“We are not very good at telling stories about a hundred people doing things or considering that the qualities that matter in saving a valley or changing the world are mostly not physical courage and violent clashes but the ability to coordinate and inspire and connect with lots of other people and create stories about what could be and how we get there.”
My own response has evolved. There’s the initial shock of learning how actually bad things are going to be, and it’s only human to react strongly and emotionally to that, especially as a parent.
But it’s important to realize, too, that life will go on. Many people’s grandkids who would otherwise have lived will probably either die or never be born because of climate change; many others will have lives that will be deeply unpleasant. But people will still be here. We’re a weedy species. Like cockroaches and starlings, we won’t vanish. An almost unthinkable number of other species probably will, but humans — at least some humans — will remain. They’ll still fall in love, share special moments, tell stories, laugh… Your grandkids probably have as good a shot at that as anyone’s. So there’s that.
Also, after the Sixth Great Extinction has run its course, a few million years from now, there will be a new flowering of species radiating their way into the vacant niches. And through all that, the silverfish probably won’t even notice, except for there having been a brief and unexplained hiccup of warmth and moisture and starchy book bindings, now passed.
For me it comes down to a choice between despair and hope. Tolkien wrote that “by 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead.” It haunted him, and he spent his life crafting a story to dramatize what he thought about how a person should respond to knowledge like that. Look at Denethor’s actions after he looks in the Palantir, versus Aragorn’s. Or look at Frodo and Sam, and their responses to Galadriel’s Mirror.
That Guardian piece I linked to isn’t giving you Lovelock’s views directly; like the Mirror of Galadriel, The Guardian is dangerous as a guide of deeds. We need to know what’s coming in order to prepare ourselves and to counter those who would mislead. But we also need to appreciate that if things are going downhill the way they appear to be, we should recognize and honor what we have today. I think that’s the point Lovelock was trying to make in that interview, though I’m not sure his interviewer really understood.
If a version of me had lived in the 1840s, and I could go back in time and talk to him, what would I tell him? Would I show him pictures of the carnage of the Civil War? Or tell him uplifting stories about the beginning of the end of slavery? Talk about the bombing of Hiroshima? Or about the landings on the Moon? What would I want him to know about the future? And if he knew what was coming, how would I want him to respond?
I think I’d want him to go bird-watching. I’d want him to walk through the forest listening for the call of an Ivory-billed Woodpecker. I’d want him to watch Carolina Parakeets at play, or stand beneath a flock of Passenger Pigeons so huge it blocked out the sun.
Everything dies. Individuals, societies, species: all of us are coming to an end. One day life itself will come to an end. It can be comforting to imagine otherwise, but that’s a fantasy.
Climate scientists and magazine writers (and programmers) aren’t necessarily the best people to advise you on how to process that knowledge. I think poets are a better source. So I re-read Tolkien. Also, thanks to despairoftranslators, I’ve been reading Owls and Other Fantasies by Mary Oliver. God, I love that book.
Wild Geese
You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers. Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting — over and over announcing your place in the family of things.
“I’m increasingly attracted by the idea that there can be at least small pockets where life and character and beauty and meaning continue. If I could help protect one of those from destruction, maybe that would be enough. Maybe it would be more than most people do.”
honestly i think most girls these days feel this deep restless emptiness inside them because no one has access to a field or meadow anymore. you can’t run out of the kitchen with a scarf around your head until you find the nearest empty pasture with hay blowing gently in the wind and just lay in the grass for a long time and listen to the wind until whatever is terrible and hard has passed and you remember that you are made of earth and you will be earth again and then you pick a handful of queen anne’s lace and walk home. girls don’t have empty fields to run to anymore and somewhere deep inside they know that they are missing something vital, and they spend their lives looking for it.
I think I figured out why I was falling into a deep well of wtf lately.
The county-year-list thing ended, which was fine; I was ready to not be so obsessive. I had a bunch of followup work to do in connection with the CBC compiling anyway, and the multi-year process of updating our local general plan to deal with sea level rise has been entering the phase where it goes from boringly slow to blindingly fast as the magician misdirects my attention and surprise! it’s a bunny! and I’m like, wait; we don’t NEED a bunny, we need a bear on a unicycle but the magician is like haha too late! better luck next time!
And there’s also, you know, my job. So I had plenty to do.
But in the meantime the usual (unusual) hijinks were going on in terms of US politics, and when I’m suddenly not getting up at 4 a.m. half the mornings to get in a couple of hours’ birdwatching in the far corners of the county I was paying more attention to my twitter feed, and it turns out my selection of politics-obsessed twitter follows, which worked fine when I was dipping in and out while attending to local avian matters, was WAY TOO MUCH AWFUL when consumed as a steady diet uninterrupted by birds.
So: Twitter follows trimmed down. And I’ve gotten on top of the CBC compiling and the SLR planning, so that’s cool. I’m going to prescribe myself just a little more birdwatching. And we’ll see how it goes.
So much loving Yulin Kuang’s “I Didn’t Write This” series of short films. It’s a gorgeously simple idea, that reel of cinematic art unfolding alongside and in conversation with a literary work, like a peek into someone else’s dreams. Or like your own dreams, when you fall asleep with a favorite book on your chest.
So: here are my poem suggestions. I’ve fallen in love with the work of Mary Oliver, whose work so often gives me the strange upside-down feeling of being recognized by someone I’ve never met. There’s a quiet, attentive beauty to her work that I think would blend well with Yulin’s warm, funny, careful director’s eye.
STARLINGS IN WINTER
Chunky and noisy, but with stars in their black feathers, they spring from the telephone wire and instantly
they are acrobats in the freezing wind. And now, in the theater of air, they swing over buildings,
dipping and rising; they float like one stippled star that opens, becomes for a moment fragmented,
then closes again; and you watch and you try but you simply can’t imagine
how they do it with no articulated instruction, no pause, only the silent confirmation that they are this notable thing,
this wheel of many parts, that can rise and spin over and over again, full of gorgeous life. Ah, world, what lessons you prepare for us,
even in the leafless winter, even in the ashy city. I am thinking now of grief, and of getting past it;
I feel my boots trying to leave the ground, I feel my heart pumping hard, I want
to think again of dangerous and noble things. I want to be light and frolicsome. I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing, as though I had wings.
THE MESSENGER
My work is loving the world. Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird— equal seekers of sweetness. Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums. Here the clam deep in the speckled sand.
Are my boots old? Is my coat torn? Am I no longer young, and still half-perfect? Let me keep my mind on what matters, which is my work,
which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished. The phoebe, the delphinium. The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture. Which is mostly rejoicing, since all the ingredients are here,
which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart and these body-clothes, a mouth with which to give shouts of joy to the moth and the wren, to the sleepy dug-up clam, telling them all, over and over, how it is that we live forever.
Twitter (which for me is mostly US politics twitter, because I intentionally segregated my social media into (politics) | (uplift|landscapes|droll webseries|birds|pretty dresses) in November 2016, is making me super sad lately.
How about we vote in a law that puts a cap on how long a government shut down can happen… say 20 days… before the president has to agree to a budget solution or else the 21st day congress begins the process of impreachment because civilian jobs and salaries and livelihoods are not a bargaining tool for the president to abuse is order to get their way
If you aren’t serving the people then you aren’t doing the job of the presidency and you need to be replaced
