“feel-like” temps in triple digits
here today, & i couldn’t be happier – seasonable weather. sort of. yesterday: hi: 93 norm: 87 lo: 72 norm: 66 @ least it feels like summer. e.p.a. on c.c. in ks., 2016: soil becomes drier rainfall, more intense floods, more severe alters crop yields summers increasingly hot: yup. on paper, anyway. . . . i.r.l., we go about our quotidianisms & nothing much seems different in the heart of the belly of the u.s.a. – but elsewhere: u.n. rapporteur coins “climate apartheid” – “travelling through chennai, it is not hard to find a row of empty pots dotting the pavements. deep in the slums of mylai, a long line collects behind a bright yellow tanker. the driver fills the public tank while people wait their turn to fill four pots of water. any more than four is risky & can provoke fights.” (this for past 2 months; & the little girl wants to know “why does the tanker have to tell me when to go to school and when not to?”) + those in lines lose wages or jobs; + water diverted to nearby apt. complex for wealthy; 5 million in the city 5 million more around it; farmers have no money to pay moneylenders; hotels have no water to wash dishes; villagers in maharashtra desperately digging into dry riverbed to try to find water; indian govt. report: 21 cities will run out of groundwater by 2020. . . . but that’s, like, next year. but the i.p.c.c. said we have 12 yrs. (well, ok, 11 yrs., 3 mo. now) to save the earth . . . from the who woulda thunkit dept.: moving glaciers form pop-up lakes in pakistan himalayas, & the lakes threaten villages w/floods (glacial lake outburst floods, or g.l.o.f.s) meanwhile, “we've never seen these types of temperatures in jamaica,” says the weatherman (those winds off the sahara); + more flooding in s.w. china (cars washed away “like toys,” 300k people evac’d); roads, bridges out in siberia; & low-income folks in miss. displaced due to flooding upstream “those poor people” “ain’t it a shame” but it’s not just the global south – tho you wouldn’t know about the european heatwave if you live on this side of the atlantic, unless maybe you have vacation plans, so here’s the news from a poem, like w.c.w. said: france hits all-time hi temp: 113 f; june record highs: germany, poland, czechia, luxembourg (giant hi pressure over greenland + n. central europe – same one that’s melting the glacier – plus hot air from sahara); & people are starting to die of heat wildfires in catalonia (“el infierno viene”); germany & greece, too; & becoming a weapon of war in the mideast “o come on, you can’t just say every weather event is climate change.” no. but every event is hitched up to every other one . . . hence missouri r. flooding continues as dams release more water (+ our little release of floodwater & sewage into creek & river here); & lower mississippi valley record flood duration, hi water near n.o.la. higher than 1927 flood, 30 levee breaches; & freshwater runoff into gulf: algal bloom toxin warnings, lo salinity, “hundreds of jobs in seafood harvesting & processing . . . impacts on family livelihoods are at risk” (there is a “shellfish growers climate coalition” - !) – & we won’t even mention the dolphins and sea turtles, just the human beings for now I don’t intend to turn this into a “review blog” – but there is a lot of interesting fiction, poetry, cinema, etc. dealing climate change, in the last few years. For instance, there are a couple of British examples of Cli-Fi (climate fiction) that I find provocative, esp. when juxtaposed. The novella The End We Start From (Grove 2017), by Megan Hunter, is written from the point of view of a woman (unnamed) who has given birth just in time for floods that lead to the near-total evacuation of London. She and her husband, R., head north, first to his parents’ house. In the course of sallying forth for provisions, both of R’s parents die in apparent food riots of some sort. Their infant son, Z., falls ill, and our narrator insists they find a hospital; R. is so traumatized that he can hardly stand to be around other people anymore. After the baby’s condition is stabilized, they head northward again, and end up in a refugee camp in Scotland. R. abandons mother and child (Cf. Gold Fame Citrus, by Claire Vaye Watkins – similar topos). Mother & infant find supportive friendship with another mother & infant in the camp, and life continues. It is a beautifully written book – with believable voice and details, including one of the more detailed descriptions of caring for an infant that one is likely to come across. The narrator’s “entries” are interspersed with snippets of mythology: origin stories, flood stories, eschatologies. These have an interesting parallax relation to the action. The story gives a compelling speculative description of what the psychological effects of being displaced might be on a first-worlder who’s never had to experience such things – esp. one who is “bringing new life into the world.” And the whole thing is, in a way, an allegory for motherhood. The thing I like about the premise is that a major disaster has befallen the nation, but society has not completely disintegrated. It’s stretched pretty thin, to be sure. But unlike so much dystopian cli-fi, the city is not permanently underwater; and IRL, the more pervasive danger from sea-level rise comes in the form of severe (and periodic?) flooding, rather than permanent submersion. There does seem to be some kind of armed conflict underway in and around London, but it doesn’t seem to affect the principal characters directly. Suffice it to say that a new normal settles in. There is even what can be described as a happy ending, under the circumstances. However, it is an example of what Jonathan Neale, in an essay in the May issue of The Ecologist (“Social Collapse and Climate Breakdown”) identifies in dystopian narratives: “There are little groups of savages wandering the roads, scavenging and fearful, making tentative friends to keep the dark at bay.” Unfortunately, he continues, “That is not remotely what it’s going to be like.” Neale, informed by his experience growing up in Punjab during Partition and doing field-work later in Afghanistan, arrives at the disturbing conclusion that “when the moment of runaway climate change comes for you, where you live, it will not come in the form of a few wandering hairy bikers. It will come with the tanks on the streets and the military or the fascists taking power.”* At a time when that very thing is happening in some of the countries most affected by climate chaos (including those asked to host displaced persons), his analysis is disturbingly cogent. The Wall (Norton 2019), by John Lanchester, begins from Neale’s premise. In this novel, the UK has built an enormous concrete wall around the entire coast of the British Isle to keep out “The Others” – desperate people who attempt to sneak into the country after a perilous sea journey. Every young person must serve a stint as a “Defender” on the Wall; if any Others get past, an equal number of Defenders are put to sea in a boat (reciprocity, get it?). Oh – and all British citizens and legal residents are “chipped,” so the government can keep track of them. But there are domestic rebels who are trying to help The Others get in – and get chipped. All of this has obvious bearing on current political events. The story is told from the point of view of a young man who is a newly-drafted Defender. Again, very believable voice and details – as is the scenario, bleak as it is. For one thing, there is generational conflict: the parents just don’t get it: they’re too old to have to serve on the Wall; they just want to watch beach movies (the youngsters have never seen a beach). For another, the subsequent events are nasty and brutish, if not short. Why the difference between the two books? Somewhat optimistic vs. mostly pessimistic authors? Or could it be that, between 2015 and 2019, many writers’ view of the world has changed – a new, far grimmer IPCC report, more rightist populist strongmen taking power, etc. Does it mean we have resigned ourselves to dystopia? If Lanchester’s vision is closer to the spirit of our age, it makes one wonder if there is a way to prevent fascism in places like the U.S. or the U.K. And if so, what is to be done? Whatever the response, I don’t think it will do to say, “I’m a writer – it’s not my job.” ---------------------- * See also the statement by Philip Alston, UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, “Human rights might not survive the coming upheaval.” Satellite loop from June 18 shows a haze of dust stretching across the Atlantic from Africa to the Caribbean. Image courtesy NOAA. so the question becomes:
why do this? why this chronicle that may or may not add up to anything in the end? & in the meantime is – o.m.G! soooooooooo dePRESSing . . . (i know, right?) hmm. well, i guess it’s experimental writing of a sort: to record data – not trend-lines & graphs but that which appeals to the soul or the gut: when does a problem become an emergency? when do i start to identify w/the thirsty indians? when do i start to fear? moreover some writer or poet or somebody needs to record this, to bear witness (god knows the american media aren’t doing it . . .) to honor the suffering, the deaths, the people who are falling and places that perish – the strangeness of life on earth today & tomorrow while we still have power here – to run computers & to be relatively comfortable by hoovering the rest of the world’s goods i guess. really, i don’t know what else to do & i nurture the wan hope that writing is the way to find out but the reality is that chennai is at 1% of usual water supply (women digging into dried, cracked lakebed); all-time-record highs: maui; kingston, jamaica (saharan dust over the caribbean); lhasa, tibet; several spots in the swiss alps; & germany imposes speed limits on the autobahn (!): the heat forms dangerous cracks (they’re getting saharan dust, too. but it might keep hurricanes down; & it’ll make for some nice sunsets on the east coast) & as continental u.s. has wettest yr on record so far, only state w/extreme drought: alaska wildfires: florida (> 50 sq. mi.); arizona (> 175 squ. mi); germany (near berlin); almost 12,000 this year in amazonia (drought + land clearance); & another snowfall near denver – state snowpack 4,121% ↑ norm – predicted hi 92 f friday flooded fields in corn belt: futures ↑ 30% since mid-may, w/ mozambique, zimbabwe, kenya desperate for imports after cyclones; drought in cotton country; veggies freezing in australia; oranges shriveling in maharashtra; bees in france not making honey submerged docks around lake ontario; 2 mexico-u.s. border crossings closed due to floods (that drowned father & daughter photo . . . ) & diseases: valley fever ↑ 137% / 3 yrs in calif. – fungus spread by duststorms; while lyme exponential in the east: “there is little doubt that it is pandemic,” says mary beth pfeiffer, author of lyme: the first epidemic of climate change. “it’s in china, russia, japan, australia. it’s moving fast into canada. it is all across the u.s.,” due to favorable conditions for tick population explosion (also causing: babesiosis, ehrlichiosis, anaplasmosis, southern tick-associated rash illness, tick-borne relapsing fever, tularemia, colorado tick fever, q fever, rocky mountain spotted fever, & powassan encephalitis). & i shall put on my permethrin- treated clothing and venture out into the back yard to water the plants Speaking of the SubIime and other planets. . . I recently saw Lars von Trier's film Melancholia (2011), which he wrote and directed. The first part of the film is from the perspective of Justine, whose depressive behavior causes her to destroy her marriage on her wedding night - and resign from her cushy job. Her dad is a drunk and her mom is ingrown with bitterness, so neither of them are much help to her. The reception and aftermath become a wasp’s nest of family infighting, jockeying for status, treating people instrumentally, judgementalism, and all the other venal crap that makes up daily human life.
After the wedding/marriage meltdown, Justine sinks into an even deeper depression. Her sister, Claire, is the no-nonsense, put-together one with little patience for her erratic sibling. But when Justine finally breaks down completely, Claire takes pity and tries to nurture Justine back to stability. The second half of the movie is from Claire's perspective. It is some days or weeks after the wedding debacle, and another big event – this time astronomical – frames the action. Claire becomes increasingly convinced that the massive planet Melancholia, which somehow has entered our solar system, is not going to fly by the earth, as the mainstream scientists predict, but will in fact hit it (which it does, as we find out in the opening sequence). At this point, the sisters' roles are reversed: Justine, whose world has already come to an end, and who already expects the worst, is quite calm and collected. Her world has already fallen apart. But now Claire begins to go to pieces, consumed by desperation and despair, acting irrationally and erratically. The final sequence is quite a moving statement about the power of art to make meaning out of catastrophe. And the film itself is very beautiful. Brazillian philosopher Deborah Danowski and anthropologist Eduardo Vivieros de Castro see the planet Melancholia as being an allegorical version of what Isabelle Stengers calls "the intrusion of Gaia." By Gaia, she means not the goddess or the organism; not a nurturing mother in whose embrace we all subsist. Rather, Stengers means the geophysical processes that capitalist society has set in motion, that have taken on a life of their own, apart from our will. That future is headed our way, and is given tangible form by von Triers, argue Danowski and Vivieros de Castro. All we know for sure is that this “Gaia” will destroy the world we know. It's a compelling reading, as the movie can serve as quite an apt parable. The sensible people who are "getting on with their lives" and regarding climate change as something for hysterics to worry about may not know how to cope, as the effects become less and less escapable. The depressing depressives, who've known all along how bad things can get, may be the ones who are most mentally prepared. And that group includes a lot of writers! post-solstice dog days – days
shortening, earth farther from sun, but hotter than any other time of year: from the cool evening, come in, go to the hot attic, & you will understand global warming (or, as we used to say, the greenhouse effect); or sit in a closed car on a warm day & be very hot we live on a planet apparently on the ground: here: friday brought straight-line winds, uprooted trees, manhole covers blurped off their manholes by the force of swelling water & i spent much of the weekend breaking, stuffing, and sawing (this could get old, but quick); tx., ok., ark., mo. also hit again, as was the e. coast (i’m tired of counting flight cancellations); k.c. got a year’s worth of rain in six months; “this planting-delay issue, because of what states it has affected . . . historically important for market direction.” & planting delays, flooding in argentina, too . . . meaning: get ready to pay more at the grocery store (corn prices rise to five- year high and counting); belleville, il: - debris and damage reporting tools - recovery resources - mental health helpline - road/travel updates* - co. emerg. mgmt. contacts . . & our poor state parks, holding on by a shoestring, now have to refund fees of washed-out campers – this w/ “mountains of debris” to remove; meanwhile utqiagvik, alaska, northernmost u.s. town, topped its all-time record hi (in its warmest year on record), @ 80 f (which was also the hi yesterday in lawrence, ks); & i read that more canadian armed forces deployed for domestic climate disasters than overseas, their numbers “probably too small to deal with all of the tasks"; no training in climate catastrophe; this w/canada warming 2x faster than rest of world; speaking of which: they look like roaches swarming a piece of moldy bread but are cattle photo’d from the air, hundreds crowding a single watering point (new s. wales – having driest year in 160); “workers within office environments are not safe considering the record heat wave experienced in kuwait,” but “employees should try to compose themselves regardless of the situation & avoid conflicts as much as they can”; record highs for date: - miami - honolulu - anchorage (w/extreme drought) highest on record for any day ever: - delhi (earlier this mo.) india: “80% of the country’s 91 major reservoirs have below- normal storage” (fish floating in clumps or hi & dry); in fact, 11 reservoirs have no water at all”: planting delayed there, too; & the villagers queue up two days in advance for water, but when the trucks come, only half get it: “there is no rain, so there is no work on farmlands, and no money, so how can we afford water?” 10-yr-old riding train to fetch water: “i don’t like doing this, but my mother says we have no choice” – “don’t blame the hand of God,” sayeth the court (to the govt.), “what did the hand of the man do?” all this as reservoirs overflow in wuhan, china – as do roads & subways after flooding; “the city needs a plan to mitigate and adapt to climate change,” says lawrence-douglas co. sustainability director jasmin moore; yes we do but we avoid conflict as much as we can ________ * For a complete list of the 14 flood-related road closures in and around Belleville, IL & metro-east St. Louis area, see: https://www.bnd.com/news/local/article231881163.html A comparison of Lake Puzhal, a major source of water for the city of Chennai, India (formerly known as Madras), in June 2018 (top) and June 2019 (bottom). The city, which is the capital of Tamil Nadu state, has a population of 4.9 million (or more, depending on who you ask).
Global, catastrophic climate disruption is something big – for us. But look at this photograph: what do you see? Can you make out a little white pixel? Like one that’s burned out on your computer screen? That’s us. It’s the earth, as photographed from the edge of the solar system by the Voyager 2 spacecraft. The stripes are glare from the sun in the camera lens; Carl Sagan used the metaphor of a dust mote in a sunbeam to describe the look of the planet from this distance.
That’s it – that’s what all the excitement is about. That’s it. Thousands of people have died in a blink of an eye for a tiny sliver of that tiny pixel. There are oak midges, and there are the oak mites that parasitize the oak midges. And the oak mites have millions of organisms in their guts. And so on, all the way down. And all the way up: is anybody on the other side of the galaxy noticing? If so, we’re nothing but a mathematical blip on a very powerful instrument. OK, this is all pretty banal stuff if you start talking about it too much. But what I notice is not the tininess of the earth – it’s the hugeness of everything around it. And that blackness is full of bright energy, dark energy, visible and invisible matter. Possibly in multiple dimensions at once. All of that is “nature.” When people use that word, they usually mean trees and birds and stuff. But nature is everything that is (including us, of course). Nature writing should include outer space. I don’t say that in order to conclude that coal-fired power plants, SUVs, and fracking were all natural processes after all – that smells too much like ethical off-gassing. But I do say it to put things in perspective. Why should we – why would we – be saved? Why would nature writ large care about that speck? Why would that speck – which to us is the titan Gaia – care about one lousy species? It’s gone through five mass extinctions so far, each of which almost scrubbed the planet clean of biota. And then things re-evolved in very different form. “The Tao treats the 10,000 things as straw dogs, to be cast into the fire,” writes Lao Tzu. Considering current events from that perspective might be a species of the Sublime. The Sublime is an incredibly complex topic with a long history and tons of ink spilled about it. It doesn’t mean what it means in common parlance (superb, out-of-this-world excellent). Suffice to say that it usually involves something that is terrible and beautiful; something that could kill you but hasn’t (yet); that invokes awe rather than fear. In this philosophical sense of the word, that describes the immensity of space, its coldness, its non-humanness. Poets have never hesitated to write about the sublime, though it has fallen out of fashion. Perhaps the geophysical era currently underway will bring it back. Right now, the rain is coming down in sheets, in waves, blurring the houses and trees behind. The trees in the foreground transform into frantic beasts. I can feel the wind whumping the walls. Crack of large branch; thunks on the roof. The neighborhood uncannily transmogrified into one of those other planets with opaque atmospheres and storms the size of the earth. This is it -- one of those other planets we always heard about. true:
may 2019 proved rainier than any other month in kansas history, but lawrence experienced more rain in 1915; this may was only #5! plus which – plus which: only 2 record hi’s for june have happened in the 21st c. – so maybe things look better than we thot hurrah topeka: avg hi june: 84.7f month to date avg: 84.6 avg lo june: 63.7 month to date avg: 62.1 lawrence: normal rainfall month to date: 3.77 actual rainfall month to date: 2.25 (hmm) weather ≠ climate; for that, you’ll need 20 yrs worth of this “poem”; but this week – this week – it has to be right in front of our face i won’t write about what’s happening to the himalayan glacier, as that’s actic-y; nor what will happen to the billion people who depend on it for water, as that’s a mere prediction; i’m trying to stay focused on the present. so: drought now: chennai, city of 4.6 M: “floor of the chembarambakkam reservoir is cracked open, dry and sun-baked”; city’s three other reservoirs “nearly all dry” water trucked in: “every day, hundreds of thousands of residents have no choice but to stand in line for hours in soaring summer temperatures, filling cans and plastic containers” w/only 30 liters/day, while the rich have tankers bring it to their door; 9 states hit record temps; (again, i’m not going to repeat predictions – or gossip) & heat this week: s. yemen (7 dead); video of polar bear, sluggishly foraging on a city dump will play after ad in 12 seconds; 9k evac’d so far in alberta: “The wildfire is advancing quickly” & “The two largest of the wildfires – we’re expecting that it would be unlikely for them to be labelled extinguished before next year”; more record highs in hawai’i; & parts of central and southern africa, s.e. asia, s. brazil, w. pacific, barents sea, n.w. canada, n.e. alaska: warmest 1st 5 mo. of year on record; top 5 warmest months of may worldwide happened in past 5 yrs famine this week: s. korea sends n. korea 50k m. tons of rice – 10 M need immediate help due to drought floods this week: s. uruguay: 7,400 people forced to leave their homes; some refuse: fear of looting; midwest u.s.: fear of west nile; “so far this year’s heavy rains are a perfect illustration of what scientific models of climate change predict for the region” – “too much too early and not enough late”; (& what is to be done, if when tulsa overhauls its storm drainage – political blood & huge investments – it still gets swamped . . .) “monsoon” rains deal body-blow to British businesses; & in s. africa, 70 dead from heavy rains & port of durban covered in plastic, wood, and other flotsam therefrom; after tennis-ball-sized hail, wichita suffers flooding, road closures – s. central kansas’ wettest year ever, so far; algal dead zone in gulf grows and grows: runoff from midwest fertilizer, flooded sewage systems: "i think there's less focus on it in chicago because the (sewage) water is going the other way. we don't interact with the water that we're shooting toward the gulf of mexico. if we're not bathing in it, we're not going to the beach in it, and we're certainly not drinking it, there's less of an awareness." (there’s no sea-level rise here) no cyclones/hurricanes (yay!) – tho 72 M tons of rotting timber remain from michael (remember him?); only 13% cleared so far; florida timber industry busted (the stuff you just don’t think of): “with the amount of bugs that are coming to feast on all of the dead decaying material here, there is a really good chance that you'll lose the green trees that are still standing as well” in front of your face q. to james lovelock, mr. gaia hypothesis: what is to be done about climate change? a.: enjoy the next 20 yrs. that is, don’t worry, be happy for tomorrow we die. so why can’t i? ----------------------- * As always, sources available upon request. And comments, objections, etc., encouraged. |
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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. |