last night,
the u.k. youth climate network projected onto the bank of england -- not in the psychological sense, but rather a video of young folks sending messages to the b.o.e. directors, saying things like “in the midst of covid-19 & climate breakdown, the bank of england uses public money to support the fossil fuel industry” & "meanwhile, the treasury ignores the people forced to choose between food and rent, and prioritises companies' profits over workers.” the whole facade was a screen in fact and not just metaphorically . . . (the same cld be sd re: u.s. govt., but no projections abt that . . .) meanwhile we’re looking for heat indices around 105-110 f chez nous today; while 1200 daily heat records, 159 july heat records, & “dozens” of all-time heat records broken this week in the u.s.a.; the great lakes feel like bath- water: avg. 80 f: “algae” blooms proliferate (actually cyanobacteria, oozing neurotoxins & various carcinogenic chemicals -- if you go to the beach stay 6’ away from other people & at least that far from the lake), as b.b.c. sez “global warming will increase the chances of summer conditions that may be "too hot for humans" to work in. but hey — no hurricanes; fewest tornadoes in 70 yrs. go figure. that’s why they call it “chaos” — e.g., there are still floods in s. china — re- member them? — part of why we can’t get p.p.e., test kits, etc. — those pesky supply chains, you know; & 3 gorges dam 10 meters > its “warning level”; 50 k cubic meters/second h2o flowing into the reservoir; wuhan + 3 provinces declare “red alerts” as waters rise above “maximum guaranteed safety level” (they guarantee safety over there? ever?) elsewhere over 1 m people crammed into makeshift shelters in e. india, due to worst monsoon flooding in generations & its # of c-virus cases nears 1 m; as “rain & drainage water entered” hyderabad’s osmania hospital, turning corridors & wards “into a cesspool” . . . reading all this makes me think u.s. commercial media shuts out the “rest” of the world as effectively as any totalitarian regime’s propaganda machine, even as history rushes us on with everyone else, know it or not, our little lower-case selves borne on the currents
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Before long the sycamores will show their white limbs, the massive platter-sized leaves a stack of brown biomass in my backyard. Everything starts over again, repeating shamelessly. Arresting blossoms pull me over for a look-see: roses in October, August like September like August: it just doesn’t quit. A lake around the girdling world, something flows underneath us, causes the vacant lot on the corner to swell as though it were turning into a hill. It is perilous not to smile, but hard to recall: if I were anyone, I’d have no problem facing it. Dirty clouds scum over soppy air the birds just walk over.
The best approach: to remain open, receptive to whatever. I can’t remember anything about dying: it’s as though life began when you least expect it, filling the fashions with windows, grabbing what you can. If they can neither see nor hear you, it renders you invincible by invisible. I prefer going about my day this way, hovering a few centimeters, not enough for folks to notice, collecting moments. Am I an ethical agent? Yes, you are an ethical agent. Prove it. No, you are a secret agent. This wandering through the bardo of never knowing what happens next worries me sometimes: I only appear inside houses, filled as they are with situations the wall can barely cope. Status of the observer: witness and censor both. Even the tigers are evacuating (Assam, India) . . . i’m so proud of you,
lawrence, kansas! lo yesterday: 67 f normal lo: 67 hi yesterday: 90 normal hi: 90 (heat index 105 or so, but whatever) precip yr. to date: 21.54” normal y.t.d.: 21.58 all of which means we’re normal again! we like being normal. new normal or old? either, so long as it’s the same way everywhere else . . . but it's not: hottest temp on earth since 2017: mon., death valley, 128 f; all-time hottest temp recorded any- where, on this warming planet? 129 f in 2013 (also @ death valley) moral? don’t move to death valley. better yet, don’t move, period, full stop. helas, the climate keeps on moving no matter what we do: that’s why ⅓ of bangladesh is underwater w/1.5 m people affected; "our homesteads have been flooded. we had a little road left which got destroyed last night. so, we're taking away all our crops like rice and corn," sez the farmer, rabiul islam; & farmer samsud doha sez “we're having issues regarding food also. the cooking ovens have been flooded. even our beds are also underwater" (cooking! the things you don’t think about til it happens to you); & across the border in assam, same story: 85 dead so far; 44 k people in “relief camps” (& as for the endangered one- horned rhino, well, it ain’t looking good for them either) (“but of course it’s flooding in bangladesh — it’s monsoon season! those people are used to dealing with this.” not for at least a decade they aren’t; tho back then 1000s died, which shows it pays to prepare) & while trump is golfing, pakistan in glofing: that’s g.l.o.f.: “glacier lake outburst flooding,” up in the mountains -- see, the glaciers are melting (duh) & when they melt, water collects on top (duh) and it gets deeper & forms a lake, but then one of the “banks” also melts, it breaks, and you’ve got a wall of water barreling down the valley, washing out roads, washing away homes, stranding 500 families, etc. etc. (the things you don’t think of) 27 of 31 chinese provinces inundated -- “many people lost their houses in my village,” sez a mr. zhang; “the floodwaters are still increasing… authorities are discharging waters from the poyang lake” — not to mention 3 gorges dam; w.h.o. sez don’t drink the water, don’t eat food that’s been in it, bleach all clothes that’ve been in it; but what if the waters cover all your stuff & foodstuffs & your up to yr waist in it? 50 villages cut off in n.w. iran; 11k peeps evac’d in w. japan (that wasn’t meant to rhyme, but all these incidents rhyme); worst floods in 80 yrs for ethiopia . . . & those swarms of locusts you haven’t been hearing about? that stretch from kenya to india? they’re “expected to peak this month, as a wetter-than-normal monsoon arrives, and to flourish as the rains continue through october.” all those cyclones in the indian ocean, don’t you know; "people couldn’t make all that happen, no way; sure, it's warming, but, well, the lord giveth . . . " tho ghulam sarwar panhwar, farmer in hyderabad, sez “each time it is like a black cloud descending from the sky. there are millions of them, and they attack the cotton and other crops, eating all the green leaves in just 3–4 hours before moving on. half of my cotton crop is gone. we chase them off by beating drums and banging metal plates. what else can we do?” wow, you say, must be a lot of farmers in those countries; you’d think they’d get out of the business; which many would if they could -- but climate is all about money. hence nobody seems to care to record heatwaves in sub-saharan africa — no money down yonder . . . but there are a lot of record hi’s & heat waves recorded in the u.s.: san antonio; washington, d.c.; new orleans; even the water in the great lakes meanwhile don’t ask me about how big the fires in siberia are; don’t ask me about how much methane they now think is in the atmosphere (or what it does — esp. not that); don’t ask me about pink glaciers or what micro- plastics do to arctic ice; for i am in the middle of the 1st world, where things are normal & we have our own problems to worry about now don’t we? (continued from Friday, July 10 . . .)
. . . Fair enough. But from his unobjectionable epistemological premise, Scranton derives an ontology, which he describes as “Accepting unknowing”: Embracing the void. Recognizing the limits of human knowledge. Relinquishing our consoling fictions about the future. Acknowledging the transience of the present and seeing in the death of what is the birth of what will become . . . [a] commitment to a future existence which by definition cannot be described. . . . This quasi-Heideggerian, quasi-mystical cloud of unknowing & becoming “also remains committed to some future human existence, no matter what form that existence takes, no matter who that human is.” But at this point, the argument gets a little sketchy, to my mind — or falls back on a kind of existentialist, choose-your-own-adventure narrative. Ultimately, for Scranton, all narratives about the world are narratives about our own mortal selves. OK. How shall we then live? “There is no solution to the riddle of existence,” Scranton opines, and “no amount of sophistication can ultimately justify the suffering that is being. . . . All we have is compassion, patience, and the recognition that every possible human future begins with the end of what came before.” It’s true that we don’t know exactly what will transpire with the climate. We can’t say for certain how many hurricanes will hit the east coast by 2050. But we have a pretty goddam good idea that quite a few of them will. Anybody who’s read anything about the climate crisis knows pretty well what needs to happen in order to ensure that the human race has options in the future; and they know pretty well the kind of things that will happen if we don’t. On the level of human will, a cloud of unknowing can pretty easily become a fog of indecisiveness. The contemplation of it may be just as formalist as anything Kermode advocates. In a way, "Time" is the god-term here. The passage of time, the coming-into-being of the future, these forces unfold themselves apart from human will. All we have, at the end of the essay, is passive acceptance and hope in the face of what’s-going-to-happen. The one thing here that might give us any guidance is the "compassion and patience" part. To me, knowing in even sketchy outline what’s coming down the pike places an ethical demand on each of us. The current victims of climate chaos place ethical claims on us by their very existence or deaths. Maybe you respond to that claim by working for whatever mitigation is possible. Maybe you educate people on the links between racism, neoliberalism, and climate chaos. Maybe you work to adapt hydrological infrastructure and food supply chains to the new climatic realities. Maybe you just try to make yourself a stronger, better person, more compassionate towards and patient with the people around you, in the meantime. It’s the fact that we don’t have all the facts that makes any ethical action — or inaction — perilous. But perhaps the very existence of other people will prompt us to take that leap of faith. the wet:
as in, really wet -- torrential downpours, in fact: s. china (2.24 m evac’d); s. japan (70 dead); plus nepal (40 dead); bangladesh (100s of 1000s marooned); n.e. india (44 dead, 21k uprooted) meanwhile, the dry: 170k people live in refugee camps in s.w. algeria, where, last tuesday, the mercury popped up to 123 f . . . if that’s not our uninhabitable earth, it’s pretty darn close; meanwhile, phoenix, arizona fits itself out with more shade & water to keep people from dying of heat; & the smoke from siberia drifts over w. coast of u.s., while forests still burn in ukraine; lake michigan surface water hottest ever for july; las cruces, new mexico wilts under record temps for over a week (up to 107 f); that’s not the half of it, of course; and the second half may be hotter still . . . Not long ago, I read an essay by Roy Scranton (author of the essay — and later book — “Learning to Die in the Anthropocene”). This essay, “Beginning with the End,” was a very interesting meditation on western notions of time. Scranton begins by analyzing Frank Kermode’s 1967 book The Sense of an Ending, which examines the structure and implications of various narrative forms in novels, over the centuries. For Kermode, like Wallace Stevens, our stories about reality are always fictions, but sometimes they founder upon a reality that does not match up with them (a predicted end of the world on a date certain that comes and goes, for instance). Then one must construct a new story that accounts for the new reality.
While Scranton admires Kermode’s erudition and style, he faults the critic for not addressing the epistemological problems this framework presents. If all fictions are equally fictions, how does one choose between them? Whose interests does a particular eschatology serve? In other words, Scranton faults Kermode for his formalism — the tendency to assess these various fictions on purely structural or aesthetic grounds. Kermode, on Scranton’s account, himself abides by “a fiction of disinterested contemplation focused on the endlessly fascinating games we play with language at the expense of attending to the reality those games evolved to cope with.” From a cosmic point of view, all fictions look equal, but “we do not live our lives from a cosmic point of view.” But Scranton himself is not altogether immune from speaking from an olympian p.o.v.: . . . the world has already ended, over and over, for countless peoples and epochs. The world of paleolithic hunter-gatherers ended with the emergence of cities and agriculture. The world of Tang-dynasty China, in which Laozi and Confucius may have been contemporaries, ended too. So did the preliterate world of the eastern Mediterranean brought to life in Homer’s Iliad, long before Plato was himself witness to the end of the world that came after Homer’s, as literacy transformed Greek conceptions of being. The list continues. It’s hard to argue with Scranton’s meaning here: i.e., that every “world,” in the sense of a civilization or culture, comes to an end. There is nothing new under the sun. Especially if you're the sun. But it’s all well and good to contemplate the passing epochs of history disinterestedly — unless, of course, your own world is ending (or has ended already). Scanton has a reputation of being a doomer (cf. his recent book We’re Doomed — Now What?). But he’s not a prepper. How come? The fact of the matter is, as science tells us and prudent reflection confirms, we do not know the future. We do not know how quickly the planet will warm in our lifetimes. We do not know whether it’s too late to change. We do not know whether our civilization can survive the next century. We do not know how many species will eventually go extinct. We do not know how long the earth can sustain more than eight billion humans. We do not know when our cities will collapse. The list continues (it is an essay filled with lists — a “catalog essay,” if you will). Scranton concedes that it is likely, given the scientific data, that the planet is warming quickly, that our civilization will die, that many species are going and will go extinct, that the planet cannot sustain geometrical population increase indefinitely, that our cities will collapse, or that the hour is very very late. But the fact that we don’t have a time-line for these events is key, for him. “Utopian fictions,” from Murray Bookchin’s “social ecology” of the 1960s to “the Sunrise Movement and the Green New Deal,” are, for Scranton, “farcical daydreams against the coming chaos, popsicle-stick castles in a hurricane wind . . . .” Likewise, “our fictions of collapse, violence, and survival seem equally fictional, in their way: race wars, water wars, border wars, authoritarianism, pandemics, rising seas, abandoned cities—surely all this will come to pass, but in what forms we cannot possibly imagine.” It doesn’t matter that these occurrences are likely, within a generation or two. For Scranton, what is decisive is that we don’t have the details. You know the world will end, but you know not the day nor the hour. And what good is an end of the world if you can't predict it? Or can't describe what kind of plagues will descend or how many heads a particular beast possesses? Fuggedaboutit! (. . . to be continued Tuesday, July 14) "it sez in the yew-nighted
states constitution: thou shalt not wear a mask. yeah, it’s too bad about grandma. but . . . well, the lord giveth . . ." this whole covid thing reminds me of the fragility of everything hannah arendt sez totalitarian regimes don’t just think “everything is permitted” -- they think everything is possible so why not open everything up, go without masks & expect to stay healthy, if it is today’s party line? the party decides what reality is, not reality, the party. so why not keep burning “clean coal,” sprawling city footprints, massively tooting methane, & using petrochemicals to make everything? maybe b/c “co2 in earth’s atmosphere nearing levels of 15m yrs ago”? or: “‘rising chance’ world will exceed 1.5˚ c warming limit in 5 yrs”? ("rising chance" -- *snork!*) but first the good news: june 2020 was not the hottest june on record. it was only a tie. with june 2019. n.e. siberia spent june 18 f > normal; if that happened in n.y.c., they’d have highs of 104 & lows of 87 every day of july (but it won't happen here) we won't go into “arctic amplification” or feedback loops & tipping points: we want to keep it on the ground, where most people live, in this verse-chronicle so: let’s talk about canada -- they have people there -- where they define a “tropical night” as a lo of > 68 f: usually toronto has 1 or 2/yr. but they’ve had 6 straight “tropical nights” in toronto "and we're not even in the dog days of summer.” in hyderabad, construction fells trees, kills shade: street vendors have to sit in 110+ f, but potential customers don’t like to stand in it, so . . . “stay cool w/portable a.c.!” the ad sez deluges kill 58 in s. japan; 219 evac’d in central japan; houses & people swept away by rushing water in nepal; buffaloes, in gujarat; “heaviest rain in years” in hubei: 100 perished so far: latest: 9 in landslide (they didn’t publish names, but they had them) the state gov. in nigeria, nattily dressed in sharkskin caftan as he surveys washed- out roads, sez: “i want to assure you that we will repair the damaged roads, expand the gutters and bridges so that when rains fall, the gutters and the bridges would be able to accommodate the large volume of water. w/ this, the problem of erosion would be a thing of the past.” yes, it would. but we don’t do such things here in the u.s. of a., where if it ain’t broke, we sure as hell ain’t gonna fix it. which means it — and we — would be really, really broke, one day -- if we let it get to us. but we don’t let it. we’ll take our rising chances. Do we now find ourselves in Zone 6a or 6b? Or even 7a? Are we in a Free Speech Zone or a Watch What You Say Zone? The Twilight Zone or the Daybreak Zone? Is this the Zona Rosa or the Zona Muerta? What time zone do you have? What light spreading across the longitudes? Does AutoZone imply a PostAutoZone? “Zone A” sounds like prime real estate, when in reality it is composed of “areas subject to inundation by the 1-percent-annual-chance flood event generally determined using approximate methodologies.” Does that zone seem erogenous or erosional? Zones define deer season, bear season, four seasons or none. My autonomous zone trumps your occupied zone, so don’t bother me — I’m in The Zone. I’d rather be in the DNS than the DMZ. The Zone 7 Water Agency is proud to report that all water supplied met regulatory standards. Back on earth, we have torrid zones, temperate zones, and . . . I forget the other one. O and death zones, too, way up yonder in the sky. You can see zones in the sky, if you look, populated by gods & monsters. You can run a zone defense, but you only score by running into the end zone. Then the men who run the game will throw up their hands.
for once, things are normal here
(in the arithmetical sense, at least): hi 92 f / norm 89 lo 69 / norm 67 precip y.t.d.: 21.09” norm y.t.d.: 20.35” so see? everything’s o.k. -- another way of saying “my confirmation bias is bigger than your confirmation bias”; or maybe just “i’ve got mine jack.” in any case the social scientist sez “in 2003, asked in surveys for their first reaction to the phrase ‘global warming,’ only 7% reacted with words like ‘hoax’ or ‘scam.’ by 2010 that had risen to 23%.” why? seems when we analyze folks’ reactions to the climate crisis, really “we’re analysing the way they see the world, their politics, values, cultural identity. it wouldn’t be a stretch to say we’re measuring their psyche, their innermost self.” in my country, this is a very . . . fraught proposition. americans have a very rich fantasy life. not the folks who were here 1st, b/c they’re on the business end of reality: one of many fires in arizona bearing down on diné homes: yet another invasion — or contagion maybe -- a first nation already decimated by a virus in quebec, it’s the james bay cree who are feeling it worst, as > 151k acres burn (~ 2 x last year) in kyushu, 40 people died & at least 11 are missing in the non- stop deluge (4.7” in 1 hour) -- “residents spelled the words ‘rice, water, SOS’ on the ground” -- this on 2nd anniversary of floods & landslides that took 300 lives. meanwhile, in philly, 2 months of rain fell on monday (i’ve been waiting for something to fall on monday, but i was hoping it wld be heavier) + it’s flooding in mumbai, karachi, & wuhan; mongolia & yemen jan-june 2020 = hottest 6 months recorded in russian history (+ 50 f > normal — think abt that for a minute); record level wildfires in siberia 147 dead of lightning strikes over 10 days in n. india. & it's twice the annual avg rainfall already in one place; highest ever ocean temps in another; end-of-the-century predictions already fulfilled, somewhere else & pink ice in the alps -- signs & wonders? or just signs? just remember: none of these things means anything by itself; & your assumptions are safe with me. You may have read the editorial in Newsweek by Tim Worth and Tom Rogers, entitled “How Trump Could Lose the Election — and Still Remain President.” In it, they lay out a plausible, albeit convoluted, scenario by which 45 could stay in office (more-or-less constitutionally) despite having lost the electoral college tally.
I’ve also been reading Sinclair Lewis’ 1935 dystopian satire, It Can’t Happen Here. If Worth and Rogers spin a believable yarn about how an authoritarian-minded populist demagogue might sidestep the electoral process, Lewis shows us what might happen once such a one is hell-bent on retaining and expanding his power. First, the premise. Sen. Burzelius “Buzz” Windrip is the favorite for President in 1936. The narrator describes him as “vulgar, almost illiterate, a public liar easily detected, and in his ‘ideas’ almost idiotic” — which, with the exception of the “almost,” reminds me of someone I know. Buzz presents the electorate with a kind of folksy, friendly, can-do brand of fascism. Windrip, in his book Zero Hour: Over the Top, writes things like: “I know the Press only too well. Almost all editors hide away in spider-dens, . . . plotting how they can put over their lies, and advance their own positions and fill their greedy pocketbooks by calumniating Statesmen who have given their all for the common good . . . .” And of course Buzz excludes Jewish and “Negro” people from the category of “true Americans.” The shock of the Depression has made the electorate hunger for easy answers and exciting story lines, and so they elect Buzz (fair and square, apparently). On the day of Windrip’s inauguration, his private army, the Minute Men (MMs), arrest 150 members of Congress and place them in the DC jail. An angry mob marches on the jail, which is surrounded by MMs. The MMs waver — until, through a loudspeaker, Windrip addresses them, thus: “To you and you only I look for help to make America a proud, rich land again. You have been scorned. They thought you were the ‘lower classes.’ They wouldn’t give you jobs. . . . They said you were no good, because you were poor. I tell you that you are, ever since yesterday noon, the highest lords of the land — the aristocracy — the makers of the new America of freedom and justice. Boys! I need you! Help me — help me to help you! Stand fast! Anybody tries to block you — give the swine the point of your bayonet!” A machine-gunner M.M., who had listened reverently, let loose. The mob began to drop. Our hero, Doremus Jessup, is a small-town Vermont newspaper editor. Intellectually, he knows Buzz and the MMs are bad news — that it can indeed “happen here.” But emotionally, psychologically, he has a hard time believing it can happen in his sleepy rural valley. Until it does. As one of his associates puts it, “it’s like reading about typhus [or raging floodwaters] in China and suddenly finding it in your own house!” All of which prompts Doremus to reflect on the causes of the dictatorship. He thinks: “It’s the fault of Doremus Jessup! Of all the conscientious, respectable, lazy-minded Doremus Jessups who have let the demagogues wriggle in, without fierce enough protest. “A few months ago I thought the slaughter of the Civil War, and the agitation of the violent Abolitionists who helped bring it on, were evil. But possibly they had to be violent, because easy-going citizens like me couldn’t be stirred up otherwise. . . . “It’s my sort, the Responsible Citizens who’ve felt ourselves superior because we’ve been well-to-do and what we thought was ‘educated,’ who brought on the Civil War, the French Revolution, and now the Fascist Dictatorship . . .” He closes by wondering “Is it too late?” And the book doesn’t give us any easy answers. Fortunately for us, IRL, Roosevelt and not a Buzz Windrip secured the Democratic nomination in 1936 [yes, Windrip runs as a Democrat, in the novel] and then won the general election; and he was prevented from packing the Court. Unfortunately, there was another World War; fortunately, the War broke out before “it” could happen here. It Can’t Happen Here is a rather-too-believable (even -familiar), and therefore chilling, scenario. But we’re in a different situation now. The current economic crisis was not brought on by a financial house of cards (though it may knock one over). It was brought on by our confrontation with Nature — or, perhaps better said, with Gaia. If you push farther into the forest and raid the animals, you’re going to get diseases from them. And if a pandemic breaks out, it is going to send the economy into a tailspin. If you keep doing what you're doing, there will be still more pandemics in the pipeline. And if, on top of all that, the weather becomes more chaotic, unpredictable, and violent, you’re not going to come out of the economic and social tailspin. So what happens if a demagogue says they’re going to right the ship of state? What if that demagogue will stop at nothing to retain and expand their power? And what if, on top of all that, humans’ relation to the rest of Nature has changed so fundamentally that nothing can be counted on except disruption, for the foreseeable future? Climate Change is the gift that keeps on giving — a de facto permanent revolution in everyone’s life. Taken together, all of this might make people yearn to transform a supposed strongman into a President-for-Life. And I must say that Lewis makes this scenario easy to imagine. What will you do, Doremus? |
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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. |