Reckonings: a journal of justice, hope and history

Barbara Kingsolver and the Pledge of the American Climate Corps

Barbara Kingsolver and the Pledge of the American Climate Corps

(from Grist.org)

Barbara Kingsolver has been weaving her concern about the environment into her books ever since she started writing novels in 1988. Her 2012 novel Flight Behavior explored how climate change might affect the monarch butterfly, and the 2007 nonfiction work Animal, Vegetable, Miracle recounted her family’s experiment eating only food grown near their home in Virginia.

She recently applied this skill to a new, much shorter genre: pledge-writing. The coordinators of the American Climate Corps — President Joe Biden’s signature green jobs program — invited Kingsolver to pen the promise new members would recite when sworn in. “I told them, ‘This will be the first vow or pledge I’ve written since my wedding vows,’” Kingsolver said. Last month, the first 9,000 members of the Climate Corps committed to Kingsolver’s oath:

I pledge to bring my skills, respect, and compassion to work every day, supporting environmental justice in all our communities.

I will honor nature’s beauty and abundance, on which we all depend, and commit to its protection from the climate crisis.

I will build a more resilient future, where every person can thrive.

I will take my place in history, working with shared purpose in the American Climate Corps on behalf of our nation and planet, its people, and all its species, for the better future we hold within our sight.

The inaugurated members have spread across the country to install clean energy, restore habitats, and build trails. The Biden White House expects to employ 20,000 young people over the first year of the program, inspired by the Civilian Conservation Corps, which President Franklin D. Roosevelt launched in the 1930s to help the country recover from the Great Depression. 

Kingsolver believes that the reimagined version will make history, too, calling it “one of the most exciting things that’s happening in the country right now.” In a call with Grist, she discussed her vision for the American Climate Corps and how it connects to the themes in her novels: nature, empathy, and class. This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

1. What was the thinking behind the language you used in the pledge?
2. In less than 100 words, I tried to bring in the most important parts of this initiative — that it’s about respecting and bringing justice to communities, it’s about respecting and honoring the environment and our connection with it, and it’s about taking a part in history. I read it aloud to myself as I worked, because a pledge is more like poetry than anything else. It has to sound right spoken aloud, and it has to sound like you mean it. Like a wedding vow!
3. You’ve said that you believe writing can promote social change. Is that part of why you wrote this? 
4. Words are what I have to offer. That’s my way of giving blood. I think that advocacy and literature are two very different things, and this was a chance to really jump on advocacy, which I’m delighted to do. I feel this rising sense of worry and paralysis among younger generations as they look at the world they’re inheriting. And I’ve always thought that worry can be a paralyzer or an engine that puts you to work, and that you’ll go farther and feel better if you put your worry to work.
5. I know you’ve been writing about climate change in your novels for a long time. What have you learned about how to communicate about it in an approachable way?
6. I think the most important thing to remember, no matter who you are, whether you’re a policymaker, or a novelist, or just a friend or a relative entering a conversation, is that nobody likes to feel judged. People take information from sources that they trust, and trust involves respect. So if you open a conversation with the words “you idiot,” that conversation is already over. 

I write with the assumption that my readers are all at least as smart as I am. I never talk down because there’s no reason I should. I might have some fact that other people don’t have, or some skills that other people don’t have, and likewise, they have facts and skills I don’t have. So I go into this as an equal exchange. I think that if more people remembered that on social media, the world would be a happier place.

1. In Demon Copperhead, your most recent novel, a through line that surfaces is how coal companies have exploited Appalachian communities. Can you talk about what inspired you to write about climate change, and if the history of the region had anything to do with that?
2. Well, I’m a rural person. I grew up playing in the woods as a largely unsupervised child. So, the woods, the fields, the water, the river — this is always going to be part of my world. I don’t think of the world as a place of only human interest and occupation. I think of myself as a species among the species. I studied biology, so I have this awareness that every breath I take, the oxygen that I breathe, was manufactured by trees. So, it’s going to be part of my writing, always. It’s part of my thinking, always. 
3. Poverty and class are often central themes in your books. Thinking about the Climate Corps, part of its purpose is to revitalize areas of the country that have long been neglected. What role do you hope it will play?
4. I think this is a really class-conscious endeavor, encouraging kids from everywhere, from every class, in every geographic part of the U.S., rural or urban, to have opportunities to engage with conservation, to engage with the future in this way, and to be really clear that enjoying the environment is not a privilege of the elite.

Bennacht - John O'Donohue's lovely blessing

In earlier years, here in the pages of Reckonings, I offered this deeply moving blessing by the late John O'Donohue, an Irish poet, author, priest, and philosopher who lived from 1956 to 2008. He is best remembered as a student of Celtic spirituality, a tradition rich in meaning and worthy of lingering reflection. O'Donohue's books include Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom, Eternal Echoes, To Bless the Space Between Us, and Walking in Wonder.

See also the writing of John Philip Newell (https://www.earthandsoul.org), the preeminent living scholar of Celtic spirituality. I recommend his book Sacred Earth, Sacred Soul (2021).

Finally, I've greatly enjoyed reading about the early (5th century) Irish saints - Patrick, Brigid of Kildare, Columba, Brendan - whose lives are buried in history but reawakened in deeply informed and wonderfully engaging novels; for example, Frederick Buechner's Brendan (1987).

I wish I could include O'Donohue's own reading of "Bennacht" here. His Irish English is lovely to hear. He read the poem in a conversation with Krista Tippett in On Being: https://medium.com/@onbeing/beannacht-a-poem-8c2c29a4d14e. 

The only two (Gaelic) words readers may not know are the poem's title, which means blessing, and the word "currach" in mid-poem. A currach is an Irish boat used for sailing in the west of Ireland. The Oxford English Dictionary describes a currach as: "A small boat made of wickerwood and covered with hides [later, canvas], used from ancient times in Scotland and Ireland, and propelled with a paddle, a coracle."

 

With that brief introduction, here is John O'Donohue's "Bennacht."

 

 

 

 

 

Bennacht

by John O'Donohue

 

On the day when

The weight deadens

On your shoulders

And you stumble,

May the clay dance

To balance you.

 

And when your eyes

Freeze behind

The grey window

And the ghost of loss

Gets into you,

May a flock of colors,

Indigo, red, green

And azure blue,

Come to awaken in you

A meadow of delight.

 

When the canvas frays

In the currach of thought

And a stain of ocean

Blackens beneath you,

May there come across the waters

A path of yellow moonlight

To bring you safely home.

 

May the nourishment of the earth be yours,

May the clarity of light be yours,

May the fluency of the ocean be yours,

May the protection of the ancestors be yours,

 

And so may a slow

Wind work these words

Of love around you,

An invisible cloak

To mind your life.

 

 

 

 

 

It's Earth Day, and the News Isn't Good

New reports show that ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are melting faster than anticipated, and other disasters loom.

Elizabeth Kolbert

The New Yorker

April 22, 2023

Over the past three decades, Greenland's ice loss rate has increased sevenfold. Photograph by Kerem Yücel / AFP / Getty

 

The Greenland ice sheet is, quite literally, a relic of the last ice age. It consists of snow that fell year after year, century after century, and never melted; at the bottom, some flakes fell more than a hundred thousand years ago. The ice sheet is so enormous—at its center, it's more than ten thousand feet tall—that it creates its weather, which is one of the reasons it survives and also one of the reasons it's so vulnerable. As the world warms, the ice sheet is shrinking; as it shrinks, it's losing elevation. At lower elevations, the air is warmer, so it shrinks more, and the cycle continues.

Just in time for Earth Day, a team of scientists funded by NASA and the European Space Agency has released the results of what might be thought of as the ice sheet's latest checkup. The patient is not well. Over the past three decades, the researchers found, the rate of ice loss from Greenland has increased sevenfold. In one hot year—2019—Greenland shed four hundred and forty-four billion tons of ice; these tons contained enough water to flood the entire state of California to a depth of three feet. The researchers found that the melt from the West Antarctic Ice Sheet has been accelerating; since the early nineteen-nineties, the rate of ice loss from West Antarctica has more than doubled. The new figures "are pretty disastrous, really," one of the scientists, Ruth Mottram of the Danish Meteorological Institute, told the Associated Press.

The latest study, published in the journal Earth System Science Data, follows close on the heels of another study forecasting catastrophe, which appeared last month in Nature. A team of Australian and American scientists calculated that ice melts off Antarctica could dramatically alter ocean circulation over the next few decades, with knock-on effects that would affect everything from sea levels and marine habitats to weather patterns over land. Matthew England, a co-author of the Nature study and an oceanographer at the Climate Change Research Centre at the University of New South Wales, said that the team was startled by its conclusions. "It's way faster than we thought these circulations could slow down," he told the Guardian. Bill McKibben summarized the study's findings as: "The South Pole to Planet Earth: Drop Dead."

I could go on here—global sea-surface temperatures recently hit a record high; a study released earlier this month reported that sea levels along the southeast coast of the United States have been rising at the astonishing rate of half an inch a year—but I won't, since I'm sure that you get the picture. The world is on track for disasters on a scale that humans have never before experienced. Scientists keep warning us to get off this track, yet we seem unwilling—or at least reluctant—to do so. "Greenhouse gases continued to increase rapidly in 2022," the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced earlier this month.

The original Earth Day, in 1970, was an exuberant, urgent, and bipartisan event. Some twenty million Americans participated—roughly ten percent of the country's population. Representative Pete McCloskey, a California Republican, helped organize the day; Senator Bob Packwood, Republican of Oregon, spoke at American University; and Senator Charles H. Percy, Republican of Illinois, spoke in Chicago. "Considering the immense problem we are faced with, we have to come up with some new, bold, different ideas," Percy said. By the end of that year, the Republican President, Richard Nixon, had created the Environmental Protection Agency and signed the Clean Air Act. Two years later, with overwhelming support from both parties, Congress passed the Clean Water Act.

 

Since then, Earth Day has devolved into a rote (and often ill-attended) exercise; the G.O.P. has become the party of “let them eat oil,” and, in Congress, one piece of environmental legislation after another has died in committee. (The Inflation Reduction Act, approved last summer, was an important exception to this trend; it passed without a single Republican vote, and this week House Republicans introduced a bill that would roll much of it back.) Seeing how a political system as distracted and divided as ours can deal with a problem as immense and complicated as climate change is difficult, but, one way or another, it will have to. Rising sea levels will compel some coastal communities—possibly even entire cities—to relocate. Changing weather patterns will force state and local governments to invest in costly new infrastructure. Drought will remake American agriculture. Just last week, in an effort to prevent the country’s two largest reservoirs—Lake Mead and Lake Powell—from shrinking so much that they become useless, the Biden Administration released a plan that could cut water deliveries to Arizona, California, and Nevada by six hundred and fifty billion gallons a year.

At a certain point, lurching from crisis to crisis, Americans will wish they had heeded all those scientific warnings and taken action sooner. There is still, perhaps, a chance to avoid melting most of the Greenland ice sheet and shutting down major ocean currents. But only if Americans of both parties—and, indeed, people around the globe—heed the message of Earth Day. Considering the immense problem we are faced with, we truly have to come up with new, bold, different ideas. ♦

 

 

Chavruta

My son Joshua and I gather in a weekly chavruta. The word is Hebrew or Aramaic, and literally means fellowship or group of fellows, and is a traditional rabbinic approach to Talmudic study in which a small group of students meets to analyze, discuss and debate a shared text. Joshua and I meet online, as he lives in New York State and I in northern California. Our chavruta is devoted each week to the work of one poet, and we've sometimes spent several weeks if our imagination is particularly taken by the work of a given poet, as it was most recently by the writing of Emily Dickinson. 

I wanted to speak here of our hour this morning. We had agreed to focus on the poetry of one of our favorites, Jane Hirshfield. We chose her work because Joshua had read, and proposed that we discuss together this morning, a wonderful interview of Hirshfield by Ezra Klein of The New York Times, on March 3, 2023. Klein is known as a skillful and insightful writer and podcaster, and this interview Klein entitled "The Poet Jane Hirshfield Invites Us to Embrace Habits of Deep Noticing and Attention⸺and Observe the Beauty that Unfolds."

Klein begins their discussion by introducing Hirshfield to his listeners: "She's the author of many collections of poetry, including her most recent "Ledger," which is probably the book of poetry I've gifted to others most often. She's also the author of two very beautiful books of essays on poetry and how it works and the poetic mind. And if you are intimidated by poetry, I really recommend these, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry and Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World. 

I'll end this brief discussion with the first poem of Jane Hirshfield that Ezra Klein asked her to recite during the interview. It is a 2014 poem illustrative of Hirshfield's increasing attention in her work to the climate crisis.

 

Let Them Not Say

 

Let them not say:    We did not see it.

We saw.

 

Let them not say:     We did not hear it.

We heard.

 

Let them not say:     They did not taste it.

We ate. We trembled.

 

Let them not say:     It was not spoken, not written.

We spoke,

We witnessed with voices and hands.

 

Let them not say:     They did nothing.

We did not-enough.

 

Let them say, as they must say something:

 

A kerosene beauty.

It burned

 

Let them say we warmed ourselves by it,

read by its light, praised

and it burned.

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Hotter Planet Takes Another Toll on Human Health, by Bill McKibben

A Hotter Planet Takes Another Toll on Human Health

A new hypothesis about heat waves, redlining, and kidney stones.

By Bill McKibben

January 19, 2023

The planet is getting steadily hotter, and large swaths of it are moving past the point at which it’s safe to do heavy outside labor in the middle of the day.Photograph by Dominique Berbain / Getty

Shortly after the New Year, the Washington Post ran a story with a headline that would have seemed inexplicable, even runic, to most readers just a few years ago: “The world’s torrid future is etched in the crippled kidneys of Nepali workers.” But we’re growing used to the idea that the climate crisis, in Naomi Klein’s phrase, “changes everything,” so why not the internal organs of Nepalis? Remarkable reporting by Gerry Shih tells a series of unbearably poignant tales: young Nepali men, struggling to earn a living in their impoverished homeland, head to the Gulf states to do construction work in the searing heat, some without access to sufficient water, some until they collapse. (Other reporting also shows that some Nepalis who work abroad resort to the black market for a transplant that might keep them—and the families that depend on the money they earn—alive.) The piece ends with a man coming back to the care of his sister, who donates her own kidney to save him. The costs of the medical procedures require that he sell his half-built house, and that he give up his life’s dream, which was to get married.

The Post was right: the world’s future is likely encapsulated in this story. The planet is getting steadily hotter, and large swaths of it are moving past the point at which it’s safe to do heavy outside labor in the middle of the day. A 2022 study estimated that six hundred and seventy-seven billion working hours a year were already being lost because it’s too hot to go outside and build things or farm. The researchers assessed the cost at more than two trillion dollars annually, but, of course, it could also be measured in other units—in vital organs, or dreams.

But it’s not just the future that’s illuminated by such studies; it’s the past as well. Unless you’ve been keeping up with your issues of Current Opinion in Nephrology and Hypertension, you may have missed a recent article titled “Redlining has led to increasing rates of nephrolithiasis in minoritized populations: a hypothesis.” I saw it only because one of the medical experts who wrote it—David Goldfarb, who runs the dialysis unit at New York’s V.A. hospital and teaches at New York University’s School of Medicine—is an old family friend. He forwarded it to me, and it fairly blew my mind.

“Nephrolithiasis” is the technical term for the development of kidney stones, those small formations that, as they pass, can cause excruciating pain. (I’ve never had them, but I know more than one man who has said he came away from the experience with a newfound appreciation for what his wife had undergone during labor.) Doctors have long known that higher temperatures lead to more sweat, which reduces urine volumes and thus increases “the saturation of the insoluble salts that cause kidney stones.” During heat waves in the U.S., it takes just three days before emergency-room visits for kidney stones begin to spike.

For reasons that remain unclear, kidney stones have traditionally been more common among white people, but, in recent years, doctors have noted huge increases among Black Americans and a significant rise in Latino communities. The authors of the new article looked to the past for a possible explanation—particularly to the nineteen-thirties, when a federal agency, the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, graded all of America’s neighborhoods and deemed some of them “hazardous” for investment, essentially because they were home to large minority communities. This grading system (from A for “best” and B for “still desirable” to C for “declining” and D for “hazardous”) underlay what came to be known as redlining. The grading system led to “chronic disinvestment” in the lower-rated neighborhoods, resulting, over time, in less of everything from parks and green spaces to street trees and air-conditioning in homes.

Now the results can be measured with a thermometer: in Portland, Oregon, the authors report, neighborhoods that were graded A in the nineteen-thirties now “average 8 degrees Fahrenheit lower than the city’s mean temperature, while D-graded neighborhoods average 4.8 Fahrenheit degrees warmer.” Actually, you don’t need a thermometer—that’s a thirteen-degree gap that anyone can feel just by walking across town. No one has carefully studied the incidence of kidney stones among these different neighborhoods, but the authors, in their hypothesis, point to research now under way. Similar work on asthma, another heat-related disease, has shown emergency-room visits are 2.4 times higher in redlined tracts.

Indeed, Goldfarb’s son Ben—an environmental journalist who this year will publish a book called “Crossings,” on the environmental impact of roads—writes that the HOLC grading program produced all kinds of deleterious health effects. In Syracuse, Miami, Minneapolis, and other cities, large parts of neighborhoods that the agency had redlined—and whose residents were mostly Black—were bulldozed to make room for interstate highways. He told me, “Minorities today disproportionately live near the urban freeways that displaced them, and suffer as a result. Air pollution causes asthma and cancer; noise pollution increases the risk of heart disease and stroke; and the physical fragmentation wrought by highways shatters local economies. It’s heartbreaking, though hardly surprising, that disastrous policy decisions made decades ago continue to destroy bodies and communities today.”

It’s true that everyone is going to pay some price as the planet cooks. The authors of the nephrology study predict a likely additional cost to the U.S. health-care system of at least a billion dollars a year. But some people are going to be hit much harder than others because of history. Doing justice in the present requires taking that past seriously—understanding how we ended up where we are, and why we must put those with the least first, as we try to address the future. But we’re at a moment in this country when the idea of historical responsibility is increasingly seen not as logical and obvious but as some kind of invidious political correctness.

In April, 2022, Governor Ron DeSantis, of Florida, signed the Stop Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees Act, or the Stop WOKE Act. (In introducing the bill, he had said, “In Florida we are taking a stand against the state-sanctioned racism that is critical race theory,” adding that “we won’t allow Florida tax dollars to be spent teaching kids to hate our country or to hate each other.”) A preliminary injunction was issued against the act, which includes a dictum against any school teaching that “a person, by virtue of his or her race, color, sex, or national origin, bears personal responsibility for and must feel guilt, anguish or other forms of psychological distress because of actions, in which the person played no part, committed in the past by other members of the same race, color, national origin, or sex.” But, even if you can silence teachers, legislation can’t muffle the effects of history. On a hot summer’s day in Jacksonville, Florida, where DeSantis was born, the temperature in A neighborhoods is 5.5 degrees below the mean, and it’s 4.4 degrees above the mean in the D-rated communities. ♦

What Planet Do I Live On?

What Planet Do I Live On?

A Little Bit of a Rant

 

Bill McKibben

The Crucial Years

September 16, 2022

Yesterday, Rep. Ro Khanna’s energy subcommittee of the House Oversight and Reform Subcommittee released a tranche of documents from various Big Oil companies, designed in part to build support for a windfall profits tax on the huge sums that these firms have sucked in this year thanks to Vladimir Putin’s war. The documents show how mercenary and devious the companies have been, pretending to back climate action like the Paris climate accords, but in fact working to make sure they are a dead letter.

But I confess I got stuck on the very first document the committee released. I got stuck because it’s…about me, and who doesn’t, in their heart of hearts, love/hate reading what people think of you? 

From what one can decipher from the email chain, a woman named Virginia Northington, who once had worked for the great historian Douglas Brinkley, later joined something called the Brunswick Group which “helps companies navigate a complex array of societal challenges, as well as articulating a company’s ‘purpose,’” and whose “Climate Hub helps businesses respond to climate change.” There Ms. Northington went to work “advis[ing] American, British, and European clients on litigation and crisis mandates,” which in the spring of 2016 (i.e. right after the Paris climate accords) apparently meant clipping out opeds from me and forwarding them to a long list of BP executives. One of those executives, Robert Stout, now a vice-president for regulatory policy and advocacy, responded that the essays he’d passed around was a “must-read,” which is a nice thing to say but I don’t think he meant it that way. One of his employees, the director of communications and external affairs, responded in more heartfelt fashion. As Mr. Tom Wolf wrote to a long list of colleagues as follows:

I'm sorry, I live on earth so I don't get what planet this guy lives on. We all know his diatribe has many holes in it...but his biggest one is the infrastructure piece. Americans are fighting pipelines, but they are also fighting transmission lines that would bring wind energy and solar energy to market....they are fighting utility solar farms in the desert because it affects the desert turtle, they are fighting home solar that looks ugly.

Simply put, Americans have a Dire Straits mentality. They want their money for nothin' and their chicks for free.

For the record, as readers of this newsletter know, this is one issue where I’m not a hypocrite. I fight for solar even if someone thinks it looks ugly , and I’ve been doing it for a long time. And in fact my home has solar panels all over the top, and on a couple of poles in the yard—they’re not as pretty as the surrounding trees, except when you think about what they mean, which is that we can now get the energy we need from the sun instead of, say, ripping a hole in the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico which then leaks for six months in what was the largest oil spill ever. 

But it was Wolf’s language that really got me thinking. “I don’t get what planet this guy lives on,” he asks, and so let me answer.

I live on a different planet than the one I was born on. That one had plenty of ice at each pole, and lots of coral reefs in between. The great glaciers of the Alps and the Himalayas and the Andes were locked in icy grandeur; the seasons, in my home parts, stretched on as they had for millennia, ever since the retreat of the last Ice Age.

But now I live on a planet—I called it Eaarth once, in the title of a book—that looks somewhat like that old one, but is irrevocably changed. The first pictures we ever took of it, the ones that came back from the Apollo missions, are now hopelessly out of date: there’s a lot less white and a lot more blue up top because most of the sea ice in the summer Arctic is gone. The pH of the oceans on this new planet is different, and so is the chemical composition of the atmosphere: the air now holds much higher concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane, and as a result the temperature has gone well beyond what humans have ever experienced before. On this planet, people starve—right now, this year—because it doesn’t rain anymore where they live, and they go hungry because it rains more than it’s ever rained before. On this planet, the sea level has begun to climb, threatening to wipe out entire nations. On this planet, tens of millions of our brothers and sisters are already on the move, because they can no longer live in the places where they were born. 

It’s a deeply unjust planet, because the people who caused the temperature to rise are not usually the people who suffer the most from that rise. And it’s an arguably insane planet, because so many of the people who run it ignored for decades the clear warning of scientists that we faced a stiff but surmountable challenge. Worse than ignored—the leaders of the fossil fuel industry, at the time the biggest and richest industry on the planet, suppressed and denied the truth. Few were more disgusting about it than BP, which originally sought to rebrand itself as Beyond Petroleum (doubtless advised by someone like the Brunswick Group) and then decided that wasn’t making enough money so they dropped the idea and returned to just plain old Petroleum. It invested heavily in shale fracking, and in Alberta’s tar sands, literally the dirtiest possible oil. 

But it’s also a planet filled with remarkable people, who have rallied by their millions to stand up to people like Mr. Wolf, trying in the process to write a new future for this planet. While he’s sat around commenting sardonically on opeds, they’ve marched, gone to jail, and often won (when they beat the Keystone pipeline, they cost those tarsands investments real money). There are far more of us than there are of him; in a world where BP’s billions didn’t buy politicians, we’d have long since won these fights.

And we will win those battles, or at least keep trying. Because we live on a planet that, though degraded by the greed of Big Oil, still has such heart-searing beauty. It’s a world where creeks still tumble down mountainsides, where trees still spread their branches to make shade in the heat, where hummingbirds and anteaters remind us of the whimsy of evolution, where people love and protect each other, family and strangers both. It’s a good world still, and worth defending. Complex, buzzing, cruel, mysterious, sexy, alive. For a while yet anyway, no thanks to BP.

Oh, and Dire Straits? I mean, come on. Just because you flak for an oil company doesn’t mean you can’t find someone with a bit more groove to frame your social commentary. Let me nominate Mr. Marvin Gaye, who might have been thinking of BP when he wrote lyrics considerably more immortal than anything from the Knopfler brothers.

Ah, things ain't what they used to be 
Where did all the blue skies go?
Poison is the wind that blows
From the north and south and east

End of rant. I’m glad they read what I write, and I’m glad they pass it around, and I’m glad that it scares them and makes them sad. I’ll keep at it. 

In other climate and energy news this week:

+A landmark new report from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis looks at carbon capture projects around the world and finds they…don’t work. Instead:

• Failed/underperforming projects considerably outnumbered successful experiences.
• Captured carbon has mostly been used for enhanced oil recovery (EOR): enhancing oil production is not a climate solution.
• Using carbon capture as a green light to extend the life of fossil fuel power plants is a significant financial and technical risk: history confirms this.

+David Wallace-Wells is really using his new platform at The New York Times to advance critical parts of the climate story, and this week’s coverage of China is no exception:

China also seems to occupy a confusing place in the landscape of climate geopolitics because that landscape has shifted lately as well. Ten years ago, or even five, climate diplomacy often meant rhetorical appeals to global cooperation mixed with realpolitik efforts to move more slowly than your rivals. Today, decarbonization is still happening much too slowly, but fast enough to move the diplomatic dynamics away from a rivalry of inaction toward an apparent rivalry of action. Climate investment is booming in the United States, and with the CHIPS act and the I.R.A. climate bill now passed into law, the country has affirmatively joined what Politico recently called a new “green-energy arms race.”

+A group of blue-state treasurers has against efforts by their fossil-fueled counterparts to limit environmentally responsible investing:

The blacklisting states apparently believe, despite ample evidence and scientific consensus to the contrary, that poor working conditions, unfair compensation, discrimination and harassment, and even poor governance practices do not represent material threats to the companies in which they invest. They refuse to acknowledge, in the face of sweltering heat, floods, tornadoes, snowstorms and other extreme weather, that climate change is real and is a true business threat to all of us.

We disagree.

Disclosure, transparency, and accountability make companies more resilient by sharpening how they manage, ensuring that they are appropriately planning for the future. Our work, alongside those of other investors, employees, and customers have caused many companies to evolve their business models and their internal processes, better addressing the long term material risks that threaten their performance.

+Yvon Chouinard is an awfully good guy. Thanks!

+It was the hottest summer on record for Europe and for China. Thanks BP! Thanks Brunswick Group!

On the Outside Looking In

https://billmckibben.substack.com/p/on-the-outside-looking-in?r=6x70p&s=r&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

How Bad Is It?

How Bad Is It?

 

by Bill McKibben

September 8, 2022

 

I got a phone call last night, from a person I admire as much as anyone I know; she’s spent her life working, with great effectiveness, for a wide variety of progressive causes. I turn to her for guidance on dozens of questions. But last night she was turning to me, and with a simple, despairing question: “is it just all over for the climate?” 

She’d been reading stories from the past week about the truly horrific flooding in Pakistan (watch this video, please—it’s the single best depiction I’ve seen of what the crisis feels like, and though it’s on CNN, the most mainstream of media, it does not shy away for a second from talking about the blame that falls on the global north for the climate crisis, and the need for reparations), and about the giant Thwaites glacier in the Antarctic retreating twice as fast as scientists had thought, and about a new study showing that even if we stopped emitting carbon now melting ice on Greenland would produce almost a foot of sea level rise. 

I heard from one of the co-authors of that study, Jason Box, a few days later. He sent me photos of a spot where we’d camped on the Greenland ice sheet a few years ago; he’d been back there over the weekend, he said, when his team had to decamp fast because an unprecedented melt was underway. September 1 is supposed to mark the end of the melt season on Greenland, but all of a sudden temperatures were soaring—above freezing even at the very summit of the ice sheet, which is almost always safely below zero. “While rushing down the ice sheet, we felt surprisingly warm pulses of air on our faces, like the Chinook winds I remember from Colorado,” he wrote. As a result of the anomalous warm weather, the Washington Post reported, As a result, “tens of billions of tons of ice were lost — an event that could further Greenland’s already significant contributions to rising sea levels.” As another researcher explained, “Greenland’s ice margin can’t tolerate the conditions that are becoming increasingly common for it. This event is typical of those destabilizing conditions.”

So. There’s an ongoing, sometimes acrid, debate in climate circles about ‘doomism’ versus ‘hopium,’ which I have no desire to join. (As usual, count me with Rebecca Solnit, who spends her time highlighting the fights we are winning: that seems to me entirely useful, because it motivates). I've been fighting this battle for so many years now that sometimes the largest-scale questions don’t even occur to me; but they occur to others, obviously, and they deserve answers. Given events like those of the past few weeks (I haven’t even mentioned what may be the most prolonged heatwave in human history that hit China this summer, nor the current raging heat in the American west) it is a fair question to ask: are we reaching the point where events are so far out of control that our efforts to stem the tide are pointless? 

So let me just lay out my own sense, in case it’s helpful to anyone else

1. We are not getting out of this crisis unscathed, or anything like it. It’s been many years since “stopping global warming” was on the menu. We’ve raised the temperature a degree celsius already, and that’s way too much because—well, see above. A degree is a mess
2. It will get worse. Even if we do everything right at this point, there’s enough momentum in the system to take us near two degrees; that’s going to be far far worse. Not just twice as bad—damage increases exponentially, not linearly, as we head past various tipping points.
3. If we don’t do everything right, that “near to two degrees” will actually be nearer three degrees Celsius, which is five or six degrees Fahrenheit, which is a world where civilizations won’t be able to function in the ways we’re used to them functioning. That civilizational breakdown—a political and human phenomenon, not a scientific one—could come sooner; we don’t know where the civilizational red lines are, only that we’re close. 
4. Which means: despair is not an option yet, at least if it’s that kind of despair that leads to inaction. But desperationis an option—indeed, it’s required. We have to move hard and fast.
5. The most obvious place we have to move is the energy transition. Physics means we have to go fast; economics means going fast will focus for now on sun, wind, and batteries because they are cheap and available. The fossil fuel industry, desperate to maintain its business model, is in the way; they must be fought.
6. But we also have to shore up civilizations in all the other ways we can imagine, especially by sharing resources and technologies. Our systems are too brittle now; places like Pakistan just lack the resilience to deal with a crisis they did not create. Global solidarity is not kindness; on a small world it’s a survival strategy. 

I did not tell my friend: drop everything else you’re doing and work only on climate. But I did tell her: all our other dramas now play out on the stage of climate change. For the forseeable future—for as long as our lives last—the rapid rise of the temperature on the planet of our origin is the overriding human story.

In other climate and energy news:

+Today’s the day: big demonstration in DC trying to stop the dirty side deal that Joe Manchin is trying to extort from Congress. He wants a pipeline for his buddies; there’s no reason to give it to him. Livestream here; follow @powhr_coalition and @ThirdActVa on Twitter as the day progresses. At the American Prospect, David Dayen is optimistic we can win this fight. Oh, and that pipeline Manchin wants to build? The pipe has been sitting out in the weather for years now, corroding. If you want more background, including on the reasons that blue state residents actually have some power in this fight for once, here’s an interview I did yesterday with the remarkable Jim Braude and Margery Eagan on that effervescent radio show, Boston Public.

+You know that thing Herschel Walker said about trees? Bay area arborist (and superb activist) Joe Lamb provides a mighty riposte from a few branches up. 

+Too often the media has turned AOC into a caricature, but this profile from GQ reminds us once again that she’s a remarkably supple political thinker. 

“This generational tension has existed among virtually every single social movement in American history, in labor, in suffrage, in civil rights, in marriage equality,” the congresswoman said. “And it is a tension between history and the present moment. It’s a tension between inside and outside. It’s a tension between what we can learn and what we don’t know. Any sort of criticism of the Democratic Party is immediately cast as helping the right or ‘You’re disrespectful’ or ‘Don’t you know everything that these people have done?’ And we do, but we are also allowed to learn from the outcomes of those victories and the unique dynamics of the present moment, to also say that we have to change tack and we can’t just do the same thing for 30 years.

+Who’d a thunk it? The electric utility industry gleefully joined their fossil fuel brethren in the devastating climate denial campaigns, as this new study makes painfully clear. 

Before 1980, electric utilities' messaging was generally in line with the scientific understanding of climate change. However, from 1990 to 2000, utility organizations founded and funded front groups that promoted climate doubt and denial. After 2000, these front groups were largely shut down, and utility organizations shifted to arguing for delayed action on climate change, by highlighting the responsibility of other sectors and promoting actions other than cleaning up the electricity system.

+Excellent news: The batteries in electric cars are lasting far longer than predicted (or warrantied). Most outlive the cars they’re in, with plenty of life left to be used as backup storage in big solar arrays. “At the end of the vehicle’s life—15 or 20 years down the road—you take the battery out of the car, and it’s still healthy, with perhaps 60 or 70% of usable charge,” one expert explained.

+Americans are continuing to move to the hottest, driest places. This will make the inevitable counter-migration all the more intense when it comes. 

+From Hannah Laga Abram, a great account of an under-appreciated aspect of the climate crisis: what happens when heavy rains fall on land scarred by fresh forest fires? (Floods and slides, since there’s nothing to hold the water back)

The last two months forced brothers Zack and Marck Romero to become professional weathermen. 

From the moment the rain starts falling in the mountains — and it's fallen almost daily — they know it will take the flood between 45 and 48 minutes to reach their creekside land in this small town near Las Vegas.

First, they hear a roaring. Then, for two to three hours, their driveway transforms into a churn of dark water and tangled debris. No one can get in or out. When the water level drops enough, the brothers attach a chain with a tire on the end to their tractor and drag it through the creek bed to clear out the culvert in preparation for the next day’s deluge.

+Fatih Birol, head of the International Energy Agency, has a very-worth-the-read column in the Financial Times on the planet’s current energy woes post Putin’s invasion. Money graf:

I talk to energy policymakers all the time and none of them complains about relying too much on clean energy. On the contrary, they wish they had more. They regret not moving faster to build solar and wind plants, to improve the energy efficiency of buildings and vehicles, or to extend the lifetime of nuclear plants. More low-carbon energy would have helped ease the crisis — and a faster transition from fossil fuels towards clean energy represents the best way out of it.

+Odd Canadian philosopher (and hugely influential social media presence) Jordan Peterson turns out to be a climate denier too. Why is this always a part of the package?

+To understand how we got so deep into the climate crisis without acting, it’s worthwhile understanding just how dysfunctional the economics profession was in the early days of the fight. A great account in the New York Times points out that the most widely used model from the beginning was drawing criticism for underestimating the havoc that climate change would wreak. Like other models, it has been revised several times, but it still relies on broad assumptions and places less value on harm to future generations than it places on harm to those today. It also doesn’t fully incorporate the risk of less likely but substantially worse trajectories of warming. 

+Farmers are getting much better at working around solar panels.

+Abrahm Lustgarten at Pro Publica interviews Jay Famiglietti, the executive director of the Global Institute for Water Security, about water in the west. He’s not hopeful.

I don’t think we’re talking about sustainability. I think we’re talking about managed depletion. Because it’s impossible to keep growing the food that we grow in California. It’s agriculture that uses most of the groundwater. The math just isn’t there to have sustainable groundwater management. If you think of sustainability as input equals output — don’t withdraw more than is being replenished on an annual basis — that’s impossible in most of California.

 

The Democrats Finally Deliver

 

The Democrats Finally Deliver

 

The Senate’s passage of a sweeping, if imperfect, climate-change-and-health-care bill is a landmark moment in U.S. policymaking.

John Cassidy
The New Yorker
August 8, 2022

When Joe Biden departs on Wednesday for a vacation on Kiawah Island, South Carolina, he will have reasons to be cheerful. Last Friday, the Labor Department reported that employers created more than half a million jobs in July, confirming that Biden was right when he said the economy isn’t in recession. The House of Representative looks set to pass the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 later this week; Senate Democrats voted the legislation through over the weekend, and it includes parts of the President’s Build Back Better policy agenda.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the new legislation, which provides extensive tax breaks for clean energy and authorizes Medicare to negotiate the prices of certain prescription drugs, is that it survived at all. Just a month ago, when Senator Joe Manchin told Chuck Schumer, the Senate Majority Leader, that he wouldn’t support the bill, it seemed dead. Thanks to Manchin’s change of mind and Schumer’s cat-herding, the bill was resurrected and rushed through the Senate before the summer recess, a feat that prompted at least one Democratic senator—Brian Schatz, of Hawaii—to shed tears.

Going into the midterms, Biden and the Democrats will also be able to tout other legislative accomplishments. In June, Congress passed the first gun-control bill in thirty years, which tightened background checks for young buyers and provided incentives for states to expand “red flag” laws that allow the authorities, with the approval of a judge, to disarm dangerous individuals. In the past couple of weeks, two more bills have been passed. The CHIPS Act provides more than fifty billion dollars to encourage the manufacture of semiconductor chips in the United States. A new veterans’ bill creates an entitlement program for veterans who may have been exposed to toxic waste from fires on military bases known as “burn pits.”

Taken together, these pieces of legislation should put to bed the notion that Biden and the Democrats can’t get anything done, and they also demonstrate that his election pledge to pursue bipartisan initiatives wasn’t an empty one. Despite the hyper-partisanship in Washington, three of the four bills gained some Republican support. And Senate Democrats, after months of disarray, held together and passed the Inflation Reduction Act on a party-line vote of fifty-one to fifty using the reconciliation process. “I was one of the folks who was first in supporting now President Biden when he was candidate Biden and I think he’s done good things for our country,” the Delaware Senator Chris Coons told ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos on Sunday. “I think he’s got a strong record of accomplishments to run on.”

The Inflation Reduction Act—so-named to placate Manchin—contains the biggest effort to tackle climate change that the U.S. government has taken. Right now, thanks largely to the retirement of coal-fired electricity plants, the country is on track to reduce its carbon emissions by about thirty per cent by 2030, compared to 2005. By providing about $370 billion in tax credits over ten years for solar and wind producers, as well as for the purchase of electric vehicles, the new bill will increase the emissions reduction to about forty per cent, according to several expert analyses.

Although hitting that figure would fall short of the White House’s initial target of a carbon reduction of fifty per cent, it would represent a historic move in the right direction. In addition, the bill should boost employment in the clean-energy and clean-manufacturing sectors, which are already attracting significant private investment. How big a boost? A study, from the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, says that the new legislation bill would create more than nine million jobs in this sector over the next ten years.

Another important element of the bill is that it would empower Medicare to use its heft to negotiate lower prescription-drug prices. Other public health-care systems, such as the United Kingdom’s National Health Service, have long haggled over the prices that they pay pharmaceutical companies. In this country, the Big Pharma lobby has managed to maintain a system in which drug companies can largely dictate their own prices. At last, Congress has challenged this cozy arrangement, albeit in a modest way. The new legislation would cover ten drugs starting in 2026. As critics have pointed out, that’s not very many. But it seems likely that this number will expand once the general principle is accepted.

The legislation also places an annual cap on prescription-drug outlays for people covered by Medicare. In this way and others, it reflects some long-standing progressive priorities. “The best that can be said of the bill is that it represents a significant reorientation of policy in a number of areas,” Felicia Wong, the president of the liberal Roosevelt Institute, told me. “It starts things in the direction we need to be going.” As additional examples, Wong cited the eighty-billion-dollar boost to the I.R.S. budget, which is designed to enable the agency to go after wealthy tax dodgers more effectively; and the taxing of stock buybacks, which is intended to incentivize corporations to invest in capital equipment and research rather than boosting their stock prices.

Wong also emphasized that the new spending bill doesn’t go far enough—a point that is indisputable. For all the worthwhile things it contains, many others got left out of Biden’s original agenda. A short list incudes the enhanced child income-tax credit, which dramatically reduced child poverty before being phased out last year; paid leave; guaranteed pre-school for four-year-olds and expanded child care; a reversal of the high-income tax cuts in Trump’s 2017 tax bill; and an end to the carried-interest loophole for private equity and hedge funds, which represents another indefensible blemish on the tax code.

The common theme is that efforts to tackle pressing social problems and rising inequality got left out. Unlike private-equity tycoons, poor and working-class families don’t have the entire Republican Party, platoons of highly-paid lobbyists, and a certain Democratic senator from Arizona looking out for their interests. Unlike green-energy producers and manufacturers of electric vehicles, they aren’t making hefty investments that need tax breaks to succeed in shifting the economy away from fossil fuels. As often before, their needs will have to wait.

That’s more an endemic failing of the American political system, and a fifty-fifty Senate, than of this particular piece of legislation. In making a serious commitment to green energy, the enactment of the bill would be a landmark moment in U.S. policymaking. In demonstrating that this generation of Democrats can pass major legislation unaided, it would upend the previous narrative of a faltering Biden Administration. Relative to where things stood a couple of months ago, the change seems momentous. ♦

Congress looks set to finally pass historic climate legislation

August 8, 2022 issue of The New Yorker:

Congress Looks Set to Finally Pass Historic  

Climate Legislation

 

The bill, now supported by Joe Manchin, reflects the growing strength of the environmental movement, but also the lingering influence of the fossil-fuel industry.

 

By Bill McKibben

July 31, 2022

The longest-maintained temperature readings of any location on earth are in the Midlands of England. A monthly tally began in 1659, and the daily record dates back to 1772. One can imagine mutton-chopped clerics and ruddy-faced retired colonels, in the centuries since, tromping out to take those readings; some days it was hot and some days it was cold, but, until last month, the highest daily mean ever measured there was 25.2 degrees Celsius, or about 77.4 degrees Fahrenheit, in August of 2020. Then, on July 19th, as an epic heat wave swept across the British Isles, the mark was reset at 28.1 Celsius, or 82.6 Fahrenheit. If that hadn’t happened, topping the previous high by a full 5.2 degrees Fahrenheit would have seemed statistically impossible. The fact that it did happen is frightening—a sign of a world coming unstuck.

But, more happily, a different sort of record fell last week—the thirty-four-year stretch that saw no major legislative action on the climate in the U.S. Congress. It began in 1988, when the NASA scientist James Hansen informed the Senate of what was then called the “greenhouse effect,” and it appears to have come to a close last Wednesday, when Senator Joe Manchin, Democrat of West Virginia, finally agreed to President Joe Biden’s big budget reconciliation package. The bill contains hundreds of billions of dollars in tax credits and grants for the transition to solar and wind power, electric vehicles, efficient home heating, and more. The package—the remains of what started out as the Green New Deal, before slimming down to Build Back Better, and, now, the Inflation Reduction Act—looked dead last month, when Manchin flatly rejected parts of it, including the climate protections.

The pushback was severe, however—among other things, the President suggested that he might declare a “climate emergency” and enact what measures he could by himself. Now, assuming that the Democrats stand together, as early as next week we could see an end to that long legislative drought. The bill penalizes oil and gas companies that fail to cut methane emissions, but it doesn’t actually pressure energy utilities to abandon coal and gas. (Manchin vetoed that provision, the Clean Electricity Performance Program, last year.) Still, analysts say that it would cut emissions to forty percent below 2005 levels by the end of the decade.

Taken as a whole, the bill is a triumph. It would be the most ambitious climate package ever passed in the U.S., and would allow the country to resume a credible role as an environmental leader.

Yet it reflects not just the growing strength of the climate movement but also the lingering power of the fossil-fuel industry, containing provisions such as one stating that, for the next decade, no offshore wind lease can be sold unless an offshore oil and gas lease of a certain size has been sold during the previous year. The political trade-off is worth it, in carbon terms, but there’s no denying that it will set a problematic example around the world.

Last week, the Democratic Republic of the Congo announced that it hopes to become “the new destination for oil investments,” and scheduled an auction of oil and gas leases in its vast rain forest, including parts of the biologically diverse Virunga National Park, a sanctuary for endangered mountain gorillas. The government also aims to allow drilling in the nation’s extensive peatlands, which are an effective storehouse for carbon; in fact, they hold as much carbon as the entire world emits in three years.

Opening the region up to drilling wouldn’t just add fuel to the fire—it would shut off a hose that fights the flames. Still, in addition to doing whatever is possible to dissuade the D.R.C. from allowing that, it’s worth viewing the announcement as a trolling of other nations, such as this one, that continue to think they have a right to expand fossil-fuel production. Tosi Mpanu-Mpanu, Congo’s longtime climate representative, has been at every big global climate meeting since 2007, so he no doubt knew exactly how much controversy he’d unleash when he told a reporter from the Times last week that his country’s priority is to generate revenue to fight poverty—“not to save the planet.”

It seems likely that the D.R.C.’s goal may be to sweeten a multiyear agreement that it entered into last November, at the Glasgow climate conference, to protect the rain forest, in return for five hundred million dollars in international investments. (The oil beneath the forest is doubtless worth far more.) If so, the gambit is a powerful one, because few countries have the moral standing to tell Congo off. In April, for instance, Canada announced plans to allow drilling in a basin off the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador that could access three hundred million barrels of oil. The Biden Administration itself last month signaled support for the Trump-era Willow project, on Alaska’s North Slope, which could produce six hundred million barrels of oil. As scientists pointed out in a letter to the Secretary of the Interior, Deb Haaland, the project would be a “carbon bomb” of enormous proportion.

What’s the difference between the D.R.C. and the United States or Canada? For one thing, the gross domestic product per capita in the D.R.C. is less than six hundred dollars, versus sixty-nine thousand dollars in the U.S., and fifty-two thousand in Canada. For another, the average resident of the U.S. emits some fifteen metric tons of carbon dioxide a year, while the average Congolese emits about 0.03 metric tons. In other words, the average American is responsible for about five hundred times more climate damage than the average Congolese is.

The right response, then, is to provide the climate aid that the Global North has long promised to the Global South but has not delivered in full. In the case of Congo, that means helping develop, as safely and benignly as possible, the mining of cobalt, which is used in batteries that are crucial to clean-energy technology. But we must also prevent new fossil-fuel boondoggles of our own. It’s possible that the reconciliation package has exhausted Washington’s energy to tackle the climate crisis for the time being, but politicians aren’t the only players. When the Trump Administration rushed to auction off parts of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for drilling, no major oil companies submitted bids, in part because environmental campaigners made the project too toxic for them and for their potential financiers. Civil society will need to continue stepping up in the years to come, because, if countries keep digging up their oil and gas, every record broken will likely be a baleful one. ♦

For the Third Time in Three Decades, Congress Punts on Serious Climate Legislation

For the Third Time in Three Decades, Congress Punts on Serious Climate Legislation

Joe Manchin tanks Congress’s big chance to cut the heat.

By Bill McKibben

The New Yorker

Saturday, July 16, 2022

NASA just declared that this June has tied with that of 2020 for the hottest we have ever measured. At the moment, forecasters are predicting that, on Monday, the United Kingdom, which maintains the longest instrumental record of temperature in the world, may see the hottest day that nation has ever recorded.

This was the backdrop to the news on Thursday that Senator Joe Manchin, Democrat of West Virginia, won’t support climate legislation, bringing to an apparent end his long and excruciating flirtation with Joe Biden over the climate portions of the Build Back Better bill, the President’s ambitious economic package, which contained the most sweeping climate measures ever to reach the Senate floor. To provide the even more excruciating context: this is the third time in the past thirty years that Congress has balked at serious climate legislation.

In July, 1997, the Senate voted 95–0 (led by another West Virginia Democrat, Robert Byrd) to pass a resolution stating that the United States should not be a signatory to what became the Kyoto Protocol, arguing that it asked too much of this nation and too little of developing countries. Vice-President Al Gore came back from the Kyoto Climate Change Conference that December with a treaty, but President Bill Clinton didn’t even bother sending it to the Senate, knowing that it would be rejected, and other attempts to pass climate legislation never reached the floor.

In 2009, “cap-and-trade” legislation passed the House by a narrow margin—more than forty Democrats joined Republicans in siding with the fossil-fuel industry. The bill limped to the Senate, where John Kerry, of Massachusetts, and Barbara Boxer, of California, could not find a Republican co-sponsor. They didn’t even bring the bill up for a vote, knowing that it would lose; private whip counts at the time indicated that they would be lucky to get forty votes.

And now this failure, which is all the more painful for having been so close to success. The Democratic Party, pushed hard by young activists in the Sunrise Movement, rallied behind Build Back Better, passing it through the House with almost no dissenting votes among the Democrats (a good thing, given the narrow margins that the Party currently enjoys there). That reflected a deep Party-wide consensus; during the 2020 Presidential primaries, climate change was a top priority for Democrats, and Biden used it skillfully on the way to winning the White House. His closing ads in the general-election campaign included ones about climate; his stance helped bring him wide (and crucial) support from young voters.

Manchin didn’t do Biden the favor of saying no up front. Instead, he got the President to strip the sticks from the bill (the clean-energy pricing plan that would have forced utilities toward clean energy) and then he nibbled away at the carrots. He used the hope of his vote to get the more fossil-fuel-friendly Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act passed, and he used the fear of his rejection to keep Biden from invoking executive authority to block federal oil leases and pipelines. Although the sentiments of Senator Kyrsten Sinema, of Arizona, are always hard to read, it appears that there was a solid forty-nine-vote bloc for the climate actions in the bill. But forty-nine gets you precisely nothing.

So now we’ve struck out three times. The country that historically has put more carbon in the atmosphere than any other, and whose scientists played the lead role in figuring out the climate crisis, has refused to do anything about it. Our Congress—the place where, in 1988, Jim Hansen sounded the first truly public alarm about global warming—has never passed major climate legislation. The most distressed person in all this might be John Kerry, who is now the President’s global climate envoy. He’s been using the prospect of serious American action to try to rouse the rest of the world to action, and without that card in the deck he’s left mostly with jokers. (You think that Xi Jinping isn’t fully aware of what Joe Manchin just did?)

But there are plenty of other people mourning, too. The policy analysts who have spent the past two years recasting the legislation every time Manchin made another demand, only to see their work be for nought. The engineers and entrepreneurs who were counting on the infusion of money from the bill (a tiny fraction of the subsidies that have been extended over the decades to fossil fuel) to jump-start the rapid transition to renewable energy. The young people who have to live in what geologists may someday dub the Manchinian epoch. There is no chance now that the U.S. can meet even the modest targets for emissions reduction that Biden had promised for this decade, and hence the temperature will rise far higher than it must. Most of the bad decisions that politicians make are forgotten in the fullness of time—there have been Manchins before, and there will be Manchins again. But this Manchin, in 2022, will never be forgotten, not as long as humans are grappling with the most fundamental challenge we’ve ever faced. ♦

 

The Power of Allurement

The Power of Allurement

 

By Betsey Crawford

PUBLISHED IN SPRING 2020 

---

“Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts.” – Rachel Carson

I’m pondering one of nature’s most intriguing mysteries: why is so much so beautiful? Why all those luscious colors, gossamer wings, silken petals? Why rainbow-decked waterfalls cascading into deep, curving rivers disappearing into the folds of magnificent mountains? Cool forests of feathery ferns at the base of towering trees, full of the elation of bird song? Why rustling waves of grasslands, filled with flowers, chirping crickets, soaring meadowlarks? Deserts lit withluminous cactus flowers, the call of ravens, the song of coyotes? Why clouds on fire with the setting sun?

The easy answer is that we evolved the senses and the consciousness to find all this beautiful. And so we did. But why? We could have evolved to find a much duller world satisfactory. Bees and hummingbirds could have evolved to pollinate a planet full of white flowers. Butterflies and birds don’t need their luminous jewel tones to fly or find food. Peacocks and prairie chickens could have figured out calmer ways to attract a mate. It’s the sheer extravagance of it all that makes it so mysterious.

Douglas iris (Iris douglasii) Ring Mountain, Tiburon, California

Beauty is an aspect of the universal power that cosmologist Brian Swimme calls allurement. It was one of the early powers to show up, as the great attracting energy of gravity swirled the universe’s new-born atoms together to form the first stars. Then the stars themselves felt the pull to one another as they formed the gravitational fields we know as galaxies. Between the stars, matter gathered into planets, then into moons around the planets. All, in turn, both being drawn and entering, Brian says, ‘into their destiny as a source of allurement.’

Allurement not only creates, but creates a mode that continues to create. Within the forms relationships develop, intimacy leads to more creativity. The earth’s long relationship with the sun eventually gave rise to life. Plants emerged. ‘Then this amazing moment comes when living beings figure out how to create the chlorophyll molecule….in resonance with the sun’s light.’ By creating this strikingly complex and beautiful molecule, plants bound themselves, and the entire earth, into an ever more intimate relationship with the sun.

This cycle of attraction — form — creativity — intimacy has given us an earth of inexpressible beauty. Imagine walking through a field of wildflowers. Or peering through a microscope at the structure of a seashell. Or discovering the intricate mathematical language that governs the universe. Our whole being responds to the power of beauty in such moments. Our hearts expand. Our energy rises. We feel alive, connected, excited. We are transported, from the Latin for ‘carried across.’ Lifted over a threshold into a realm beyond the concerns, demands, confusions of daily life.

Prickly poppy (Argemone polyanthemos) Konza Prairie Preserve, Flint Hills, Kansas

I have written before about psychologist Nicholas Humphrey’s theory that evolution favored awe. In the face of the many challenges of existence, awe gives us reasons to love life. To him, evolution wanted us to be here long enough to reproduce, and that is certainly high on nature’s agenda. But beauty preceded us by eons. I prefer Carl Sagan’s and Thomas Berry’s idea that the cosmos wanted a way to ponder all the beauty it had created, and so evolved us.

It may well be having second thoughts. As I write this, the Amazon rainforest is burning so that we can grow soybeans to feed pigs. Or clear space for ranchers to provide beef for fast-food hamburgers. It’s being opened to drill for oil to fuel our insatiable appetites for every conceivable consumer item. How, surrounded by so much beauty and sublimity, have we managed a history of so much cruelty, neglect, and obliviousness? That is another mystery. Our souls long for the beauty they have evolved to know so intimately. And yet our minds, our actions are so easily turned to the ugly. We trash our living spaces and fail to nourish and protect our children. We go to war over land and resources. We cage families fleeing danger our policies created. We burn the lungs of our planet.

In the face of this devastation, is there space for contemplating beauty? The power of allurement says yes, we must. This power draws us out of ourselves, brings us to life, again and again. It strengthens us to carry the weight of disappointment, grief, rage and move toward regeneration. This isn’t beauty as a surface attractant. The ultimate beauty of flowers doesn’t lie in how pretty they are. That, of course, is a lovely thing to contemplate. But they lived for 160 million years before we arrived to take delight in them.

Their great power lies in what the universe wanted of them, not in what we want. These are cosmic beings, forged out of chaos, molecule by molecule. The soul of the earth emerging from the soil at our feet. Formed for relationships and adept at creating them. With that soil. With the air they breathe and the sunlight they turn to nutrition. With the creatures, including us, that they form intimate, mutually beneficial relationships with.

Allurement is all about relationships. This deeper beauty draws our depths to itself, into bonds of intimacy and love. We are devastated by the news because profound relationships are being severed, day after day. ‘The industrial society has moved to break allurement apart, most profoundly to break the natural allurement people have for the rest of the universe. The field of allurement we are born into is fractured’ by the view of the natural world, including humans, as strictly a resource for plundering.

Grass widow (Olysinium douglasii) Tubbs Hill, Coeur d’Alene, Idaho

Because I spend a fair amount of time thinking about things that have been happening for epochs, part of me is able to take the long view. For millions of its early years, all that happened to our fiery, volcanic earth was a continual meteor bombardment. Out of that disorder, the delicate petals of the flowers pictured here eventually arose. All the beauty we know has arisen from the journey of disorder to order, a journey often interrupted by fresh outbreaks of chaos. The last two hundred years of industrial mindset isn’t even a blip on this time scale. But it is cataclysmic, and our hearts ache continually with the suffering we see.

I am exploring Brian’s powers of the universe to see what Nature, our oldest teacher tells us about creating a just and sustainable planet. Allurement’s profound lesson lies in the deep creative energy it launches. As we move toward what we are attracted to, we are changed. The relationships formed — with a person, a mountain, a river, a cause — attract further changes. ‘This is how the universe works. We’re captivated, and we pursue, and then we are awakened in the pursuit, and we end up captivating others’. The intensity of the relationship deepens as ‘the actual form of who we are is shaped by that which draws us.’

‘The same power of allurement that drew the stars together is working in us.’ Fully realizing this idea has the power to release the defensive crouch our current affairs can drive us to. We don’t need to create allurement, we already embody it. ‘It’s happening throughout the universe, wanting to burst forth into conscious self-awareness.’ Our task is to allow it, to remove whatever is in the way. To free ourselves from the illusions of consumerism, mindless growth, separation. In that release lies creative and generative ideas along with the energy to undertake the tasks we need. There lies intimacy with and love for all our fellow beings and entities. The world we long for is pulling us toward itself.

Speaking of extravagance: the 2019 super bloom in the Carrizo Plain, California

ABOUT BETSEY CRAWFORD

Betsey Crawford spent her years as a landscape designer and environmental activist in New York convincing people to return to their literal roots by planting native plants and restoring ecosystems. Now living in Northern California, she posts photos and writes about wildflowers, ecology, botany, spirit, and all things nature on her website, The Soul of the Earth: https://thesouloftheearth.com.

The Greatest Danger — Joanna Macy

 

The Greatest Danger

by Joanna Macy

Yes! Magazine

 

From https://www.joannamacy.net:

Joanna Macy, Ph.D., author and teacher, is a scholar of Buddhism, systems thinking, and deep ecology. A respected voice in movements for peace, justice and ecology, she interweaves her scholarship with learnings from six decades of activism. 

Her wide-ranging work addresses psychological and spiritual issues of the nuclear age, the cultivation of ecological awareness, and the fruitful resonance between Buddhist thought and postmodern science. The many dimensions of this work are explored in her thirteen books, which include three volumes of poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke with translation and commentary.

As the root teacher of The Work That Reconnects, Joanna has created a ground-breaking framework for personal and social change, as well as a powerful workshop methodology for its application.

Based in Berkeley, California, close to her children and grandchildren, Joanna has spent many years in other lands and cultures, viewing movements for social change and exploring their roots in religious thought and practice.

 

How do we live with the fact that we are destroying our world? What do we make of the loss of glaciers, the melting Arctic, island nations swamped by the sea, widening deserts, and drying farmlands?

Because of social taboos, despair at the state of our world and fear for our future are rarely acknowledged. The suppression of despair, like that of any deep recurring response, contributes to the numbing of the psyche. Expressions of anguish or outrage are muted, deadened as if a nerve had been cut. This refusal to feel impoverishes our emotional and sensory life. Flowers are dimmer and less fragrant, our loves less ecstatic. We create diversions for ourselves as individuals and as nations, in the fights we pick, the aims we pursue, and the stuff we buy.

Of all the dangers we face, from climate chaos to permanent war, none is so great as this deadening of our response. For psychic numbing impedes our capacity to process and respond to information. The energy expended in pushing down despair is diverted from more crucial uses, depleting the resilience and imagination needed for fresh visions and strategies.

Zen poet Thich Nhat Hanh was asked, “what do we most need to do to save our world?” His answer was this: “What we most need to do is to hear within us the sounds of the Earth crying.”

 

Cracking the Shell

How do we confront what we scarcely dare to think? How do we face our grief, fear, and rage without “going to pieces?”

It is good to realize that falling apart is not such a bad thing. Indeed, it is as essential to transformation as the cracking of outgrown shells. Anxieties and doubts can be healthy and creative, not only for the person, but for the society, because they permit new and original approaches to reality.

What disintegrates in periods of rapid transformation is not the self, but its defenses and assumptions. Self-protection restricts vision and movement like a suit of armor, making it harder to adapt. Going to pieces, however uncomfortable, can open us up to new perceptions, new data, and new responses.

Speaking the truth of our anguish for the world brings down the walls between us, drawing us into deep solidarity. That solidarity is all the more real for the uncertainty we face.

In our culture, despair is feared and resisted because it represents a loss of control. We’re ashamed of it and dodge it by demanding instant solutions to problems. We seek the quick fix. This cultural habit obscures our perceptions and fosters a dangerous innocence of the real world.

Acknowledging despair, on the other hand, involves nothing more mysterious than telling the truth about what we see and know and feel is happening to our world. When corporate-controlled media keep the public in the dark, and power-holders manipulate events to create a climate of fear and obedience, truth-telling is like oxygen. It enlivens and returns us to health and vigor.

 

Belonging to All Life

Sharing what is in our heart brings a welcome shift in identity, as we recognize that the anger, grief, and fear we feel for our world are not reducible to concerns for our individual welfare or even survival. Our concerns are far larger than our own private needs and wants. Pain for the world—the outrage and the sorrow—breaks us open to a larger sense of who we are. It is a doorway to the realization of our mutual belonging in the web of life.

Many of us fear that confrontation with despair will bring loneliness and isolation. On the contrary, in letting go of old defenses, we find truer community. And in community, we learn to trust our inner responses to our world—and find our power.

You are not alone! We are part of a vast, global movement: the epochal transition from empire to Earth community. This is the Great Turning. And the excitement, the alarm, even the overwhelm we feel, are all part of our waking up to this collective adventure.

As in any true adventure, there is risk and uncertainty. Our corporate economy is destroying both itself and the natural world. Its effect on living systems is what David Korten calls the Great Unraveling. It is happening at the same time as the Great Turning, and we cannot know which way the story will end.

 

Great Uncertainty

Let’s drop the notion that we can manage our planet for our own comfort and profit—or even that we can now be its ultimate redeemers. It is a delusion. Let’s accept, in its place, the radical uncertainty of our time, even the uncertainty of survival.

In primal societies, adolescents go through rites of passage, where confronting their own mortality is a gateway to maturity. In analogous ways, climate change calls us to recognize our own mortality as a species. With the gift of uncertainty, we can grow up and accept the rights and responsibility of planetary adulthood. Then we know fully that we belong, inextricably, to the web of life, and we can serve it, and let its strength flow through us.

Uncertainty, when accepted, sheds a bright light on the power of intention. Intention is what you can count on: not the outcome, but the motivation you bring, the vision you hold, the compass setting you choose to follow. Our intention and resolve can save us from getting lost in grief.

During a recent visit to Kentucky, I learned what is happening to the landscape and culture of Appalachia: how coal companies use dynamite to pulverize everything above the underground seams of coal; how bulldozers and dragline machines 20-stories high push away the “overburden” of woodlands and top soil, filling the valleys. I saw how activists there are held steady by sheer intention. Though the nation seems oblivious to this tragedy, these men and women persist in the vision that Appalachia can, in part, be saved and that future generations may know slopes of sweet gum, sassafras, magnolia, the stirrings of bobcat and coon, and, in the hollows, the music of fiddle and fresh flowing streams. They seem to know—and, when we let down our guard, we too know—that we are living parts of the living body of Earth.

This is the gift of the Great Turning. When we open our eyes to what is happening, even when it breaks our hearts, we discover our true size; for our heart, when it breaks open, can hold the whole universe. We discover how speaking the truth of our anguish for the world brings down the walls between us, drawing us into deep solidarity. That solidarity, with our neighbors and all that lives, is all the more real for the uncertainty we face.

When we stop distracting ourselves by trying to figure the chances of success or failure, our minds and hearts are liberated into the present moment. This moment then becomes alive, charged with possibilities, as we realize how lucky we are to be alive now, to take part in this planetary adventure.

 

---

"The Fish," by Elizabeth Bishop

 

The Fish

Elizabeth Bishop

I caught a tremendous fish
and held him beside the boat
half out of water, with my hook
fast in a corner of his mouth.
He didn't fight.
He hadn't fought at all.
He hung a grunting weight,
battered and venerable
and homely. Here and there
his brown skin hung in strips
like ancient wallpaper,
and its pattern of darker brown
was like wallpaper:
shapes like full-blown roses
stained and lost through age.
He was speckled with barnacles,
fine rosettes of lime,
and infested
with tiny white sea-lice,
and underneath two or three
rags of green weed hung down.
While his gills were breathing in
the terrible oxygen
—the frightening gills,
fresh and crisp with blood,
that can cut so badly—
I thought of the coarse white flesh
packed in like feathers,
the big bones and the little bones,
the dramatic reds and blacks
of his shiny entrails,
and the pink swim-bladder
like a big peony.
I looked into his eyes
which were far larger than mine
but shallower, and yellowed,
the irises backed and packed
with tarnished tinfoil
seen through the lenses
of old scratched isinglass.
They shifted a little, but not
to return my stare.
—It was more like the tipping
of an object toward the light.
I admired his sullen face,
the mechanism of his jaw,
and then I saw
that from his lower lip
—if you could call it a lip—
grim, wet, and weaponlike,
hung five old pieces of fish-line,
or four and a wire leader
with the swivel still attached,
with all their five big hooks
grown firmly in his mouth.
A green line, frayed at the end
where he broke it, two heavier lines,
and a fine black thread
still crimped from the strain and snap
when it broke and he got away.
Like medals with their ribbons
frayed and wavering,
a five-haired beard of wisdom
trailing from his aching jaw.
I stared and stared
and victory filled up
the little rented boat,
from the pool of bilge
where oil had spread a rainbow
around the rusted engine
to the bailer rusted orange,
the sun-cracked thwarts,
the oarlocks on their strings,
the gunnels—until everything
was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!
And I let the fish go.

 

The Gospel According to Mark - a story by Jorge Luiz Borges (1971)

Editorial notes from John: (1) Please don't read the final paragraph of this story until you reach it as you would normally, as your final act of reading a story. (2) Then, and only then, read that last paragraph one more time to be sure it is in your mind. I have added a third and fourth note to this paragraph, but shall reserve them to the end, as a suggestion for contemplating Borges's intentions. 

 

The Gospel According to Mark - a short story by Jorge Luiz Borges (1971)

 

The incident took place on the Los Alamos ranch, in the southern part of the township of Junín, during the last days of March,1928. The protagonist was a medical student named Baltasar Espinosa. We may describe him, for now, as one of the common run of young men from Buenos Aires, with nothing more noteworthy about him than an almost unlimited kindness and a capacity for public speaking that had earned him several prizes at the English school in Ramos Mejía. He did not like arguing, and preferred having his listener rather than himself in the right. Although he was fascinated by the probabilities of chance in any game he played, he was a bad player because it gave him no pleasure to win. His wide intelligence was undirected; at the age of thirty-three, he still lacked credit for graduation by one course—the course to which he was most drawn. His father, who was a freethinker (like all the gentlemen of his day), had introduced him to the lessons of Herbert Spencer, but his mother, before leaving on a trip to Montevideo, once asked him to say the Lord’s Prayer and make the sign of the cross every night. Through the years, he had never gone back on that promise.

Espinosa was not lacking in spirit; one day, with more indifference than anger, he had exchanged two or three punches with a group of fellow-students who were trying to force him to take part in a university demonstration. Owing to an acquiescent nature, he was full of opinions, or habits of mind, that were questionable: Argentina mattered less to him than a fear that in other parts of the world people might think of us as Indians; he worshipped France but despised the French; he thought little of Americans but approved the fact that there were tall buildings, like theirs, in Buenos Aires; he believed the gauchos of the plains to be better riders than those of hill or mountain country. When his cousin Daniel invited him to spend the summer months out at Los Alamos, he said yes at once—not because he liked the country but out of a natural desire to please, and because he could find no good reason for saying no.

The ranch’s main house was big and slightly run down; the quarters of the foreman, a man named Gutre, stood by. There were three members of the Gutre family: the father, the son (who was singularly rough and unpolished), and a girl of uncertain paternity. They were tall, strong, and bony, with reddish hair and Indian features. They rarely spoke. The foreman’s wife had died years before.

In the country, Espinosa came to learn things he hadn't known, had never even suspected—for example, that you do not gallop a horse when approaching settlements, and that you never go out riding except for some special purpose. In time, he was to come to tell the birds apart by their call.

After a few days, Daniel had to leave for Buenos Aires to close a deal on some cattle. At most, this bit of business might take him a week. Espinosa, who was already somewhat weary of hearing about his cousin’s incessant luck with women and his tireless interest in the minute details of men’s fashion, preferred staying on at the ranch with his textbooks. But the heat was unbearable, and even the night brought no relief. One morning at daybreak, thunder woke him. Outside, the wind was rocking the Australian pines. Listening to the first heavy drops of rain, Espinosa thanked God. All at once, cold air rolled in. That afternoon, the Salado overflowed its banks.

The next morning, looking out over the flooded fields from the gallery of the main house, Baltasar Espinosa thought that the stock metaphor comparing the pampa to the sea was not altogether false—at least, not that morning—though Hudson had remarked that the sea seems wider because we view it from a ship’s deck and not from a horse or from eye level.

The rain did not let up. The Gutres, helped or hindered by Espinosa, the town dweller, rescued a good part of the livestock, but many animals were drowned. There were four roads leading to the ranch; all of them were under water. On the third day, when a leak threatened the foreman’s house, Espinosa gave the Gutres a room near the tool shed, at the back of the main house. This drew them all closer; and they ate together in the big dining room. Conversation was not easy. The Gutres, who knew so much about country things, did not know how to explain them. One night, Espinosa asked them if people still remembered the Indian raids from back when the frontier command was located there in Junín. They told him yes, but they would have given the same answer to a question about the beheading of Charles I. Espinosa recalled his father’s saying that almost every case of longevity that was cited in the country was really a case of bad memory or of a dim notion of dates. Gauchos are apt to be ignorant of the year of their birth or of the name of the man who begot them.

In the whole house, the only reading material to be found were several copies of a farming magazine, a manual of veterinary medicine, a de-luxe version of the romantic verse drama “Tabaré,” a copy of The History of the Shorthorn in Argentina, several erotic and detective stories, and a recent novel that Espinosa had not read—Don Segundo Sombra. Espinosa, in order to put some life into the inevitable after-dinner attempt at conversation, read a couple of chapters of this novel to the Gutres, none of whom could read or write. Unfortunately, the foreman had been a cattle drover, and the doings of the hero, another cattle drover, failed to whet his interest. He said that the work was light, that drovers always travelled with a packhorse that carried everything they needed, and that, had he not been a drover, he would never have seen such far-flung places as the Laguna de Gómez, the town of Bragado, and the spread of the Núñez family in Chacabuco. There was a guitar in the kitchen; the ranch hands, before the time of the events I am describing, used to sit around in a circle. Someone would tune the instrument without ever getting around to playing it. This was known as "giving it a strum." Espinosa, who had grown a beard, began dallying in front of the mirror to study his new face, and he smiled to think how, back in Buenos Aires, he would bore his friends by telling them the story of the Salado flood. Strangely enough, he missed places he had never frequented and never would: a corner of Cabrera Street on which there was a mailbox; one of the cement lions of a gateway on Jujuy Street, a few blocks from the Plaza del Once; an old barroom with a tiled floor, whose exact whereabouts he was unsure of. As for his brothers and his father, they would already have learned from Daniel that he was isolated—etymologically, the word was perfect—by the floodwaters.

Exploring the house, still hemmed in by the watery waste, Espinosa came across a Bible printed in English. Among the blank pages at the end, the Guthries—such was their original name—had left a handwritten record of their family history. They were natives of Inverness; had reached the New World, no doubt as common laborers, in the early part of the nineteenth century; and had intermarried with Indians. The chronicle broke off sometime during the eighteen-seventies; they no longer knew how to write. After a few generations, they had forgotten English; even their Spanish, at the time Espinosa knew them, gave them trouble. They lacked any religious faith, but there survived in their blood, like faint tracks, the rigid fanaticism of the Calvinist and the superstitions of the pampa Indian. Espinosa later told them of his find, but they barely took notice. Leafing through the volume, his fingers opened it at the beginning of the Gospel according to St. Mark. As an exercise in translation, and maybe to find out whether the Gutres understood any of it, Espinosa decided to begin reading them that text after their evening meal. He was surprised that they listened, first attentively, and then with mute fascination. Maybe the gold letters on the cover lent the book authority. It’s still in their blood, he thought. It also occurred to him that the generations of men, throughout recorded time, have always told and retold two stories—that of a lost ship which searches the Mediterranean seas for a dearly loved island, and that of a god who allows himself to be crucified on Golgotha. Remembering his lessons in elocution from his school days in Ramos Mejía, Espinosa got to his feet when he came to the parables.

The Gutres took to bolting their barbecued meat and their sardines in order to arrive sooner at the Gospel. A pet lamb that the girl adorned with a small blue ribbon had injured itself on a strand of barbed wire. To stop the bleeding, the three had wanted to apply a cobweb to the wound, but Espinosa treated the animal with some pills. The gratitude that this treatment awakened in them took him aback. (Not trusting the Gutres at first, he’d hidden away in one of his books the two hundred and forty pesos he had brought with him.) Now, with Daniel gone, Espinosa took the master's place and gave timid orders, which were immediately obeyed. The Gutres, as if lost without him, liked following him from room to room and along the gallery that ran around the house. While he read to them, he noticed that they were secretly stealing the crumbs he had dropped on the table. One evening, he caught them unawares talking about him respectfully, in very few words.

Having finished the Gospel according to St. Mark, he wanted to read another of the three Gospels that remained, but the father asked him to repeat the one he had just read, so that they could understand it better. Espinosa felt that they were like children, to whom repetition is more pleasing than variations or novelty. That night—this is not to be wondered at—he dreamed of the Flood; the hammer blows of the building of the Ark woke him up, and he thought that perhaps they were thunder. In fact, the rain, which had let up, started again. The cold was bitter. The Gutres had told him that the storm had damaged the roof of the tool shed, and that they would show it to him when the beams were fixed. No longer a stranger now, he was treated by them with respect, almost to the point of spoiling him. None of them liked coffee, but for him there was always a small cup into which they heaped sugar.

The new storm had broken out on a Tuesday. Thursday night, Espinosa was awakened by a soft knock at his door, which—just in case—he always kept locked. He got out of bed and opened it; there was the girl. In the dark he could hardly make her out, but by her footsteps he could tell she was barefoot, and moments later, in bed, that she must have come all the way from the other end of the house naked. She did not embrace him or speak a single word; she lay beside him, trembling. It was the first time she had known a man. When she left, she did not kiss him; Espinosa realized that he didn’t even know her name. Impelled by some sentiment he did not attempt to understand, he made up his mind that upon returning to Buenos Aires he would tell no one about what had taken place.

The next day began like the previous ones, except that the father spoke to Espinosa and asked him if Christ had let Himself be killed so as to save all mankind. Espinosa, who was a freethinker like his father but felt obliged to defend what he had read to them, answered, “Yes, to save everyone from Hell.”

Gutre then asked, “What is Hell?”

“A place under the ground where souls will burn in fire forever.”

“And those who hammered in the nails—will they also be saved?”

“Yes,” said Espinosa, whose theology was rather dim.

All along, he was afraid that the foreman might ask him about what had gone on the night before with his daughter. After lunch, they asked him to read the last chapters over again.

Espinosa slept a long nap that afternoon. It was a light sleep, disturbed by persistent hammering and by vague premonitions. Toward evening, he got up and went out onto the gallery. He said, as if thinking aloud, “The waters have dropped. It won’t be long now.”

“It won’t be long now,” Gutre repeated, like an echo.

The three of them had followed him. Bowing their knees to the stone pavement, they asked his blessing. Then they mocked at him, spat on him, and shoved him toward the back part of the house. The girl was weeping. Espinosa understood what awaited him on the other side of the door. When they opened it, he saw the sky. A bird sang out. It's a goldfinch, Espinosa thought. The shed was without a roof; they had pulled down the beams to build the Cross. ♦

(Translated, from the Spanish, by Norman Thomas di Giovanni, in collaboration with the author.)

Published in the print edition of The New Yorker, October 23, 1971.

 

Here is the second part of the editorial notes from John: (3) Third, I suggest, without lingering further on the Borges story, read the original, New Testament version of The Gospel of Mark. (4) Finally, in the light of your reading, reflect upon Borges's tale and its relationship to the Christian gospel. Imagine why and how Borges may have conceived his story as a gospel (of course, he may not have done so), recalling that the word gospel is derived from the Anglo-Saxon term god-spell, meaning “good story,” a rendering of the Latin evangelium and the Greek euangelion, meaning “good news” or “good telling." The Gospel of Mark is commonly considered one of the three or four synoptic or canonical gospels, those which convey the life and message of Jesus most straightforwardly. A more specifically Christian definition of gospel is "the body of religious doctrine taught by Christ and His apostles." (Oxford English Dictionary) Has the Gutre family, in their own way, come to identify Espinosa as Christ-like, even as Christ himself?

 

Our climate change turning point is right here, right now

Our climate change turning point is right here, right now

Rebecca Solnit

 

People are dying. Aquatic animals are baking in their shells. Fruit is being cooked on the tree. It’s time to act.

Mon 12 Jul 2021

Human beings crave clarity, immediacy, landmark events. We seek turning points, because our minds are good at recognizing the specific – this time, this place, this sudden event, this tangible change. This is why we were never very good, most of us, at comprehending climate change in the first place. The climate was an overarching, underlying condition of our lives and planet, and the change was incremental and intricate and hard to recognize if you weren’t keeping track of this species or that temperature record. Climate catastrophe is a slow shattering of the stable patterns that governed the weather, the seasons, the species and migrations, all the beautifully orchestrated systems of the holocene era we exited when we manufactured the anthropocene through a couple of centuries of increasingly wanton greenhouse gas emissions and forest destruction.

This spring, when I saw the shockingly low water of Lake Powell, I thought that maybe this summer would be a turning point. At least for the engineering that turned the southwest’s Colorado River into a sort of plumbing system for human use, with two huge dams that turned stretches of a mighty river into vast pools of stagnant water dubbed Lake Powell, on the eastern Utah/Arizona border, and Lake Mead, in southernmost Nevada. It’s been clear for years that the overconfident planners of the 1950s failed to anticipate that, while they tinkered with the river, industrial civilization was also tinkering with the systems that fed it.

The water they counted on is not there. Lake Powell is at about a third of its capacity this year, and thanks to a brutal drought there was no great spring runoff to replenish it. That’s if “drought” is even the right word for something that might be the new normal, not an exception. The US Bureau of Reclamation is overdue to make a declaration that there is not enough water for two huge desert reservoirs and likely give up on Powell to save Lake Mead.

I got to see the drought up close when I spent a week in June floating down the Green River, the Colorado River’s largest tributary. The skies of southern Utah were full of smoke from the Pack Creek wildfire that had been burning since June 9 near Moab, scorching thousands of acres of desert and forest and incinerating the ranch buildings and archives of the legendary river guide and environmentalist Ken Slight (fictionalized as Seldom Seen Slim in Edward Abbey’s novel The Monkey Wrench Gang), now 91. Climate chaos destroys the past as well as the future. As of July 6, the fire is still burning.

It wasn’t just the huge plume of smoke that filled us with dread about the adventure to come; the weather forecast of daily temperatures reaching 106 F made living out of doors for a week seem daunting. Water level in the river was far lower than normal and due to drop a lot more; the temperature on our rafts and kayaks just above the water was tolerable – but as soon as you walked any distance from the river’s edge, the heat came at you as though you’d opened an oven door.

We saw an unusual amount of wildlife on the trip too – mustangs, bighorn sheep, a lean black bear and her two cubs pacing the river’s edge – but any sense of wonder was tempered by the likelihood that thirst had driven them down from the drought-scorched stretches beyond the river. We need a new word for that feeling for nature that is love and wonder mingled with dread and sorrow, for when we see those things that are still beautiful, still powerful, but struggling under the burden of our mistakes.

Then came the heat dome over the Northwest, a story that didn’t appear to make the top headlines of many media outlets as it was happening. Much of the early coverage showed people in fountains and sprinklers as though this was just another hot day, rather than something sending people to hospitals in droves, killing hundreds (and likely well over a thousand) in Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia, devastating wildlife, crops, and domestic animals, setting up the conditions for wildfires, and breaking infrastructure designed for the holocene, not the anthropocene. It signified something much larger even than a crisis impacting a vast expanse of the continent: increasingly wild variations from the norm with increasing devastation that can and will happen anywhere. It seemed to get less coverage than the collapse of part of a single building in Florida.

A building collapsing is an ideal specimen of news, sudden and specific in time and place, and in the case of this one on the Florida coast, easy for the media to cover as a spectacle with straightforward causes and consequences. A crisis spread across three states and two Canadian provinces, with many kinds of impact, including untallied deaths, was in many ways its antithesis. There was a case to be made that climate change – in the form of rising saltwater intrusion – was a factor in the Florida building’s collapse, but climate change was far more dramatically present in the Pacific Northwest’s heat records being broken day after day and the consequences of that heat. In Canada the previous highest temperature was broken by eight degrees Fahrenheit, a big lurch into the dangerous new conditions human beings have made, and then most of the town in which that record was set burned down.

Later news stories focused on one aspect or another of the heat dome. A marine biologist at the University of British Columbia reported that the heat wave may have killed more than a billion seashore animals living on the coast of the Pacific Northwest. Lightning strikes in BC, generated by the heat, soared to unprecedented levels – inciting, by one account, 136 forest fires. The heat wave cooked fruit on the trees. It was a catastrophe with many aspects and impacts, as diffuse as it was intense. The sheer scale and impact were underplayed, along with the implications.

Political turning points are as manmade as climate catastrophe: we could have chosen to make turning points out of the western wildfires of the past four years – notably the incineration of the town of Paradise and more than 130 of its residents in 2018, but also last year’s California wildfires that included five of the six largest fires in state history. It could include the deluge that soaked Detroit with more than six inches of rain in a few hours last month or the ice storm in Texas earlier this year or catastrophic flooding in Houston (with 40 inches of rain in three days) and Nebraska in 2019 or the point at which the once-mythical Northwest Passage became real because of summer ice melt in the Arctic or the 118-degree weather in Siberia this summer or the meltwater pouring off the Greenland ice sheet.

A turning point is often something you individually or collectively choose, when you find the status quo unacceptable, when you turn yourself and your goals around. George Floyd’s murder was a turning point for racial justice in the US. Those who have been paying attention, those with expertise or imagination, found their turning points for the climate crisis years and decades back. For some it was Hurricane Sandy or their own home burning down or the permafrost of the far north turning to mush or the IPCC report in 2018 saying we had a decade to do what the planet needs of us. Greta Thunberg had her turning point, and so did the indigenous women leading the Line 3 pipeline protests.

Summarizing the leaked contents of a forthcoming IPCC report, the Agence France-Presse reports: “Climate change will fundamentally reshape life on Earth in the coming decades, even if humans can tame planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions […] Species extinction, more widespread disease, unliveable heat, ecosystem collapse, cities menaced by rising seas – these and other devastating climate impacts are accelerating and bound to become painfully obvious before a child born today turns 30. The choices societies make now will determine whether our species thrives or simply survives as the 21st century unfolds…”

The phrase “the choices societies make” is a clear demand for a turning point, a turning away from fossil fuel and toward protection of the ecosystems that protect us.

Every week I temper the terrible news from catastrophes such as wildfires and from scientists measuring the chaos by trying to put them in the context of positive technological milestones and legislative shifts and their consequences. You could call each of them a turning point: The point last week at which Oregon passed the bill setting the most aggressive clean electricity standards in the US, 100% clean by 2040. The point at which Scotland began getting more electricity from renewables than it could use. The point at which New York State banned fracking. The Paris Climate Treaty in 2015. Of course, as with the climate itself, many of the changes were incremental: the stunning drop in cost and rise in efficiency of solar panels over the past four decades, the myriad solar and wind farms that have been installed worldwide.

The rise in public engagement with the climate crisis is harder to measure. It’s definitely growing, both as an increasingly powerful movement and as a matter of individual consciousness. Yet something about the scale and danger of the crisis still seems to challenge human psychology. Along with the fossil fuel industry, our own habits of mind are something we must overcome.

• Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. She is also the author of Men Explain Things to Me and The Mother of All Questions. Her most recent book is Recollections of My Nonexistence.

Layli Long Soldier's poems

Layli Long Soldier's poems are a treasure.

Her first book, Whereas (2017), won the National Books Critics Circle Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry. It is a response to the U.S. government's official apology to Native peoples in 2009. That apology, writes Krista Tippett in On Being, "was done so quietly, with no ceremony, that it was practically a secret." Krista continues, "Layli Long Soldier is a writer, a mother, a citizen of the United States, and a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation. She has a way of opening up her life, and American life, that inspires self-searching and tenderness." She lives in Santa Fe.

John Freeman wrote of Whereas in The Los Angeles Times: "Writers who live between two languages face an extra challenge in their role as lexicographers of metaphor. They must create a mythology through language that acts like double-pane glass. As in, they must correct for the distortion of the words they are translating from one language to another...Layli Long Soldier manages this double-ness with the precision of a master glassblower."

She illustrates that quality in her experience as a young mother and her realization that she must speak to her child in Diné, the Lakota language: "Whereas her birth signaled the responsibility as mother to teach what it is to be Lakota therein the question: What did I know about being Lakota? Signaled panic, blood rush my embarrassment. What did I know of our language but pieces? Would I teach her to be pieces? Until a friend comforted, Don't worry, you and your daughter will learn together. Today she stood sunlight on her shoulders lean and straight to share a song in Diné, her father's language. To sing she motions simultaneously with her hands; I watch her be in multiple musics."

 

The title poem of Whereas is a sequence—poem and prose poem:

 

WHEREAS a string-bean blue-eyed man leans back into a swig of beer work-weary lips at the dark bottle keeping cool in short sleeves and khakis he enters the discussion;

Whereas his wrist loose at the bottleneck to come across as candid “Well at least there was an Apology that’s all I can say” he offers to the circle each of them scholarly;

Whereas under starlight the fireflies wink across East Coast grass and me I sit there painful in my silence glued to a bench in the midst of the American casual;

Whereas a subtle electricity in that low purple light I felt their eyes on my face gauging a reaction and someone’s discomfort leaks out in a well-stated “Hmmm”;

Whereas like a bird darting from an oncoming semi my mind races to the Apology’s assertion “While the establishment of permanent European settlements in North America did stir conflict with nearby Indian tribes, peaceful and mutually beneficial interactions also took place”;

Whereas I cross my arms and raise a curled hand to my mouth as if thinking as if  taking it in I allow a static quiet then choose to stand up excusing myself  I leave them to unease;

Whereas I drive down the road replaying the get-together how the man and his beer bottle stated their piece and I reel at what I could have said or done better;

Whereas I could’ve but didn’t broach the subject of “genocide” the absence of this term from the Apology and its rephrasing as “conflict” for example;

Whereas since the moment had passed I accept what’s done and the knife of my conscience pierces with bone-clean self-honesty;

Whereas in a stirred conflict between settlers and an Indian that night in a circle;

Whereas I struggle to confess that I didn’t want to explain anything;

Whereas truthfully I wished most to kick the legs of that man’s chair out from under him;

Whereas to watch him fall backward legs flailing beer stench across his chest;

Whereas I pictured it happening in cinematic slow-motion delightful;

Whereas the curled hand I raised to my mouth was a sign of indecision;

Whereas I could’ve done it but I didn’t;

Whereas I can admit this also took place, yes, at least;

WHEREAS we ride to the airport in a van they swivel their necks and shoulders around to speak to me sugar and lilt in their voices something like nurses their nursely kindness through my hair then engage me as comrades in a fight together. Well what we want to know one lady asks is why they don’t have schools there? Her outrage empathy her furrowed brow. There are schools there I reply. Grade schools high schools colleges. But why aren’t there any stores there? There are stores there. Grocery stores convenience stores trading posts whatever what-have-you I explain but it’s here I recognize the break. It’s here we roll along the pavement into hills of conversation we share a ride we share a country but live in alternate nations and here I must tell them what they don’t know or, should I? Should I is the moment to seize and before I know it I say Well you know Native people as in tribes as in “people” living over there are people with their own nations each with its own government and flag they rise to their own national songs and sing in their own languages, even. And by there I mean here all around us I remind them. Drifting in side-glances to whirring trees through the van windows then back to me they dig in they unearth the golden question My God how come we were never taught this in our schools? The concern and furrow. But God the slowing wheels and we lurch forward in the van’s downshift and brake. Together we reach a full-stop. Trapped in a helix of traffic we’re late for check-in security flights our shoulders flex forward into panicked outward gazes nerves and fingers cradle our wristwatches so to answer their question now would be untimely because to really speak to it ever is, untimely. But there Comrades there Nurses. I will remember the swing of your gold earrings. There your perfume around me as a fresh blanket. There you checked my pulse kindly. There the boundary of bedside manners;

WHEREAS a woman I know says she watched a news program a reporter detailed the fire a house in which five children burned perhaps their father too she doesn’t recall exactly but remembers the camera on the mother’s face the mother’s blubbering her hiccuping and wail she leans to me she says she never knew then in those times that year this country the northern state she grew up in she was so young you see she’d never seen it before nobody talked about them she means Indians she tells me and so on and so on but that moment in front of the TV she says was like opening a box left at her door opening to see the thing inside whereas to say she learned through that mother’s face can you believe it and I let her finish wanting someone to say it but she hated saying it or so she said admitting how she never knew until then they could feel;

WHEREAS the word whereas means it being the case that, or considering that, or while on the contrary; is a qualifying or introductory statement, a conjunction, a connector. Whereas sets the table. The cloth. The saltshakers and plates. Whereas calls me to the table because Whereas precedes and invites. I have come now. I’m seated across from a Whereas smile. Under pressure of formalities, I fidget I shake my legs. I’m not one for these smiles, Whereas I have spent my life in unholding. What do you mean by unholding? Whereas asks and since Whereas rarely asks, I am moved to respond, Whereas, I have learned to exist and exist without your formality, saltshakers, plates, cloth. Without the slightest conjunctions to connect me. Without an exchange of questions, without the courtesy of answers. This has become mine, this unholding. Whereas, with or without the setup, I can see the dish being served. Whereas let us bow our heads in prayer now, just enough to eat;

 

Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss

Here is a description of Christian Wiman's short book, My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer. Wiman's essay, "Love Bade Me Welcome" is reprinted below. 

Christian Wiman is a poet and editor of Poetry magazine. He was born in West Texas in 1966. He graduated from Washington and Lee University, and has published two books of poetry as well as an eloquent and widely admired collection of reflections on the relation of poetry and religious faith, My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer.

The novelist and essayist Marilynne Robinson, author of Housekeeping and Gilead, wrote that Wiman's poetry and scholarship "have a purifying urgency that is rare in this world. This puts him at the very source of theology, and enables him to say new things in timeless language, so that the reader's surprise and assent are one and the same."

In 2012 Christian Wiman joined the Yale Divinity School Institute of Sacred Music as a senior lecturer in religion and literature.

Wiman's essay "Love Bade Me Welcome," was widely reprinted on the internet and evoked much response from readers. It first appeared in Wiman's book, Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet (Copper Canyon Press, 2007).

 

In his preface to My Bright Abyss, Wiman writes of "Love Bade Me Welcome:"

"It was about despair: losing the ability to write, falling in love, receiving a diagnosis of an incurable cancer, having my heart ripped apart by what, slowly and in spite of all my modern secular instincts, I learned to call God. It was my entire existence crammed into eight pages. The essay detailed a radical change in my life, and then it seemed—or the reaction seemed—to demand a further one."

A further such radical change, which in turn gave birth to the deeply insightful and thoughtful book, My Bright Abyss.

The title of Wiman's essay is drawn from George Herbert's poem, "Love:"

Love bade me welcome; yet my soul drew back,
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning
If I lack'd anything.

'A guest,' I answer'd, 'worthy to be here:'
Love said, 'You shall be he.'
'I, the unkind, ungrateful? Ah, my dear,
I cannot look on Thee.'
Love took my hand and smiling did reply,
'Who made the eyes but I?'

'Truth, Lord; but I have marr'd them: let my shame
Go where it doth deserve.'
'And know you not,' says Love, 'Who bore the blame?'
'My dear, then I will serve.'
'You must sit down,' says Love, 'and taste my meat.'
So I did sit and eat.

Here is Wiman's essay, "Love Made Me Welcome":

Though I was raised in a very religious household, until about a year ago I hadn't been to church in any serious way in more than 20 years. It would be inaccurate to say that I have been indifferent to God in all that time. If I look back on the things I have written in the past two decades, it's clear to me not only how thoroughly the forms and language of Christianity have shaped my imagination, but also how deep and persistent my existential anxiety has been. I don't know whether this is all attributable to the century into which I was born, some genetic glitch, or a late reverberation of the Fall of Man. What I do know is that I have not been at ease in this world.

Poetry, for me, has always been bound up with this unease, fueled by contingency toward forms that will transcend it, as involved with silence as it is with sound. I don't have much sympathy for the Arnoldian notion of poetry replacing religion. It seems not simply quaint but dangerous to make that assumption, even implicitly, perhaps especially implicitly. I do think, though, that poetry is how religious feeling has survived in me. Partly this is because I have at times experienced in the writing of a poem some access to a power that feels greater than I am, and it seems reductive, even somehow a deep betrayal, to attribute that power merely to the unconscious or to the dynamism of language itself. But also, if I look back on the poems I've written in the past two decades, it almost seems as if the one constant is God. Or, rather, His absence.

There is a passage in the writings of Simone Weil that has long been important to me. In the passage, Weil describes two prisoners who are in solitary confinement next to each other. Between them is a stone wall. Over a period of time — and I think we have to imagine it as a very long time — they find a way to communicate using taps and scratches. The wall is what separates them, but it is also the only means they have of communicating. "It is the same with us and God," she says. "Every separation is a link."

It's probably obvious why this metaphor would appeal to me. If you never quite feel at home in your life, if being conscious means primarily being conscious of your own separation from the world and from divinity (and perhaps any sentient person after modernism has to feel these things) then any idea or image that can translate that depletion into energy, those absences into presences, is going to be powerful. And then there are those taps and scratches: what are they but language, and if language is the way we communicate with the divine, well, what kind of language is more refined and transcendent than poetry? You could almost embrace this vision of life — if, that is, there was any actual life to embrace: Weil's image for the human condition is a person in solitary confinement. There is real hope in the image, but still, in human terms, it is a bare and lonely hope.

It has taken three events, each shattering in its way, for me to recognize both the full beauty, and the final insufficiency, of Weil's image. The events are radically different, but so closely linked in time, and so inextricable from one another in their consequences, that there is an uncanny feeling of unity to them. There is definitely some wisdom in learning to see our moments of necessity and glory and tragedy not as disparate experiences but as facets of the single experience that is a life. The pity, at least for some of us, is that we cannot truly have this knowledge of life, can only feel it as some sort of abstract "wisdom," until we come very close to death.

First, necessity: four years ago, after making poetry the central purpose of my life for almost two decades, I stopped writing. Partly this was a conscious decision. I told myself that I had exhausted one way of writing, and I do think there was truth in that. The deeper truth, though, is that I myself was exhausted. To believe that being conscious means primarily being conscious of loss, to find life authentic only in the apprehension of death, is to pitch your tent at the edge of an abyss, "and when you gaze long into the abyss," Nietzsche says, "the abyss also gazes into you." I blinked.

On another level, though, the decision to stop writing wasn't mine. Whatever connection I had long experienced between word and world, whatever charge in the former I had relied on to let me feel the latter, went dead. Did I give up poetry, or was it taken from me? I'm not sure, and in any event the effect was the same: I stumbled through the months, even thrived in some ways. Indeed — and there is something almost diabolical about this common phenomenon — it sometimes seemed like my career in poetry began to flourish just as poetry died in me. I finally found a reliable publisher for my work (the work I'd written earlier, I mean), moved into a good teaching job, and then quickly left that for the editorship of Poetry. But there wasn't a scrap of excitement in any of this for me. It felt like I was watching a movie of my life rather than living it, an old silent movie, no color, no sound, no one in the audience but me.

Then I fell in love. I say it suddenly, and there was certainly an element of radical intrusion and transformation to it, but the sense I have is of color slowly aching into things, the world coming brilliantly, abradingly alive. I remember tiny Albert's Café on Elm Street in Chicago where we first met, a pastry case like a Pollock in the corner of my eye, sunlight suddenly more itself on an empty plate, a piece of silver. I think of walking together along Lake Michigan a couple of months later talking about a particular poem of Dickinson's ("A loss of something ever felt I"), clouds finding and failing to keep one form after another, the lake booming its blue into everything; of lying in bed in my highrise apartment downtown watching the little blazes in the distance that were the planes at Midway, so numerous and endless that all those safe departures and homecomings seemed a kind of secular miracle. We usually think of falling in love as being possessed by another person, and like anyone else I was completely consumed and did some daffy things. But it also felt, for the first time in my life, like I was being fully possessed by being itself. "Joy is the overflowing consciousness of reality," Weil writes, and that's what I had, a joy that was at once so overflowing that it enlarged existence, and yet so rooted in actual things that, again for the first time, that's what I began to feel: rootedness.

I don't mean to suggest that all my old anxieties were gone. There were still no poems, and this ate at me constantly. There was still no God, and the closer I came to reality, the more I longed for divinity — or, more accurately perhaps, the more divinity seemed so obviously a part of reality. I wasn't alone in this: we began to say a kind of prayer before our evening meals — jokingly at first, awkwardly, but then with intensifying seriousness and deliberation, trying to name each thing that we were thankful for, and in so doing, praise the thing we could not name. On most Sundays we would even briefly entertain — again, half-jokingly, — the idea of going to church. The very morning after we got engaged, in fact, we paused for a long time outside a church on Michigan Avenue. The service was just about to start, organ music pouring out of the wide open doors into the late May sun, and we stood there holding each other and debating whether or not to walk inside. In the end it was I who resisted.

I wish I could slow things down at this point, could linger a bit in those months after our marriage. I wish I could feel again that blissful sense of immediacy and expansiveness at once, when every moment implied another, and the future suddenly seemed to offer some counterbalance to the solitary fever I had lived in for so long. I think most writers live at some strange adjacency to experience, that they feel life most intensely in their recreation of it. For once, for me, this wasn't the case. I could not possibly have been paying closer attention to those days. Which is why I was caught so off-guard.

I got the news that I was sick on the afternoon of my 39th birthday. It took a bit of time, travel, and a series of wretched tests to get the specific diagnosis, but by then the main blow had been delivered, and that main blow is what matters. I have an incurable cancer in my blood. The disease is as rare as it is mysterious, killing some people quickly and sparing others for decades, afflicting some with all manner of miseries and disabilities and leaving others relatively healthy until the end. Of all the doctors I have seen, not one has been willing to venture even a vague prognosis.

Conventional wisdom says that tragedy will cause either extreme closeness or estrangement in a couple. We'd been married less than a year when we got the news of the cancer. It stands to reason we should have been especially vulnerable to such a blow, and in some ways love did make things much worse. If I had gotten the diagnosis some years earlier — and it seems weirdly providential that I didn't, since I had symptoms and went to several doctors about them — I'm not sure I would have reacted very strongly. It would have seemed a fatalistic confirmation of everything I had always thought about existence, and my response, I think, would have been equally fatalistic. It would have been the bearable oblivion of despair, not the unbearable, and therefore galvanizing, pain of particular grief. In those early days after the diagnosis, when we mostly just sat on the couch and cried, I alone was dying, but we were mourning very much together. And what we were mourning was not my death, exactly, but the death of the life we had imagined with each other.

Then one morning we found ourselves going to church. Found ourselves. That's exactly what it felt like, in both senses of the phrase, as if some impulse in each of us had finally been catalyzed into action, so that we were casting aside the Sunday paper and moving toward the door with barely a word between us; and as if, once inside the church, we were discovering exactly where and who we were meant to be. That first service was excruciating, in that it seemed to tear all wounds wide open, and it was profoundly comforting, in that it seemed to offer the only possible balm. What I remember of that Sunday, though, and of the Sundays that immediately followed, is less the services themselves than the walks we took afterwards, and less the specifics of the conversations we had about God, always about God, than the moments of silent, and what felt like sacred, attentiveness those conversations led to: an iron sky and the lake so calm it seemed thickened; the El blasting past with its rain of sparks and brief, lost faces; the broad leaves and white blooms of a catalpa on our street, Grace Street, and under the tree a seethe of something that was just barely still a bird, quick with life beyond its own.

I was brought up with the poisonous notion that you had to renounce love of the earth in order to receive the love of God. My experience has been just the opposite: a love of the earth and existence so overflowing that it implied, or included, or even absolutely demanded, God. Love did not deliver me from the earth, but into it. And by some miracle I do not find that this experience is crushed or even lessened by the knowledge that, in all likelihood, I will be leaving the earth sooner than I had thought. Quite the contrary, I find life thriving in me, and not in an aestheticizing Death-is-the-mother-of-beauty sort of way either, for what extreme grief has given me is the very thing it seemed at first to obliterate: a sense of life beyond the moment, a sense of hope. This is not simply hope for my own life, though I do have that. It is not a hope for heaven or any sort of explainable afterlife, unless by those things one means simply the ghost of wholeness that our inborn sense of brokenness creates and sustains, some ultimate love that our truest temporal ones goad us toward. This I do believe in, and by this I live, in what the apostle Paul called "hope toward God."

"It is necessary to have had a revelation of reality through joy," Weil writes, "in order to find reality through suffering." This is certainly true to my own experience. I was not wrong all those years to believe that suffering is at the very center of our existence, and that there can be no untranquilized life that does not fully confront this fact. The mistake lay in thinking grief the means of confrontation, rather than love. To come to this realization is not to be suddenly "at ease in the world." I don't really think it's possible for humans to be at the same time conscious and comfortable. Though we may be moved by nature to thoughts of grace, though art can tease our minds toward eternity and love's abundance make us dream a love that does not end, these intuitions come only through the earth, and the earth we know only in passing, and only by passing. I would qualify Weil's statement somewhat, then, by saying that reality, be it of this world or another, is not something one finds and then retains for good. It must be newly discovered daily, and newly lost.

So now I bow my head and try to pray in the mornings, not because I don't doubt the reality of what I have experienced, but because I do, and with an intensity that, because to once feel the presence of God is to feel His absence all the more acutely, is actually more anguishing and difficult than any "existential anxiety" I have ever known. I go to church on Sundays, not to dispel this doubt but to expend its energy, because faith is not a state of mind but an action in the world, a movement toward the world. How charged this one hour of the week is for me, and how I cherish it, though not one whit more than the hours I have with my wife, with friends, or in solitude, trying to learn how to inhabit time so completely that there might be no distinction between life and belief, attention and devotion. And out of all these efforts at faith and love, out of my own inevitable failures at both, I have begun to write poems again. But the language I have now to call on God is not only language, and the wall on which I make my taps and scratches is no longer a cell but this whole prodigal and all too perishable world in which I find myself, very much alive, and not at all alone. As I approach the first anniversary of my diagnosis, as I approach whatever pain is ahead of me, I am trying to get as close to this wall as possible. And I am listening with all I am.

 

"If You Would Go Out on a Limb for Us, It Might Just Save Our Lives" - Nicholas Kristof, NYT 5/29/21

[I'm sending this column of Nicholas Kristof from today's New York Times to family and close friends, although I know most of you read the Times and that you have probably read Kristof's column. Many of you know of my high regard for his recognized humane perspectives, including two Pulitzer Prizes for his work on (and from) China and Darfur. So for those of you who may have missed it, or might read it again (a practice I'm grateful to have learned early, and find of even greater value as an elder). 

[The first thing that struck me was its length: about two-thirds longer than a typical opinion piece, his own or others'. The second tip was that he writes from Yamhill, Oregon, the town in which he was raised and to which he often returns, especially, as I recall, when his writing turns to subjects about which he cares most deeply.

[The pandemic is thankfully in recess for most (not all) of us here in the U.S., which means it's time for us to begin to assess its impact, as well as to recognize that elsewhere in this beleaguered world of ours it continues to take a terrible toll (India, Argentina, Brazil...) 

[That assessment is what Kristof is doing here, with particular attention to longtime friends, old neighbors, friends of friends and friends of neighbors. He knows it's not likely to be an easy read, but he is fundamentally a hopeful person, and there is hope in what follows. There must be hope, as well as love — the two speak, for him, for us, as twins that sustain our lives, our ways of living truly.]

___________________________

‘If You Would Go Out on a Limb for Us, It Might Just Save Our Lives’

May 29, 2021

 

 

Credit...Matt Black/Magnum Photos

 

By Nicholas Kristof

YAMHILL, Ore. — As more vaccinated Americans emerge, blinking, to survey our post-apocalyptic world, it’s becoming increasingly clear that many of our fellow citizens may never fully recover — even if they didn’t actually contract the coronavirus.

That’s because quite apart from the direct effects of the virus, the pandemic has aggravated mental illness, domestic violence, addiction and childhood trauma in ways that may reverberate for decades.

My friends who started out prosperous have ridden out the storm in vacation homes and seen their investments soar. Here in rural Oregon where I grew up, my friends who were already down and out are mostly struggling, homeless or even dead, and there is similar anguish across a broad swath of the United States.

That’s why President Biden’s proposals to invest in families and working-class Americans are so important. Just as we acted forcefully to address the virus, we should also move decisively to address America’s persistent pandemic of despair, addiction and educational failure.

Two of my friends overdosed on heroin during the pandemic, and the girlfriend of one is now self-medicating with meth and is wanted by the law. One of my homeless friends died; another, newly homeless, begs me for money; his mother pleads for me to refuse for fear he will use it to buy drugs and again overdose.

A social worker in Oregon told me of a vulnerable family recently devastated:

A 9-year-old girl and her 11-year-old sister already were facing challenges before the virus arrived, for their mom was wrestling with drug addiction and no longer much in their lives. But their dad was trying hard to fill that void, and they were getting by.

Then the father lost his restaurant job early in the pandemic, so he was home with the kids as they grappled with remote schooling. With the financial stress and constant time together, they got on one another’s nerves. He wanted to be a good dad, but he drank too much and couldn’t always control his anger or cope with life’s strains.

Then one day this spring the dad spent an excruciating hour stuck on hold while calling the state employment office; he finally slammed the phone down in frustration. The kids were hungry — perhaps a bit whiny — and demanded lunch, so he started to make them something. He was also tipsy, and he got into a heated argument with his children about their mother.

At that point, he lost it. He placed his hands around his 11-year-old’s neck and began to strangle her. The younger daughter rushed to her sister’s rescue, and the father hit them both while shouting curses that he didn’t mean.

“I’m done with you!” the father yelled to his children. “I don’t want to see you anymore.”

The kids ran to the house of a neighbor, who called 911. They have no broken bones, but they won’t easily forget the trauma of being attacked by their dad — he had been their responsible parent! — or their ache and fear as they were placed in a shelter pending the outcome of a criminal investigation.

The father is remorseful and blames the alcohol. It’s a tragedy for the entire family, and if it hadn’t been for the coronavirus, he would have been at work, the children would have been at school, and he wouldn’t have had that frustrating phone call.

While children in rich families were being tutored individually at home, this family was imploding.

That is what the virus did: It seized upon America’s inequality and hugely magnified it.

*

This indirect toll of the virus can’t yet be calculated. But the pain spans all regions of the country, urban and rural areas alike, reverberating in myriad complicated ways: A teenage girl cuts herself, frazzled parents exchange blows, a boy is shot as murder rates rise.

The clearest secondary effect is an increase in drug use, for the number of Americans dying from overdoses set another record, an estimated 91,000 for the 12 months ending in October.

That’s because in-person counseling and support groups were suspended, because many people felt more anxious and stressed and because so many Americans feel isolated and lonely. So they self-medicate.

Across the country, there’s growing concern about fentanyl overdoses arising from the isolation. The Beaverton school district near here warned recently that “we’ve lost several students to fentanyl-related poisonings.”

Alcohol kills even more Americans than drug overdoses do, and sales figures and surveys suggest that problem drinking has risen significantly during the pandemic.

Suicide is more complicated. It’s too early to have solid data, but preliminary figures indicate that suicide fell 5 percent in 2020, and the organization Crisis Text Line reported fewer inquiries mentioning suicide. Conversely, visits to emergency rooms because of children’s mental health crises increased during the pandemic. Young people seem hit particularly hard, with one survey finding that more than a quarter said they “seriously considered suicide in the past 30 days.” By comparison, in 2018, 11 percent said they seriously considered suicide at some point in the previous year.

Part of the divergence by wealth and class is simply that stress has risen among those who are hungry or at risk of losing homes. David Blanchflower, an economist at Dartmouth, noted that 18 million Americans sometimes or often don’t have enough to eat, according to census data. More than 11 million are behind on rent or mortgage payments.

Significant increases in domestic violence have been reported during the pandemic, partly linked to increased drinking at home.

Child abuse is more difficult to gauge. Most experts I talked to believe that physical abuse (though perhaps not sexual abuse) has increased along with addiction and stress, but this view isn’t universal. In any case, the cancellation of in-person instruction has meant that abuse of children is less visible and they have fewer opportunities to confide in an adult to get help.

“In this pandemic we’re all isolated, so kids haven’t had that connection with that safe neighbor or the Sunday school teacher,” said Russell Mark, who runs a shelter for abused children, Juliette’s House, in McMinnville, Ore. “So kids have no place to turn.”

“We have a huge number of walking wounded,” he added.

School closures also mean something very basic: Many disadvantaged kids aren’t learning. One study warned that three million children in the United States have missed all formal education, remote or in-person, for a year.

“Some kids we just lose,” Melissa Rysemus, the principal of Interagency Academy, an alternative school in Seattle, told me. During more than a year of remote instruction, only about half of the school’s children attended classes, and some of them didn’t turn on their cameras.

Two of Rysemus’s students were killed during the pandemic, one shot by a boyfriend and one shot in his doorway for unknown reasons.

One way to assess the impact on children is to count “adverse childhood experiences,” or ACEs. These can be a parent beating or regularly swearing at a child or partner, or parents divorcing or abusing drugs or alcohol. Many children have one ACE, but those who have several are more likely as adults to suffer from cancer, heart disease and other ailments, as well as to abuse drugs, miss work or even kill themselves.

Several child experts told me that the pandemic has been an ACE machine, with more domestic violence, drug abuse and turmoil in homes, in addition to about 40,000 children losing a parent to Covid-19 itself. Given what we know about ACEs, today’s traumatized children may suffer increased risks for decades to come, and some may transmit the disadvantage to the next generation.

*

I’ve been worrying during this pandemic about an old friend of mine, whom I’ll call Dell. He’s smart and charming, but his grandfather was an alcoholic, and his father — a wonderful friend of mine — abused drugs and alcohol until his death six years ago. Dell started using drugs at 12, burglarizing homes to support his habit, but then three years ago, he turned over a new leaf.

Dell was a star of a recovery program, got a job, avoided drugs for more than two years and was a fantastic dad to his two children. My wife and I told him about research on the importance of talking to infants, and he began speaking to his kids constantly.

In February 2020 on the eve of the pandemic, I saw him and his new wife, and he told me he had been promoted to be a manager. We embraced and celebrated: He was going to be the one to break the cycle! His kids would thrive!

Then Covid-19 arrived, and he no longer could attend support meetings and no longer had to take urine tests — “no support and no accountability,” as his mother put it. Dell received some wrenching personal news and coped by shooting heroin. He overdosed, and the hospital barely brought him back to life.

Dell returned to drugs, and his baby soon had to get medical treatment for somehow ingesting meth when his parents were high. In quick succession, Dell lost his job, lost the baby to foster care, lost his apartment and gave up his other son to be raised by others.

A good man who loved his children and had been doing so well had seen his life collapse and was now living in his car with his new wife. His baby is now being put up for adoption.

“Life is bleak and I did it to myself,” he texted me recently. “Living in a 1996 Honda Civic and not seeing my kids because I don’t have a roof is the worst.” He asked me to help by investing in a scheme he had devised to house people in shipping containers.

“If you would go out on a limb for us,” he said, “it might just save our lives.”

I was heartsick, but Dell’s mother, who herself has been drug-free for six years, begged me not to give him money or anything that he could sell; she fears that the proceeds would go to drugs that would kill him. The best hope to save his life, she said wretchedly, is for him to be arrested and go through detox.

“I’ve never seen him this bad,” his mother told me.

*

This column may seem like a depressing read, but the truth is that while people relapse into addiction, they also, miraculously, pull themselves out — with help.

Years ago in Nashville I met Shelia Simpkins, who was trafficked into prostitution at the age of 6. She spent many years enslaved by violent pimps, struggling with addiction and repeatedly getting arrested but finally left with the help of a program called Thistle Farms. She earned a B.A. and helped countless other women start over.

Since the pandemic began, Simpkins completed her master’s in social work at Tennessee State University and was recently appointed head of residential services for Thistle Farms and to the board of the National Trafficking Sheltered Alliance. She exemplifies the grit, resilience and potential that are deeply woven into the human fabric.

The toll of the pandemic should underscore the importance of Biden’s three-part proposal to invest in America and Americans. The coronavirus has interacted with half a century of inequality, despair and family dysfunction to shatter those who were already fragile. We should fight back with vaccines and P.P.E., yes, but also with policies to address the underlying inequality of opportunity.

No set of policies can solve all the problems, but Biden’s three-part proposal would invest heavily in left-behind Americans and give needy children a hand up.

The blunt truth is that it is difficult to heal adults like Dell who have wrestled with addiction for many years and have limited education or job experience. The best time to have helped Dell was when he was 3, or perhaps 13, not now that he is an adult raising his own children. As an adage attributed, perhaps incorrectly, to Frederick Douglass puts it, “It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.”

Biden’s child tax credits could reduce America’s staggering rates of child poverty by about half. High-quality pre-K would be a lifeline for children in chaotic homes. Child care would make it easier for parents to hold jobs. Bandwidth-for-all would allow families access to the internet. Free community college would lead to better jobs and stronger families. Investments in health care would make it easier for parents to get drug treatment and mental health support.

Melissa Teague was the longtime girlfriend of an old neighbor of mine, Keylan Knapp, a good man who died of a heroin overdose as the pandemic began. Melissa’s father also abused drugs, and she has herself been wrestling with addiction since she was 13, when she was prescribed painkillers for migraines.

“Now it’s kind of a way of living,” she told me.

Keylan and Melissa, 2018.Credit...Nicholas Kristof

Sweet and shy, Melissa has served prison sentences for drug-related offenses, and she also suffers from anxiety. Keylan’s death complicated everything, for she (wrongly) blamed herself. “I miss him so much,” she lamented. “Every day seems to get harder.”

“I had to take an anxiety pill to call you,” she added. Because of her anxiety, she said, she missed a court appearance and is wanted by the police.

Melissa adores her 14-year-old son, and her foremost goal is to see him flourish and avoid the minefields that now represent her life.

“I’m tired of drugs killing everyone I love,” she said.

That’s how I feel, too. The pandemic has shown more than ever that we inhabit two Americas, but finally this year we have a fighting chance to adopt policies that can help those left behind — especially children. As we end the coronavirus pandemic, we also have a chance to tackle the pandemic of despair and inequality that holds back so many Americans.

Melissa is trying to be upbeat. “I just keep reminding myself that God is working behind the scenes, even though I may not see anything good,” she mused. She promised me that she wouldn’t overdose, and the next day she summoned the courage to attend a Narcotics Anonymous meeting.

She was feeling hope, knowing that there is a better path forward. We as a nation just have to take it.

 

Nine Years to Zero: The Climate Emergency Movement

Nine Years to Zero:                         The Climate Emergency Movement    May 12, 2021   The movement to address the climate emergency at the scale and speed required is growing. Today TCM, along with over 650 allied organizations, has sent a letter to key Democrats in Congress demanding a Renewable Energy Standard to achieve 100% renewable energy by 2030 be included in the infrastructure package that is currently in the works. Please retweet and repost to help increase the pressure to achieve this key goal.   Big news out of Hawaii: After diligent work from nearly 40 organizations that make up the Hawaii Climate & Environmental Coalition, the Hawaii legislature passed Senate Resolution SCR44, declaring a climate emergency in the state on April 29, 2021, paving the way for more comprehensive, urgent climate action at the state level. This resolution is the first state-level declaration of climate emergency in the United States. As the only U.S. state surrounded by the rising sea, this move sends a message about the severity of the climate emergency and the need to act to meet the scale of the crisis.    This declaration brings the total number of climate emergency declarations in the U.S. to 146 within 24 states. 12.49% of United States citizens now live in a town, city or state that has declared a climate emergency.   These shifts are happening because awareness of the reality of the climate emergency is finally reaching a tipping point. A new Harvard CAPS-Harris Poll found that 52% of those surveyed believe “we are under a climate emergency.” Among those polled, a higher number of Democrats and non-white respondents agreed with the climate emergency frame.    On the policy front, local climate action continues to demonstrate a key pathway for making progress toward Climate Mobilization. After declaring a climate emergency in November of 2019, the City Council in Ann Arbor, Michigan officially adopted their $1 billion A2Zero climate action plan last month, with a 2030 deadline for net-zero emissions. This is a massive commitment from a city of roughly 120,000 people and comes after dedicated organizing and collaboration in the city.  Climate Mobilization Network Launch     On May 3, we launched our Climate Mobilization Network, a new space for local climate emergency groups to connect, share their work, and take action together. If you would like to learn more about joining the network, contact Organizing Director Rebecca Harris at rebecca.harris@climatemobilization.org   Action in the Works   The National Climate Emergency Act, introduced in February by Sen. Bernie Sanders, Rep. Earl Blumenauer and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, would give the President additional tools to cut emissions, while creating accountability, oversight and a road map for equitable climate action. The bill is already supported by at least 50 members of Congress, but much more support is needed to pass the bill. You can take action here — Tell Congress to pass the National Climate Emergency Act.   The Democratic congress has seen a slew of climate bills introduced in recent weeks, including the THRIVE Act, which includes an economic recovery package that would put over 15 million people to work across the economy and cut climate pollution in half by 2030. The plan advances gender, environmental, Indigenous, economic, and racial justice, with particular attention to Black and Indigenous communities. While the emission reductions in this act are too slow on their own, this would be a great start. We appreciate and support the effort to create benefits for frontline communities and working Americans as a core focus of this legislation.    In an important move that demonstrates the kinds of bans needed to make real progress, French lawmakers have voted to outlaw short, domestic flights that could be covered by train in less than 2.5 hours.    Impacts and Setbacks   California’s drought is necessitating expanded restrictions across the state as residents brace for the coming wildfire season. Native Communities in the Pacific Northwest are being displaced by rising waters. Recent findings indicate that fossil fuel air pollution is responsible for almost 1 in 5 global deaths each year from factors like heart disease and lung cancer, as well as exacerbated impacts of COVID-19. Finally, melting glaciers caused by global warming are largely responsible for the earth shifting on its axis due to redistribution of water across the globe. Clearly we are in a climate emergency, and desperately need an urgent, whole-economy, whole-society response.    Despite the improvement of political rhetoric and some promising proposals in the works, carbon emissions have increased in 2021 by the second-highest rate in history, as governments fuel a post-COVID recovery with stimulus funds aimed at the fossil fuel-powered economy.  Climate action continues to be challenged across  the U.S.:  The governor of Louisiana has introduced a bill that would make his state a “fossil fuel sanctuary state,” deepening Louisiana’s history of air pollution in poor and majority black parishes. And all over the country, the GOP has been passing laws that directly attack those brave enough to protest injustice, from barring those who protest from ever holding public office in Indiana, to protecting those who hit protestors with their cars in Oklahoma and Iowa.  Upcoming Events   The Movement for Black Lives is launching the Red, Black & Green New Deal Initiative — a multi-year Black climate campaign to set a national Black Climate Agenda for a  sustainable future in defense of Black lives. The Initiative puts Black liberation at the center of the global climate struggle, and addresses the impact of climate change and environmental racism on Black communities.    Look out for the upcoming release from Climate Mobilization ally and acclaimed author Jeremy Lent. The Web of Meaning proposes a new and coherent story of connectedness that is based in science and interweaves the great insights of wisdom traditions.