This blog launched right before the pandemic and was intended to focus primarily on climate change. And unexpected tag was cornavirus, and it has been used more times than not. As I sit in the state of WA looking out on smog so thick from forest fires that it looks like thick fog (but it is not), it is one more layer of unfolding climate disaster. Some people have trouble seeing the pandemic as an out fall of climate change. Some people are in denial about the meaning of half of the 4,000 year old ice shelf, a piece the size of Manhattan falling off of Canada's last intact ice shelf, leaving it unable to regenerate itself over the winter. News reporters are reporting in much detail the progress of forest fires throughout the north west as well as the challenges they are presenting people - but so many of these stories never mention that the fires are caused by climate change.
What I wish would be part of every story on the forest fires: These fires are caused by climate change. Drier, hotter weather which we are experiencing for longer each summer due to increased temperatures under climate change, dry out plants making them tinder, quick to catch fire. Add other human stupidity like throwing a cigarette out a window, not dausing a campfire, or using fire works and the fire begins. The fire season is 3x longer in the NW now because of the loss of snow pack in the mountains - thus providing a longer period for fires to break out. And high winds are now starting earlier in the fall, creating the dangerous potential to fan a fire once it starts. And the forest fires themselves release more carbon to the air resulting in more long term global warming. When you see a story that does not share this information - please post it in response to the story.
So when people say that we are living in the Apocalypse....it does not really seem like hyperbole. The air quality index is suppose to be 17, it is 189 where I live, and it is over 400 in Portland, two people from there have come to stay with me because the tiny smoke particles are so small you can breathe them into your lungs, even with a mask and do damage to your body. We have all seen pictures of people in China who have to always wear masks outside because of bad air pollution, but this is actually even worse than those pictures. This gives new meaning to the words climate refugee. These are thankfully temporary climate refugees who will be able to go home next week. But for many hundreds of people in the NW they will have lost their homes in these forest fires and they will not be going home again. They will join the band of climate refugees from flooding, tsunamis, hurricanes, and drought.
But what I really want to write about is not these facts of the multiple crises, but about facing what it means to be living in these times. It is deeply imbedded in the human psyche to try to make what is bad normal or ok. We can read words with letters missing out of them because we fill in what is missing. We focus on what is normal rather than what is not. I remember a woman this spring talking about how she was enjoying the flowers coming early (while I chaffed inside over her not understanding that it is for very bad reasons, climate warming reasons, that the flowers are coming early.) We have not learned to hear the earth cry. We have in fact learned to tune out to the earth as settler's descendants.
So to have any chance to stop climate change we will have to learn to hear the cries of the earth. We will have to correctly understand the early spring as a result of warming, the lack of standing snow in parts of the country as not a blessing but a curse. We will have to learn to hear the pandemic as not just a gigantic inconvenience made worse in the US by incompetent president, but as an earth trying to shake off a parasite to its' life. We will have to hear the news of the ice shelf breaking off as a feedback loop that we have allowed temperatures to climb to high, and we will have to hear the crackles of the fires as not simply the result of some one's idiotic baby gender reveal fireworks but as the result of conditions render to ripe for fire by a long season of global warming.
Scientists for decades have been modeling what they thought would happen. They have made best case and worst case models. Policies are usually based upon best case models. We have consistently been coming out at the worst case outcomes. None the less, even among the climate activists I know these results are coming much sooner than we expected.
So some of the work is to turn towards the truth, to name this for what it is, and then not turn away from that truth. Zen master Thich Nhat Hahn is said to have said in response to the question what should we do to save the world: "What we most need to do is hear within us the sound of the earth crying." Earlier today I opened a book to a passage that said: "It is a perfect sky, it is always changing and it is always perfect". One might think of that a historically sweet but not currently relevant passage, but actually nature is full of feedback loops. They contain warnings of things going out of balance, so that rebalancing can occur. The perfectly smoke filled sky is crying out to us, asking us to correct the matter before it is too late. There are those who are so filled with despair in the face of these climate disasters that they respond with depression and hopelessness. But as I wrote about last month, the things we must do for each other and the planet are the same whether we are trying to survive upon a melting planet or if we are trying to save a melting planet. So it is best that we respond to this crisis as the Earth's call to action, and begin to act.
I-5 in OR by Salem on 9/8/2020 at noon
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