Rescuing Atlantis.

• Author: Bass, Rick
• Position: Fighting for the environment

THERE ARE A LOT OF REASONS why I've decided to start getting arrested in protests against the world's largest global warming projects, but the bottom line is that we've set the world horribly on fire, the ice is melting, and the sea is rising, and protesting this is the only decent thing to do, in addition to being a necessary survival tool.

In the face of so much misery and destruction to come, a strongly worded letter to the editor seems to pale in comparison.

And maybe one reason is selfish: I don't want to be eighty years old and standing knee- or thigh- or waist-deep in those risen waters without being able to say I tried. That I saw what was coming--finally--and did not let it pass uncontested.

Even the most casual student of history is familiar with the tragic, world-altering brutalities of the past in which subsequent generations asked, with justifiable outrage: Where were you? Why didn't you do something? Why were you quiet, why were you so very quiet? What were you doing that was more important than trying to prevent this, when you knew it was coming?

A billion of the world's poorest humans will be spilling up into the hills, fleeing the rising tides and the ruination of fresh water. Cities great and small, magnificent or modest, will be vanishing, sinking, each a lost Atlantis.

We will all be standing in those waters waist-deep with one another, with the rats swarming the floating, rotting timbers, and the oil slicks of sunken cranes and tractors and automobiles burning on those black waters, and we will be asked to answer those questions.

I am not sure if we can win and turn--reverse the behemoth. Some dim days I think not, no way. Other days, I know we can; I can see it. All it requires is taking a fork in the road, a veer in the path. We are upon that fork, are passing by it quickly. Anyone can see it, and all we have to do is take it.

So I get arrested. I used to be on the other side of the bars. I was an oil and gas geologist, and I loved it: probing with an eight-and-five-eighths-inch drill string a mile deep into mystery, the old Paleozoic beaches that resided beneath farmers' soybean fields in north Alabama and Mississippi, the old beaches frozen long ago to stone and holding treasures, sweet green-black oil and clean natural gas that roared as if in exaltation when the searching drill bit--your drill bit, your dream, your hunger--pierced that stone crypt.

I get arrested now not out of any guilt for having participated in...