Northern Madagascar from space, before & after recent muddy flooding everybody’s overwhelmed
by their own crises -- nobody has time for the world’s until the world’s becomes their own like in australia: highest temps ever in tasmania; while s. central port lincoln submerges; wildfires creeping towards the capital . . . while over yonder in belo horizonte, brazil, n. of rio, it’s the wettest month in history: 5” in 3 hrs., 60 dead, 47k displaced; “we saw a wall of water that swept away cars & people. luckily i was able to rescue everyone & i carried 3 or 4 of them on my back.” while chile declares emergency in flooded north, sends in army to help; in sumatra, 9 dead from drowning or hit by logs swept along by the current; 1000s in temporary shelters & in madagascar, abnormal rainfall submerges towns, cattle, grain — all lost -- > 100k people displaced meanwhile “in angola, girls of 12 sell themselves for as little as the cost of a loaf of bread” (worst drought in 40 yrs); 71 k in lesotho “1 step away from famine”: “we can’t plant any crops in this drought. we have no livestock left to sell or exchange for grain. so, unless we get help, we are just going to starve” & 7.7 m need urgent food aid in zimbabwe; 34k cattle dead; a different meaning to the term “food desert” which for us here means figuring out how to get yr groceries back to yr home we look at pictures from the 30s as though they’re from a different planet, as though some cosmic shift happened that means it can’t happen here, history can’t repeat, w/ its dustbowls & dictators, its stukas and starving . . .
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A recent article in Huffington Post detailed the strange bedfellows leading the Austrian government these days, viz., the conservative People’s Party and the Green Party. The contract (yes, they have to sign a contract) between the two parties obliges them to combat global warming and immigrants.
Indeed, far-right groupings across Europe are dumping climate skepticism and articulating the language of ecology to their authoritarian vision. Marine Le Pen in France invoked “blood-and-soil rhetoric, declaring that those ‘rooted in their home’ are ‘ecological’ while ‘nomadic’ people ‘do not care about the environment because they have no homeland.’” “Eco-fascism” is a term for “an ideology that defends its violent authoritarianism as necessary to protect the environment.” Or, as Naomi Klein put it in a recent interview, What actually happens is they apply that intensely hierarchical supremacist worldview to the reality that what climate change means is that the space for people to live well on this planet is contracting. More and more of us are going to have to live on less and less land, even if we do everything right. It’s already happening. So if you have that worldview, then you will apply it to people who are migrating to your country and to those who want to migrate to your country. Both the El Paso & Christchurch shooters cited this rhetoric in their pre-massacre screeds. Indeed, the more I look at what is transpiring in the human world, the more it seems like the current environmental disaster will be accompanied by increasing authoritarianism. And that authoritarianism will include racism as a prop. In the American context, creeping authoritarianism is bound up with religious intolerance, as it is in many places (which stands in for racial and gender intolerance, too). Maybe climate crisis isn’t the most immediate danger. Thinking about living under a fascist regime in the near future makes the “increasing number and intensity of storms” sound a little abstract. Some of us will be beheaded before we see life really disrupted by climate change. Authoritarians are pretty narrow-minded when it comes to writing that takes a critical view of their regime – or that they simply don’t understand (as with the Nazis’ denunciation of “degenerate art”). It’s hard to imagine very much writing of lasting interest being produced under such a regime. So . . . write what you can now? Stash it away and hope it all blows over? Or maybe doing everything we can to prevent such a regime from coming to power in the first place. And we must understand suppression of immigrants and immigration as a means to divert attention from the true causes of the climate crisis. Many courageous writers and artists have defied and worked against totalitarian regimes — not just as writers but as organizers, often clandestinely. The S may HTF politically before it does climatically. We need to take our noses out of our books. happy kansas day!
new model predicts we may have a lot of company, soon - “suburban and rural areas in the midwest will experience disproportionately large in- flux of people relative to their smaller local populations” “when migration occurs naturally,” the computer scientist sez, “it is a great engine for economic activity & growth. but when migration is forced upon people, productivity falls; human & social capital are lost; communities are broken apart.” as in small island nations, where “traditional way of life is deteriorating”; & in bolivia, the price of chicken is going up up up; in finland, the flowers bloom already; n. queensland drowns while s.e. queensland bakes; new wildfire bears down on the capital canberra; flooding spreads to rwanda, mozambique (45 dead so far); & botswana elephants trample each other to try to get to what little water is left in the watering hole . . . all due to c.c. scott morrison won’t feel it; donald trump won’t feel it; xi jinping won’t feel it; exxon-mobil won’t feel it; the rest of us are living in it, up to our eyeballs or seeping in around our feet; dry land moving fast; as the song says get it while you can . . . I finally read The Overstory, by Richard Powers (Norton 2018). A FBriend recently posted their opinion that it is “the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of the climate crisis.” This raised my eyebrow at first (“Hmm. Do the trees talk like they’re in a minstrel show?” I wondered); but then it got me curious. After all, UTC made something happen.
There is one thing certain about the book: it is long and complex (and big — tho there is a disclaimer about carbon offsets, etc.) The first section, “Roots,” details the seemingly separate and mutually irrelevant stories of each of 9 characters, from childhood to young adulthood. (My wife is reading this part now: she’s on the second of these stories and is already lost. All I can say is it helps to have taught Faulkner novels.) In any event, as you might imagine, in the subsequent section, “Trunk,” some of the characters’ lives — and various varieties of trees — begin to intersect in interesting ways. The main action begins during the “Redwood Summer” of 1990 in the remote far northern reaches of the California redwood forests. That movement involved chaining oneself to various things and people, spiking trees, and sitting in trees, as a way to prevent them from being cut down. But they were cut down, by and large — are being cut. And it’s hard to tell whether to be hopeful or despairing, by the end of The Overstory. Take, for instance, this moment, in one of the tree-sits: “They can’t win. They can’t beat nature.” “But they can mess things over for an incredibly long time.” Yet on such a night as this, as the forest pumps out its million-part symphonies and the fat, blazing moon gets shredded in Mimas’s [“their” redwood tree’s] branches, it’s easy for even Nick to believe that green has a plan that will make the age of mammals seem like a minor detour. (292) This is hopeful, I suppose — unless, possibly, if you’re a mammal. Or as long as you’re someone who sees the larger biome as being more important than any one species. The problem for our species, as a lawyer character sees it, is that “[l]ife will cook; the seas will rise. The planet’s lungs will be ripped out. And the law will let this happen, because harm was never imminent enough. Imminent, at the speed of people, is too late. The law must judge imminent at the speed of trees” (498). But, of course, it does not. People can’t see beyond the troubles of the day, let alone the year, the decade, or generations. And that is their (our) undoing. The forestry scientist, Patricia Westerford, puts it this way, to her husband, Dennis: “People are so beautiful.” He turns to her, horrified. But he’s a man of faith, and waits to hear whatever explanation she cares to deliver. And, Yes, she thinks. The thought makes her stubborn. Yes: beautiful. And doomed. Which is why she has never been able to live among them. “Hopelessness makes them determined. Nothing’s more beautiful than that.” “You think we’re hopeless?” “Den. How is extraction ever going to stop? It can’t even slow down. The only things we know how to do is grow. Grow harder; grow faster. more than last year. Growth, all the way up to the cliff and over. No other possibility.” “I see.” Clearly he doesn’t. But his willingness to lie for her also breaks her heart. She would tell him – how the towering, teetering pyramid of large living things is toppling down already, in slow motion, under the huge, swift kick that has dislodged the planetary system. The great cycles of air and water are breaking. The Tree of Life will fall again, collapse into a stump of invertebrates, tough ground cover, and bacteria, unless man . . . Unless man. (304-5) Why doesn’t “man” do anything? Well, most folks don’t see on the timescale Westerford or the trees do. We didn’t evolve for that — our rational faculty was never intended by nature to preserve all of nature, just us. We’re afflicted by confirmation bias, belief bias, the ambiguity effect, singularity effect, and of course, this all-time greatest hit: “It has a name. We call it the bystander effect. [. . .] The larger the group . . .” “. . . the harder it is to cry, Fire?” “Because if there were a real problem, surely someone – ” “ – lots of people would already have –“ (321) But given that these are the brains we’re working with, what is to be done? Especially by a writer? Powers does seem to have faith in narrative. As the psychologist of the group puts it, “The best arguments in the world won’t change a person’s mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story.” The problem is that the good stories are not telling the story that needs telling: The books [. . .] share a core so obvious it passes for given. Every one imagines that fear and anger, violence and desire, rage laced with the surprise capacity to forgive – character – is all that matters in the end. It’s a child’s creed, of course, just one small step up from the belief that the Creator of the Universe would care to dole out sentences like a judge in federal court. To be human is to confuse a satisfying story with a meaningful one, and to mistake life for something huge with two legs. No: life is mobilized on a vastly larger scale, and the world is failing precisely because no novel can make the contest for the world seem as compelling as the struggles between a few lost people. (382-3) Clearly, Powers is trying to write precisely such a novel — and perhaps recognizing the impossibility of making that contest seem more compelling than your overdrawn bank account or the kids’ fighting over the Wii. It’s a novel that de-centralizes character in favor of trees (and non-human life in general) as the main focus. There is a brief thread at the end having to do with technology and consciousness, but it’s not clear whether that will lead to salvation or faster destruction. One must have a mind of winter, and take the very very long view, in order to produce a sense of acceptance, let alone optimism. Having said that, the human characters do make ethical choices about their relationships to one another, as well as to trees — some with enormous consequences. The book finds meaning in virtue and vice, existential decisions, and sacrificing for love. But that which you truly love shall be taken from you, and it’s clear no rational or ethical response is possible without that understanding. This summer I re-read part of Deleuse’ & Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus. So much of it reads like goofy 1970s weed-induced rambling that I found it kind of hard to take seriously. But their comments on the danger of “arboreal” metaphors still struck a chord. The world-tree is an axis, a center, around which the grand story of history and life revolves. And if you’re not at the center, in the canopy, well . . . Anyway, that’s one tough tree to fell. Roots-trunk-crown: it’s an inherently hierarchical model for a book or a universe. And dealing with redwoods (esp. as synecdoches of “the world”) automatically tends toward gigantism. I have to wonder whether it isn’t better to be thinking rhizomatically, as D & G suggest — in terms of multi-nodal networks, rather than central shafts. Will survival of body and soul be promoted by government or government’s employer, big business? Or will it take a network of smaller communities or affinity groups finding whatever meaning and livelihood is to be found by helping one another? Clearly, the redwood-crusader characters are fetishizing individual trees, giving them names, etc. But, to Powers’ credit, he points out that there are networks a-plenty in the forest, both underground, in connections between root systems, and above ground, in chemical communications between various species’ branches and leaves. The aspens — those gigantic, self-cloning single-organism forests — make an appearance, and our attention is frequently drawn down down down, to the rotting logs on the forest floor. That’s where the action is — the generation of a variety of small life forms, denning by others, growth of arborescent and non-arborescent plants. Maybe such a model argues for replacing the grand récit, the über-story, with shorter ones — a linked short-story collection, maybe, rather than a novel. Getting down in the leaves like that is the only way art can help link our lives to Life. Saturday, in Marabella, Málaga, far south of Spain: ‘stralia:
“everything just shriveled w/the heat” “the suggestion that there’s any one emissions reduction policy or climate policy that has contributed directly to any of these fire events is just ridiculous” “to be a rebel, all we ask is for your email and to come to one talk,” “people have had a gutful” “out of despair and fatigue, i got involved” “that figure is 5x higher than past studies had predicted for the year. climate is racing far ahead of the models we have been using until now” “let me tell you, it’s been hard to make a catchy phrase out of ‘you are all going to die’”; black ash not black sand on the beaches meanwhile, zimbabwe: “we have no option. this water is dangerous as you can see,” sez the citizen, pointing to a pile of human waste nearby; n. madagascar: 16k dis- placed, 31 dead this wk after tropical storm; inundations leave 53 dead in s.e. brazil (6.7” rain in 24 hrs in belo horizonte, 110 yr record; landslides kill ≥ 30; & e. argentina feels another 100+˚f day; 2 wks of rising waters leave 80% of s.e. iran’s people w/o potable water, only the brown sludgy kind; (“when you think of those ahead of you, think also of those behind,” says the philosopher-king; “don’t look back they might be gaining,” sez the wiser ball player) cars tossed onto one another & through shop windows in malaga + several feet of hail; mildest winter ever in sweden; birds fly in the wrong direction in kent — & butterflies! in january — people feeding hedgehogs to keep them alive; “you don’t want hibernating animals charging around thinking it is spring,” or crops coaxed up to be froze down like in u.s.america: “spring-like warmth across much of the s., e.; fewer frosts have allowed plants to think it's safe to emerge” “houston, atlanta, chicago, boston all running 5-10 degrees f > normal: more like normal temps for march or april” sez the meteorologist here, we’re enjoying the “warm” weather (i.e., normal temps); here, we don’t go in for doomsayers, we stay optimistic, we don’t allow the plants to think at all Some day soon, there will be nothing left to say. Everyone will see, not say. They will see, finally, where they are — and where they were. It all will make sense, as an object of contemplation. That which seemed hidden will be obvious – isn’t that the literal meaning of “apocalypse”?
Sure, we were nervous, but we didn’t think that kind of thing would happen here. Everything seemed so normal, until it didn’t. Our “freedom” allowed us freedom within a bubble; it grew like a hothouse plant, in a temperature-controlled environment. But the world is made of nothing but constraints. Needless to say, no one needs to say “nature.” The question remains the same: What do you grab as you’re fleeing the fire? Or whom? The parable of the grasshopper and the ants made me so guilty and anxious as a kid. You need to keep working, working, working, if you want to survive. But at what? Maybe I need to go to Karnataka or Siberia, Amazonia or the Horn of Africa, to see for myself the rubber hitting the road and crushing people underneath. Do some “travel writing.” To make it Real. To make it urgent. O but I can’t afford it – I can’t afford to take time off – I might get sick or kidnapped, &c. But then there’s the kicker: calculating how many pounds of CO2 that will add to the atmosphere and oceans. I guess I’ve always been an introvert, never entirely comfortable around people I’m not already comfortable around. And the way things are now, people here are starting to be downright scary: taking extreme positions and hardening into them; accusing each other of crazy shit (some of which is true); staring at their phones while bumping into people around them; burning fossil fuels like they will live for a thousand years; shooting one another over the stupidest shit. Maybe “the new barbarism” is starting already. People in Bangladesh – Uighurs in the PRC – or indigenous people everywhere – don’t have to be told this. They know it from experience that the world don’t owe you a living – or even life. As others have said, the apocalypse has already happened, for many. What’s happening now is that those of us with computers and blogs are realizing we’re next. Who knew?? “incredible footage shows
moment apocalyptic dust storm swept through drought-stricken towns!” – epic global cataclysm! as click-bait (“wow,” she sez . . . ) but the u.k. is smaller than those storms in australia, which once again swelters in 104+° as electric grid nears capacity meanwhile, my students write about their traumas, their healing, p.t.s.d., major depression, schizophrenia, breakups & breakdowns – not climate chaos but personal chaos; they aren’t in sunrise or x.r., just trying to survive within the conditions handed to them while australia deals with venomous arachnids: “wet weather, followed by hot days, has created ‘perfect conditions for funnel-web spiders to thrive.’” at least they’re native . . . (meanwhile, i scramble to construct syllabi, find lost books, whip up something to offer students by way of learning – and manage my own neurodiversity in the university) those fires doubled the annual greenhouse gases for the whole country – “and really, what other evidence does he need that this is an emergency?” a: evidence w/a $ & lots of zeroes (& i want to retreat, curl up hermetically like a pangolin) meanwhile s. africa’s largest province declared a disaster area (drought, again); zimbabwe’s strategic grain reserve at 20% of mandatory minimum: “we need to build the capacity of our farmers to be resilient to climate change shocks such as drought, floods, crop livestock diseases, among others,” sez the gu’mment man (o is that all?) massive drought in afghanistan: “nooruddin watched helplessly as his flock of 100 sheep began to die from hunger & thirst. ‘I cut their heads off & fed them to the dogs’”; tornadoes, waterspouts in u.a.e.; (even w/o the climate craziness, things are getting crazier, poco a poco – & we’ve only got 1st world probs round here) drought in guatemala = declining food harvests = hungry children (↑ 24% in one year – if it were your enrique, mother, or your willie, that were going hungry, how fast could you walk? how many miles could you make in a few brief hours?) people on edge here there & everywhere, but do they know why or what kind of an edge? storm gloaria kills 9 in spain, un-houses 1500 french; northland n.z. just had its hottest, driest year ever; almost snowless winters in middel, eastern europe; great lakes of n. america still at record hi levels; cape hatteras notched 6 jan. all-time highs so far, & me? i have to stop spending so much time on this chronicle – there is too much else to handle w/o having to think about terrestrial meltdown, w/o having to think very much at all – it will all become obvious to everyone soon enough “It is like an oracle or a guide through the liminal, transitional realm, and therefore perhaps becoming even more valuable the more we slide into inevitable transition times.” This from a participant in one of the various forums and pages I subscribe to. They’re describing a possible role for art (and hence the artist) in a time of massive social change – a kind of D.I.Y. psychopomp, guiding the world-soul into a new and unknown realm.
Whether the guide ends up being Virgil or Beatrice, Charon or Hermes, is another matter. I suspect that, given the particular forum this quote appeared in, that the writer had a vague scenario in mind. It goes something like this: Climate chaos is producing a terrible time of tribulation that will become worse and spread farther, full of suffering, strife, and bad surprises. There will be violence, false prophets, social disorders – but also adaptation, resilience, the formation of new communities and adoption of simpler technologies. If we can pass through these awful dark ages, we (well, future we’s) will emerge into the bright light of a new day, characterized by ecological wisdom learned through hard experience. I like that story. And I’d be happy to serve as its psychopomp. I even like the fact that people are in fact telling that very story. Perhaps the European “Dark Ages” are behind this idea – that is, the period between the fall of the western Roman Empire and the stabilization of the feudal order (so, say, 500-1000 C.E.). Historians prefer the term “early Middle Ages” these days, though that has its problems, too, and it’s so much less dramatic. There were, of course, lots of “dark ages” and “warring states periods” before that, all over the world; but it’s a classic. During that era, seems like what poetry was being produced was religious in nature (nothing like the breakdown of social order and invasion of barbarian hordes to make you think about matters of ultimate concern). The visual arts (including architecture) produced much more impressive stuff, much earlier – it was much better at displaying the wealth and power of kings and warlords while also ensuring their entree into heaven. Be that as it may, the glory days of ancient literature were o’er, and it would be a long time before the Chanson de Roland or Canterbury Tales. Maybe the Beowulf poet was a psychopomp of the Dark Ages, and the fight against a monster in the ocean depths a kind of dream-dive into the waters of transformation. But history complicates that narrative pretty quickly. The psychopomp is, of course, the guide of souls to the underworld (or upperworld, or wherever you want to locate the realm of the dead). While I don’t think human extinction is coming anytime soon, it’s already coming for a lot of individuals and communities, due to climate crisis. So in that sense, the poet could be a literal psychopomp. you know how they say
weather isn’t climate? well, it kind of is, now, b/c techniques have improved: “it’s a signal-to-noise question,” the researcher sez -- the “signal” here = difference between what the models pre- dict & what temps & humidity actually are, to find “a pattern lurking in the fuzzy chaos of global daily weather, like a radio station waiting to be tuned in.” the result? you can see global heating in day-to-day weather #s every day since 2012. a climate scientist “could sit on the space station, look down at earth & actually see the fingerprint of climate change on any given day,” sez a climate scientist . . . so this daily x-treme weather chronicle really is a poem of our climate . . . i feel vindicated & worried: no alfred e. newman, i. on this given day, super- abundance of water in news: torrentials in e. africa now followed by locusts, scarfing up what crops are left; 18 m gal. of raw sewage poured into thames on london’s rainiest jan. day ever (1/11); more rain for israel, after record-breaking downpours earlier in jan., storm sewers spewing, roads cut off; river bursts banks in kwazulu-natal; inundations in indonesia; 4 dead, 100s of 1000s w/o power in e. spain, 70 mph winds & waves 28 feet high; & yes, hailstorms & floods in e. australia & bushfires still burn . . . signal or noise? from your station, what do you see? is yr house on fire, underwater, literal, figurative, or both? aunties save us lined in crescents the old knowledge losing its shape where can we hide the fire sign the fire edge the fire window covering the road children in the woods bullet holes a mother hands up hide you can’t throw enough under the bus the morning soup the entrance into the wood closed off vandalized yellow sticker tape in the basket don’t ask after it don’t ask before the double lined dirt road the seed and everything after oh aunties how do you fix this where does medicine come from and the rails we found in the woods the magic pathways the hut rising like wings a spore cloud everything hidden I saw it again and again the hollow ship its wasted hull in all directions no matter where you look there is no recipe for this lost butterflies and the crimson toes of youth _______________________________________________ Judith Roitman’s books are Roswell (theenk Books) and No Face: Selected and New Poems (First Intensity Press). Her chapbooks include Provisional (dancing girl press), Slackline (Hank’s Loose Gravel Press), Furnace Mountain (Omerta), Ku: a thumb book (Airfoil Press), and Two: ghazals (Horse Less Press). Most recently she has published in Horse Less Press, Talisman, YEW, Otoliths, Eleven Eleven, Futures Trading, Writing Disorder, E.ratio, Galataea Resurrects, Rogue Agent, december, the tiny, Equalizer, DREGINALD. A chapbook The Boar King is forthcoming from Magnificent Field Press. |
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June 2021
Kristin Prevallet Author/Editor
I'm a writer & teacher in Lawrence, Kansas who actually believes the scientists. I wrote a book of poems called Of Some Sky that seems to have something to do with all this. |