The title of Thornton Wilder’s play, “The Skin of Our Teeth,” comes from the King James Bible, Job 19:20: “My bone cleaveth to my skin and to my flesh, and I am escaped with the skin of my teeth.”
Written in 1942 less than a month after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, Wilder broke from established theatrical conventions and won the 1943 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. “The Skin of Our Teeth” “spoke” to its audience at that time.
Combining farce, burlesque, satire and elements of a comic strip, Wilder depicts an Everyman Family as it narrowly escapes one end-of-the-world disaster after another, from the Ice Age to flood to war. I asked our graphic designer to capture this message on the program book cover for the 1965 production of “The Skin of Our Teeth” at Arena Stage in Washington, D.C.
Wilder, like many artists, had instincts, intuition and insight about the way civilization is heading. Loring Mandel’s “Project Immortality” was next in Arena Stage’s 1965 season. The play was about a dying genius whose thought processes are being scanned into a computer with the goal, that after his death, his brain could still be employed to resolve problems about our national defense. A year later, the field of AI research was founded at a workshop at Dartmouth College.
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It feels to me like what Wilder wrote in “The Skin of Our Teeth:” “the whole world’s at sixes and sevens, and why the house hasn’t fallen down about our ears long ago is a miracle to me.” If he were still writing today, he would be speaking to the big one — our climate crisis.
People have different ways of comprehending the future. Climate scientists not only seek certifiable clues about the future of our environment, but compare those clues to the reality of the past. For millions of climate refugees seeking a more livable climate, it’s one day at a time. They don’t need “proof” that their world is at sixes and sevens. Nor does the fossil fuel industry want proof that their world is at sixes and sevens. Those are not good numbers for the bottom line.
So, that world of extraction at the expense of our environment has found a new way to fend off those pesky climate scientists by “greenwashing.” While spending millions on campaigns trumpeting token low carbon projects, these companies have worked to rehabilitate the environmental image of fossil fuels while continuing to expand their core businesses of oil, gas and coal.
They publicize “net-zero” ambitions and sustainability targets that rarely align with the Paris Agreement goals. They have invested in reputational advertising that shifts the conversation to action by consumers and governments, positions themselves as trusted partners to wider society and promotes the role fossil fuel companies play in the climate transition. The role these corporations play in America’s failure so far to meet the Paris Climate Agreements of 1.5°C (2.7°F) target has transnational repercussions.
The Paris Agreement’s long-term temperature goal was to keep the rise in mean global temperature to well below 2 °C (3.6 °F), but still above pre-industrial levels. It really wanted to limit the increase to 1.5 °C (2.7 °F) as soon as possible and to reach net-zero by the middle of the 21st century. That would be 2050.
I believe that 2050 is a “convenient” future date that allows the fossil fuel industries to keep on keeping on extracting CO2, methane and other greenhouse gases while gaslighting the general public with its greenwashing marketing campaigns.
Charles Dickens’ famous first line in his classic “The Tale of Two Cities” kind of wraps the climate conundrum up with his famous first line. “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way.”
What direction do you think we are heading in? I believe we are living in the world today by the skin of our teeth.
John Bos writes his bi-weekly “Connecting the Dots” column for the Greenfield Recorder and is a contributing writer for “Green Energy Times.” He is the editor of a new children’s book “After the Race.” He can be reached at john01370@gmail.com.