Reckonings: a journal of justice, hope and history

Among The Trees

[Preface by John R. Boettiger: I've loved the company of trees all my life, their singularity and community, their slow growth and decay, their extraordinary diversity of lifespans, their changing seasonal colors of leaves and intertwined rootedness, their hospitality to other lives, their responsiveness to breeze and wind. As a child I loved to climb them, swing from their sturdy branches, find nooks in which to contemplate, read, find refuge, soften my soul, allow my imagination to wander.

[I wanted to be a forest ranger, living atop a tower in a room of, say, 200+  square feet, with a 360-degree view, caring for the forest that surrounded me on all sides, forest trails open for exploration, resupply and companionship. Hiking forest paths is still my favorite form of recreation. I was born and spent my earliest childhood years in the Pacific Northwest, and came especially - virtually lifelong - to admire the wonderful tangle of California live oaks and to stand in awe of redwoods and giant sequoia, of which the oldest recorded lifespan was an astonishing 3,200 years. Now in my later adulthood, after too many and too stumbling - but also nourishing - moves, I am settled again in the land of my birth, grateful to have come full circle.] 

[See "Comments" at the bottom of this post.]

 

Among The Trees

by Carl Phillips

Emergence Magazine: Ecology, Culture and Spirituality (https://emergencemagazine.org)

In this extended meditation on the relationship between place and intimacy, the body and the word, Carl Phillips walks among trees to explore what can and cannot be known.

What happened back there, among the trees, is only as untenable as you allow yourself or just decide to believe it is. It happened, and now it’s over. And the end feels—to you, at least—both like the end of a long pilgrimage and like the end of a well-reasoned, irrefutable argument, which is its own form of pilgrimage. Don’t both depend on stamina and faith, in the right proportions? Wasn’t the point, at the end, persuasion?

I used to speak in terms of shadowlands, by which I meant, I think, some space where what transpires between two bodies and what gets transacted almost look the same. I’d say a thing like

There’s a kind of shadowland that one body makes, entering

another; and there’s a shadowland the body contains always

within itself, without resolution—as mystery a little more

often, perhaps, should be …

and I’d call it a poem, and it looked like one, but how it felt was more like saying aloud the words “rescue me” long enough that it almost seemed plausible that mere saying could turn the light to twilight, and the twilight dark. I lived in the world that, for lack of a prettier word, I’d call tangible, where risk meant risk, it seemed, and violation meant violation, not psychological but solid things, for they each cast a shadow as only a solid thing, so I’d been told, could, though I had tried to touch them—violation, risk—and each time my hands touched nothing.

MY EARLIEST MEMORY of trees is of a particular fig tree in the yard of the first house I remember, in Portland, Oregon. I was five, at the most. Sometimes what I remember is playing in the shade of it, and at other times the bees that seemed to bloom from inside the windfalls—though it seems now to have been less the wind that brought the fruit down but the weight of ripeness itself, as if sweetness, too much sweetness, meant mistake, punishment therefore; for hours, I’d watch the bees enter and leave the split-open sides, and how the figs looked lonely, once the bees had gone, as if to be plundered meant at least not being alone …

One evening, instead of coming inside when called, I climbed the fig tree, wearing only a tee shirt and underpants. It seemed
like a game, to be up in the tree, and my parents not able to find me, calling my name as they wandered the yard. And then somehow, I fell, and then suddenly stopped falling: my underwear had caught on a branch, saving me from hitting the ground, but holding me in midair, unable to get down. The way I remember it, my mother told my father to get a ladder.

What’s very clear in memory is my father saying I should hang there in the tree for a bit, to learn a lesson about disobeying my parents.

I find no evidence, in my sixty years of knowing him, that my father is particularly attentive to historical resonances when it comes to our daily lives, but I can’t help thinking about the place of trees in African-American history, as the site for lynching. How strange for my father, an African American, to find it a fitting punishment to leave his son hanging in a tree at night.

My earliest memory of humiliation is of a particular fig tree in the yard of the first house I remember. Who can say how related this is to my refusal, all my life, to believe forgiveness exists?

Some trees are compasses, and some are flags. If a flag tells you where you are, a compass can potentially tell you how to get there or how to find someplace else. A flag, in marking a spot, seems more definitive, a form of punctuation; a compass implies movement, navigation. I know a man who, whenever he needs to write, or cry, or think—really think—goes to a
willow in his local park and hides beneath its draped branches. He goes there so often, you could almost say he’s become part of the willow; he seems a willow himself; he marks a place in my life where I stopped to rest, once, but I couldn’t stay. Then there’s another man, long ago now. His body a forest when seen from the air in a small plane, so that it’s possible to get close enough to see where the oaks give way to poplar trees, or where, if you follow the pines far enough, they’ll open out to a field across which you can see the ocean. I couldn’t have found my way here without him.

DESPITE MY CHILDHOOD mishap with the fig tree, and despite fairy tales, in which the forest so often contains danger—witches ready to shove children into ovens, wolves masquerading as harmless grandmothers—I’ve had a love of trees all my life. Throughout high school, I lived in a house in the woods in Massachusetts, and even on the darker mornings of winter what kept me from being frightened was the trees themselves—mostly scrub pines, as we called them there, with struggling oaks scattered among them. Unlike the kids at school, the trees remained silent as I passed, and I took this as a sign of acceptance. Irrational, sure—but in my feeling so unlike everyone else at school, in my confused wrestling with what I felt was real but I couldn’t name precisely, why not take silence for acceptance? Among the trees loneliness could be itself, in the open—so could strangeness—even as both remained hidden from the rest of the world for the time it took me to pass through the woods to the bus stop. As I walked, I’d sing to the trees, loudly at first, then more and more softly the closer I got to where the woods gave out, until all I could hear was whatever wind there was through the leaves and needles. A sound like the trees unable to sing back, but trying to.

As with myth, fairy tales often seem designed to explain something very real in surreal terms. The story of Red Riding Hood might as easily be a way to warn about the fact of dangerous animals in the woods as to suggest that potential criminals might be encountered. The secrecy that a forest provides makes it the perfect setting for crime. Also for intimacy, which has often been deemed a crime. It makes sense that woods and forests have long been a queer space. Queer, not just in the sense of strangeness or alienation—going back to my relationship to the woods in high school—but in terms of sexuality, the woods as a space in which to hunt for sex. What is cruising, if not a form of hunting, if not to pass, as animal (the act of sex is perhaps our most animal manifestation, as humans), in pursuit of another human who has chosen for the moment to yield more entirely to the animal that each of us carries inside?

Was like when the body surrenders to risk, that moment when an unwillingness to refuse can seem no different from an inability to, though they are not the same—inability, unwillingness. To have said otherwise doesn’t make it true, or even make it count as true. “Yes, but what does the truth matter now,” I whispered, stepping further inside what, by then, was night, almost. The tamer animals would soon lie down again, and the wild go free.

It's not just the convenience of the woods—its ability to conceal, to keep a secret—that makes it a likely site for sexual behavior that isn’t societally condoned. Trees are utterly natural, or the collections of trees called woods and forests tend, anyway, not to have been artificially constructed (as compared with parks or public gardens). And this natural context for sexual intimacy can give, if not a sense of wholesomeness exactly, then a sense of permission, at least, to what can feel like—what we’ve been made to feel is—transgression; if only temporarily, the trees erase the shame that drove us to seek hiddenness in the first place. Or if shame didn’t drive us there, a reasonable fear likely did. And then—remember?—that well-worn path where we found one another, the trees to either side like a lengthy convoy of fears that kept diminishing, the more south they shuffled—until there was no fear.

 

At this point in my life, I’m not always sure how much of what I think about my life among trees—in forests, in woods—actually happened, how much is imagined, and how much is what I’ve read and somehow superimposed over my own actual experience—everything from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight—the forest as the site of quest and conquest, riddle and answer—to those passages in Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings where so much travel is done under cover of night through forests. In the Tolkien, especially, while there is plenty of potential danger, so many of the scenes have to do with camaraderie and trust and an intimacy that isn’t sexual at all. Or I think about Randall Jarrell, whose poetry often revisits fairy tale, and seems especially fascinated with what goes on in the woods—specifically, Jarrell seems to want to rewrite fairy tale and the psychology of it. The forest is an example of “the lost world” that he’s always seeking, where the witch who would kill children is transformed. Here’s the end of his “The House in the Wood”:¹

Here at the bottom of the world, what was before the world

And will be after, holds me to its black

Breasts and rocks me: the oven is cold, the cage is empty,

In the House in the Wood, the witch and her child sleep.

The house is held by the wood, the mother and child are held by the house, perhaps the mother is holding her child. Which is to say the poem’s in part about enclosure as a form of security, and about nurture, the very opposite of what the witch conventionally stands for. The wood, in effect, reverses evil to the good it began as, or that’s the wish, a human one, with which the wood in the end has very little to do. In that same poem, Jarrell reminds us that

… after the last leaf,

The last light—for each year is leafless,

Each day is lightless, at the last—the wood begins

Its serious existence: it has no path,

No house, no story; it resists comparison …

So there are the trees of literature, floating somewhere in my head, always. Then there are all of my actual adventures and misadventures among trees throughout my life. And then there are the stories that maybe began with a shred of fact but got transformed in the course of my making a poem. Jarrell, again: “Which one’s the mockingbird? which one’s the world?”

They moved together in groups, and singly.

They moved among the trees as among the parts of a language they’d forgotten they knew.

Pitch pine, sycamore, maple, oak, and birch.

Humiliation, loneliness, permission, sex, and shame.

Memory, innocence, forgiveness. Willow. Willow.

Another way of thinking, though, about this interplay between reality and imagination when it comes to memory is that I’ve lost track of what happened, versus what serves as camouflage for what happened—camouflage in the form not just of trees but of the context they become for the stories that I tell in poems. In a sense, the poems themselves are trees, or tree-like, in that they become a place where what’s difficult and/or forbidden can have a place both to be hidden and within which to feel free to unfurl and extend itself. Here’s how I spoke of the forest once:

 … I lived, in those days, at the forest’s edge—

metaphorically, so it can sometimes seem now, though

the forest was real, as my life beside it was. I spent

much of my time listening to the sounds of random, un-

knowable things dropping or being dropped from, variously,

a middling height or a great one until, by winter, it was

just the snow falling, each time like a new, unnecessary

taxonomy or syntax for how to parse what’s plain, snow

from which the occasional lost hunter would emerge

every few or so seasons, and—just once—a runaway child

whom I gave some money to and told no one about,

having promised …

 

And here is a different way since then:

There’s a forest that stands at the exact center of sorrow.

Regrets find no shelter there.

The trees, when they sway,

sway like the manes of horses when a storm’s not far.

There’s no reason to stay there,

nothing worth going to see,

but if you want to, you can pass through the forest

in the better part of a long day.

Who would want to, though?

Story, versus information. Lyric, versus didactic. Long, periodic sentences, versus clipped, straightforward ones. Catalpa trees aren’t hawthorns. I’m not the man I was.

They lay where they’d fallen, beneath the forest’s canopy. And at first when they woke, it was as if the forest, besides containing them, was itself contained, as in a snow-globe when it’s been shaken and just now set down, except instead of snow, just shadows falling, like snow, in pieces that it was as useless to try to hold on to as catching snow on the tongue—“to catch us is at once to know us and to lose us,” said the shadows, falling like snow, gathering in shadowy, steep banks on which the light, being light, depended.

To know where we came from—and what we came through—doesn’t have to mean we know any more clearly where we are, except not there, anymore. The forest begins where civilization ends, so I’d been told. Past here be monsters. Past the meadow; past harvest. Past daylight into forest light—for it’s never all darkness, beneath the trees, not even at night; not even on a moonless night. Song travels differently in forest light. Everything’s different.

That the forest itself contains no apology doesn’t mean you’re not hurt. Or I’m not sorry. Or I didn’t hurt you.

Toward the end of Marilyn Nelson’s poem “My Grandfather Walks in the Woods,” the grandfather asks the trees a question, and “They answer / with voices like wind / blowing away from him.” That’s one way of putting it, for their voices can sound like wind. What matters more, I think, is that in the language of trees there’s no grammatical mood: questions, statements, commands—it’s all song, stripped of anything like judgment, intention, or need. This makes translation especially difficult. Though I know parts of many of their songs, I’ve only three by heart: “Yes, you can tell me anything,” and “No, even we can’t help you,” and “If I were you, I’d be the lostest, lostest boy I know.”

In the dream, I’d bought a large house in a large city, a house that came with a backyard so thick with trees that by summer, by then in full leaf, they blocked all views of the high-rises to the north, of the neighbors to the west, while to the east through the leaves of an old pear tree I could see the cathedral dome, on top of it a cross caught the sunlight and tossed it back. Besides the pear, there’s a high-rise-sized pin oak, two dogwoods, two catalpas, a chestnut, before the yard ends in a stand of bamboo I’ll eventually lose almost all of, as the dream continues. When I wake, it’s as if to another dream, though it feels no different: I become briefly silver, as in what the leaves mean, beneath. Bells are ringing. No, the leaves are falling. Now the bells start ringing. Sudden scattering, all around me, of leaves, all gold.

 

Carl Phillips

Carl Phillips (1959 -)

Carl Phillips is the author of Wild Is the Wind, Reconnaissance, Silverchest, and Riding Westward. His collection The Rest of Love won the Theodore Roethke Memorial Foundation Poetry Prize and the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Male Poetry, and was a finalist for the National Book Award. He is the recipient of numerous honors, including the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the Lambda Literary Award, the Pushcart Prize, the Academy of American Poets Prize, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Library of Congress.

 

Jane Hirshfield: A poem about finding life while we shelter in place

A poem about finding life while we shelter in place

Jane Hirshfield 

March 23, 2020

 

 

Award-winning poet, essayist and translator Jane Hirshfield lives in Mill Valley.

Editor’s note: In the days following the Bay Area’s shelter-in-place order, The San Francisco Chronicle contacted poet Jane Hirshfield, asking if she would write about this rare and unsettling experience. The celebrated Mill Valley writer replied by offering a poem she’d already written, that morning, reminding us that sometimes poetry can summarize a moment with great poignancy.

 

Today, When I Could Do Nothing

Today, when I could do nothing,
I saved an ant.

It must have come in with the morning paper,
still being delivered
to those who shelter in place.

A morning paper is still an essential service.

I am not an essential service.

I have coffee and books,
time,
a garden,
silence enough to fill cisterns.

It must have first walked
the morning paper, as if loosened ink
taking the shape of an ant.

Then across the laptop computer — warm —
then onto the back of a cushion.

Small black ant, alone,
crossing a navy cushion,
moving steadily because that is what it could do.

Set outside in the sun,
it could not have found again its nest.
What then did I save?

It did not move as if it was frightened,
even while walking my hand,
which moved it through swiftness and air.

Ant, alone, without companions,
whose ant-heart I could not fathom—
how is your life, I wanted to ask.

I lifted it, took it outside.

This first day when I could do nothing,
contribute nothing
beyond staying distant from my own kind,
I did this.

 

• Jane Hirshfield's ninth book of poems, Ledger, has just been released by Knopf.

The Way We Get Through This Is Together

[Preface by John R. Boettiger: Rebecca Solnit is a freelance writer who has composed more than 20 books on subjects including hope, feminism, the environment, politics, place, art and human rights. Among her awards are a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, and a National Book Critics Award in criticism.

[Readers will see that my postings on the climate crisis often in these last months have come to focus as well – almost inevitably – on the coronavirus crisis as well. Together they are the two preeminent challenges of our times.]

 

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/14/mutual-aid-coronavirus-pandemic-rebecca-solnit

The Way We Get Through This Is Together

The way we get through this is together: the rise of mutual aid under coronavirus. Amid this unfolding disaster, we have seen countless acts of kindness and solidarity. It’s this spirit of generosity that will help guide us out of this crisis and into a better future.

Rebecca Solnit
Thu 14 May 2020
The Guardian

People behaving badly is a staple of the news, and the pandemic has given us plenty of lurid snapshots. In the US alone, we have seen protesters with guns in Michigan’s capital demanding an end to lockdown, anti-vaxxer women in a frenzy at California’s capitol, opportunists stockpiling hand sanitiser to resell for profit.

One of the biggest cliches about disasters is that they reveal civilisation as a thin veneer, beneath which lies brutal human nature. From this perspective, the best we can hope for from most people under crisis is selfish indifference; at worst, they will swiftly turn to violence. Our worst instincts must be repressed. This becomes a justification for authoritarianism and heavy-handed policing.

But studies of historical disasters have shown that this is not how most people actually behave. There are nearly always selfish and destructive people, and they are often in power, because we have created systems that reward that kind of personality and those principles. But the great majority of people in ordinary disasters behave in ways that are anything but selfish, and if we’re stuck with veneer as a metaphor, then it peels off to reveal a lot of creative and generous altruism and brilliant grassroots organising. With the global pandemic, these empathic urges and actions are wider and deeper and more consequential than ever.

A dozen years ago, the term “mutual aid” was, as far as I can tell, used mostly by anarchists and scholars. Somehow it has migrated into general usage in recent years and now, in the midst of the pandemic, it is everywhere. Mutual aid has generally meant aid offered in a spirit of solidarity and reciprocity, often coming from within struggling communities, empowering those aided, and with an eye towards liberation and social change. Generally it meant volunteer coalitions doing work such as rebuilding or food distribution or supporting resistance camps. One of the most striking aspects of this global crisis is how many forms of aid and solidarity there are. These new forms of generosity we are seeing – organising, networks, projects, donations, support and outreach – are numerous beyond counting, a superbloom of altruistic engagement.

This work has been made more difficult by the great withdrawal – the empty schools, shops, streets and offices. And that withdrawal is itself altruism in action – a withdrawal carried out by billions for the benefit of their communities, as well as their own safety. In the initial phase, we withdrew from the spaces we share out of solidarity: we moved apart to come together. We intentionally produced, in the form of business and school shutdowns and staying home, an unprecedented economic calamity as an alternative to accepting mass death.

In March, many small business owners and service workers in the US willingly shut down their enterprises, and thereby their livelihood, even before the official orders came. In April, 50 restaurant owners in the Atlanta area publicly rejected the Georgia governor’s invitation to reopen. Together they took out an ad in a local newspaper and wrote: “We agree that it’s in the best interest of our employees, our guests, our community and our industry to keep our dining rooms closed at this time.”

For some, staying home may be a strain, but for others it means financial ruin. Sacrificing your own financial security for the common good was a solemn commitment that people made across the world. It was one of the things that made this crisis distinct: how often refraining, not doing, not going anywhere, not continuing activities, was also an act of public-spirited generosity. This is willing sacrifice for the public good. But people have been doing more than that.

In March, the UK’s National Health Service called for 250,000 volunteers to sign up to help seniors, people who were isolating and medical staff who needed deliveries. More than three times that many signed up. Appreciation for the NHS grew even stronger, and the widespread weekly rounds of applause for its workers became one of the welcome interruptions of isolation. In mid-March, a website was launched listing several hundred new mutual aid groups across the country, so people could search their local area.

“In my area in London, we have had so many [mutual aid groups] that we’ve spun off down to street level,” one Londoner told me. “Our two-street collective has done shopping, picked up medicines, created an Easter-egg -in-the-window hunt for kids, all to help one another.” Another wrote: “Hackney in London has all the usual stuff like grocery buying and support, plus people are sourcing donated phones for people in hospital, laptops for kids who need them to access home learning and cars for healthcare staff redeployed to the makeshift Covid-19 hospital.”

A few weeks ago, I heard someone complain that Lexington, Kentucky, had four mutual aid groups – they were concerned that so many volunteers would be redundant; I was awestruck by the abundance. In the course of writing this piece, I looked at various new mutual aid projects: meal deliveries to the elderly in Paterson, New Jersey; the Twin Cities Queer and Trans Mutual Aid group in Minneapolis-Saint Paul; projects to aid the Hopi, Zuni and Navajo on reservations in the US south-west; a Washington state project to support the undocumented; sex workers organising to raise emergency funds.

I saw people stuck at home in isolation teach dance and drawing classes, tell stories, play music online to encourage others quarantining in place; Italians singing together from their balconies and Iranians reciting poetry from theirs; a young native Nevadan going fishing to feed members of her Pyramid Lake Paiute tribe. Most of us have seen, or performed, one-off acts of kindness – running an errand for a frail neighbour, chalking a cheerful message on the pavement, picking up the shopping bill for the struggling couple at the checkout, donating to a fundraiser for an acquaintance who has been laid off or taken ill. But such individual actions are not enough to address this triple catastrophe of a viral pandemic, a financial collapse and the emotional, educational and other consequences of the great withdrawal.

Thus there are also people building organisations to provide broader, ongoing practical aid – such as the young people in more than a dozen US cities delivering groceries and supplies to older and immunocompromised people via a network called Zoomers to Boomers – and others organising emotional support for those who feel isolated, including the UK’s adopt-a-grandparent programme. There are new groups, projects, organisations and networks, and old ones retooling for the crisis.

Fiji-based climate organiser Thelma Young-Lutunatabua told me about the return of traditional Fijian forms of equitable, cooperative food distribution to make sure no one was left out. “The way we get through this is together,” she said.

Fifteen years ago, in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, a mutual aid organisation called Common Ground Relief was founded by a handful of people inside the damaged area, including the former Black Panther Malik Rahim. (In the US, perhaps the most famous past examples of mutual aid are the Black Panther party’s 1960s-era food programmes to assuage hunger in inner-city neighbourhoods.) The group’s slogan was “solidarity not charity”, a phrase inspired by the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano: “I don’t believe in charity. I believe in solidarity. Charity is so vertical. It goes from the top to the bottom. Solidarity is horizontal. It respects the other person. I have a lot to learn from other people.”

As a definition of mutual aid’s ideals, “solidarity not charity” surfaces constantly today. Charity often implies that the afflicted population is powerless or incompetent to address its own needs. Sometimes, it can take away confidence and pride even as it gives tangible aid. Solidarity is, first of all, an affirmation that we are in this together, and mutual aid demonstrates that even in crisis we have strength and capacity to care for ourselves. The term comes from the anarchist philosopher Peter Kropotkin’s 1902 book Mutual Aid: a Factor of Evolution, which argues that aiding and protecting others and serving the needs of the group rather than the individual has been essential to the survival of many species, and is evident in early and traditional human societies.

In the time of coronavirus, mutual aid has been used to describe myriad new volunteer cooperative projects that have arisen in response to disaster. But the landscape of outreach is complex and varied. Take, for example, the creation and circulation of masks. There is a whole spectrum of mask economies from corrupt profiteering and outright theft – including by the US federal government– to the very different world of creative mutual aid. Many of us, myself included, have made a few masks for those we know. Others have gone into bulk production.

San Francisco local government supervisor Matt Haney fundraised and organised the distribution of thousands of masks for the impoverished, densely housed – and houseless – residents of the city’s Tenderloin district, which he represents. Adriana Camarena, a lawyer from Mexico City, realised that the undocumented day labourers near her home in San Francisco’s Mission district had few supplies and little access to health information to meet the crisis. So she began making and distributing cloth masks and hand sanitiser, and giving brief educational talks to go with them.

Meanwhile, the artist and art professor Stephanie Syjuco settled into mask mass production to meet the needs of people in Oakland and Berkeley, starting with masks for a group working to address food insecurity among UC Berkeley students. By late April, she had personally made 700 masks. And the Auntie Sewing Squad, founded by Los Angeles performance artist Kristina Wong, now includes more than 500 members, and has produced more than 20,000 masks, by Wong’s count.

The aunties (and uncles, but mostly aunties) began by making masks for hospital workers, and then for farmworkers, people released by ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) or getting out of prison, immigrant communities and other vulnerable groups. It’s a model of decentralised, volunteer-driven organising: whoever finds a need obtains pledges from makers until the required number is reached, and the beautifully made masks are gathered and shipped to their destination. Many pay for their own materials and shipping, and donations support others. This week, the squad is sending a van full of supplies, including masks, materials and three sewing machines, to the Navajo nation, which has been hard hit by the virus. The Navajo is just one of several indigenous communities they have reached out to.

The Auntie Sewing Squad even expanded to include cooking to support those who sew. “When you’ve been bent over a sewing machine for 12 hours, a nice order of pad thai is really welcome,” one auntie told me.

The US mask-makers, like donors to food-distribution programmes, are in part compensating for governmental failure. Had the federal government prepared for crisis, and supported the scientific advice on how to respond to pandemics, the need for these mutual aid efforts could have been smaller. There has been much talk of the underlying health conditions that make individuals more vulnerable to Covid-19. The US as a whole has underlying conditions – systemic racism, poverty and financial precariousness, lack of access to healthcare and the internet for rural and poor families – that have made this crisis far worse than it should have been. The old conservative argument against social programmes was that these needs should be met by individual and independent institutions’ generosity. In unequal societies, these were never enough to meet the need.

What is noteworthy for me about this crisis is that there is no clear distinction between purely volunteer- and donation-driven projects, and a host of other endeavours trying to meet the needs of the moment. There are many ways that businesses and workers are stepping up or shifting what they do and how they do it, out of altruism. A Buddhist group in Tallahassee, Florida, raised $500,000 to purchase masks from China for medical workers in their area. The jet belonging to the New England Patriots football team brought 1.2m masks directly from China to circumvent the federal government’s outbidding of Massachusetts on personal protective equipment (PPE).

Elsewhere, the New York Times reported on Amish families who, as other jobs dried up, turned to mass-producing cloth masks, face shields and other PPE for the Cleveland clinic, which urgently needed them. (This, like the California government program that lets otherwise shuttered restaurants deliver meals to isolated senior citizens, is when aid becomes literally mutual, meeting needs on both sides of the interaction.) Then there are the 43 Pennsylvania factory workers who chose to isolate themselves in their workplace for a 28-day marathon of 12-hour days, during which they produced tens of millions of pounds of polypropylene, the raw material from which a lot of PPE is made. Like the Amish, they were paid for their work, and were working in intense new ways, fuelled by social commitment, to meet an urgent need. One of the workers said: “We’ve been getting messages on social media from nurses, doctors, emergency workers, saying thank you for what we’re doing. But we want to thank them for what they did and are continuing to do. That’s what made the time we were in there go by quickly, just being able to support them.”

During the final 1,000 days of the second world war, shipyard workers in the San Francisco Bay Area produced 1,000 warships – a warship a day. Something like that epic, urgent industry seems to be at work now, but outside the federal government, or any government. In early April, the Bay Area branch of the news site Hoodline reported: “On Thursday morning, two tons of rolled sheet plastic arrived at a warehouse in Alameda. By the end of the weekend, it had become 16,000 plastic face shields. That remarkable turnaround is entirely owed to self-organisation by Bay Area makers, who have transformed maker spaces, universities, fabrication shops and almost anyone with their own sewing machine, CNC machine or 3D printer into an ad-hoc corps of medical supply manufacturers.” The report called the self-organised effort involving industrial-design students and teachers a “distributed factory”. Such decentralised efforts, organised without top-down authority, are exemplary mutual aid.

In April, 14 nurses and seven doctors from the same institution set off for a one-month assignment on the Navajo reservation, whose residents are facing high levels of infection. They were coordinated by the existing UCSF Heal Initiative(Health, Equity, Action and Leadership), which works with impoverished and vulnerable communities from Haiti to Nepal. Its mission statement is: “We seek to embody solidarity and contribute to the movement for global health equity led by communities themselves.” This initiative, based on the principle of “solidarity not charity”, has been working with communities under stress for six years, and will still be there when the immediate crisis is over.

During “ordinary” disasters – a hurricane, an earthquake – there’s a phenomenon called volunteer convergence, whereby people eager to help gather in the impacted areas. Sometimes so many people and so much donated material shows up that they pose management problems for those at the centre of the crisis. This is not an ordinary disaster – the impacted area is all over the world, and convergence is banned – but people are showing up in many ways. Some of this work is always going on – there is always suffering and injustice to assuage, and there are always people trying to do so.

Even ordinary disasters never really end. There are many ways in which Hurricane Katrina’s impact on New Orleans and other parts of the gulf coast lasted – though there are, at least, some positive aspects to this lingering impact. The Common Ground Health Clinic spun off from Common Ground Relief. Fifteen years on, it’s still delivering free medical care in the New Orleans region.

The Covid-19 pandemic and economic crisis will not end – if ending means things going back to the way they were. Whatever “normal” meant on 1 January 2020, it will never return, and neither will millions of the jobs financed by the disposable income that has just dried up. It’s worth remembering that, in the past few decades, the return to 19th-century robber-baron capitalism – via the dismantling of social safety nets, and the transformation of education, healthcare and other basic human needs into for-profit schemes that served shareholders first – meant that everyday life had already become a disaster for too many billions of people before this crisis.

There is a long, rough road ahead. Without radical change, the way food, shelter, medical care and education are produced and distributed will be more unfair and more devastating than before. It seems likely that conservatives will argue for brutal austerity and libertarian abandonment of the most desperate, while the rest of us are going to have to argue for some form of post-capitalism that decouples meeting basic needs from wage labour – perhaps the kind of basic income that Spain is planning to introduce.

The devastating economic effect of the pandemic will make innovation essential, whether it is rethinking higher education or food distribution, or how to fund news media. The Green New Deal offers a model for how to move forward on jobs and leave fossil fuels behind as that sector founders and climate catastrophe looms. Protests in many fields – including nurses demanding PPE, and warehouse, delivery and food-service workers protesting against exploitative or unsafe working conditions – suggests that workers’ organisations may be gaining strength.

I believe the generosity and solidarity in action in the present moment offers a foreshadowing of what is possible – and necessary. The basic generosity and empathy of most ordinary people should be regarded as a treasure, a light and an energy source that can drive a better society, if it is recognised and encouraged. Mostly, it’s overlooked, undermined and sabotaged. Capitalism, and its octopus arms of entertainment, advertising and marketing, endeavour to reduce us to consumers. This means making us the kind of miserable, selfish, lonely people who seek fulfllment through buying stuff, and believe in competitiveness as a basic social force. Competitiveness, that driving word behind free-market ideology, means we are rivals and there is scarcity; each of us gets more by seeing that someone else gets less.

Competition is the antithesis of mutual aid, which is not only a practical tool but an ideological insurrection. The fact that even in places like the US, where these competitive, isolating messages have bombarded us for at least 150 years, millions still reach out in generosity, and are still moved to meet the needs that become visible in moments such as this, is testament to something about human nature and human possibility. Those urges are strong and deep, and they can be a foundation for something different. Indeed, they often have been before, when European social welfare was built up, when US social safety nets were created, and when people self-organised on smaller scales to take care of each other.

Some of that sense of urgency and shared destiny will fade away, as it often does after a disaster, but one of the important things to remember is that some of it was here before this pandemic. I sometimes think that capitalism is a catastrophe constantly being mitigated and cleaned up by mutual aid and kinship networks, by the generosity of religious and secular organisations, by the toil of human-rights lawyers and climate groups, and by the kindness of strangers. Imagine if these forces, this spirit, weren’t just the cleanup crew, but were the ones setting the agenda.

What I have seen after earlier disasters is that a lot of people aspire to “go home” and “back to normal”, but some find in the moment a sense of self and a sense of connection so meaningful that something about who they were and what they did in the crisis carries forward into how they live the rest of their life. Sometimes this is as intangible as a change of priorities and habits, and a new sense of agency; not uncommonly, it’s as substantial as a new coalition, a new network, a new set of policy priorities, a new political career or a decision to go into work that supports the whole. And even those who want things to get back to normal often find they are changed permanently in their sense of who they are, and what matters most. The pandemic marks the end of an era and the beginning of another – one whose harshness must be mitigated by a spirit of generosity. An artist hunched over her sewing machine, a young person delivering groceries on his bicycle, a nurse suiting up for the ICU, a doctor heading to the Navajo nation, a graduate student hip-deep in Pyramid Lake catching trout for elders, a programmer setting up a website to organise a community: the work is under way. It can be the basis for the future, if we can recognise the value of these urges and actions, recognise that things can and must change profoundly, and if we can tell other stories about who we are, what we want and what is possible.

 

It Could Happen Any Time

[Preface by John R. Boettiger: This is not the first time that my son Joshua has contributed to Reckonings, as you will see if you seek his name in "Search Reckonings" on the lower right of this page. I have plucked the following poem by William Stafford and Joshua's commentary from the website of his current congregation, Temple Emek Shalom in Ashland, Oregon (https://emekshalom.org/). What Joshua writes below, though written seven years ago on December 1, 2015, and in a different season, seems deeply appropriate to the time of crisis we are now experiencing. I also realize that today is the day of shabat in the Jewish weekly calendar, so I will close this preface with a longstanding prayer addressed to readers: Shabat Shalom. The traditional translation is “Good Sabbath.” This is a decent translation, but the phrase is very nuanced. ... So when someone wishes you Shabat Shalom, they are saying to you “May you dwell in completeness on this seventh day."]

 

It Could Happen Any Time

Rabbi Joshua Boettiger

12-1-15

It could happen any time, tornado,
earthquake, Armageddon.  It could happen.
Or sunshine, love, salvation.

It could, you know.  That’s why we wake
and look out — no guarantees
in this life.

But some bonuses, like morning,
like right now, like noon,
like evening.

– William Stafford

 

Sometimes the world feels like a very scary place; sometimes we don’t know what to do with the rush of horrific news in our world that we may receive in the course of any given day. And we feel the truth that, as Stafford writes, “it could happen any time.” So that is true. We cannot deny that it is so. And we wake up and look out and know that there are no guarantees in this life.

And yet there is more that could befall us at any time, and is in fact, is extraordinarily more likely to actually happen: sunshine, love, salvation.

We look out our window now. Sometimes our fear for our world and our loved ones in it clouds and darkens our vision. This is just what it is to be alive. And every generation feels it and has felt it and will continue to feel it.

And yet there is morning, noon, evening. Each of them an indescribable miracle; a gift staring us right in the face. We cannot deny that this is true – the gift that is this life; the miraculous in what we call the mundane.

May we have the courage to be who we are and to be in the world as it is. Hanukah is a season of miracles. May we have the courage to meet the miraculous half-way.

The Coronavirus Is Rewriting Our Imaginations

[Prefatory note from John R. Boettiger: Bill McKibben wrote recently: “If there is one essay from the weeks of pandemic I wish I could make everyone read, it would be Kim Stanley Robinson’s offering on The New Yorker’s Web site. No novelist has engaged as long or as successfully with the climate crisis.” Robinson’s essay is reprinted below.]

 What felt impossible has become thinkable. The spring of 2020 is suggestive of how much, and how quickly, we can change as a civilization.

 By Kim Stanley Robinson

New Yorker

May 1, 2020

The critic Raymond Williams once wrote that every historical period has its own “structure of feeling.” How everything seemed in the nineteen-sixties, the way the Victorians understood one another, the chivalry of the Middle Ages, the world view of Tang-dynasty China: each period, Williams thought, had a distinct way of organizing basic human emotions into an overarching cultural system. Each had its own way of experiencing being alive.

In mid-March, in a prior age, I spent a week rafting down the Grand Canyon. When I left for the trip, the United States was still beginning to grapple with the reality of the coronavirus pandemic. Italy was suffering; the N.B.A. had just suspended its season; Tom Hanks had been reported ill. When I hiked back up, on March 19th, it was into a different world. I’ve spent my life writing science-fiction novels that try to convey some of the strangeness of the future. But I was still shocked by how much had changed, and how quickly.

Schools and borders had closed; the governor of California, like governors elsewhere, had asked residents to begin staying at home. But the change that struck me seemed more abstract and internal. It was a change in the way we were looking at things, and it is still ongoing. The virus is rewriting our imaginations. What felt impossible has become thinkable. We’re getting a different sense of our place in history. We know we’re entering a new world, a new era. We seem to be learning our way into a new structure of feeling.

In many ways, we’ve been overdue for such a shift. In our feelings, we’ve been lagging behind the times in which we live. The Anthropocene, the Great Acceleration, the age of climate change—whatever you want to call it, we’ve been out of synch with the biosphere, wasting our children’s hopes for a normal life, burning our ecological capital as if it were disposable income, wrecking our one and only home in ways that soon will be beyond our descendants’ ability to repair. And yet we’ve been acting as though it were 2000, or 1990—as though the neoliberal arrangements built back then still made sense. We’ve been paralyzed, living in the world without feeling it.

Now, all of a sudden, we’re acting fast as a civilization. We’re trying, despite many obstacles, to flatten the curve—to avoid mass death. Doing this, we know that we’re living in a moment of historic importance. We realize that what we do now, well or badly, will be remembered later on. This sense of enacting history matters. For some of us, it partly compensates for the disruption of our lives.

Actually, we’ve already been living in a historic moment. For the past few decades, we’ve been called upon to act, and have been acting in a way that will be scrutinized by our descendants. Now we feel it. The shift has to do with the concentration and intensity of what’s happening. September 11th was a single day, and everyone felt the shock of it, but our daily habits didn’t shift, except at airports; the President even urged us to keep shopping. This crisis is different. It’s a biological threat, and it’s global. Everyone has to change together to deal with it. That’s really history.

It seems as though science has been mobilized to a dramatic new degree, but that impression is just another way in which we’re lagging behind. There are 7.8 billion people alive on this planet—a stupendous social and technological achievement that’s unnatural and unstable. It’s made possible by science, which has already been saving us. Now, though, when disaster strikes, we grasp the complexity of our civilization—we feel the reality, which is that the whole system is a technical improvisation that science keeps from crashing down.

On a personal level, most of us have accepted that we live in a scientific age. If you feel sick, you go to a doctor, who is really a scientist; that scientist tests you, then sometimes tells you to take a poison so that you can heal—and you take the poison. It’s on a societal level that we’ve been lagging. Today, in theory, everyone knows everything. We know that our accidental alteration of the atmosphere is leading us into a mass-extinction event, and that we need to move fast to dodge it. But we don’t act on what we know. We don’t want to change our habits. This knowing-but-not-acting is part of the old structure of feeling.

Now comes this disease that can kill anyone on the planet. It’s invisible; it spreads because of the way we move and congregate. Instantly, we’ve changed. As a society, we’re watching the statistics, following the recommendations, listening to the scientists. Do we believe in science? Go outside and you’ll see the proof that we do everywhere you look. We’re learning to trust our science as a society. That’s another part of the new structure of feeling.

Possibly, in a few months, we’ll return to some version of the old normal. But this spring won’t be forgotten. When later shocks strike global civilization, we’ll remember how we behaved this time, and how it worked. It’s not that the coronavirus is a dress rehearsal—it’s too deadly for that. But it is the first of many calamities that will likely unfold throughout this century. Now, when they come, we’ll be familiar with how they feel.

What shocks might be coming? Everyone knows everything. Remember when Cape Town almost ran out of water? It’s very likely that there will be more water shortages. And food shortages, electricity outages, devastating storms, droughts, floods. These are easy calls. They’re baked into the situation we’ve already created, in part by ignoring warnings that scientists have been issuing since the nineteen-sixties. Some shocks will be local, others regional, but many will be global, because, as this crisis shows, we are interconnected as a biosphere and a civilization.

Imagine what a food scare would do. Imagine a heat wave hot enough to kill anyone not in an air-conditioned space, then imagine power failures happening during such a heat wave. (The novel I’ve just finished begins with this scenario, so it scares me most of all.) Imagine pandemics deadlier than the coronavirus. These events, and others like them, are easier to imagine now than they were back in January, when they were the stuff of dystopian science fiction. But science fiction is the realism of our time. The sense that we are all now stuck in a science-fiction novel that we’re writing together—that’s another sign of the emerging structure of feeling.

Science-fiction writers don’t know anything more about the future than anyone else. Human history is too unpredictable; from this moment, we could descend into a mass-extinction event or rise into an age of general prosperity. Still, if you read science fiction, you may be a little less surprised by whatever does happen. Often, science fiction traces the ramifications of a single postulated change; readers co-create, judging the writers’ plausibility and ingenuity, interrogating their theories of history. Doing this repeatedly is a kind of training. It can help you feel more oriented in the history we’re making now. This radical spread of possibilities, good to bad, which creates such a profound disorientation; this tentative awareness of the emerging next stage—these are also new feelings in our time.

Memento mori: remember that you must die. Older people are sometimes better at keeping this in mind than younger people. Still, we’re all prone to forgetting death. It never seems quite real until the end, and even then it’s hard to believe. The reality of death is another thing we know about but don’t feel.

So this epidemic brings with it a sense of panic: we’re all going to die, yes, always true, but now perhaps this month! That’s different. Sometimes, when hiking in the Sierra, my friends and I get caught in a lightning storm, and, completely exposed to it, we hurry over the rocky highlands, watching lightning bolts crack out of nowhere and connect nearby, thunder exploding less than a second later. That gets your attention: death, all too possible! But to have that feeling in your ordinary, daily life, at home, stretched out over weeks—that’s too strange to hold on to. You partly get used to it, but not entirely. This mixture of dread and apprehension and normality is the sensation of plague on the loose. It could be part of our new structure of feeling, too.

Just as there are charismatic megafauna, there are charismatic mega-ideas. “Flatten the curve” could be one of them. Immediately, we get it. There’s an infectious, deadly plague that spreads easily, and, although we can’t avoid it entirely, we can try to avoid a big spike in infections, so that hospitals won’t be overwhelmed and fewer people will die. It makes sense, and it’s something all of us can help to do. When we do it—if we do it—it will be a civilizational achievement: a new thing that our scientific, educated, high-tech species is capable of doing. Knowing that we can act in concert when necessary is another thing that will change us.

People who study climate change talk about “the tragedy of the time horizon.” The tragedy is that we don’t care enough about those future people, our descendants, who will have to fix, or just survive on, the planet we’re now wrecking. We like to think that they’ll be richer and smarter than we are and so able to handle their own problems in their own time. But we’re creating problems that they’ll be unable to solve. You can’t fix extinctions, or ocean acidification, or melted permafrost, no matter how rich or smart you are. The fact that these problems will occur in the future lets us take a magical view of them. We go on exacerbating them, thinking—not that we think this, but the notion seems to underlie our thinking—that we will be dead before it gets too serious. The tragedy of the time horizon is often something we encounter, without knowing it, when we buy and sell. The market is wrong; the prices are too low. Our way of life has environmental costs that aren’t included in what we pay, and those costs will be borne by our descendents. We are operating a multigenerational Ponzi scheme.

And yet: “Flatten the curve.” We’re now confronting a miniature version of the tragedy of the time horizon. We’ve decided to sacrifice over these months so that, in the future, people won’t suffer as much as they would otherwise. In this case, the time horizon is so short that we are the future people. It’s harder to come to grips with the fact that we’re living in a long-term crisis that will not end in our lifetimes. But it’s meaningful to notice that, all together, we are capable of learning to extend our care further along the time horizon. Amid the tragedy and death, this is one source of pleasure. Even though our economic system ignores reality, we can act when we have to. At the very least, we are all freaking out together. To my mind, this new sense of solidarity is one of the few reassuring things to have happened in this century. If we can find it in this crisis, to save ourselves, then maybe we can find it in the big crisis, to save our children and theirs.

Margaret Thatcher said that “there is no such thing as society,” and Ronald Reagan said that “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” These stupid slogans marked the turn away from the postwar period of reconstruction and underpin much of the bullshit of the past forty years.

We are individuals first, yes, just as bees are, but we exist in a larger social body. Society is not only real; it’s fundamental. We can’t live without it. And now we’re beginning to understand that this “we” includes many other creatures and societies in our biosphere and even in ourselves. Even as an individual, you are a biome, an ecosystem, much like a forest or a swamp or a coral reef. Your skin holds inside it all kinds of unlikely coöperations, and to survive you depend on any number of interspecies operations going on within you all at once. We are societies made of societies; there are nothing but societies. This is shocking news—it demands a whole new world view. And now, when those of us who are sheltering in place venture out and see everyone in masks, sharing looks with strangers is a different thing. It’s eye to eye, this knowledge that, although we are practicing social distancing as we need to, we want to be social—we not only want to be social, we’ve got to be social, if we are to survive. It’s a new feeling, this alienation and solidarity at once. It’s the reality of the social; it’s seeing the tangible existence of a society of strangers, all of whom depend on one another to survive. It’s as if the reality of citizenship has smacked us in the face.

As for government: it’s government that listens to science and responds by taking action to save us. Stop to ponder what is now obstructing the performance of that government. Who opposes it? Right now we’re hearing two statements being made. One, from the President and his circle: we have to save money even if it costs lives. The other, from the Centers for Disease Control and similar organizations: we have to save lives even if it costs money. Which is more important, money or lives? Money, of course! says capital and its spokespersons. Really? people reply, uncertainly. Seems like that’s maybe going too far? Even if it’s the common wisdom? Or was.

Some people can’t stay isolated and still do their jobs. If their jobs are important enough, they have to expose themselves to the disease. My younger son works in a grocery store and is now one of the front-line workers who keep civilization running.

My son is now my hero: this is a good feeling. I think the same of all the people still working now for the sake of the rest of us. If we all keep thinking this way, the new structure of feeling will be better than the one that’s dominated for the past forty years.

The neoliberal structure of feeling totters. What might a post-capitalist response to this crisis include? Maybe rent and debt relief; unemployment aid for all those laid off; government hiring for contact tracing and the manufacture of necessary health equipment; the world’s militaries used to support health care; the rapid construction of hospitals.

What about afterward, when this crisis recedes and the larger crisis looms? If the project of civilization—including science, economics, politics, and all the rest of it—were to bring all eight billion of us into a long-term balance with Earth’s biosphere, we could do it. By contrast, when the project of civilization is to create profit—which, by definition, goes to only a few—much of what we do is actively harmful to the long-term prospects of our species. Everyone knows everything. Right now pursuing profit as the ultimate goal of all our activities will lead to a mass-extinction event. Humanity might survive, but traumatized, interrupted, angry, ashamed, sad. A science-fiction story too painful to write, too obvious. It would be better to adapt to reality.

Economics is a system for optimizing resources, and, if it were trying to calculate ways to optimize a sustainable civilization in balance with the biosphere, it could be a helpful tool. When it’s used to optimize profit, however, it encourages us to live within a system of destructive falsehoods. We need a new political economy by which to make our calculations. Now, acutely, we feel that need.

It could happen, but it might not. There will be enormous pressure to forget this spring and go back to the old ways of experiencing life. And yet forgetting something this big never works. We’ll remember this even if we pretend not to. History is happening now, and it will have happened. So what will we do with that?

A structure of feeling is not a free-floating thing. It’s tightly coupled with its corresponding political economy. How we feel is shaped by what we value, and vice versa. Food, water, shelter, clothing, education, health care: maybe now we value these things more, along with the people whose work creates them. To survive the next century, we need to start valuing the planet more, too, since it’s our only home.

It will be hard to make these values durable. Valuing the right things and wanting to keep on valuing them—maybe that’s also part of our new structure of feeling. As is knowing how much work there is to be done. But the spring of 2020 is suggestive of how much, and how quickly, we can change. It’s like a bell ringing to start a race. Off we go—into a new time.

 

 

Kahlil Gibran on fear

One of the communities that continues to nourish me in the virtual world that accompanies the coronavirus epidemic is the Community Congregational Church (CCC) at the top of Rock Hill Road in Tiburon, California. In this instance, I am thinking of a weekly meeting called Stone Soup that normally meets in the church's Seminar Room but has adapted to meet during these times through the medium of Zoom. Imagine 25 to 30 of us, focusing our discussion on the readings that accompany the previous and prospective Sunday services (also Zoom facilitated).

Typically, one of the two readings is a biblical passage, the other often a story or poem from a more contemporary writer. In the most recent Stone Soup of which I am thinking, the second reading is a poem by the 20th-century Lebanese-American artist Kahlil Gibran.

Born in 1883 of a poor Maronite Christian family in the village of Bsharri in what was then the Ottoman Empire and is now Lebanon, Gibran had very little formal schooling before being taken by his mother to the United States in 1895. The family settled in Boston's South End. Although attracted to the Western aesthetic culture of the day, his mother and elder half-brother wanted Gibran to absorb more of his own heritage, so at the age of 15 he returned to his homeland to study for three years at the Collège de la Sagesse, a Maronite-run institute in Beirut.

Quiet and sensitive as a young boy, Gibran "displayed an early artistic aptitude and a love for nature that became evident in later works." The writing for which he became best known was the book he called The Prophet, published in 1923.

 

Fear
by Kahlil Gibran

It is said that before entering the sea
a river trembles with fear.

*She looks back at the path she has traveled,
from the peaks of the mountains,
the long winding road crossing forests and villages.

And in front of her,
she sees an ocean so vast,
that to enter
there seems nothing more than to disappear forever.

But there is no other way.
The river can not go back.

Nobody can go back.
To go back is impossible in existence.

The river needs to take the risk
of entering the ocean
because only then will fear disappear,
because that’s where the river will know
it’s not about disappearing into the ocean,
but of becoming the ocean.

 

"Fear" is a poem of changing consciousness. The reader contemplates a river flowing into the ocean. "It is said," earlier in its life, "before entering the sea, a river trembles with fear." She can look back at her journey, but cannot go back. The source of the fear is clear:

she sees an ocean so vast,
that to enter
there seems nothing more than to disappear forever.

That is the fear: to disappear forever, only postponed in a tidal marsh whose life is barely ours. I wish I had known that earlier, that there is no other way, that I can not go back. Poet, you speak with such clarity and certitude, brook no argument, no wiggle room. You ironically call it risk, but then say in truth:

Nobody can go back.
To go back is impossible in existence.

However much we wish to go back, to relive our earlier existence (selectively, differently, to be sure) we can only go forward. That is my word, not yours. But it changes all, as you do, finally, in your very last lines. I see it is not risk you ask, but trust. All that looking back and all that trembling fear is apprenticeship. Learning what is not, in order to know what is.

it’s not about disappearing into the ocean,
but of becoming the ocean.

 

* The river's gender intrigues me in this poem. Conventional usage suggests male. The river is female. I think the choice is inspired. The learning it conveys, the river's flow and her coming to know, are more yin than yang.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My dear friend Al Braidwood, after reading an earlier version of this post, sent me an excerpt from the Chandogya Upanishad, translated from the original Sanskrit by Al's former meditation teacher Eknath Easwaran.

"As the rivers flowing east and west

merge in the sea and become one with it,

forgetting they were ever separate streams,

so do all creatures lose their separateness

when they merge at last into pure Being.”

 

 

Love and Nonviolence in the Time of Coronavirus

Tuesday, March 17, 2020, CommonDreams

Love and Nonviolence in the Time of Coronavirus

By Ken Butigan

The COVID-19 pandemic has ground the world to a halt.  While Hubei province in China has begun to recover, it has done so by locking down sixty-million people and severely disrupting the patterns of life and work there.  The rest of the world is generally behind the curve in its response, with the number of cases skyrocketing and a few countries courageously taking the same drastic measures that the Chinese did toward containment and mitigation.  The United States has declared a national emergency, but the pivotal strategy of testing is severely lagging. Quite likely, the next weeks will see a dramatic increase in cases and deaths.

How, then, does this crisis sharpen our choice for a culture of active and life-giving nonviolence?  Doesn’t it, instead, point to a future of epidemics, social disruption, economic chaos, and an increase in the politics of fear?

There is no question that the current catastrophe could worsen an already grim trajectory of climate change, poverty, racial injustice and militarism. It could feed the flames of authoritarianism and regimes of surveillance, even as it could drive long-term economic dislocation, with harsh impacts in the lives of people everywhere.

At the same time, however, this crisis is so global, so encompassing, so pervasively universal—touching virtually every person on the planet—that it not only begs for an immediate and comprehensive response, it cracks open the possibility for a long-term cultural and planetary shift toward a more just, peaceful and sustainable order.

"Let us use these coming days and weeks to take steps toward a liberation from the domination system and toward a culture of peace and nonviolence."

It is the magnitude of this cataclysmic predicament that directly confronts us, willingly or not, with the choice Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. specified for humanity half a century ago—nonviolence or nonexistence—and prompts us urgently to discover a way forward drawing on nonviolent methods toward a more nonviolent world.

While combating this pandemic with xenophobia and “us versus them” nationalism has been the reaction of some, the reality is that, if we are to survive this crisis effectively, it will require comprehensively nonviolent cooperation and approaches.  We are already seeing these in action.  When the people of Wuhan and Italy—and now Spain—join in the radical social-distancing of staying home for weeks, they are not only protecting themselves, they are engaging in a powerful, nonviolent action of social responsibility and solidarity. When societies take rapid, extraordinary steps to mitigate the shock of job loss or the expense of testing, they are pursuing nonviolent strategies—nonviolent because they resist the violence of exclusion or indifference while fostering healing and unity.  Even as we find ourselves in the midst of this disorienting and surreal disaster, we are often responding instinctively with empathy and compassion.  No doubt, this nonviolent energy, extended to the entire world, will be increasingly needed as the scale of this catastrophe becomes clearer over the next weeks and months.

Nonviolence is organized love.  A constructive force, an active method, and a powerful way of life, active nonviolence is the power of creative love unleashed to relieve suffering, to struggle for justice, and to nurture a world where everyone counts.  Now more than ever this energy is urgently required to respond to the world of hurt that the COVID-19 tsunami is leaving in its wake—the growing number of people struck down with the virus; the keen grief of those who have suddenly lost loved ones; the overwhelmed health-care systems and providers; but also those caught in its financial wreckage, including minimum wage workers who suddenly have no income; small business owners with raser-thin margins forced to shut down; and, most palpable of all, millions at the margins who have no safety net, no resources, no health care, no recourse.

The present world of pain not only presents an emergency requiring an immediate response, it throws in sharp relief the need for dramatic social change.  We have not built a world that is up to effectively dealing with this challenge. This moment of what we might call “pan-suffering”—agony reaching deeply into the lives and societies across the globe—is revealing the need for societies and systems capable of handling such transnational emergencies while providing for those most impacted by them.

From “War Footing” to “Nonviolent Mobilization”

While the metaphor of “going to war against the virus” crops up in many media reports—“Every college and university is on a war footing about this and are trying to assemble as much information as possible” (LA Times); “New York adopts war footing to ready hospitals for virus surge” (Bloomberg News); “Trump’s national emergency declaration, corporate partnership put U.S. on war footing vs. coronavirus” (Boston Herald)—the strategies in place, and the ones that will succeed, are anything but those of war-fighting.  When the media reach for a term like “war footing,” they are falling lazily into a traditional groove for describing a concerted, society-wide strategy for mobilizing people and resources to solve a monumental problem confronting the nation or the world. 

"The present world of pain not only presents an emergency requiring an immediate response, it throws in sharp relief the need for dramatic social change."

If, in fact, defeating COVID-19 will most effectively happen through nonviolent strategies, it is best to reach for a metaphor that both implies this and minimizes the possibility of violent counter-measures (as in the “war in Iraq” or even policies that have taken on this signifier, like “the war on drugs” or “the war on poverty”).  Rather than the metaphor of war, it is better to take on a metaphor from the world of nonviolence, for example, “nonviolent mobilization”: inviting people across our societies to tap their power for love, mercy, peace and nonviolent change in a comprehensive and collaborative way.  Truly ending this epidemic will require a common vision of, and policies supporting and fostering, unity, cooperation and healing.

The more we take steps now in the spirit of nonviolent transformation, healing and connectedness, the more we will glean lessons for going forward as a society and a planet.

These lessons—for example, that health-care for all lessens the spread of epidemics; that an economic safety-net for all buffers the shocks of such catastrophes; that our limited resources should be poured into meeting the human needs of all instead of military systems that buttress “us versus them” geo-politics—will point us toward and serve as a foundation of a nonviolent shift that our nation and our world desperately needs.

Pace e Bene

While many of us may have long been thinking along these lines, it is in these moments of shock and peril that we can find the gumption to take the concrete steps for making this shift a reality.

In addition to teaching at DePaul University, I work with Pace e Bene Nonviolence Service, a thirty-year-old organization spreading the power of nonviolence. Pace e Bene (“Peace and Good,” a greeting used by St. Francis of Assisi) has long been working for what Joanna Macy calls “the great turning.”  Since 2014, we have been collaborating with a growing community of sisters and brothers in the US and around the world to take steps toward building and nurturing a culture of active nonviolence free from war, poverty, racism and environmental destruction.  Each year since then Campaign Nonviolence has been growing—by organizing Nonviolent Cities, by facilitating trainings and workshops, by publishing books on nonviolence, by encouraging the Catholic Church to spread nonviolence (in our work with Pax Christi International’s Catholic Nonviolence Initiative), and by mobilizing nonviolent actions for a week each September, anchored by the International Day of Peace. (This year, the Campaign Action Week will take place September 19-27.)

In all of this, we have been preparing for a turning point.  Maybe it is here.

This all depends on our choice.

On the Threshold?

We can’t predict what the long-term impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic will be.  Perhaps, after it passes, we will resume the life we have always known.  There is some evidence that this is what’s happening in China, where the lessening of the coronavirus spread has seen a return to pre-COVID-19 fossil fuel consumption levels.

At the same time, there is the potential for a long-term shift.  In spite of rampant nationalistic tendencies, this disease underscores the inextricable interconnectedness of planet earth. We are all literally in this together, and that togetherness does not stop at national borders.  The healing the earth’s population in the face of this global infection ultimately will hinge on the care for all, not for some. Just as humanity began to reset its self-understanding after Apollo 8’s “earthrise” photo was beamed home in 1968—a startling image that helped us “get” that we are one borderless planet, suspended in the darkness, together—so COVID-19 shocks us into an even deeper awareness: whatever threatens one threatens all.  Our survival depends on one another.  Or, to put it positively, we are being beckoned to, once and for all, outgrow our limiting conceptions of self and nation.  Our full flourishing hinges on transcending the confining cultural and social operating systems that exclude, demonize, and reject. 

"Whatever the outcome, the experience of this current pandemic is likely a rehearsal for the summoning of global resolve to, once and for all, tackle the series of grave 'epidemics' that are mutating and growing all around us."

COVID-19 has deepened our understanding of the Apollo 8 image: we see a planet wounded and needy, one community of communities in need of healing, compassion, and transformation, a sacred reality calling us to the nonviolent turn. Violence will not heal this brokenness and pain. Only nonviolence—purified of violence at its very roots, as Sr, Nancy Shreck, OSF has put it—can relieve this suffering in its comprehensiveness.

Whatever the outcome, the experience of this current pandemic is likely a rehearsal for the summoning of global resolve to, once and for all, tackle the series of grave “epidemics” that are mutating and growing all around us: the epidemic of economic inequality; the epidemic of racism, sexism and homophobia; the epidemic of nationalism and xenophobia; the epidemic of militarist systems and solutions; and the existential epidemic of planetary collapse.  Our current struggle offers us the gift of both seeing the “big picture” in a new way and the invitation to shift our way of life and being in foundational ways in light of that “big picture.”

It is a vivid and compelling invitation to see anew the indivisible reality of life and, consequently, to join and contribute to the global movement for this cultural and planetary shift.

Steps Forward

The immediate question is: How can we make this choice for a nonviolent shift in the midst of the current chaos?

First, within our own lives.  As one nation after another goes into lockdown in order to interrupt the transmission of COVID-19, more and more of us will be staying put at home.  This is an opportunity to prepare ourselves for taking part in this shift. How? Instead of regarding it as a kind of involuntary imprisonment, perhaps we can envision it as a space for transformation.  In the fourth century, the first monks headed to the deserts of Egypt and Palestine to, as Thomas Merton imagined it, jump ship from the Roman Empire, which had begun to co-opt the Church.  Their life of contemplation and self-confinement was a process of being freed from empire, physically but also spiritually.  They sparked a revolution of consciousness that has rippled down to our own day. 

Similarly, let us use these coming days and weeks to take steps toward a liberation from the domination system and toward a culture of peace and nonviolence.  With intentionality, reflection, prayer and community offline and online, we can take steps to challenge scripts of fear and division and to experience healing and transformation in our lives, our relationships and in the global movement for a world where everyone counts.

"Let us commit ourselves to the dramatic, systemic transformation needed now more than ever. "

In this time of anxiety, let us renew our relationship with our loved ones, even if we are in close quarters.

In this time of dislocation, let us nurture the bonds of connection and solidarity.

In this time of disruption, let us find ways to commit our lives to the healing and well-being of all.

In this time of instability, let us imagine what nonviolent practice we can take up and deepen.

A New Movement is Coming

The greatest social movement in human history is coming.  Each of us is called to join it.  It is a global movement, a movement of movements.  It is learning from the history of movements that has been accelerating over the past century.  It is rooted in the blood and tears of millions who have spent their lives throughout history clamoring for justice, working for peace, laboring for a world that works for everyone.

This movement will not appear by magic.  It requires hard work and “acting our way into thinking.”  It will be deeply nonviolent—saying No to injustice and Yes to the humanity of all, including the humanity of our opponents.

In a curious way, COVID-19 is a strange messenger.  It is calling us resolutely to join this planetary movement that is emerging.

Let us join this all-embracing movement.  We can fill our knapsack for the journey ahead by taking nonviolence trainings online, planning for action in September, imagining how your locality could become a nonviolent city—and entering the mystery of nonviolent healing and transformation.  We can ready for humanity’s next step by finding—online, or off—a small group of 4 or 5 people to reflect, study and plan together, supporting one another as catalysts for transformation, as agents of nonviolent change, as advocates for a renewed and revitalized world.

Let us commit ourselves to the dramatic, systemic transformation needed now more than ever.  The vision, principles and strategies of nonviolent movement-building will strengthen our ability and capacity as agents of nonviolent change for a renewed and revitalized world.

We do not know, yet, how the change which is needed will come about. In these days of darkness and decision, let us open ourselves to the new direction to which we are being called.

Let us choose the way of nonviolent love in this time of coronavirus.

Ken Butigan is director of Pace e Bene, a nonprofit organization fostering nonviolent change through education, community and action. He also teaches peace studies at DePaul University and Loyola University in Chicago.

Hope and Falling Together: Rebecca Solnit in conversation with Krista Tippett (2016)

On Being with Krista Tippett

Rebecca Solnit

Hope and Falling Together

May 26, 2016

“When all the ordinary divides and patterns are shattered, people step up to become their brothers’ keepers. And that purposefulness and connectedness bring joy even amidst death, chaos, fear, and loss.” A singular writer and thinker, Rebecca Solnit celebrates the unpredictable and incalculable events that so often redeem our lives, both solitary and public. She searches for the hidden, transformative histories inside and after events we chronicle merely as disasters, in places like post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans.

Rebecca Solnit is a contributing editor at Harper's Magazine and a regular writer for publications including The Guardian and The London Review of Books. Her books include A Paradise Built in Hell, Hope in the Dark, and a new collection of essays, The Mother of All Questions.

Krista Tippett, host: Rebecca Solnit describes her vision as a writer like this: “to describe nuances and shades of meaning, to celebrate public life and solitary life, to find another way of telling.” She is a contributing editor to Harper’s Magazine and the author of profound books that defy category. She’s emerged as one of our great chroniclers of untold histories of redemptive change in places like post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans. She writes that, so often, “When all the ordinary divides and patterns are shattered, people step up to become their brother’s keepers. And that purposefulness and connectedness bring joy even amidst death, chaos, fear, and loss.”

Rebecca Solnit: I want better metaphors. I want better stories. I want more openness. I want better questions. All these things feel like they give us tools that are a little more commensurate with the amazing possibilities and the terrible realities that we face.

Ms. Tippett:  Rebecca Solnit’s books include A Paradise Built in Hell, Hope in the Dark, and a new collection of essays, The Mother of All Questions. She was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and moved with her parents to the San Francisco Bay Area when she was young. I spoke with her in 2016.

Ms. Tippett: I usually start my conversations with an inquiry about the spiritual background of your childhood, and — however you would define that. And as I look at the sweep of your writing, I see so many elements that, to me, are profoundly spiritual — a long sense of time, a robust commitment to hope. You describe your childhood in so many ways — in one place, these are words you use: “a scrawny, battered little kid in a violent house.” And I wonder how you would think about that notion of the spiritual background of your childhood. And it occurs to me that perhaps some of these things were seeded by absence, as much as by presence.

Ms. Solnit:  I think that’s true. And when you ask that question, what comes to mind is a map of where most of my childhood took place. I wrote somewhere that I had an inside-out childhood, because every place was safe but home. If you went — just on the other side of the backyard fence was a quarter horse stud farm and then dairy farms and open space. And the landscape and the animals, domestic and wild, were this huge refuge and really fed me and encouraged me, and there was a sense of community with the non-human. And so that was if you went north, even just to the other side of the fence and beyond — it was just endless open space and oak trees and grasslands and wildlife.

And then if you went south, there was a really great public library. And the minute I learned how to read, it was as though I’d been given this huge treasure. Every book was a box I suddenly knew how to open, and in it I could meet people, go to other worlds, go deep in all kinds of ways. And I spent my childhood in the hills and in the books. And those — so that was not maybe what people think of conventionally as spirituality, but that was my company, my encouragement, my teaching, my community.

Ms. Tippett: That’s lovely. So the sweep of your work is wonderful, and it’s daunting, as an interviewer. But I actually thought I would start with — I’d just love to have a conversation with you about this piece that was in Harper’s not that long ago, about — I can’t remember the title of it. But it was ostensibly about the choice not to have children.

Ms. Solnit: Oh, yeah. It’s called “The Mother of All Questions.”

Ms. Tippett: The Mother of All Questions.” And part of what you were reflecting on, or a jumping-off point for your reflection, was the fact that people are so curious about that and, in fact, so presumptuous about it. And I think you make the case very quickly that it’s a valid and life-giving choice, not to have children. But in fact, the piece, like so much of what you write, becomes a reflection on the vast expanse of what it is to be alive. And so there’s this: you said, “People lock onto motherhood as a key to feminine identity in part from the belief that children are the best way to fulfill your capacity to love, even though the list of monstrous, ice-hearted mothers is extensive. But there are so many things to love besides one’s own offspring, so many things that need love, so much other work love has to do in the world.”

Ms. Solnit: Yeah, exactly.

Ms. Tippett: And you say — I love this phrase: “There’s so much other work love has to do in the world.” I just feel like that’s so worth just putting out in public life and reflecting on.

Ms. Solnit: Yeah, and it’s partly — we overemphasize this very specific zone of love. It’s as though we’ve hyper-mapped it and obsessed about it and shone lights on it and things. And then there’s this whole other territory of relationships, to the larger world in particular and to public life, to — I hang out with a lot of climate activists, and there’s this profound love they have for the natural world, for the future, for justice. And that really shapes lives and gives them tremendous meaning. And it benefits all of us that they have this and that this motivates them, because they’re acting on behalf of all of us. And we should call that love. And we should look at the way that —

Ms. Tippett: And it’s a passionate love, right? It’s a passionate love.

Ms. Solnit: Absolutely. It’s just — it’s ferocious, and it’s protective the way that mother love can be. And if anything’s going to save the planet, it’s that love. But mostly we don’t even acknowledge that it exists, and so we have these blank spots on the map of who we are. And I want to try and fill those in and encourage people to go there, to recognize that actually, their lives can take place or are already taking place there and that this will give them this bigger sense of self.

Ms. Tippett :So a lot of the themes that run through your work, the things you care about, I want to say they’re outliers in terms of what we know how to talk about in public — certainly, in intellectual circles. And so maybe let’s talk about hope, because I think hope is one of those.

Ms. Solnit: I can talk about hope till, I think, the cows come home.

Ms. Tippett: [laughs] Well, I just — I want to start — somewhere you write that your fascination with this — maybe you began to articulate your fascination with this when you registered your emotions and the emotions of others in response to the 1989 earthquake in San Francisco. And my sense is that what you — how you responded and how you saw others respond — it was not, perhaps, what you would have expected.

Ms. Solnit: The amazing thing about the 1989 earthquake — it was an earthquake as big as the kind that killed thousands of people in places like Turkey and Mexico City and things like that. But partly because we have good infrastructure, about 50 people died. A number of people lost their homes. Everybody was shaken up. But what was so interesting for me was that people seemed to kind of love what was going on. And when I’d ask people, or when it would come up in conversation, because for years afterwards around here, people would be like, “Oh, where were you at 5:02, or is it 5:03 P.M., on October 17, 1989?” And people would get this expression that I later ran into when I visited Halifax, Nova Scotia, after a big hurricane there, when I talked — and then eventually, I did a whole book on this mysterious emotion. People would light up. And everything we’ve been told about disaster by trashy Hollywood disaster movies with Charlton Heston and Tom Cruise, everything about the news — is that human beings are fragile, disasters are terrible, and we’re either terrified because we’re fragile, or our morality is also fragile, and we revert to our best-deal, savage, social-Darwinist, Hobbesian nature, and go out raping and looting.

Those myths became a secondary disaster, worse than the hurricane that hit New Orleans on August 29, 2005, because that’s why it was — the city was shut off, turned into a prison city, why the police were shooting black people in the back, why people were not allowed to evacuate and supplies were not allowed in while people were dying of exposure and lack of medication and et cetera.

So that was part of where I got hopeful, and then also, in a larger sense, one of the things I’m really interested in is, what are the stories we tell, and what are their consequences? And are there other ways of telling, other ways — other stories that don’t get told? And hopefulness is really, for me — is not optimism: that everything’s going to be fine, and we can just sit back. And that’s too much like pessimism, which is that everything’s going to suck, and we can just sit back.

Hope, for me, just means a Buddhist sense of uncertainty, of coming to terms with the fact that we don’t know what will happen and that there’s maybe room for us to intervene, and that we have to let go of the certainty people seem to love more than hope and know that we don’t know what’s going to happen. And we live in a very surprising world, where nobody anticipated the way the Berlin Wall would fall or the Arab Spring would rise up, the impact of Occupy Wall Street. Obama was unelectable, six months before he was elected.

Ms. Tippett: But I wonder, as you just described that, just then, what you said — in those moments of disaster, of crisis, we come face to face with the reality that unexpected things will happen — as you said, that life is surprising, in good ways and bad. That’s just true. But is there something life-giving, even energizing, about people actually having to face those bedrock realities in those moments?

Ms. Solnit: Yeah, and there’s a way a disaster throws people into the present and gives them this supersaturated immediacy that also includes a deep sense of connection. It’s as though in some violent gift, you’ve been given a kind of spiritual awakening where you’re close to mortality in a way that makes you feel more alive. You’re deeply in the present and can let go of past and future and your personal narrative, in some ways. You have shared an experience with everyone around you, and you often find very direct but also metaphysical senses of connection to the people you suddenly have something in common with.

And then oftentimes, the people who do the really important work in disasters, which doesn’t get talked about much, are the neighbors. Who’s going to rescue you when your building collapses, when the ice storm comes, and the power goes out? It’s probably going to be the neighbors. And so the question is really two things. One is, how can we get there without going through a disaster, and …

Ms. Tippett:[ laughs] That’s right. That’s the question, isn’t it?

Ms. Solnit: And I think of that as this funny way the earthquake shakes you awake. And then that’s the big spiritual question: How do you stay awake? How do you stay in that deeper consciousness of that present-mindedness, that sense of non-separation and compassion and engagement — and courage, which is also a big part of it, and generosity? People are not selfish and greedy.

So and then the other question is, why has everything we’ve ever been told about human nature misled us about what happens in these moments? And what happens if we acknowledge, as I think people in the kind of work that neuropsychologists and the Dalai Lama’s research projects and economists are beginning to say, what if human — everything we’ve been told about human nature is wrong, and we’re actually very generous, communitarian, altruistic beings who are distorted by the system we are in but not made happy by it? What if we can actually be better people in a better world?

Ms. Tippett: A story I have always loved, that, to me — Dorothy Day, I just feel like, gets quoted all the time, more and more. Somehow, she’s really come to the forefront of consciousness. And you do write about — in your book, A Paradise Built in Hell, which I love so much — you write about the San Francisco earthquake of April 18, 1906, which killed 3,000 people and annihilated the center of the city, as you say, and shattered this hundred-mile stretch.

But Dorothy Day was in Oakland. She’s eight years old. She watches this thing that someplace you describe as — you say, yes, people fall apart, but in disaster, there’s also this falling together that we don’t chronicle. And she — the question she asked was — she saw, to me — this is me looking at this — she saw that people were capable of this; that all along, they knew how to do this, to take care of each other.

Ms. Solnit: Exactly.

Ms. Tippett: And she said, “Why can’t we live this way all the time?”

Ms. Solnit: No, that is her formative experience. She said, while the disaster lasted, people loved one another. And Dorothy Day is such a key figure for that book, both because the earthquake becomes a spiritual awakening and the template for what she pursues in her life, and because she’s somebody who had a partner and a child, and she kept the child, but she gave up family life for this larger sense of community she pursued as the founder of Catholic Worker. And she treated poverty as the disaster in which she would create this kind of communitas, this deeper, broader, higher, more spiritual sense of community than private life had offered her. And she’s so interesting as somebody who renounces it directly and connects this other sense so directly to disaster.

Ms. Tippett: Yeah, and you talk about — in all the places you looked, and in your own circle as you were in that disaster, there’s virtue that arises, and that there’s a joy — there’s a hope and a joy. And I was thinking about that phrase of hers, “the duty of delight.” So it’s not — so yes, there’s — she makes sacrifices that seem — that would seem extreme in the context of most of our lives. But that joy was also something she claimed and hung onto.

Ms. Solnit: “Joy” is such an interesting term, because we hear constantly about happiness — “Are you happy?” And it’s — emotions are mutable, and this notion that happiness should be a steady state seems destined to make people miserable. And joy is so much more interesting, because I think we’re much more aware that it’s like the light at sunrise, or the lightning, or something — that it’s epiphanies and moments and raptures, and that it’s not supposed to be a steady state, and that’s OK. And I think it’s a word that comes up a lot more in spiritual life than “happiness,” that millstone, happiness.

Ms. Tippett: Absolutely, yeah. You draw a connection often between, I would say, the reasonableness of hope and the reality of darkness. Would you say something about that?

Ms. Solnit: Well, I really wanted to rescue “darkness” from the pejoratives, because it’s also associated with dark-skinned people, and those pejoratives often become racial in ways that I find problematic. So I wrote a book called Hope in the Dark, about hope, where that darkness was the future — that the present and past are daylight, and the future is night. But in that darkness is a kind of mysterious, erotic, enveloping sense of possibility and communion — love is made in the dark, often as not — and then to recognize that unknowability as fertile, as rich as the womb, rather than the tomb, in some sense. And so much, for me, of hope is not, as I was saying, not optimism that everything will be fine, but that we don’t know what will happen.

A guest of yours whose name I’m going to mispronounce — Walter Brueggemann…

Ms. Tippett: Yes, yes, theologian of the prophets.

Ms. Solnit: Yeah, and I listened to his interview, and he talked about how much hope is grounded in memory. And I was so excited to hear someone say that. We think of hope as looking forward, but memory lets us know, if we have a real memory, that we didn’t know. We didn’t know the Berlin Wall was going to fall, and the Soviet Union was going to fall apart, and the binary arrangement those of us who are older grew up in, where it seemed like capitalism and communism and the Cold War standoff was going to last for centuries.

If you study history deeply, you realize that, to quote Patti Smith, “People have the power” — that popular power, civil society, has been tremendously powerful and has changed the world again and again and again; that we’re not powerless; that things are very unpredictable and that people have often taken on things that seemed hopeless — freeing the slaves, getting women the vote — and achieved those things. And I feel like so much of what we’re burdened by is bad stories, both people who have amnesia, who don’t remember that the present was constructed by certain forces to serve certain elements and can be deconstructed and that things could be very different, that they have been very different, that things are always changing and that we have agency in that change.

And one of the simple examples I often go back to is that when you and I were small, to be gay or lesbian or otherwise — something other than standard heterosexual — was to be considered mentally ill or criminal or both, and punished accordingly. And to go from there to national same-sex marriage rights is an unimaginable journey. It’s — and that’s a lot of what my hopeful stuff is about, is trying to look at the immeasurable, incalculable, indirect, roundabout way that things matter.

My friend, David Graber, has a wonderful passage about how the Russian revolution succeeded, but not really in Russia. It terrified, or at least motivated, leaders in Europe and North America and elsewhere to make enormous concessions to the rights of poor and workers and really furthered economic justice in other places. And if you can say that a revolution was successful, but not in the country it took place in, then you can start to trace these indirect impacts.

Ms. Tippett: You can listen again and share this conversation with Rebecca Solnit at civilconversationsproject.org. We are expanding On Being’s Civil Conversations Project to be more of a resource for families and communities. Find audio, video, and a starter guide for beginning new conversations where you live and reinventing common life for this century, because the point of speaking together differently is to live together differently. Again, all that at civilconversationsproject.org.

Ms. Tippett: You have this wonderful sentence that “History is like the weather, not like checkers.” And you talk about — here’s another: “Sometimes cause and effect are centuries apart; sometimes Martin Luther King’s arc of the moral universe that bends towards justice is so long few see its curve; sometimes hope lies not in looking forward but backward to study the line of that arc.” It’s an un-American way of thinking, but it’s an essential way, I think, to inhabit this century, in particular.

Ms. Solnit: There used to be products advertised in comic books and things — “Instant results guaranteed, or your money back.” If disappointment is your goal, that’s a sure-fire recipe for it. For example, Occupy Wall Street was pronounced a failure before it had really gotten going, and at one point, there were Occupies in New Zealand and Japan and Europe — in California alone, there were about 400 Occupies at the peak, in late 2011. And they dispersed, as these encampments and people — in which people had these extraordinary dialogues. And the impact of those dialogues is hard to measure. But you can look at Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and Bill de Blasio of New — the mayor of New York, as people who are carrying those frameworks into the mainstream and into electoral politics. And you can also look at both national things — the movement against punitive student debt and the …

Ms. Tippett: I feel like what you’re — you’re kind of — you’re drawing a map, and it’s a different kind of map than we came out of the 20th century in our heads with, which is about how social change happens. I think maybe the image people go to, in a default way, is maybe the civil rights movement, simplified — large numbers of people on the street, a charismatic leader, and laws that get passed right in that moment.

So let me ask you this, because, one, I very much appreciated your writing about Hurricane Katrina and the world after Hurricane Katrina. And this is one of these places where we’ve told the story in a certain way. And we — and even from the very beginning, the story was narrated and presented in a way that was largely just incredibly demoralizing. If you met someone — say, a Martian, who — [laughs] who was not here and had never heard of this, how would you tell, start to tell, the fullness of that story of Hurricane Katrina, what happened to this city called New Orleans and how that history is still being made now?

Ms. Solnit: I should say that all my work on disaster draws from these wonderful disaster sociologists who had this — do this incredible work, documenting what happens in disasters, and have since World War II. I’m kind of their popularizer, and people like Kathleen Tierney. But — and they say there’s no such thing as a “natural” disaster, meaning that in an earthquake, it’s buildings that fall on you. So what are the building codes? Who lives in substandard housing? Who lives on the floodplain? Who gets evacuated? Who gets left behind? What happened to New Orleans is that the levees failed. About seven-eighths of the city flooded, meaning that a lot of it was from a few feet to 15 feet or more deep in water, and just all systems failed, and some hospitals were able to run on generators.

There was a supposedly — there was what was called a mandatory evacuation, but people who didn’t have the resources to evacuate were left behind to face what happened. So that’s the set-up for it that creates a disaster. In Cuba, when there’s a mandatory evacuation, everybody receives the assistance they need to evacuate, so it’s our kind of laissez-faire, every-man-for-himself system that left what were often portrayed as the “criminal element,” was a lot of poor women, single moms with kids, a lot of elderly people. And a lot of the guys who got portrayed as gangsters and things were the wonderful rescuers and these really able-bodied young guys who did amazing things.

Then things happen, like they basically get sealed off. You can walk out of the central city to dry land, but the sheriff of a suburb called Gretna, and his thugs, get on the bridge with guns and turn people back at gunpoint. You cannot walk out of New Orleans to dry land, so you’re trapped. You’re a prisoner, essentially.

Ms. Tippett: And that was because of the narrative they were working off, in terms of who these people were?

Ms. Solnit: Yeah, well, the — all the clichés that surfaced in the 1906 earthquake, all the crap about human nature, about how we all revert — especially poor people, especially non-white people — how we revert to our savage, social-Darwinist nature, were aired. And the mainstream media — and this includes The New York Times and The Washington Post and CNN and The Guardian, all the major news outlets — it wasn’t — were the unindicted co-conspirators, I always say. They start publishing all this garbage about how there’s mass killings in the Superdome. And that was just believed so much that the Federal Emergency Management Agency sends a gigantic tractor-trailer refrigerated truck to get what turns out to be six bodies, not the 200 that are supposed to be there.

There’s all these stories that people are shooting at helicopters, so you can’t have helicopter rescues. And so they mount a campaign, not to treat suffering human beings and bring them resources, but to reconquer the city. Kathleen Blanco, the governor of Louisiana, said, “We have troops fresh from Iraq, and they have M16s that are locked and loaded, and they know how to use them.” And it’s like, that is not a humanitarian effort. M16s are not how you help that grandmother dying on the roof. And some of those grandmothers died.

And so people were not a victim of a hurricane, they were a victim of vicious stories; of the media’s failures; of the failures of the government on every scale, from the city of New Orleans that left prisoners locked in flooded jails, to the federal government. And so that’s political failures, but behind those politics are stories.

And what’s interesting is that a lot of people believe those stories. And we often treat stories like they’re very trivial, like they’re story hour for kids or — but people live and die by stories. And people died of vicious stories in New Orleans. Everybody could have been evacuated in 24 hours. Everybody could have been evacuated beforehand.

Ms. Tippett: Well, and the stories you also tell that we don’t hear, which were life-giving — that in the immediate aftermath, more than 200,000 people invite displaced strangers into their homes through hurricanehousing.org, which I never heard about; that the massive number of people who went to New Orleans, who went to the Gulf Coast to help rebuild — that it was like the Freedom Summer in Mississippi, magnified a thousand-fold. So there’s also that taking place, and those lives, one at a time.

Ms. Solnit: And there was — from the very minute it all began, there was tremendous altruism. The first round of rescuers were people who were themselves inside the city who got boats or did other things to rescue people, who came together in buildings that weren’t damaged and formed little communities and took care of the vulnerable. But there are these extraordinary stories. And people really — that impulse to help is so powerful. And they talk — they call it “disaster convergence,” and it often becomes a problem, where you have — you remember after 9/11, people lined up around the block all over the country, to give blood. People really want to help. That’s who we are.

And New Orleans, for years afterwards, had all these people — church groups, and I saw amazing Mennonite builders rebuilding houses, and Habitat for Humanity, and I kind of loved it. It was the whole spectrum, from Catholic Charities to the Mennonites to pretty radical anarchists. And people working with Common Ground, which was founded by the Black Panthers and young white supporters and became a project that did a lot of different things, and not all of it worked out perfectly, but some of it was amazing, and it became really a part of the conversation. But they founded the first really good clinic for people who needed emergency care, who needed their diabetes medicine or their tetanus shot or their wound disinfected. And that split off into Common GroundClinic, which is still going strong more than ten years later. And that’s the kind of indirect consequences that I find so interesting to trace, is that here’s something that came out of Katrina that’s still helping people every day.

Ms. Tippett: Right. So we talked a little while ago about love and your idea that love has so many other things to do in the world, aside from these silos of loving our families and loving our children. So if I ask you just what story or people come to mind — if you think about the word “love” as a practical, muscular, public thing in New Orleans, ten years after Hurricane Katrina, what comes to mind for you?

Ms. Solnit: So many things; it’s a really magical place. People have deep connections in New Orleans. I would try to explain that people in New Orleans and Katrina lost things that most of us hadn’t had for generations. A lot of people lived in a neighborhood where they knew hundreds of people. They knew everybody who lived near them. They might have extended family. They might be like Fats Domino, who was born in a house in the Lower Ninth Ward, delivered by his grandmother. People live in their grandparents’ houses. They have these deep roots and wide branches.

And they engage in public celebration. They talk to strangers. And they — it’s a deeply Dionysian place, with the second line parades all — 40-something Sundays a year; not just Carnival, not just Mardi Gras. And it’s a profoundly spiritual place. So all these things are part of the place, and so they’re already really rich.

But a lot of people, after Katrina, felt like, OK, we really have to engage to keep this place alive. And there was a real rise in civic engagement, and a number of institutions around justice and policing were reformed. The police were actually taken over by the federal government, because it was the most corrupt and incompetent police department in the United States. They got a semi-decent mayor for a change, after a lot of corruption — particularly from Ray Nagin, who went to jail for it, the mayor during and after Katrina. And people really started to dream big, about “OK, here we are on the fastest-eroding coastline in the world, in a city that’s partly below sea level, in an era of climate change, increasing storms, and rising waters. How do we adapt?” And people are having this really exciting conversation about rethinking the city and how water works in the city, building systems of survival.

And again, this is like all disasters. The storm was horrible. It killed about 1,800 people. It displaced a lot of black people who were never able to come back, and impacted the continuity and mental health of the community. But it did create this engagement and this really creative planning of the future. And New Orleans might have just continued its gentle decline, without Katrina.

Ms. Tippett: Right, and it’s kind of an incubator now, isn’t it? Kind of a …

Ms. Solnit: Yeah, yeah, and a lot of the young people, these young idealists who moved there, fell in love with the place and stayed. And it’s complicated; some of them are the white kids who are gentrifying traditionally black neighborhoods. But they’re also — some — they’re not all white, and they are people who are bringing a passion for urban planning, community gardens; for thinking about these social and ecological systems. And the place is very energized right now in new ways, and it has retained quite a lot, if not all, of the energy it had before.

Ms. Tippett: I’m Krista Tippett, and this is On Being. Today, with writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit. I spoke with her during the 2016 presidential election.

Ms. Tippett: It seems to me that that story of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina becomes just an extreme example of a larger reality you see. And so here’s something you wrote, where it’s so beautifully stated — and in fact, each one of us individually, if we stopped to take it apart, has a story of a million events or actions or people without which we would not be. And you wrote, “Trace it far enough and this very moment in your life becomes a rare species, the result of a strange evolution, a butterfly that should already be extinct and survives by the inexplicabilities we call coincidence.” [laughs]

Ms. Solnit: Yeah, and it’s also about the unpredictability of our lives and that ground for hope I talk about — that we don’t know what forces are at work, what — who and what is going to appear, what thing we may not have even noticed or may have discounted that will become a tremendous force in our lives.

People in this culture love certainty so much, and they seem to love certainty more than hope, which is why they often seize on these really bitter, despondent narratives that are — they know exactly what’s going to happen. And that certainty just seems so tragic to me. I want people to tell more complex stories and to acknowledge that sometimes we win, and that there are these openings. But an opening is just an opening; you have to go through it and make something happen. And you don’t always win, but if you try, you don’t always lose.

Ms. Tippett: Yeah, you don’t always win, but I think I come back to your idea that history is like — and in fact, our lives — are like the weather, not like checkers. So your point, which actually is, I would say, is the kind of complexity that I think theology at its best imposes — that you walk through the openings, and perhaps you don’t win that battle, or you don’t see the result you hoped for; perhaps you outright lose. But the complex way you’re wanting to tell the stories of reality and of our lives is that whatever we do, there are always consequences that we don’t control and can’t see and can’t calculate, but they matter. They count.

Ms. Solnit: The guy I’m involved with loves to say, and I’m getting — it’s from Foucault, and I’m getting it wrong — that “We know what we do. We know why we do it. But we don’t know what we do, does.” And I love that sense that we don’t know consequences. We can learn and surmise. And that a lot of what matters is indirect and nonlinear. And it’s like even checkers seems too sophisticated and complex for the metaphor. I use bowling, where people are like, “Either we knocked all the pins down with this bowling ball, or we had a gutter ball, and nothing happened.”

And my wonderful environmentalist friend, Chip Ward, likes to talk about the “tyranny of the quantifiable,” and I’ve been using that phrase of his for about 15 years. And it is a kind of tyranny, and I think — and it does get mystical, where you have to look at what’s not quantifiable. Martin Luther King is assassinated in 1968. A comic book about how civil disobedience works out was distributed during the civil rights movement, gets translated into Arabic and distributed in Egypt and becomes one of the immeasurable forces that help feed the Arab Spring, which is five years old right now; and most of it doesn’t look that good, but they did overthrow a bunch of regimes. And the French Revolution didn’t really look very good five years out, I was saying the other day.

Ms. Tippett: Oh, I know. It’s so important that you point that out — that we — and also, our revolution. These things are messy, and they take generations. And we forget that, and we’re already calling it as a loss, and it’s absurd, really. It’s absurd.

Ms. Solnit: Yeah, and I think that there are really good points to be made that — for example, that overthrowing a dictator is nice, but you need democratic institutions. In Egypt, for example, the military was a power that didn’t go away. And you need to not just have that amazing moment in the streets and that rupture, but you need to have an ongoing engagement with transforming the system and making it accountable. But what happened mattered, nevertheless, and I think for people, many people in the Middle East, just the sense that it’s not inevitable that we live in authoritarianism; we are not powerless. And I think of Alexander Dubček — the hero of the Prague Spring of 1968, which was quashed — playing a role in the 1989 revolution that liberated that country.

Ms. Tippett: That’s so true, yeah.

Ms. Solnit: And I want better metaphors. I want better stories. I want more openness. I want better questions. All these things feel like they give us tools that are a little more commensurate with the amazing possibilities and the terrible realities that we face. And what we get given, so often, are just these kind of clumsy, inadequate tools. They don’t help. They don’t open things up. They don’t shed light. They don’t lead us to interesting places. They don’t let us know how powerful we can be. They don’t help us ask the questions that really matter and that start with rejecting the narratives we’re told and telling our own stories, becoming the storyteller rather than the person who’s told what to do.

Ms. Tippett:I ’m very much a comrade in your reverence for something called public life and — which I think we’ve narrowly equated with political life, in recent generations, but opening that language up more. You’ve said public life enlarges you, gives you purpose and context. I want to come to this idea that — [laughs] maybe this analogy is more apt — we’re in the middle of this presidential election year, which is so confusing, messy, and there’s a lot of anger in the room. And where am I going with this? You — I don’t want to compare it to a natural disaster, but you said — [laughs] I think I am, in my mind. [laughs]

Ms. Solnit: Oh, go; do it. [laughs]

Ms. Tippett: But you said, in the middle of a natural disaster, there’s this joy that rises up. So on the one hand, we have this spectacle of — I think — let’s just say — I think I can safely say this: a presidential election is — which is not what any of us — how any of us would want it to be, perhaps. But tell me, where are you taking joy in public life right now? And that might have nothing to do with politics.

Ms. Solnit: Yeah, I totally agree we need a broader sense of public life, that it’s a sense of belonging to a place, by which I mean the physical place — the trees, the birds, the weather, the coastline or the hills or the farms…

Ms. Tippett: The people.

Ms. Solnit: As well as the people and the institutions. And it’s one of the reasons I love New Orleans. People really engage with each other, just in every day, and — whereas sometimes, living in the Bay Area, it feels like where I’m in a zombie movie; everybody’s walking around in a trance, staring at their phone, and nobody’s in the private world your phone opens onto.

But it’s funny the way you describe it, because I think there’s a kind of self-forgetfulness and a sense of having something in common that brings that joy, when it comes in disaster. And of course, a presidential election is the exact opposite. It’s partisanship and this sort of deep attachment to “I’m right and you’re wrong,” and the squabbling.

Ms. Tippett: But — so put that aside, because I think that’s not very joyful for you or me. But where are you finding joy in public life right now? Where do you want to look, in terms of the larger narrative of who we are and what we’re capable of and what this moment — you often talk about — you say, “Whenever I look around me, I wonder what old things are about to bear fruit, what seemingly solid institutions might soon rupture, and what seeds we might now be planting whose harvest will come at some unpredictable moment in the future.” So where are you looking right now with intrigue?

Ms. Solnit: The climate movement, which was this embryonic, ineffectual thing, ten years ago — and I was in Paris for the climate conference, and it’s global. It’s powerful. It’s brilliant. It’s innovative, and remarkable things are happening and real transformations. And ten years ago, we didn’t even have the energy options. We didn’t really have good alternatives to fossil fuel the way we do now, as Scotland hedged towards 100 percent fossil-free energy generation, as all these remarkable things happened. So we’re really in an energy revolution that’s an evolution of — a revolution of consciousness about how things work and how connected they all are, and this incredible kind of war of the world against the fossil fuel corporations. It’s very effective.

But that’s the pragmatic side. What I also see is these deep connections between people in North America and Africa and the Pacific — the Philippines, Asia — this global movement that’s really coming of age and that has a kind of profound beauty, not in only some of the individuals I’m friends with who are doing great things, but a kind of beauty of creativity, of passion, of real love for the vulnerable populations at stake; for the world, the natural world; for the sense of systems and order — the natural order of the weather patterns, sea levels, things like winter.

Ms. Tippett: [laughs] Yeah, things like winter, yeah.

Ms. Solnit: Yeah, yeah — winter as it used — winter and spring as it used to be, where the bird migrations happened in coordination with these flowers blooming and these insects hatching, et cetera. And what we recognize, when we address climate change, is this infinite complexity that has a beautiful kind of order to it, and it’s falling into disorder. And so the love, the intelligence, the passion, the creativity of that movement is one. And there’s many other things I could say, but right now that’s just so exciting.

And it’s negotiating. It’s negotiating, and this is what hope is about, for me. It’s not saying, “Oh, we can pretend that everything’s going to be fine, and we’ll fix it all, and it’ll be as though it never happened.” It’s really saying, the difference between the best-case scenario and the worst case-scenario is where these people in the Philippines survive, where these people in the Arctic are able to keep something of their way of life. And we’re going to do everything we can to fight for the best case rather than the worst case — without illusions; without thinking that we’re going to make it all magically OK and like it never happened. And so that tough-mindedness is also really beautiful; that pragmatic idealism.

Ms. Tippett: That tough-minded hope.

Ms. Solnit: Exactly.

Ms. Tippett: I think you would give it that word.

Ms. Solnit: And hope is tough. It’s tougher to be uncertain than certain. It’s tougher to take chances than to be safe. And so hope is often seen as weakness, because it’s vulnerable, but it takes strength to enter into that vulnerability of being open to the possibilities. And I’m interested in what gives people that strength, and what stories, what questions, what memories, what conversations, what senses of themselves and the world around them.

Ms. Tippett: We’ve run — well, we’re just over about a minute. I just want to ask you one last question. It’s a huge question, but just where would you start thinking about this? How is your sense of what it means to be human evolving right now, as you write and as we speak? What contours is that taking on that perhaps you wouldn’t have expected ten years ago, or when you were 15 and miserable? [laughs]

Ms. Solnit: [laughs] Yeah, yeah. I was a really isolated kid, and my brothers teased me when I did girl things, so I wasn’t very good at girl things, so I wasn’t very good at connecting to other girls, and I was just the weird kid with her nose in a book. And so I have really wonderful people around me and really deep connections, and that’s incredibly satisfying. And it’s all kind of amazing.

I think a lot of us wish you could send postcards to your miserable teenage self. I always thought that “It Gets Better” campaign for queer kids should be broadened, because it gets better for a lot of us. My mother, in her ever un-encouraging way, when I won some big prize, said, “This is all such a surprise. You were just a mousy little thing.” [laughs] But it is kind of a surprise. And it’s like, to have this ability to participate and really maybe be helpful to other people — to do really meaningful work — it’s all just this kind of astonishment.

Ms. Tippett: Rebecca Solnit is a contributing editor at Harper’s Magazine and a regular writer for publications including The Guardian and The London Review of Books. Her books include A Paradise Built in Hell, Hope in the Dark, and a new collection of essays, The Mother of All Questions.

Anne Lamott: How We Endure and Find Meaning in a Crazy World

“The world is always going to be dangerous, and people get badly banged up, but how can there be more meaning than helping one another stand up in a wind and stay warm?”

By Maria Popova

We live in a culture of dividedness and fragmentation of the self. When we contemplate what it takes to live a full life, we extol mindfulness and wholeheartedness.

But being wholehearted is only sufficient if your heart is your whole self; being mindful is only sufficient if your mind is all you are. We are, of course, so much more expansive than our hearts and our minds and our perfect abs, or whatever fragment we choose to fixate on. But we compartmentalize our experience in this way, divide it into fragments, as if to divide and conquer it. I’ve written before about our resistance to speaking of the soul, of which those of us who uphold secular ideals of rationalism are especially culpable. And yet I find, over and over, that the fullest people — the people most whole and most alive — are those unafraid and unashamed of the soul.

The soul has had no greater champion in this age of fragments than Anne Lamott — a writer of exceptional lucidity and enchantment, with a rare way of becalming our modern anxieties and ancient anguishes, from grief and gratitude to the perils of perfectionism to how we keep ourselves small with people-pleasing. In Stitches: A Handbook on Meaning, Hope and Repair (public library), Lamott lays bare the deepest, most worn yet most resilient threads of the soul and laces out of the loose ends an extraordinary lattice of assurance and grace — assurance that there is hope for awakening in ourselves “a deeper sense of immediacy or spirit or playfulness” amid the slumber of ordinary life, and for those moments when we feel like all such hope is lost, the grace of trusting “that we do endure, and that out of the wreckage something surprising will rise.”

 

A century and a half after Tolstoy tussled with the search for meaning in a seemingly meaningless world, Lamott writes in the opening essay, titled “Beginning”:

We so often lose our way.

It is easy to sense and embrace meaning when life is on track. When there is a feeling of fullness — having love, goodness, family, work, maybe God* as parts of life — it’s easier to navigate around the sadness that you inevitably stumble across. Life holds beauty, magic and anguish. Sometimes sorrow is unavoidable, even when your kids are little, when the marvels of your children, and your parental amazement, are all the meaning you need to sustain you, or when you have landed the job and salary for which you’ve always longed, or the mate. And then the phone rings, the mail comes, or you turn on the TV…

What is the point of it all when we experience the vortex of interminable depression or, conversely, when we recognize that time is tearing past us like giddy greyhounds? It’s frightening and disorienting that time skates by so fast, and while it’s not as bad as being embedded in the quicksand of loss, we’re filled with dread each time we notice life hotfoot it out of town.

One rarely knows where to begin the search for meaning, though by necessity, we can only start where we are… It somehow has to do with sticking together as we try to make sense of chaos, and that seems a way to begin.

In a living testament to Faulkner’s assertion that the writer’s duty is “to help man endure by lifting his heart” and to E.B. White’s conviction that the writer “should tend to lift people up, not lower them down,” Lamott captures the precarious goodwill of the human spirit:

We try to help where we can, and try to survive our own trials and stresses, illnesses and elections. We work really hard at not being driven crazy by noise and speed and extremely annoying people, whose names we are too polite to mention. We try not to be tripped up by major global sadness, difficulties in our families or the death of old pets…

We work hard, we enjoy life as we can, we endure. We try to help ourselves and one another. We try to be more present and less petty. Some days go better than others. We look for solace in nature and art and maybe, if we are lucky, the quiet satisfaction of our homes…

We’re social, tribal, musical animals, walking percussion instruments. Most of us do the best we can. We show up. We strive for gratitude, and try not to be such babies.

And then there’s a mass shooting, a nuclear plant melts down, just as a niece is born, or as you find love. The world is coming to an end. I hate that. In environmental ways, it’s true, and in existential ways, it has been since the day each of us was born.

Where is meaning in the meteoric passage of time, the speed in which our lives are spent? Where is meaning in the pits? In the suffering? I think these questions are worth asking.

But in asking these questions, Lamott observes — as Meghan Daum did in her eloquent defiance of the platitude industrial complex — that we rarely afford adversity anything more than the status of a complacent metaphor:

Our lives and humanity are untidy: disorganized and careworn. Life on earth is often a raunchy and violent experience. It can be agony just to get through the day.

And yet, I do believe there is ultimately meaning in the chaos, and also in the doldrums. What I resist is not the truth but when people put a pretty bow on scary things instead of saying, “This is a nightmare. I hate everything. I’m going to go hide in the garage.”

My understanding of incarnation is that we are not served by getting away from the grubbiness of suffering. Sometimes we feel that we are barely pulling ourselves forward through a tight tunnel on badly scraped-up elbows. But we do come out the other side, exhausted and changed.

To heal, it seems we have to stand in the middle of the horror, at the foot of the cross, and wait out another’s suffering where that person can see us.

Echoing Emerson’s notion that life is a series of surprises, which we mostly resist, Lamott considers the inevitable ebb and flow of the human experience — the same cycling of impoverishment and excess that Rilke memorably extolled — and writes:

No matter what happens to us — to our children, to our town, to our world — we feel it is still a gift to be human and to have a human life, as long as we ignore the commercials and advertisements and the static that the world beams at us, and understand that we and our children are going to get knocked around, sometimes so cruelly that it will take our breath away. Life can be wild, hard and sweet, but it can also be wild, hard and cruel.

The bad news is that after the suffering, we wait at the empty tomb for a while, the body of our beloved gone, grieving an unsurvivable loss.

It’s a terrible system. But the good news is that then there is new life. Wildflowers bloom again… They’re both such surprises. Wildflowers stop you in your hiking tracks. You want to savor the colors and scents, let them breathe you in, let yourself be amazed. And bulbs that grow in the cold rocky dirt remind us that no one is lost.

But nowhere are these surprises at their most acute, or their most unwelcome, than in loss. “Grief, when it comes,” Joan Didion wrote in her indispensable memoir of loss, “is nothing like we expect it to be” — a notion Lamott enlivens with her touch of poetic precision:

Most of us have figured out that we have to do what’s in front of us and keep doing it… Every time we choose the good action or response, the decent, the valuable, it builds, incrementally, to renewal, resurrection, the place of newness, freedom, justice…

We live stitch by stitch, when we’re lucky. If you fixate on the big picture, the whole shebang, the overview, you miss the stitching. And maybe the stitching is crude, or it is unraveling, but if it were precise, we’d pretend that life was just fine and running like a Swiss watch. This is not helpful if on the inside our understanding is that life is more often a cuckoo clock with rusty gears.

In the aftermath of loss, we do what we’ve always done, although we are changed, maybe more afraid. We do what we can, as well as we can.

A great truth, attributed to Emily Dickinson, is that “hope inspires the good to reveal itself.” This is almost all I ever need to remember. Gravity and sadness yank us down, and hope gives us a nudge to help one another get back up or to sit with the fallen on the ground, in the abyss, in solidarity.

That solidarity, Lamott argues in a sentiment that calls to mind Jeanette Winterson’s exquisite notion of “the paradox of active surrender,” is often what art gives us:

When you love something like reading — or drawing or music or nature — it surrounds you with a sense of connection to something great. If you are lucky enough to know this, then your search for meaning involves whatever that Something is. It’s an alchemical blend of affinity and focus that takes us to a place within that feels as close as we ever get to “home.” It’s like pulling into our own train station after a long trip — joy, relief, a pleasant exhaustion.

If a writer or artist creates from a place of truth and spirit and generosity, then I may be able to enter and ride this person’s train back to my own station. It’s the same with beautiful music and art.

Beauty is meaning.

But rather than a compendium of philosophical reflections suspended mid-air by the free-hanging laziness of aphorism, Lamott’s book is a tapestry of real stories — “real” in the rawest, most soul-shaking sense of the word — from which her firmly grounded yet elevating wisdom springs. In another essay, Lamott — a staunch champion of the uncomfortable art of letting yourself be seen — recounts her own journey from a difficult childhood to self-destruction to recovery and meaning. In a passage that evokes Henry Miller’s assertion that “it takes only one friend, if he is a man of faith, to work miracles,” she writes:

What saved me was that I found gentle, loyal and hilarious companions, which is at the heart of meaning: maybe we don’t find a lot of answers to life’s tougher questions, but if we find a few true friends, that’s even better. They help you see who you truly are, which is not always the loveliest possible version of yourself, but then comes the greatest miracle of all — they still love you.

I also learned that you didn’t come onto this earth as a perfectionist or control freak. You weren’t born a person of cringe and contraction. You were born as energy, as life, made of the same stuff as stars, blossoms, breezes. You learned contraction to survive, but that was then. You have paid through the nose — paid but good. It is now your turn to reap.

It can be healthy to hate what life has given you, and to insist on being a big mess for a while. This takes great courage. But then, at some point, the better of two choices is to get back up on your feet and live again.

In the fourth essay, Lamott revisits this subject of how we embolden each other to go on living. Echoing Emerson’s unforgettable contention that “people wish to be settled [but] only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them,” she writes:

Alone, we are doomed, but by the same token, we’ve learned that people are impossible, even the ones we love most — especially the ones we love most: they’re damaged, prickly and set in their ways. Also, they’ve gotten old and a little funny, which can be draining. It is most comfortable to be invisible, to observe life from a distance, at one with our own intoxicating superior thoughts. But comfort and isolation are not where the surprises are. They are not where hope is… Only together do we somehow keep coming through unsurvivable loss, the stress of never knowing how things will shake down, to the biggest miracle of all, that against all odds, we come through the end of the world, again and again — changed but intact (more or less)… Insofar as I have any idea of “the truth,” I believe this to be as true as gravity and grace.

I’ve always loved funky rustic quilts more than elegant and maybe lovelier ones. You see the beauty of homeliness and rough patches in how they defy expectations of order and comfort. They have at the same time enormous solemnity and exuberance. They may be made of rags, torn clothes that don’t at all go together, but they somehow can be muscular and pretty. The colors are often strong, with a lot of rhythm and discipline and a crazy sense of order. They’re improvised, like jazz, where one thing leads to another, without any idea of exactly where the route will lead, except that it will refer to something else maybe already established, or about to be. Embedded in quilts and jazz are clues to escape and strength, sanctuary and warmth. The world is always going to be dangerous, and people get badly banged up, but how can there be more meaning than helping one another stand up in a wind and stay warm?

Stitches is a soul-stretching read in its totality — the kind you revisit again and again, and find especially assuaging assurance during life’s darkest moments. Complement it with Lamott on the greatest gift of friendship, Meghan Daum on how we become who we are, and Victoria Safford on what hope really means.

What comes after fossil fuels?

What comes after fossil fuels?

By Bill McKibben, in The New Yorker, March 11, 2020

The fossil-fuel industry is slowly dying. It’s not just because of the transitory effect of the coronavirus, which has temporarily cut demand; it’s secular, as the economists say. Justlast week, Bloomberg reported that even natural-gas utilities are feeling the scorn of investors, who want to put their money in renewable electricity. The key question, of course, is how slowly the industry is dying—we badly need to speed up the current trajectory to catch up with the physics of climate change.

But it’s not too early to start asking what the industry will leave behind, beyond a badly overheated planet. And one answer, apparently, is a huge number of holes in the ground, not to mention a huge number of holes in government budgets. It turns out that, in jurisdictions around the planet, oil and gas companies have been failing to reclaim, or even plug, old wells that are no longer producing in commercial quantities. These unfunded liabilities are truly enormous.

Take Alberta, Canada, for example: the Alberta Energy Regulator has publicly estimated that the province faces $18.5 billion in costs for oil and gas wells that need to be decommissioned. But the A.E.R.’s internal review shows that the estimated cost could be up to forty billion to seventy billion. It has a hundred and seven thousand wells that are depleted past the point of profitability. Another ninety-three thousand wells are inactive, and seventy-seven thousand have been plugged but are awaiting the more expensive part of cleaning up the site. Many of those are “orphaned”—the companies that owned them have gone bankrupt—and some, in addition to leaving scars in the landscape, are still leaking greenhouse gases, such as methane, into the atmosphere, making life hard for the farmers who must work around them. The Alberta authorities have on hand about two hundred and twenty-six million dollars “in security deposits to pay for cleanup if companies declare bankruptcy.”

The picture looks much the same around the world. The Carbon Tracker Initiative, a London-based think tank, published a paper last month pointing out that “asset retirement obligations,” the term for what oil companies will have to pay to decommission their old wells, are significant, though hard to quantify, since “companies are not required to disclose the relevant information and rarely do.” But, in Europe, for instance, in 2006, these environmental liabilities amount to half of the companies’ reported debt obligations. The working assumption has always been that the costs would be paid by the proceeds from future operations: drill a new well, and part of the profit will go to pay for capping the last one. But that assumption no longer makes sense: since climate change is forcing us to keep oil and gas in the ground, the revenue stream for that cleanup is likely to disappear.

“The risk that the taxpayers will be left holding the bag is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore,” the report concludes. “Moreover, industry’s argument calls into question why you would allow the oil and gas activity in the first place, if the project cannot pay for its eventual retirement.” A good point, and one that will be a drag on the already lagging fossil-fuel sector, as investors begin to ask more probing questions.

Mark Olalde and Ryan Menezes, in the Los Angeles Times, provided a really powerful closeup of one city last week: Los Angeles, it turns out, has nearly a thousand abandoned wells. “If not plugged and cleaned up, many of these orphaned wells will continue to expose people to toxic gases, complicate redevelopment and pose rare but serious threats of explosions. If the state were to tackle the cleanup, it would cost tens of millions of dollars.” Oh, and the city’s fire department has just one full-time well inspector.

If there’s a bright spot in all of this, it’s that the need to clean up these wells could provide ongoing work for precisely the workers who drilled them, allowing them an easier transition to the future. Two Canadian activists—Regan Boychuk, a founder of Reclaim Alberta and the Alberta Liabilities Disclosure Project, and Avi Lewis, the co-founder and strategic director of the Leap—outlined in the Toronto Star what they call an “epic opportunity.” A government “serious about sparking the next boom in the oil patch,” they write, would force the companies that have extracted hundreds of billions in profits from Canada’s prairies to use the revenues from their mature and declining wells to underwrite the cleanup, creating “decades of full employment” in Alberta. That would be the closest thing to a happy ending the oil industry can still provide the planet.

 Climate School

• An ominous new report helps us understand the basic math of climate change. Scientists who, for the past thirty years, have studied three hundred thousand trees in tropical rain forests, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Amazon, report that the trees’ ability to soak up carbon from the atmosphere is, apparently, flagging. “We’ve found that one of the most worrying impacts of climate change has already begun,” Simon Lewis, a professor in the school of geography at the University of Leeds, in England, and one of the senior authors of the research, told the Guardian. “This is decades ahead of even the most pessimistic climate models.”
  
  
• A report along the same lines but more hopeful: Can large-scale plantings of a South African shrub help soak up lots of carbon dioxide? “Because of spekboom’s remarkable growth rate, its rate of carbon capture can rival that of tropical forests,” a scientist who has studied the plant for years told the BBC.

Passing the Mic

This week, I interviewed Vann R. Newkirk, II, a staff writer at The Atlantic, about his new podcast series “Floodlines,” which débuts this week. It’s an eight-part look at the legacy of Hurricane Katrina, which means, of course, that it’s also a look at the moment when both climate change and inequality emerged as concerns for many Americans.

 

Katrina felt revelatory—about climate change but also about who counts and who doesn’t in our country. I think a fair number of Americans were shocked to discover that lots of their fellow-citizens didn’t have cars, so they couldn’t simply flee. Was it a significant moment in the wider discovery of inequality in America?

I think Katrina and the levees breaking were a moment comparable to, say, the Dust Bowl, in terms of reorienting people to the shape of inequality in America. Some of the critiques of white supremacy (and environmental racism) that we consider almost standard today were considered fringe or conspiratorial before Katrina. 

The United Nations estimates that we could see a billion climate refugees this century. Given the lessons of the Katrina diaspora, what should we be thinking about when we read numbers like that?

The lesson of Katrina is that we already are seeing mass movements of people within the United States at the leading edges of climate disasters. Hurricane Maria, in 2017, reiterated that point, and state leaders should already be planning for large, permanent population shifts—both due to sudden disasters and to long-term attrition. Lots of people will be rethinking what “home” means. But another thing that Katrina should teach us is that maybe it’s time to also rethink the “refugee” framework. The American obligation to victims of climate change shouldn’t be motivated solely by altruism or charity. Rather, those victims have a claim against the rest of us—against U.S. government policy, against those who might profit off their displacement, and against those of us who warm and degrade the world—that we are morally bound to settle. This was the case during Katrina, and it will be for every climate-linked catastrophe down the road. 

I’ve stood under that new levee wall in New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward at commemorations of the disaster and felt a welter of different emotions, from sadness and anger at the history behind it to a fear that it was, at best, a stopgap against a still-rising tide. What do you feel when you’re there, and what do you think longtime residents of that neighborhood feel?

I’ve spent a lot of time in the past year around the Lower Ninth Ward and with people who have roots there, and in my mind it’s become something like a Black Atlantis. The depths of pride and nostalgia people have for it feel, somehow, even more powerful than most folks’ memory of home. It’s a place defined by precariousness but also by the pride of building something of your own, for a community that hasn’t often been allowed to have things of their own. Standing by the wall, thinking about the power of their memory and the depths of loss, I’ve been overwhelmed at times.

Scoreboard

🔄It’s hard to call this a win or a loss, but it’s certainly wild: Saudi Arabia announced that it would open the spigots and cut its oil prices by nearly ten per cent. The news—part of a fight with the Russians for market share amid falling demand—led to the most dramatic single-day decline in world crude prices in at least three decades. For motorists, it may mean paying two dollars or less for a gallon of gas, but for people worried about the climate it cuts two ways. Cheap oil means we’ll use more: expect the already robust demand for S.U.V.s to continue. On the other hand, the lower price makes it hard for many producers to drill new wells—in particular, high-cost producers, such as those in Canada’s tar sands.

⬆️ The Ivies have been the last redoubt for the oil industry, as they fight against the divestment movement—but last week Brown University announced the league’s first total divestment from funds that focus on fossil fuels. “People know that this sector is dying . . . and it’s just not a good long-term investment,” Brown’s president, Christina Paxson, told the student newspaper. “It carries too much risk for the endowment.” The announcement was followed a few days later by a similar pledge from Wesleyan—but, whereas Brown is already in the process of selling ninety per cent of its stock, Wesleyan said that the process could take until 2030, drawing a mixed reaction from student activists who point out that the climate crisis is now.

⬆️ For those keeping track of efforts to stop the financing of fossil fuels, an increasingly common note was struck by the Swiss bank UBS, which said that it was joining other institutions no longer interested in financing thermal coal, tar sands, or Arctic offshore oil projects—notably Trump Administration plans to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. An increasingly fascinating question: Exactly who will be willing to underwrite drilling in what’s been called America’s Serengeti.

Warming Up

Two pieces of music I’ve had on repeat lately: Dreams to Be Born, by Rebecca Foon, and Legacies, by Jesse Paris Smith. Both are meditative, absorbing, masterly; and they come from a pair of musical activists whose Pathway to Paris concert series has turned into an adroit nonprofit that spurs worldwide climate action.

—Bill McKibben

Adam Gopnik on Trump's impeachment and aquittal

I don't think there are writers on public affairs I admire more than Adam Gopnik of The New Yorker. He has been writing for that magazine since 1986. Among his work is a just-completed book, A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism. The following account is a retrospective appraisal of Trump's impeachment and acquittal.

 

THIRTEEN (WELL, TEN) WAYS OF LOOKING AT AN IMPEACHMENT AND ACQUITTAL

By Adam Gopnik
February 8, 2020, The New Yorker

(With apologies to Wallace Stevens, and in descending order of despair—though, perhaps, ascending order of importance.)

Impeachment was, despite it all, essential.

The purpose of impeachment was never political. It was never meant to be undertaken, and never should have been undertaken, with an eye to the Democrats being in a better political position after it was over. On those grounds it was, as Nancy Pelosi clearly felt, up to the very brink, a gamble not worth taking. The reasonable argument for why it had to be attempted was that to not impeach Donald Trump was not, well, reasonable. To allow obvious heedlessness to pass unchallenged was to collaborate in it. Impeachment was undertaken out of principle—the principle that the rule of law matters, and the corollary principle that political parties are not put in office to practice passivity. And it was, it must always be remembered, undertaken not at the political behest of a few radicals but in response to the collective and appropriate panic of national-security and intelligence professionals within the executive branch, who blew whistles and gave testimony because they believed that the President’s behavior was as wrong as wrong could be. Whether it was politically advantageous or not in the short run, it would have been politically disastrous in the long run to crawl away from such a conflict begun in such patriotic good faith. Right really should matter here.

Yes, but Trump won, and the consequences are terrifying.

As some people said at the time, the one good thing about an attempted impeachment was that at least the Republican senators, who all know exactly who and what Trump is, would at last be forced to own their bad consciences. What no one properly understood was that they had no consciences left to own—that their recognition of Trump’s obvious guilt would be overwhelmed by their fear of his opposition and that of his followers; exactly because they knew how bad he was, they would be compelled to redouble their irrational allegiance. They could not even look at any evidence, because they knew what it would show. Bad money always gets thrown in after good, as the gamble becomes ever more desperate. The trouble is that Trump is now left in firmer control of a party made passive by adherence to him, with his wounded narcissism leaving him more evidently deranged than before. His behavior during his post-impeachment appearances might have seemed extreme to Ludwig II of Bavaria, or caused Caligula to raise an eyebrow. Meanwhile, Attorney General William Barr will protect Trump while allowing the Justice Department to be used as a weapon against his enemies. Of all the truly frightening moments of the process, the worst might have been the attempt at reassurance by Senator Lamar Alexander, who insisted that, though Trump might have been mistaken to ask a foreign President to investigate his political rivals, he will now know that the right thing to have done would have been to ask his Attorney General to start investigations. That this idea—in itself a betrayal of every imaginable American constitutional principle—was proposed as more appropriate is a true mark of the defeat of the rule of law. Nothing now stands between Trump’s id and Trump’s actions.

Actually, Trump won, but it’s trivial.

Trump is an inherently weak President—one with a narrow base of support and zero persuasion skills, and, as of now, one who is too chaotic to be much good at suppressing dissent. His acts and their intended consequences are further apart than our fears and his unhinged rages make us believe. Imagine if the plot had succeeded and the President of Ukraine actually announced investigations into the Bidens—would anyone have actually been fooled about the origins of those investigations, aside from those among Trump’s followers who live to be fooled by him? The true pattern of Trumpism—oafish chaos with self-defeating results, evil talk, and impotent action—will continue. Nothing has altered. The best efforts of Trump are horribly ugly but ultimately meaningless. All that has happened is that we are exactly where we were before, but with one side marginally less passive and the other marginally more enraged. Allowing Trump to have gotten away with his “perfect” phone call would seem to us now far worse as policy, while having exactly the same effect of creating an ever more unbounded Trump. A Trump not called to order would be no different than one who has been.

And you know what? Actually, Trump lost.

The idea of a “verdict of history” is an absurdity. But the verdict of verdicts is not. In this regard, Mitt Romney’s speech was, however impotent judicially, dispositive morally. Scoffing at the idea that Trump’s behavior was not impeachable, showing that it obviously was, Romney ended all ambiguity and spoke for the truth, and to history.

Adam Schiff’s eloquence will always be remembered.

Certainly, the most permanent moment of the entire impeachment lay in Schiff’s performance before the Senate as the lead House manager. Often speaking extemporaneously, with a sobriety and a carefully paced intelligence that one might have thought had vanished entirely from the American lectern, let alone American politics, he was, without exaggeration, Lincoln-like. Lincoln-like, that is, in a highly specific, formal way: he laid a careful, even tedious foundation of elaborate law and evidence, and then rose to moral exhortation only on that basis. He turned legal argument into moral practice. It may be too late for anyone to act on this truth, but, if the Democratic Party could vote its conscience and its honor right now, it would surely end, en masse, by nominating Schiff for President.

And so will Romney’s courage.

John F. Kennedy’s famous book “Profiles in Courage” would be better off called “Profiles in Collaboration,” since, as all now know, it was largely written by his doppelgänger, Theodore Sorensen, albeit from J.F.K.’s ideas, while the courage of many of Kennedy’s subjects, especially those who voted to acquit Andrew Johnson in his impeachment trial, now seems less conclusive than it once did. No matter—the central idea is that democratic politics, though designed to conform legislator to constituency, sometimes demand a legislator who refuses to conform. This idea, of nonconformity through principle, is essential to the difference between demagogic democracy and liberal democracy, and Mitt Romney, whatever his flaws and faults, defined it for his time. (It was made all the more moving by his being inspired by that most echt American of scriptures, the Book of Mormon.)

There was a truly shocking collapse of conscience.

The real story was not the complete collapse of conscience among the Senate Republicans. That was to be expected—after all, the first vote for impeachment ever offered by a senator of the same political party as the President was Romney’s. The real collapse was among the higher-ranking politically appointed military and national-security professionals who had been part of Trump’s inner circle before departing it, voluntarily or not. John Bolton’s behavior, in particular, was inexplicable. Clearly filled with contempt for Trump’s manifest unfitness, he refused to speak openly against him, apparently out of some bizarre mix of distaste for the Democratic Congress and a will to sell books in the fall. The passivity of the Republicans was to be expected; that of Bolton was not. Nor was that of other high-ranking former officials, including respected retired generals like James Mattis—and H. R. McMaster and John F. Kelly, who spoke softly, but not sharply. Though they weren’t in the White House at the time of the Ukraine phone call, they know the character of the President. Yet they remained largely silent, seemingly out of a misplaced sense of professionalism and discretion. (Misplaced because of the unique gravity and urgency of the circumstance. Though it’s good for soldiers to be discreet, there are moments when their duties as citizens are more important than their habits as officers.)

It’s over, and Trump will win.

An overwhelming number of vectors now point toward Trump’s reëlection this year: the state of the economy, the disarray of the Democrats, and the general truth that incumbent Presidents win. How the Constitution will survive in the face of a second victory, given the speed with which Trump is demolishing it now, is hard to imagine.

It’s not over, and Trump will lose.

Trump’s disadvantages remain enormous. No incumbent President before him has done so little to win over even a small part of the opposition. The Democrats just need to nominate someone capable of understanding and acting on the basic truth of all liberal-democratic politics—that what is needed is the broadest possible coalition, the biggest imaginable tent in which to gather the forces against the autocrat. It should not really be as hard as it is threatening to be.

History has its eyes on you.

This quote from “Hamilton,” and the very fact that, not long ago, that work, with its image of glorious diversity, was the one great American entertainment, should remind us of how rapidly and suddenly political waves can crest and take over. The contingencies and chances that come with political life are far greater than its destinies and certainties. Any attempt to trace our current crisis to some inexorable pattern laid down in 1964 or 1980 or even 2007 is absurd. It was not very long ago when the natural culmination of the cycles of history seemed to be the Presidency of Barack Obama—a Presidency that had seemed to many impossible to imagine, and that, as hard as it is for progressives to accept, was sufficiently radical to inspire the wild reaction that we are living through now. History is made by lost regiments, late-arriving cavalry, or, in this case, by tens of thousands of votes hived off here and there in Midwestern states. Nothing is written, or fated, or certain, and, as momentous as this election will be, no one knows its outcome, which will depend as much on the tiny fractals of chance as on some inexorable plot in history.

History is happening.

One last quote from “Hamilton,” again, to coax us all out of the sudden, enforced numbness that many feel. There has been, perhaps, in the past three years, an undue lack of passion in the opposition to Trump’s degradation of democracy into Putin-Orbán-style autocracy. Too much trust, perhaps, was placed in the workings of constructional processes, culminating in the impeachment and acquittal. During Trump’s term, there has been no march on Washington as large as the first Women’s March, right after the Inauguration, no turn to mass protest as the fundamental anti-democratic nature of the Administration deepens. History will forgive us our failures; it will never forgive us our passivity. The coming months are fateful for our democracy; everyone will be tested, and every vote will count if all these American ambiguities are, somehow, to be resolved.

On Being: an extraordinary podcast

"On Being" is a weekly podcast available at https://onbeing.org. It consists of a leisurely conversation of the inimitable Krista Tippett with one of a wonderfully diverse collection of fascinating people from many realms of accomplishment: "Pursuing deep thinking, social courage, moral imagination and joy, to renew inner life, outer life, and life together."

For more information look for https://onbeing.org. Here is a short description;

"The On Being show and podcast was created by Krista Tippett inside a legacy media organization (American Public Media) in 2003.

"It began with a controversial idea for a public radio conversation, Speaking of Faith, that would treat the religious and spiritual aspects of life as seriously as we treat politics and economics. On Being, as it has evolved, takes up the great questions of meaning in 21st-century lives and at the intersection of spiritual inquiry, science, social healing, and the arts. What does it mean to be human, how do we want to live, and who will we be to each other?

"The show launched on two public radio stations. Even as it grew year over year, it remained fairly hidden on the dial, consigned, as The New York Times wrote, to the 'God ghetto' timeslot of Sunday mornings. When podcasting came along, On Being took its place among leading podcasts. It has been downloaded and played over 200 million times." 

For a slightly longer and more personal description, Krista Tippett wrote a letter in early 2019 about On Being's birth and continuing evolution. To read it, go to https://onbeing.org/blog/marking-15-years-with-a-new-gathering-place.

 

The Pure Spirit of Greta Thunberg

The Pure Spirit of Greta Thunberg

By Carolyn Kormann
The New Yorker
December 13, 2019

The teen-age activist Greta Thunberg is pure spirit, committed to the foremost emergency of our time and to the science behind it.

 

On December 3rd, Greta Thunberg, the sixteen-year-old climate activist from Sweden, completed her second transatlantic voyage, by almost entirely emissions-free sailboats, in the span of four months. Her small figure, dressed in black, stood, waving, on the bow of a catamaran, as it approached the port of Lisbon. Hundreds of people, standing onshore, cheered, welcoming her back to Europe. “I’m not travelling like this because I want everyone to do so,” she told reporters after walking off the boat onto dry land. “I’m doing this to send a message that it is impossible to live sustainably today, and that needs to change.” The scene felt both ancient and precisely of this moment, like Thunberg herself, who writes regularly in a paper journal but has mastered social-media virality, who can seem ageless and androgynous (the fierce stare) while also strikingly young and girlish (the braids), who acts with an otherworldly grace while delivering an outraged message grounded in the latest, best climate science. Her lightning-strike emergence as the planet’s hero, her capacity to inspire students around the world—all in the span of little more than a year—can seem like a prophesied story, an epic poem, a fable. Margaret Atwood (and others, including myself) have compared her to Joan of Arc—if the teen-age medieval warrior, who was burned at the stake in part for impersonating a man, had been inspired by scientific reports instead of divine voices and visions of angels. Centuries from now, we hope, people will live in a thriving, equitable civilization and tell Thunberg’s tale, too.

But it is, as Thunberg says repeatedly, precisely what we do during this century that will determine the fate of those future centuries, and what we do during the next decade that will determine the climate for the nearly two billion children alive today. They are the ones Thunberg represents, whom she is fighting for, and whom she has mobilized, since August, 2018, when she first sat outside the Swedish Parliament with a simple handwritten sign that read, in black letters, “skolstrejk for klimatet.” Hundreds of thousands of students (and, gradually, their parents), in cities around the world, have followed her lead, striking from school and marching in the streets to protest for climate action. “You say you love your children above all else,” she said in her first big address, at last December’s United Nations climate talks. “And yet you are stealing their future in front of their very eyes.”

From Lisbon, Thunberg took a train to Madrid, where leaders from around the world were gathering for another round—the twenty-fifth since 1995—of U.N. climate negotiations (known as the Conference of the Parties, or COP25). The point of this year’s talks was for countries to lay the groundwork for ambitious new targets in the reduction of their greenhouse-gas emissions. By the end of 2020, according to the terms of the Paris Agreement, countries are to commit to new nationally determined contributions (N.D.C.s, in U.N.-speak) that reflect the scale of global decarbonization necessary to limit global heating to two degrees Celsius. (The current pool of N.D.C.s, which many countries are not even meeting, would lead to more than three degrees warming by century’s end.) A related issue at the talks has involved carbon markets—detailed in Article 6 of the Paris Agreement—in which one country can pay another country for its emissions reductions (the equivalent of buying a carbon credit) and then count those reductions towards its own N.D.C. Australia, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, and India have, reportedly, all been blocking text that would provide strong regulations of these kinds of markets and accounting mechanisms. Though the final text of this year’s agreement is due today, the deliberations will likely continue at least until Saturday.

Thunberg, meanwhile, has increasingly referred, in mathematical detail, to carbon budgets, or the amount of carbon dioxide that we have left to emit into the atmosphere if we want to limit global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius. In her speech to world leaders in Madrid, on Tuesday, she referred her audiences to page 108, chapter 2, of the 2018 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, and she said that, if we are to have a sixty-seven per cent chance of achieving that goal, we had, as of the first of January, 2018, four-hundred-and-twenty gigatons of carbon dioxide left in our carbon budget. That number is now much lower, considering that we emit approximately forty-two gigatons of carbon dioxide every year. This means that we have roughly eight years left to burn fossil fuels at current levels before our budget is empty. For all the efforts underway to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, they are nowhere near enough. Global emissions again hit a record high in 2019. As Thunberg also said, in the same speech, “The biggest danger is not inaction. The real danger is when politicians and C.E.O.s are making it look like real action is happening, when in fact almost nothing is being done, apart from clever accounting and creative P.R.”

On Wednesday, Time named Thunberg the magazine’s Person of the Year. Donald Trump, who is famously obsessed with being on the cover of Time, could not stand it. He has campaigned on fossil-fuel expansion, has betrayed on numerous occasions that he does not understand what climate change is, and, on November 4th, he officially began proceedings to remove the U.S. from the Paris Agreement. (Every other country in the world remains a signatory to the pact.) On Thursday, in response to Thunberg’s news, he tweeted: “So ridiculous. Greta must work on her Anger Management problem, then go to a good old fashioned movie with a friend! Chill Greta, Chill!” Thunberg, as always, took the President’s mockery in stride, changing her Twitter bio, minutes later, to “A teenager working on her anger management problem. Currently chilling and watching a good old fashioned movie with a friend.”

This is not the first time that Thunberg has one-upped Trump’s mocking tweets. In September, she gave a historic speech with the kind of rhetorical vigor that exemplifies her gifts as an orator. “This is all wrong,” she said. “I shouldn’t be up here. I should be back in school, on the other side of the ocean. Yet you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you!” Later, Trump retweeted a video clip of her remarks, adding, “She seems like a very happy young girl looking forward to a bright and wonderful future. So nice to see!” The same day, Thunberg put the exact words in her Twitter bio: “A very happy young girl looking forward to a bright and wonderful future.”

Thunberg is Trump’s perfect foil. She is pure spirit, committed to the foremost emergency of our time, to the science behind it, and to the people who are working every day to rapidly change our energy systems and consumption patterns so that we avert climate change’s deadliest impacts and destabilizing tipping points. Thunberg is devoted to learning, writing, and understanding the world around her. She constantly lifts up other young climate leaders—especially those from indigenous and frontline communities—and begs reporters to focus on them, not her. (On Monday, she and Germany’s most prominent youth activist, Luisa Neubauer, hosted a press conference with young leaders from the Marshall Islands, the Philippines, Russia, and Uganda.) She is a gifted public speaker, not because she stirs up chaos and hate through incoherent rants, but because she speaks elegantly and intelligently, in logical, pithy, unmuddied sentences. Her rhetorical gifts are, perhaps, all the more remarkable considering that, when she was younger, she fell into a major depression concerning climate change and stopped speaking altogether for months. As she said at the start of her speech on Tuesday, “A year and a half ago, I didn’t speak to anyone unless I really had to. But then I found a reason to speak.”

 

David Whyte on Vulnerability

Vulnerability

David Whyte

December 12, 2016

Vulnerability is not a weakness, a passing indisposition, or something we can arrange to do without, vulnerability is not a choice, vulnerability is the underlying, ever present and abiding undercurrent of our natural state. To run from vulnerability is to run from the essence of our nature, the attempt to be invulnerable is the vain attempt to become something we are not and most especially, to close off our understanding of the grief of others. More seriously, in refusing our vulnerability we refuse the help needed at every turn of our existence and immobilize the essential, tidal and conversational foundations of our identity.

To have a temporary, isolated sense of power over all events and circumstances, is a lovely illusionary privilege and perhaps the prime and most beautifully constructed conceit of being human and especially of being youthfully human, but it is a privilege that must be surrendered with that same youth, with ill health, with accident, with the loss of loved ones who do not share our untouchable powers; powers eventually and most emphatically given up, as we approach our last breath.

The only choice we have as we mature is how we inhabit our vulnerability, how we become larger and more courageous and more compassionate through our intimacy with disappearance. Our choice is to inhabit vulnerability as generous citizens of loss, robustly and fully, or conversely, as misers and complainers, reluctant and fearful, always at the gates of existence, but never bravely and completely attempting to enter, never wanting to risk ourselves, never walking fully through the door.

---

Excerpted with permission from Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words by David Whyte.

From Krista Tippett's "On Being":

Before he was known as a poet and philosopher, David Whyte lived another life as a naturalist. After getting his degree in marine zoology he spent almost two years living in the Galapagos Islands observing animals, birds, and landscapes. He says in this week’s On Being that this extended period of deep and attentive observation opened him to a new way of understanding the act of paying attention.

“I began to realize that my identity depended not upon any beliefs I had … but my identity actually depended on how much attention I was paying to things that were other than myself,” he says. “And as you deepen this intentionality and this attention, you started to broaden and

deepen your own sense of presence."

 

Everything Is Waiting for You

David Whyte

Listen

After Derek Mahon

Your great mistake is to act the drama
as if you were alone. As if life
were a progressive and cunning crime
with no witness to the tiny hidden
transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny
the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely,
even you, at times, have felt the grand array;
the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding
out your solo voice. You must note
the way the soap dish enables you,
or the window latch grants you freedom.
Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.
The stairs are your mentor of things
to come, the doors have always been there
to frighten you and invite you,
and the tiny speaker in the phone
is your dream-ladder to divinity.

Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the
conversation. The kettle is singing
even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots
have left their arrogant aloofness and
seen the good in you at last. All the birds
and creatures of the world are unutterably
themselves. Everything is waiting for you.

 

Loving a Vanishing World: a vivid perspective on the climate emergency — Emily Johnston

Yesterday I encountered the work of Emily Johnston, poet, powerful writer, climate activist, runner, builder. She contributes to the work of Resilience,  "a program of Post Carbon Institute, a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping the world transition away from fossil fuels and build sustainable, resilient communities." Her first book of poems and prose poems, Her Animals, was published in 2015 by Hummingbird Press. I want to share with readers of Reckonings the gist of her recent essay, "Loving a Vanishing World," recently published in Medium at  https://medium.com/@enjohnston/loving-a-vanishing-world-ace33c11fe0.

 

Johnston's essay strikes a deep personal chord for me, but I hope will intrigue you as well. I'll offer you enough of her essay (the whole is perhaps a 20-minute read) to give you a sense of its—and her—character.

 

The waters to which Johnston is drawn, among British Columbia's Gulf Islands, were among those into which I was first immersed as a young child, in a kind of deep, unknowing baptism, waters my family explored from our home on Mercer Island in Lake Washington. 

At that age and in that time I had no access to Johnston's contemporary consciousness, but I can imagine that then some seeds were set and nourished that are now growing to maturity, I hope in time to respond usefully to her core questions: 

"[W]hat does it mean to love this place? What does it mean to love anyone or anything, in a world whose vanishing is accelerating, perhaps beyond our capacity to save the things that we love most?

"The word 'sacrament' comes from the Latin for 'solemn oath'—used by early Christians.... as the translation for the Greek word for 'mystery.' This work is, in the deepest sense, both a solemn oath and a mystery; it is a sacrament. We are walking into great darkness, and the light that guides us must come from within." 

We have such inspiring companionship, from Ruth Bader Ginsburg to Greta Thunberg. 

"What we do matters. We cannot save the world. We can save a great deal. How much depends on us and us alone. That is our burden, and our greatest gift." 

___________________________

"Do you want to be among those who let the fossil fuel industry kill the world? Or do you want to be among those who did everything in their power to save what could be saved?

"In the world of your imagining, can you see that ending fossil fuel use in the developed world in the next twelve or fifteen years is actually far easier and cheaper than the alternative? Can you see that the only sane thing to do is to radically change our agriculture and our forestry to help stabilize the climate — again, knowing that the alternative would be so, so much harder? Can you see children living who might have drowned, reasonably stable communities that might have burned, species and animal individuals hanging on into the coming century and beyond — and understand those as a thing to fight for, for the rest of your life?

"We can rejoin the web of life. We do not have to be its destroyer. But our last best chance is now, and countless tasks lie ahead of us.

"So when you go home and are tired and unsettled and thinking about all that you have to do; or next week, when... someone asks you to do something you’re not sure you want to do; or better yet, when you realize that there’s something you could do by bringing a group of people together, remember: in any moment, we can choose to show up.

"We can let them kill this beautiful world— or we can get to work making space for a decent future."

 

 

A letter about Martin Buber, from the Schumacher Center for a New Economics

Martin Buber in the “He-Atid” bookstore in Jerusalem, 1946 (Martin Buber Archives).

Dear John Boettiger, While reviewing early Schumacher Center newsletters, we found this April 1985 reminder of Martin Buber’s contribution to new economic/social thinking. Buber On The Social Future We came to trust Martin Buber for his careful record of the human spirit in its process of observing itself in relation to the universe. In his book I And Thou, Buber was able to sustain and explore the simultaneous experiences of observer and observed. Commenting on the languages of “primitive” peoples in which the separation of the “I” and the “thou” was not yet as sharpened, Buber writes: “The Feugian (language) surpasses our analytical wisdom with a sentence-word of seven syllables that literally means: ‘they look at each other, each waiting for the other to offer to do that which both desire but neither wishes to do.'”* We came to love Martin Buber for his wonderful retellings of old Hasidic tales, the world of sense perception and the world of imagination blending, separating and then coloring each other again. Only recently did we discover Buber’s social writings. His Paths in Utopia is a concise history of decentralist-cooperative thinking. He discusses Saint-Simon, Fourier, Owen, Marx, Proudhon, Kropotkin and Landauer among others (see New Economic Thought Timeline) and is quickly able to come to the essence of the writer’s contribution, finding and naming the vision that moved each one. But while describing these other social thinkers, Buber is at the same time tracing his own path, his own vision of a new social order. A recurring theme in the book is that of “Associations” — free associations of producers and consumers who together out of their mutual interest determine production and quantity and distribution. Buber sees these associations as small in scale and regional, or land-based, and so of necessity there is an element of self-sufficiency in their planning. Buber suggests that the limited and vying interests of the producer against the consumer can only shape a limited and vying future. He points again to the simultaneous experience, to our mutual interests as both producers and consumers. It is in this simultaneity that individuals meet at a larger social level and feel their communality. It is a vision of local control of local resources and manufacturing and of participation in decisions by those affected by those decisions. Paraphrasing the school of Fourier, Buber writes: “Only through these voluntary associations will the third and last emancipatory phase of history come about in which the first having made serfs out of slaves, and the second wage earners out of serfs, the third will accomplish the transformation of wage earners into companions or associates.” * Buber’s elaboration of the concept of producer/consumer associations is bold and useful.   Robyn Van En and farm workers distributing the week’s CSA shares. Photo by Clemens Kalischer. It is this same recognition of the transformative power of consumers and producers working together that led Robyn Van En to shape the Community Supported Agriculture movement. It is also this same recognition that led the Schumacher Center staff to coin the term Community Supported Industry that would have consumers and producers co-creating new import-replacement businesses, sharing the risk to ensure the future character of their local economies.  Best wishes, Staff of the Schumacher Center for a New Economics

350.org

I think this is the first occasion on which I've given over an entry in Reckonings wholly to a particular organization or movement, but in this event it's about time.

350.org was founded by Bill McKibben and a group of Middlebury College students in 2007 as a movement "to stand up to the fossil fuel industry to stop all new coal, oil and gas projects and build clean energy for all." It now has members and groups throughout the world, and it's not easy to overstate its growth in those 12 years. The remainder of this piece is drawn from the 350.org website.

To solve the climate crisis, we need to organize for a Fossil Free world. 350 is building a future that's just, prosperous, equitable and safe from the effects of climate change. We're an international movement of ordinary people working to end the age of fossil fuels and build a world of community-led renewable energy for all.

350's goals are essentially threefold:

1. A Fast & Just Transition to 100% Renewable Energy for All
   Accelerate the transition to a new, just clean energy economy by supporting community-led energy solutions.
2. No New Fossil Fuel Projects Anywhere.
   Stop and ban all oil, coal and gas projects from being built through local resolutions and community resistance.
3. Not a Penny more for Dirty Energy
   Cut off the social license and financing for fossil fuel companies — divest, de-sponsor and defund.

 

 

 

350's values have five essential components:

1. We are bold, creative and strategic.

The climate crisis is immense – we must be daring and courageous in response. We embrace new experiments and solutions, recognizing that this crisis requires new ways of solving problems.

2. We Work for Justice

The fight against climate change is a fight for justice. People all over the world are feeling the impacts, but the people suffering the most are the ones who have done the least to cause the problem. The work we do — and the ways we do it — has to address that injustice. That means listening to the communities who are getting hit the hardest, amplifying the voices that are being silenced, and following the leadership of the people on the frontlines of the crisis.

3. We Care for and Trust One Another

We take care of ourselves and our communities, honor one another in our non-violent approach to this work, and share that spirit and learning with others. No one has all the answers, so we value the experience and knowledge of our partners and our communities. That's why we listen to our communities and our allies to learn and evolve together.

4. We are Stronger When We Collaborate

Climate change is not just an environmental issue, or a social justice issue, or an economic issue — it’s all of those things at once. The only way we will be strong enough to put pressure on governments and stand up to the fossil fuel industry is if we all work together.

That means bringing people together and building diverse coalitions — from students, to labor unions, human rights and social justice groups; from marginalized communities and faith groups, to universities, business owners and all those who believe in the need for transformational change.

5. We are Transparent and Accountable

To ensure the integrity of our work, we strive to be transparent and open, while respecting everyone's right to privacy and ensuring people's safety. We are accountable to each other, to the people and groups we collaborate with, and to those impacted by our work. We strive to honor the relationships we build with each other.

 

History

350.org was founded in 2008 by a group of university friends in the United States along with author Bill McKibben, who wrote one of the first books on global warming for the general public, with the goal of building a global climate movement. 350 was named after 350 parts per million — the safe concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Our first actions were global days of action that linked activists and organizations around the world, including the International Day of Climate Action in 2009, the Global Work Party in 2010, Moving Planet in 2011. 350 quickly became a planet-wide collaboration of organizers, community groups and regular people fighting for the future.

Today 350 works on grassroots campaigns across the globe: from opposing coal plants and mega-pipelines, to supporting renewable energy solutions and cutting financial ties of the fossil fuel industry. All of our work leverages people power to dismantle the influence and infrastructure of the fossil fuel industry.

Some of our proudest moments of recent years include campaigns against Keystone XL and Dakota Access in the United States, stopping fracking in hundreds of cities in Brazil and Argentina, joining historic grassroots mobilizations before and after the Paris Climate Agreement was signed, and pushing hundreds of universities, foundations, cities and churches to divest from fossil fuels.

 

Climate Science Basics:

It’s warming.
It’s us.
We’re sure.
It’s bad.
We can fix it.

 

1. It's warming.

Right now, annual global average temperature is about 1° Celsius* hotter than average. The last cooler-than-average month was in October 1965. One degree Celsius might not sound like a big increase in temperature, but it’s the difference between life and death for thousands of people. Earth has always had natural cycles of warming and cooling, but not like we’re seeing now. The top five hottest years on record are 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, and 2010. And rising temperatures doesn’t only mean it’s getting hotter. The Earth’s climate is complex — even a small increase in average global temperature means big changes, with lots of dangerous side effects.

* For a  Celsius-Fahrenheit conversion table, see here.

2. It's us.

Human beings are causing climate change, largely by burning fossil fuels.

Rising temperatures correlate almost exactly with the release of greenhouse gases.

Before the 18th century, when humans in the industrial west began to burn coal, oil and gas, our atmosphere typically contained about 280 parts per million of carbon dioxide. Those are the conditions “on which civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted.”

Now, as the use of fossil fuels spreads through the world, the amount of carbon in the atmosphere is skyrocketing — we’re now well over 400 parts per million CO2 in the atmosphere. [We just hit 415ppm carbon in the atmosphere for the first time ever in the history of humanity.] At the same time, the rapid growth in demand for animal-based agriculture by wealthier countries has seen other greenhouse gasses like methane and nitrous oxide rapidly rise. The contribution of agriculture causes about 15% of global emissions. Burning fossil fuels remains by far the biggest single contributor to the problem, causing 57% of global emissions. This is compounded by the fact that carbon dioxide stays active in the atmosphere much longer than methane and other greenhouse gasses.

"In 2018," we are reminded by Elizabeth Kolbert, "carbon dioxide emissions from the energy sector rose to a new high of thirty-six billion tons. Also in 2018, nearly thirty million acres of tropical forest were lost—an area the size of Pennsylvania. As the website InsideClimate News noted, this destruction occurred 'even as more corporations and countries made commitments to preserve tropical forests.' As long as we continue to tear through the biosphere, expect the losses to continue to mount." 

Fossil fuel companies are taking millions of years worth of carbon, once stored beneath the earth as fossil fuels, and releasing it into the atmosphere. In 2014, CO2 concentrations crossed 400 ppm in the atmosphere for the first time in at least 2.5 million years.

Keeping fossil fuels in the ground is the most important step we can take to prevent further climate change.

3. We're sure.

An overwhelming 97% of scientists agree that climate change is being caused by human greenhouse gas emissions. There is no meaningful debate about the basic science of climate change.

The finding that more CO2 in the atmosphere will warm the climate dates back to the 1890s. Attacks on the credibility of climate science are perpetuated by vested interests, including the fossil fuel industry, which has pumped millions of dollars into creating uncertainty about our understanding of climate change.

The oil company Exxon knew about climate change’s impact in the 1970s, and found out that action would impact their bottom line. As a result, they joined an industry-wide attack on the truth, creating a false debate that prevented action for decades. Now we know that Exxon, and other companies like Shell, have been taking actions to protect their infrastructure from climate change for decades — while fighting action to protect the rest of us.

It’s also important to listen to indigenous, traditional and local knowledge. In many places of the world elders and community leaders are sharing their understandings of how ecosystems are changing.

If we pay attention to what scientists and frontline communities are telling us, instead of fossil fuel industry deceptions, the message is clear: Humans are causing the rapid onset of climate change, which is already bringing costly impacts across the world. The best way to stop it is by keeping fossil fuels in the ground.

4. It's bad.

One degree of warming has already resulted in devastating impacts across the planet.

Global grain yields have declined by 10% from heatwaves and floods connected to climate change, unleashing hunger and displacement. Over 1 million people living near coasts have been forced from their homes due to rising seas and stronger storms, and millions more are expected to flee in the coming years.

Climate change science has evolved rapidly in recent years and it is now possible for scientists to pinpoint the contribution that climate change is making to many extreme weather events or other impacts: extreme heat, ocean warming and acidification, storms, sea-level rise and melting ice, declining habitat [and enormously increased extinction].

5. We can fix it.

The basic facts of climate change are grim: 80% of fossil fuel reserves need to stay in the ground for us to stay below 2°C* of warming and fossil fuel companies aren’t going to do that without a fight.

Here’s the good news:

1. We know exactly what we have to do — keep fossil fuels in the ground and quickly transition to 100% renewable energy.
2. Renewable energy is getting cheaper and more popular every day. In fact, global carbon emissions have already started to slow due to the rapid growth of clean energy.
3. We’re not alone — the worldwide movement to stop climate change and resist the fossil fuel industry is growing stronger every day.

* Even if we do manage to keep 80% of fossil fuels in the ground, a world that’s 2°C warmer is going to be a much different, scarier place. We’re only at +1°C now, and we’re already seeing more storms, flooding, heatwaves, drought, and island nations at risk of going underwater. +2°C is going to mean a lot of human suffering, and tremendous damage to the planet.

Pablo Neruda, "Keeping Quiet"

I read Neruda's "Keeping Quiet" to our meditation group this past Saturday morning.

It is a beautiful reflection on the deeply engaging practice of stillness.

I've been reflecting lately on a collection of related issues, including the differences and similarities of meditating alone and meditating with a group of friends; the contrasting experiences of speaking and listening to another person, in a dyad and in a group; between moving and stillness, walking and running, doing and being, indifference and engagement, coming and going, happiness* and sadness, happiness and joy**; the mysteries of living, dying and death. There is, of course, diversity in each of those variables (the last none of us know), even moment-by-moment changes in short time spans. To string such qualities of experience together as I have done here is bewildering. Counting to twelve helps, as in meditation we may count our breaths, usually one to ten—then we start over again.

 

* See Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom (2006)

** See David Brooks, "The Difference Between Happiness and Joy," The New York Times, May 7, 2019.

 

 

Keeping Quiet

Now we will count to twelve
and we will all keep still
for once on the face of the earth,
let's not speak in any language;
let's stop for a second,
and not move our arms so much.

It would be an exotic moment
without rush, without engines;
we would all be together
in a sudden strangeness.

Fishermen in the cold sea
would not harm whales
and the man gathering salt
would not look at his hurt hands.

Those who prepare green wars,
wars with gas, wars with fire,
victories with no survivors,
would put on clean clothes
and walk about with their brothers
in the shade, doing nothing.

What I want should not be confused
with total inactivity.

Life is what it is about...

If we were not so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving,
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves
and of threatening ourselves with
death.

Now I'll count up to twelve
and you keep quiet and I will go.

 

                        — Pablo Neruda

 

Greta Thunberg and global warming

I. From The Guardian (UK):

 

Nobody could have predicted that a Swedish teenager would shift the terms of the global climate debate in the way that Greta Thunberg has done. Since she began her school strike in Stockholm last August, Greta has addressed the World Economic Forum in Davos, the European parliament, the UN climate talks in Poland, and met with the Pope in Rome.

 

The school strike was Greta's idea. Green activists and scholars have spoken for years of the generational injustice of climate change. The school strikers belong to a 21st-century generation who have either taken this idea on, or arrived at it through a process of deduction of their own. Greta, who believes her outlook has been influenced by her autism, says she learned about climate change at school aged eight, and became depressed at 11. By 15, her angst had translated itself into a distinctive form of civil disobedience – the Friday school strikes which spread around the world.

 

Green activists and scholars have spoken for years of the generational injustice of climate change. The school strikers belong to a 21st-century generation who have either taken this idea on, or arrived at it through a process of deduction of their own. Greta, who believes her outlook has been influenced by her autism, says she learned about climate change at school aged eight, and became depressed at 11. By 15, her angst had translated itself into a distinctive form of civil disobedience – the Friday school strikes which spread around the world.

 

Here are her remarks to members of the Houses of Parliament (UK) on April 23, 2019:

 

'You did not act in time': Greta Thunberg's remarks to Members of Parliament in London

My name is Greta Thunberg. I am 16 years old. I come from Sweden. And I speak on behalf of future generations.

I know many of you don’t want to listen to us – you say we are just children. But we’re only repeating the message of the united climate science.

Many of you appear concerned that we are wasting valuable lesson time, but I assure you we will go back to school the moment you start listening to science and give us a future. Is that really too much to ask?

In the year 2030 I will be 26 years old. My little sister Beata will be 23. Just like many of your own children or grandchildren. That is a great age, we have been told. When you have all of your life ahead of you. But I am not so sure it will be that great for us.

I was fortunate to be born in a time and place where everyone told us to dream big; I could become whatever I wanted to. I could live wherever I wanted to. People like me had everything we needed and more. Things our grandparents could not even dream of. We had everything we could ever wish for and yet now we may have nothing.

Now we probably don’t even have a future any more.

Because that future was sold so that a small number of people could make unimaginable amounts of money. It was stolen from us every time you said that the sky was the limit, and that you only live once.

You lied to us. You gave us false hope. You told us that the future was something to look forward to. And the saddest thing is that most children are not even aware of the fate that awaits us. We will not understand it until it’s too late. And yet we are the lucky ones. Those who will be affected the hardest are already suffering the consequences. But their voices are not heard.

Is my microphone on? Can you hear me?

Around the year 2030, 10 years 252 days and 10 hours away from now, we will be in a position where we set off an irreversible chain reaction beyond human control, that will most likely lead to the end of our civilisation as we know it. That is unless in that time, permanent and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society have taken place, including a reduction of CO2 emissions by at least 50%.

And please note that these calculations are depending on inventions that have not yet been invented at scale, inventions that are supposed to clear the atmosphere of astronomical amounts of carbon dioxide.

Furthermore, these calculations do not include unforeseen tipping points and feedback loops like the extremely powerful methane gas escaping from rapidly thawing arctic permafrost.

Nor do these scientific calculations include already locked-in warming hidden by toxic air pollution. Nor the aspect of equity – or climate justice – clearly stated throughout the Paris agreement, which is absolutely necessary to make it work on a global scale.

We must also bear in mind that these are just calculations. Estimations. That means that these “points of no return” may occur a bit sooner or later than 2030. No one can know for sure. We can, however, be certain that they will occur approximately in these timeframes, because these calculations are not opinions or wild guesses.

These projections are backed up by scientific facts, concluded by all nations through the IPCC. Nearly every single major national scientific body around the world unreservedly supports the work and findings of the IPCC.

Did you hear what I just said? Is my English OK? Is the microphone on? Because I’m beginning to wonder.

During the last six months I have travelled around Europe for hundreds of hours in trains, electric cars and buses, repeating these life-changing words over and over again. But no one seems to be talking about it, and nothing has changed. In fact, the emissions are still rising.

When I have been travelling around to speak in different countries, I am always offered help to write about the specific climate policies in specific countries. But that is not really necessary. Because the basic problem is the same everywhere. And the basic problem is that basically nothing is being done to halt – or even slow – climate and ecological breakdown, despite all the beautiful words and promises.

The UK is, however, very special. Not only for its mind-blowing historical carbon debt, but also for its current, very creative, carbon accounting.
Since 1990 the UK has achieved a 37% reduction of its territorial CO2 emissions, according to the Global Carbon Project. And that does sound very impressive. But these numbers do not include emissions from aviation, shipping and those associated with imports and exports. If these numbers are included the reduction is around 10% since 1990 – or an an average of 0.4% a year, according to Tyndall Manchester.

And the main reason for this reduction is not a consequence of climate policies, but rather a 2001 EU directive on air quality that essentially forced the UK to close down its very old and extremely dirty coal power plants and replace them with less dirty gas power stations. And switching from one disastrous energy source to a slightly less disastrous one will of course result in a lowering of emissions.

But perhaps the most dangerous misconception about the climate crisis is that we have to “lower” our emissions. Because that is far from enough. Our emissions have to stop if we are to stay below 1.5-2C of warming. The “lowering of emissions” is of course necessary but it is only the beginning of a fast process that must lead to a stop within a couple of decades, or less. And by “stop” I mean net zero – and then quickly on to negative figures. That rules out most of today’s politics.

The fact that we are speaking of “lowering” instead of “stopping” emissions is perhaps the greatest force behind the continuing business as usual. The UK’s active current support of new exploitation of fossil fuels – for example, the UK shale gas fracking industry, the expansion of its North Sea oil and gas fields, the expansion of airports as well as the planning permission for a brand new coal mine – is beyond absurd.

This ongoing irresponsible behaviour will no doubt be remembered in history as one of the greatest failures of humankind.

People always tell me and the other millions of school strikers that we should be proud of ourselves for what we have accomplished. But the only thing that we need to look at is the emission curve. And I’m sorry, but it’s still rising. That curve is the only thing we should look at.

Every time we make a decision we should ask ourselves; how will this decision affect that curve? We should no longer measure our wealth and success in the graph that shows economic growth, but in the curve that shows the emissions of greenhouse gases. We should no longer only ask: “Have we got enough money to go through with this?” but also: “Have we got enough of the carbon budget to spare to go through with this?” That should and must become the centre of our new currency.

Many people say that we don’t have any solutions to the climate crisis. And they are right. Because how could we? How do you “solve” the greatest crisis that humanity has ever faced? How do you “solve” a war? How do you “solve” going to the moon for the first time? How do you “solve” inventing new inventions?

The climate crisis is both the easiest and the hardest issue we have ever faced. The easiest because we know what we must do. We must stop the emissions of greenhouse gases. The hardest because our current economics are still totally dependent on burning fossil fuels, and thereby destroying ecosystems in order to create everlasting economic growth.

“So, exactly how do we solve that?” you ask us – the schoolchildren striking for the climate.

And we say: “No one knows for sure. But we have to stop burning fossil fuels and restore nature and many other things that we may not have quite figured out yet.”

Then you say: “That’s not an answer!”

So we say: “We have to start treating the crisis like a crisis – and act even if we don’t have all the solutions.”

“That’s still not an answer,” you say.

Then we start talking about circular economy and rewilding nature and the need for a just transition. Then you don’t understand what we are talking about.

We say that all those solutions needed are not known to anyone and therefore we must unite behind the science and find them together along the way. But you do not listen to that. Because those answers are for solving a crisis that most of you don’t even fully understand. Or don’t want to understand.
You don’t listen to the science because you are only interested in solutions that will enable you to carry on like before. Like now. And those answers don’t exist any more. Because you did not act in time.

Avoiding climate breakdown will require cathedral thinking. We must lay the foundation while we may not know exactly how to build the ceiling.
Sometimes we just simply have to find a way. The moment we decide to fulfil something, we can do anything. And I’m sure that the moment we start behaving as if we were in an emergency, we can avoid climate and ecological catastrophe. Humans are very adaptable: we can still fix this. But the opportunity to do so will not last for long. We must start today. We have no more excuses.

We children are not sacrificing our education and our childhood for you to tell us what you consider is politically possible in the society that you have created. We have not taken to the streets for you to take selfies with us, and tell us that you really admire what we do.

We children are doing this to wake the adults up. We children are doing this for you to put your differences aside and start acting as you would in a crisis. We children are doing this because we want our hopes and dreams back.

I hope my microphone was on. I hope you could all hear me.

 

II. A perspective from The New Yorker, April 24, 2019:

The Uncanny Power of Greta Thunberg’s Climate-Change Rhetoric
By Sam Knight
April 24, 2019, The New Yorker

Greta Thunberg, the sixteen-year-old climate activist, says that all she wants is for adults to behave like adults, and to act on the terrifying information that is all around us.

During the week of Easter, Britain enjoyed—if that is the right word—a break from the intricate torment of Brexit. The country’s politicians disappeared on vacation and, in their absence, genuine public problems, the kinds of things that should be occupying their attention, rushed into view. In Northern Ireland, where political violence is worsening sharply, a twenty-nine-year-old journalist and L.G.B.T. campaigner named Lyra McKee was shot and killed while reporting on a riot in Londonderry. In London, thousands of climate-change protesters blocked Waterloo Bridge, over the River Thames, and Oxford Circus, in the West End, affixing themselves to the undersides of trucks and to a pink boat named for Berta Cáceres, an environmental activist and indigenous leader, who was murdered in Honduras. Slightly more than a thousand Extinction Rebellion activists, between the ages of nineteen and seventy-four, were arrested in eight days. On Easter Monday, a crowd performed a mass die-in at the Natural History Museum, under the skeleton of a blue whale. In a country whose politics have been entirely consumed by the maddening minutiae of leaving the European Union, it was cathartic to see citizens demanding action for a greater cause. In a video message, Christiana Figueres, the former executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, compared the civil disobedience in London to the civil-rights movement of the sixties and the suffragettes of a century ago. “It is not the first time in history we have seen angry people take to the streets when the injustice has been great enough,” she said.

On Tuesday, as members of Parliament returned to work, Greta Thunberg, the sixteen-year-old Swedish environmental activist, was in Westminster to
address them. Last August, Thunberg stopped attending school in Stockholm and began a protest outside the Swedish Parliament to draw political attention to climate change. Since then, Thunberg’s tactic of going on strike from school—inspired by the response to the Parkland shooting in Florida last year—has been taken up by children in a hundred countries around the world. In deference to her international celebrity, Thunberg was given a nauseatingly polite welcome in England. John Bercow, the speaker of the House of Commons, briefly held up proceedings to mark her arrival in the viewing gallery. Some M.P.s applauded, breaching the custom of not clapping in the chamber. When Thunberg spoke to a meeting of some hundred and fifty journalists, activists, and political staffers, in Portcullis House, where M.P.s have their offices, she was flanked by Ed Miliband, the former Labour Party leader; Michael Gove, the Environment Secretary and a prominent Brexiteer; and Caroline Lucas, Britain’s sole Green Party M.P., who had invited her.

Thunberg, who wore purple jeans, blue sneakers, and a pale plaid shirt, did not seem remotely fazed. Carefully unsmiling, she checked that her microphone was on. “Can you hear me?” she asked. “Around the year 2030, ten years, two hundred and fifty-two days, and ten hours away from now, we will be in a position where we set off an irreversible chain reaction beyond human control, that will most likely lead to the end of our civilization as we know it.”

Thunberg—along with her younger sister—has been given a diagnosis of autism and A.D.H.D. In interviews, she sometimes ascribes her unusual focus, and her absolute intolerance of adult bullshit on the subject of climate change, to her neurological condition. “I see the world a bit different, from another perspective,” she told my colleague Masha Gessen. In 2015, the year Thunberg turned twelve, she gave up flying. She travelled to London by train, which took two days. Her voice, which is young and Scandinavian, has a discordant, analytical clarity. Since 2006, when David Cameron, as a reforming Conservative Party-leadership contender, visited the Arctic Circle, Britain’s political establishment has congratulated itself on its commitment to combatting climate change. Thunberg challenged this record, pointing out that, while the United Kingdom’s carbon-dioxide emissions have fallen by thirty-seven per cent since 1990, this figure does not include the effects of aviation, shipping, or trade. “If these numbers are included, the reduction is around ten per cent since 1990—or an average of 0.4 per cent a year,” she said. She described Britain’s eagerness to frack for shale gas, to expand its airports, and to search for dwindling oil and gas reserves in the North Sea as absurd. “You don’t listen to the science because you are only interested in solutions that will enable you to carry on like before,” she said. “Like now. And those answers don’t exist anymore. Because you did not act in time.”

The climate-change movement feels powerful today because it is politicians—not the people gluing themselves to trucks—who seem deluded about reality. Thunberg says that all she wants is for adults to behave like adults, and to act on the terrifying information that is all around us. But the impact of her message does not come only from her regard for the facts. Thunberg is an uncanny, gifted orator. Last week, the day after the fire at Notre-Dame, she told the European Parliament that “cathedral thinking” would be necessary to confront climate change.

Yesterday, Thunberg repeated the phrase. “Avoiding climate breakdown will require cathedral thinking,” she said. “We must lay the foundation while we may not know exactly how to build the ceiling.” In Westminster, Thunberg’s words were shaming. Brexit is pretty much the opposite of cathedral thinking. It is a process in which a formerly great country is tearing itself apart over the best way to belittle itself. No one knew what to say to Thunberg, or how to respond to her exhortations. Her microphone check was another rhetorical device. “Did you hear what I just said?” she asked, in the middle of her speech. The room bellowed, “Yes!” “Is my English O.K.?” The audience laughed. Thunberg’s face flickered, but she did not smile. “Because I’m beginning to wonder.”

 

Pádraig Ó Tuama, and David Wagoner's poem "Lost"

I sat down early this afternoon to read and listen to Krista Tippett's conversation with Pádraig Ó Tuama, leader of a peace and reconciliation community called Corrymeela in the far north of Northern Ireland, a community grown from the history of The Troubles.

I was drawn to the title of their talk with each other, "Belonging Creates and Undoes Us." Tippett describes Corrymeela as "extending a quiet, generative, and joyful force far beyond [its] northern coast to people around the world." Ó Tuama is a poet, a theologian, and author of an extraordinary memoir, In the Shelter: Finding a Home in the World, perhaps suggested by a very old Irish proverb, "It is in the shelter of each other that the people live."

The second moment at which I lingered was when I learned that Pádraig Ó Tuama's favorite poem is David Wagoner's "Lost," which I did not know. The poem, inspired by a wisdom tradition of Northwest Indians, expresses familiar thoughts in a distinctive and moving way:

 

Lost

 

Stand still.

The trees ahead and bushes beside you

Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,

And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,

Must ask permission to know it and be known.

The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,

I have made this place around you.

If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.

No two trees are the same to Raven.

No two branches are the same to Wren.

If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,

You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows

Where you are. You must let it find you.

 

                -- David Wagoner

 

What is it to treat one's experience of Here as "a powerful stranger" whose permission must be sought "to know it and be known"? As Ó Tuama says, such power can be benevolent or malevolent, as can be such permission, granted or denied. If our Now—our true Here—is unknown, as Wagoner makes clear in his poem—"if what a tree or a bush does is lost" on us, we are surely ourselves lost. We must be silent, still and alert if we are to be found, if we are truly, consciously to be in the forest of our being.  

The third  time I paused in my reading of the conversation was when I began more deeply to understand its subject of relationship, when Pádraig Ó Tuama described what he called "a beautiful phrase from West Kerry where you say, 'mo sheasamh ort lá na choise tinne' — “You are the place where I stand on the day when my feet are sore.”

I came to admire a short, dark, and deeply affecting poem by Ó Tuama, a poem he calls "The Pedagogy of Conflict":

 

When I was a child, 

I learned to count to five

one, two, three, four, five.

But these days, I’ve been counting lives, so I count

one life

one life

one life

one life

one life

because each time

is the first time

that that life

has been taken.

Legitimate Target

has sixteen letters

and one

long

abominable

space

between

two

dehumanizing

words.

 

Toward the end of their conversation, Krista Tippett asked Pádraig Ó Tuama to read aloud the last lines of his book, In the Shelter. I savor them. They serve as well to conclude these brief reflections.

 

Neither I nor the poets I love found the keys to the kingdom of prayer and we cannot force God to stumble over us where we sit. But I know that it’s a good idea to sit anyway. So every morning I sit, I kneel, waiting, making friends with the habit of listening, hoping that I’m being listened to. There, I greet God in my own disorder. I say hello to my chaos, my unmade decisions, my unmade bed, my desire and my trouble. I say hello to distraction and privilege, I greet the day and I greet my beloved and bewildering Jesus. I recognize and greet my burdens, my luck, my controlled and uncontrollable story. I greet my untold stories, my unfolding story, my unloved body, my own love, my own body. I greet the things I think will happen and I say hello to everything I do not know about the day. I greet my own small world and I hope that I can meet the bigger world that day. I greet my story and hope that I can forget my story during the day, and hope that I can hear some stories, and greet some surprising stories during the long day ahead. I greet God, and I greet the God who is more God than the God I greet.

Hello to you all, I say, as the sun rises above the chimneys of North Belfast.

Hello.