Welcome to Earthweal’s second open link weekend. Every Friday afternoon at 4 PM EST an open link challenge kicks off, inviting all comers to share a poem, new or old, long or short, hopefully in the spirit of this forum but all doors are really open as long as your contribution is a poem.
Open-forum links will be accepted through Sunday night, followed by a Monday challenge focused on some aspect of our changing Earth and lasting til Friday. The Jan. 13 Monday Challenge will be GHOSTS.
That’s all you need to know to get started today. If you’re itchin’ to post, click on the Mr. Linky link which follows. Ifyou don’t mind, put your location after your name in the link so we know where the report is coming in from. For Earthweal to take root, we need global voices!
Homily follows. Would love to read your thoughts and responses in the comments section. Conversation has been so energized and heartfelt!
Fruitful posting and reading and commenting—
Brendan
These days, the pace of world events keeps the news on a fast spin cycle. Coverage of the Australian fires has been eclipsed by war-thunder in the Middle East. Residents of Puerto Rico still slowly rebuilding from Hurricane Maria are without power—again—after a series of earthquakes. A new coronavirus from the dreaded SARS family is spreading in China and the East Coast of the USA is experiencing unseasonable heat with temps more than 30 degrees above average. Here in Florida, after a few cool nights earlier in the week it now swelters like there’s no tomorrow. And so the world races on. Bitter cold snaps are coming, then drenching spring rains, then tornadoes, then hurricanes, then summer heat and drought, wildfire and more big storms … you all know the reel: We just can’t tell how much climate change is magnifying and speeding things up, a warp drive powered by something monstered by human intervention.
Still, many of us though are not ready yet to leave the immense devastation of fire in Australia. The backstory always takes a while to filter in. People are just returning to their homes and trying to decide whether to rebuild or leave. Fire management practices are being assessed with lessons to be learned from Aboriginal methods. The scale of devastation to non-human life keeps growing by magnitudes, and whatever number we come up for the dead—more than a billion, some scientists now say—there is an even greater shadow number of survivors who won’t be able to live on in what’s left. Some species are sure to go extinct.
And the fires keep coming back. Kangaroo Island is ablaze again, with a third of its 1,700 square miles already burned including Flinders Chase national park and Kangaroo Island Wilderness Retreat. Home to many unique animal species and some 60,000 koalas, the island is becoming an ecological disaster. Welcome to the nightmare of the Anthropocene, no longer down the road.
A tipping-point is a fact of life which consumes all the facts we can summon to describe it, a growling magnitude of multiplying dimensions. The spectral red glow of those fires brings into consciousness a new and perhaps unstoppable weather whose catalyst is itself.
“It’s like the fire is a sentient being,” said a New South Wales writer whose husband and son are volunteer firefighters. “It feels like it’s coming to get us.”
What is fast eroding is any believable sense of resilience against such stacked events. Climate change is creating unliveable zones. The thought of adaptation in the manner we’d prefer is as behind our present moment as climate change denial was five years ago. That’s how fast geologic time is now smashing through real time.
If that is so, where is the hope? Without something to have faith in in the midst of this, something to believe in and work for, despair becomes the only conclusion and distraction an opiate, dulling pain and clouding vision with obliviousness. Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we will be gone. Party like it’s 1999.
But as Holderlin says: where there is danger, salvation grows as well. Much of the old dominant human order may not be worth saving, but new sources of earthwealth may become visible as the old ones burn away.
Jeb Bendell asserted in a 2018 paper a way of working through the fall of the human world we are witnessing. He begins by asserting that runaway climate change will result in societal collapse within the next few decades. However, that is unthinkable and untenable only if we cannot let go of the civilization and order which created it. We can’t manage our climate now that tipping points are passing, nor can we maintain status quo in our politics, economy and social structures; however, we can strive for a deeper adaptation which can provide hope and meaning in the maelstrom.
He writes,
Reflection on the end of times, or eschatology, is a major dimension of the human experience, and the total sense of loss of everything one could ever contribute to is an extremely powerful experience for many people. How they emerge from that experience depends on many factors, with loving kindness, creativity, transcendence, anger, depression, nihilism and apathy all being potential responses. Given the potential spiritual experience triggered by sensing the imminent extinction of the human race, we can appreciate why a belief in the inevitability of extinction could be a basis for some people to come together.
Remember in Poe’s classic tale, boats are easily devoured by the Maelstrom, but it is possible to survive if one clings to rising shapes, even if they make no sense for sailing.
“In abandoning hope that one way of life will continue, we open up a space for alternative hopes,” Tommy Lynch recently wrote in Slate. Can our grief for so many animals extinguished or rendered homeless by the Australian brushfire act as a whetstone for a sharper, more insightful clarity about the difficulties ahead and work that is still worthwhile?
There is always productive work to be about, even if its larger end is a future not as hot as it could be without that work. Humanity will probably fail to keep warming of the world under 2 degrees C by the end of the century, but we can avoid 3 or 4 or 5 degrees C, maybe. Green New Deals are possible. We can drive less, consume less meat, transition to alternative energy. We can vote and encourage others to do so. Jedidiah Purdy, a legal scholar with a fine mind for politics in the Anthropocene, writes in The Atlantic about his decision to have children and teaching his son “to wonder at the world before he learns to fear for it.” I’m not as game as he is for keeping the world populated with the likes of us, but we do need voices of welcome.
Predictably, those who are too in bed with former orders and their powerful lobbies will hunker down further and hurl invective on the prevailing digital wind (Rupert Murdoch’s flagship newspaper The Australian is an appalling case in point). Don’t expect the fossil fuel industry to become like the apostle Paul, struck Christian on the road to Damascus. Expect the trolls to continue pushing climate misinformation like methed-up sex offenders. And then there’s US President Donald Trump, who, during at an event yesterday to announce his administration’s rollback of requirements of the National Environment Policy Act, sent his love to Australian PM Scott Morrison, proclaimed love for the environment and clean air and clean water and adoration for jobs, jobs, jobs. Another head-spinner for a future which will hold us all to account.
The danger of despair has already woven its dark thread into this forum; it this only about despair, who has the fortitude to keep coming back for fresh buckets of black water? But behind that despair there may be doors; temporary houses can still be located where inconceivables become pantry stock.
The only thing I know to do is keep writing.
So here goes.
earthweal 