“Any fool can destroy trees.” ~ John Muir, from “Save the Redwoods” essay in John Muir, Nature Writings, The Library of America, p. 830, 1997, N.Y., N.Y.
Study the maps from the Berkeley Climate Monthly Report (previous post on this blog). Study Europe, especially France and Spain. This heat pattern was long predicted by climate scientists yet with all we know, and without any hope of a global effort to reduce heat producing carbon emissions, it may yet all come true and then some.
Heating on land takes human lives, destroys forests whose carbon sequestration is fundamental to the gentle climate we have known for at least the last 10,000 years. We have depended on weather patterns known to us as seasons of the year. Farmers have known these patterns and have planned accordingly.
As agriculture varies over the centuries and location, humans have learned how to extract the most food out of a given piece of land. Extraction from tilling the land we have recently observed destroys the underlying networks of mycelia that are the conduits of water and minerals and the central hub of the lives of millions of microbes and invertebrates whose lives make our abundant foodshed possible.
We are entering a new era of life on Earth. Across the world people and organizations labor to restore ecosystems and to protect species. Notable too are the family by family efforts to plant natives to support insects and birds and other of our kin at risk from climate change, pesticides, and general disruption of their life cycles in their habitats.
In spite of these local or regional efforts, we have passed a point where Earth’s biological systems are irrevocably disrupted by climate forcing that has caused drought, floods, fire, mega-storms and now, these play back on each other for a forcing effect. The fires in the NE USA, Canada, and Europe are illustrative. The fires are so intense now that they are creating their own weather. When this happens, no human intervention can stop them. More people are displaced.
We have passed tipping points now. No going back. This could have been stopped or slowed down had we stuck together across political and social divides but we did not. We know Mother Earth’s creatures are malleable and ultimately able to adapt under favorable conditions. Its still possible that there are things we can do now but they are hard and will need big collaborations to achieve.
This fact has been hard for me personally to acknowledge. Generally, I am an optimist believing there is hope to make change happen soon enough. But those changes, at least in America, have been stymied and denigrated by leaders and some of the public alike. All that fossil fuel lobbying paid off? No one will be unscathed by the coming Earth changes. Nature will endure but in some form we cannot predict nor whether we’ll survive to be part of it. Nature is responsive and ultimately able to change under different conditions.
America embraces capitalism as its economic religion and oath. The vagaries of the system have boomeranged over the decades between the forces of greed and the forces of prudence and justice. In America the forces of avarice and greed are in the White House at present, half the Congress unwilling to stop it, and the other half powerless. Citizens and representatives still in touch with reality are forming coalitions and I feel a groundswell forming to stop them. But when? The world is burning around us. How much longer can rich and powerful people live in altered realities with all their power and wealth? Don’t hold your breath. Better to join with friends and people who DO possess reason and power through the Constitution.
I am not giving up nor are you. There is a growing coalescence among neighbors and communities across the U.S. We can do amazing things together; we can’t stop climate change but we can adapt to it using not only our wits, but also by cultivating a reverence for the Earth we forgot somewhere on the way to “get the gold”.
The reason our culture has not embraced an intelligent relationship with our planet is the way we consider humans separate from other species and the land and waters of Mother Earth. Yet nothing could be further from the truth no matter what some religions may teach. We are a biological species. Our contribution to the whole biota is that we are reasoning creatures and we have an opposable thumb and we make stuff. We could be very useful to Mother Earth by understanding how the natural world works and that we are one among millions of species. I am no fool that that change of worldview could happen in America soon enough, but a great deal of our people are coming to this understanding. So, a major action we can take is to be in a spiritual posture of humility and take actions to undo the conditions that are causing climate change.
We can’t stop it now, but we can mute the impacts and then learn what the new realities will mean for ALL life on Earth and adjust how we live. That is, we embrace and recall reverence for life which our species once embraced. We should turn to the original keepers of North America, the Tribal Nations across this land. We can learn from their understanding of our place in the great panoply of life on this land.
Susan Feathers 