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." 

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"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."