energy-saving appliances, or boycotts Esso and writes letters to politicians asking for tougher emissions standards.

Global warming isn’t a tax hike. It isn’t a marriage on the rocks or a mid-life crisis; something that can be worked out at a weekend retreat. It’s bigger than that, and it’s bigger than you or me. So no, you have not done your part by believing the hype and buying what you’re told will make you a greener person. Glaciers aren’t going to look at the tiny solar panel on your roof and say “well, that’s a fair compromise,” and stop melting. There is no easy way out of this, and your empty, consumer-oriented gestures are a weak bargaining chip to begin with. In the end, you’re just blowing hot air up your own ass.

So what do we do once we’ve reached the stage of acceptance? What can we say once we acknowledge all we have done and the scope of the situation? Honestly, I’m not sure. I don’t know how to slow down, let alone stop the pollution created by our industrialized world without crippling the global economy. In fact, I’m not sure it can be done. But I’m not counting it out, I’m not ignoring the problem, I’m not finger-pointing, I’m not giving up, and I’m definitely not deluding myself into thinking simple, superficial gestures are going to fix the world.

And neither should you.

One night this past December, I was walking home from a party with two friends. We stopped at a busy intersection, and on the side of a building nearby there was a digital clock. It was around 2 A.M., but the time was not what interested me or my friends. The clock was alternating between displaying the time and the temperature. When it switched to display the temperature, it read 9 degrees Celsius. No, the clock was not broken. The outside temperature at 2 A.M. on a December night in Toronto was 9 degrees. With bemused laughter I looked over at my friends. One expressed bewilderment with a shrug of his shoulders. The other uttered a golden nugget of truth, one that, as with most truths, many people seem to avoid confronting.

His eyes still glued to the clock, he exclaimed “We’re already fucked. People think global warming is something that’s coming in the near future. It’s already fucking here. This is it.”

My friend had a point.

Global warming has slowly grown into the popular, fashionable cause it is today with the help of celebrities and celebrity politicians. It’s the new gay. The talking heads and their followers love munching their gums about the pros and cons of hybrids and Kyoto, and there’s an ever-growing sentiment amongst the public that global warming might be an issue we need to take seriously.

You don’t need to look further than Hollywood to see confirmation of this. An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore’s lecture-turned-documentary about ice caps melting and climates changing, has been nominated for an Oscar. Cameron Diaz runs her mouth about her Prius and its imaginary MPG figures every chance she gets. It won’t be long before climate change tops AIDS in Africa as the top cause for celebrities who want to feel like they’re important.

But it’s all bullshit, and it’s all happening too late. Like every popular concern, people are catching on with their 20/20 hindsight, and saying “we should do something about this!” With something like AIDS in Africa, it’s okay that we didn’t get to the problem in time for solutions, because it’s not about finding solutions, it’s about acknowledging the problem. Most people don’t need to worry about solving those problems because those problems aren’t actually a part of their lives. The difference here is that unlike AIDS in Africa, global warming is worldwide. Climate change isn’t something that exists in pictures of far-off exotic lands; it’s happening right in our own back yards. The temperature in Toronto should not be 9 degrees in the middle of a December night. Things should be frozen. Things need to be frozen. It’s part of the balance of nature.

We’re not dealing with a problem we will face soon. This isn’t an asteroid plummeting towards earth. Global warming has already hit, and because it has, it’s all the more impossible to undo the damage and find a solution. It’s even more impossible when people refuse to acknowledge this and continue to talk about global warming like it’s something on the horizon. And it’s all but impossible when we wrap ourselves in a shroud of egoism and discuss the matter as though the earth is our machine: we broke it, and we can fix it.

We can’t fix the earth. We don’t have the ability to fix a planet. And we aren’t killing the earth, we’re killing ourselves. The earth will continue to exist, whether we’re living on it or not. That is probably the biggest irony of this entire issue, and the hardest one for people to face. Global warming isn’t about saving the earth from us; it’s about saving our asses from ourselves.

More on this next week…