Curiosity is a stiletto, needle-point, both edges razor sharp, lethal in the wrong hands, yet also a stimulating path to discovery — just one more double-edged sword from which I have never cowered. In fact, I slide it under my belt to tickle my grandsons’ fancy, maybe even that of their children if ever so fortunate. Stifle a child’s curiosity and you ought to be charged with abuse. At least, that’s my view, televangelist, Sunday School teacher and chief of police be damned.

What’s got me thinking this week is the lawn, a rare three weeks without mowing. Having performed the chore for nearly 50 years in this fertile valley, I know it has never before happened in my lifetime. So, of course, my wheels are spinning to a shrill, piercing scream, on my walks, in my rambles, when random thoughts distract even the most gripping reads.

Yeah, I know, I can feel readers’ angst already: “Uh-oh,” they’re pondering, “where’s he going with this?” And I suppose there are a many turns I could take on a subject like curiosity, starting with that threadbare axiom about the cat and the pleasant outcome that brought about its reincarnation. But, no, far too familiar. What’s bugging me as I sit here today, contemplating a drought interrupted by our first puddles in weeks, followed by inspiring Wednesday-morning air, is the reading of Bill McKibben’s troubling “Rolling Stone” magazine piece titled “The Reckoning,” on global warming. When will people finally “get it” and expel the diabolical, manipulative deniers from our political landscape? I’m not optimistic it’ll happen anytime soon.

According to McKibben, for many years the lonely canary in a rickety, old, backwoods coal mine posted “No Trespassing,” it may already be too late. He lays out some simple, defeatist math concerning U.S. fossil fuels already in storage for intended use. He says if it’s all used, we’re freakin’ cooked, literally. So stop at the newsstand and pick up a copy, fresh cougar bait on the cover, it’ll tell you all you need to know and plenty you’d probably rather not know about the state we’re in, thanks to greedy energy companies and the clever wordsmiths and unethical scientists they employ to mislead the clueless flock. It’s criminal. If you want more, go to 350.org and sign up for email alerts, just so that the crisis threatening the world as we know it stays in plain view. A scholar from the beautiful Champlain Valley college town of Middlebury, Vt. — where I found myself sitting on the common Sunday afternoon — McKibben is from the neighborhood and well worth heeding.

Problem is that McKibben does most of his preaching to the choir, can’t seem to reach lazy mainstream-news hounds who continue to get their daily fix about the coast-to-coast drought ravaging our land, the related wildfires scorching the parched West, without even a faint whiff of the crucial question hovering over the whole crisis: Why? Gee, do you suppose it could have anything to do with the millions of gallons of oil sludge circulating along the deep, dark ocean floor somewhere in the Atlantic following the disastrous 2010 BP Gulf spill? How about Fukushima? Could the poisonous radiation belched into to the atmosphere and puked into the ocean be even partially to blame for this record heat and drought? Sadly, if you’re looking for a culpability analysis, you won’t find it on the nightly news or morning paper. No sir. If it’s the truth you seek, you must search alternative sources, be they cutting-edge blogs or other online news sources, or secondary publications like “Mother Jones,” “The Nation,” “Rolling Stone” or “Orion,” that literary gem few know of. If you can believe it, even Al Jazeera covered the Gulf spill and Fukushima back in the day better than Associated Press, and it’s not like Arabs have no energy interests to protect.

It reminds me of the old days, before the Internet and 24/7 cable news stations, when you had to read “Ramparts” or I.F. Stone or, again, “Rolling Stone,” if you wanted to know what was going on in Vietnam, at Kent State or on the city streets of San Francisco, LA and Chicago. It’s the same, tired old story today, with the courts, the cops and the mainstream press fighting hard to protect the status quo while lonely, altruistic voices like McKibben sound Paul Revere’s alarm to deaf ears of loyalist “sheeple” waving their flags made in Taiwan, singing praise of “true patriots” like Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hanitty, prime-time gasbags for the Rupert Murdoch/Roger Ailes propaganda machine. Yes indeed, history repeats itself and will likely continue doing so until it all comes to a hot, fiery grand finale, by which time it’ll be pointless even to say, “I told you so.”

Which I guess brings us right back where we started, to the concept of basic human curiosity. Those who are curious today can find answers easier than back in the Sixties and early Seventies. Problem is that intellectual and philosophical curiosity have been suffocated in debt, which leaves middle-class college graduates with no freedom to explore or travel or figure out precisely who they are before settling down to own a home, raise a family and punch the clock; better still, blast away with an assault rifle at a movie theater. There’s just no time for floating and free thinking these days, only immense pressure to quickly plug into a “good job,” which these days translates to one that pays well, not necessarily makes you happy. What we end up with is a flock of expressionless automatons, what Orwell and Upton Sinclair and many others called wage slaves, even if some of the jobs do bring a livable wage and financial security, albeit for a job you either hate or, to perform it, must hang your conscience on the hallway coat rack.

No matter what McKibben and others of his honorable ilk say, I sense I’m going to miss the day of reckoning. Yeah, I know the salmon and the Pocumtucks have already vanished, and soon Franklin County sugarbush will follow the same tragic path. I truly believe I will live to see the day when the nostalgic sight of steaming springtime sugar shacks will require a drive north. It’s an image that makes me think of my grandsons. I’m convinced they’ll taste global-warming horror. For that I feel diluted guilt and a pure rage, because we could have prevented it with curiosity, activism and rejection of capitalist greed that benefits few and leaves the rest of us sucking filthy wind the press assures us meets acceptable government health standards, whatever that means.

All I know is that Mother Earth has taken ill, greed’s to blame and the culprits would fight another civil war to prevent change. Activists tried to foster change in the Sixties, got squashed and are now following our salmon and indigenous tribesmen to a lonely place called Oblivion. Just bang a hard right at the four-corners to Doom, and drill, Baby, drill.