This is a bad month for the earth. An ice shelf the size of Manhattan fell of the Greenland Ice cap. Scientists say there is not enough ice left to regenerate the ice cap over the winter. This has been the metric activists had hoped to avoid for decades and have watched slowly approaching. It is a tipping point. Much of California has been on fire this summer. Large areas of trees have burned. Basin National Park the home to some of the largest and oldest redwoods in the United States burned. Out of control massive wild fires is also a tipping point. There are no climate activists I know that are not depressed about this. Mostly we don't talk about it. We already know what it means. What is there to say really?
This gets to the heart of a question people have asked me over and over again: is there hope? Is it already too late? I gave up on that question about 5 years ago. It stopped mattering. It is both true that we have always had all of the solutions we needed (We don't need to invent some miracle technology). We have had enough solutions all along that if implemented we could have ended this several decades ago. What we have lacked was the political will - in large part due to the misinformation campaigns of Exxon, Shell and the Koch brothers. People ask the question as if they should only try if there is still a chance, but while they are not yet certain they have failed to act. The obvious question is: "What are you waiting for?"
But why the answer has stopped mattering to me is I realized we have to do the same things if we are still trying to avoid over shooting 1.5C temperature rise (which just for us Americans this get real is 2.7 F.) as we have to do to try to adjust to it. We have to start doing regenerative agriculture so that we draw down carbon and so we survive drought, We have to start building carbon neutral buildings so we stop using fossil fuels but also so we are cooler in the coming heat. We have to plant and preserve trees so we drawdown carbon but also to keep us cooler on a hotter planet. We have to make 20 min walkable neighborhoods to avoid gas guzzling car trips, but also so we build resilient communities that can help each other out in the face of increasing catastrophes. We have to build more social justice because it will help us change our fossil fuel dependant society but also because it will help us come together to survive. At some point things will be so dire that all we can do is fight for survival. We are not there yet, but covid is giving us a peek at what a society unraveling really looks like. For those of us with enough privilege to not yet be drowning, don't use it to try to get back to normal. Use it to fight for a transformation of our systems to something sustainable.
The other reason it has stopped mattering to me whether it is "too late" is I am realizing that it is human hubris to think we actually know. We know enough to know we are in trouble. We know enough to model the level of decline (although even though those models have had to be corrected many times for factors we had not thought of or interfaces we had not known about.) These are reasonable canaries in the coal mine, giving us reliable warnings. But what we don't know is at what rate or how we would recover if we suddenly stopped messing with the planet.
To give an example. Many years ago I went to visit Mt Saint Helens, some 24 years after it erupted. The ranger was explaining that it was so bad after it erupted, so much ash and lava had gone into the lake at the bottom of the lake that the scientists thought the lake was dead. They were very surprised that after many years the lake started to slowly come back to life. They discovered at that point that leaves that fell in the lake and sank to the bottom released oxygen what was starting to re-oxygenate the water. She also commented on how new plant life had come throughout faster than imagined, etc. My daughter and then husband hiked down to the bottom while I sat in meditative reflection. When much later my daughter came running up the path I noticed for the first time that day that she was wearing a shirt that had one word on it: HOPE. I left the Mt that day realizing that the earth has complex methods for healing that we are not fully aware of. All of nature in fact is inclined towards correction and healing when not interfered with. That there is indeed hope.
That same year I watched a documentary about the Black Plague in Europe. It was strangely comforting. I came to learn that at the time the majority of people knew little of disease and hygiene and believed that the Devil was invading town by town and killing people. Since whole towns were dying they had reason to fear that perhaps all life on earth would come to an end. They endured great loss and suffering. And yet....life did not end on earth.
The Redwoods that burned in CA. Turns out they were intended to have regular fire by nature and most of them survived. I still grieve the ones that died.
Please do not construe either of these stories to mean I don't think the threat of climate catastrophe is not real, urgent or bearing down on us. These stories are simply meant to say we do not know everything, and it is still incumbent upon us to do everything we can to help the Earth and the life within its web to survive.
No comments:
Post a Comment