i bring up omar
el-akkad’s book american war: the south secedes (again), this time when the feds try to outlaw fossil fuels; & my cousin says, “i think it’s more likely to break down urban / rural rather than by states this time. it would be more like the breakup & war in yugoslavia. i doubt i could drive to memphis w/o going through several checkpoints of heavily armed white boys” (ones w/big gas-burning pickup trucks, just to make a point). sez my wife: the harrington men each have their own dystopia (ha. ha. ha.) meanwhile, social organization seems to be holding up pretty well around here . . . they’re even re- paving the streets. and if i can’t see it, it’s not happening. aug. 12 temps, l.f.k.: hi: 95 / norm: 90 lo: 73 / norm: 66 rain mo. to date: 4.06 normal rain mtd: 1.29 but elsewhere? – tornadoes in central amsterdam, in luxembourg, in new zealand; lightning at the north pole . . . signs ‘n’ wonders, y’all; typhoon lekima: 116 mph winds, 6.2” rain in 1 hr, 1.2 m evac’d, dozens dead & missing in zhejiang; $2.5 b losses & counting (u.s. only lost $1 b so far this yr); video of large buildings melting into torrents; china’s 9th 2019 typhoon so far; pakistan: most monsson flood deaths caused by “roof collapse & electrocution” – adults wading waist-hi water, kids, up to neck; 100s of 1000s displaced in myanmar this year or killed in mudslides, floods (those poor people – funny weather they’ve been having); millions force-flooded out by monsoons in india – the n.e. & w. coast pummeled by downpours; tamil nadu gets more rain in 24 hrs than ever before; while drought in n. & s. states; droughts, crop failures also in chile, australia (@ least sydney has a desalination plant); & remember the “polar vortex”? now the “antarctic vortex” brings snow to e. australia for 1st time in decades (which, dinesh d’souza sez, is proof global warming n’existe pas: any contrary evidence dis- proves a premise, right?) meanwhile: “cloud of smoke & soot bigger than the european union billows across siberia” from three-month-old fires, “extending the duration beyond even the most persistent fires in the 17-year dataset” from european satellites; oymyakon, coldest inhabited place on earth (normally) now hotter than majorca (but the sun shines brightly here in lawrence – the temps sort of normal, even); 50 forest fires in greece; wildfires continue in greenland, alaska; “temps either tied or broken previous record highs every day in hilo, kahului, honolulu”; galveston, tx highest low temp ever (86 f) – but i occupy only one spot – how can i account for events in disparate parts? how encompass the globe, like sherwin-williams “cover the earth” (or was it “coat”?), instead of breaking it up into little bits? only imagination will do it, but will it? & if it does, what will it do?
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I’m not good at grief. When something bad happens, I don't grieve so much as get depressed. That’s not the same thing. But neither is sadness, really. I think of grief as a longer-term process, rather than an emotion. I also incline towards analyzing and doing – confronting external obstacles rather than internal states. I’m quick to look for lessons from defeat, rather than mourning the defeat itself. I want to look for the solution – possibly from being American. Or maybe I don’t notice grief because it’s my background state – possibly from being Irish-American. Maybe I don’t feel “climate grief” because I’m always feeling grief.
We’re told that we should acknowledge our grief for “the environment” – for the lost species, lost glaciers, lost battles, lost weather patterns, lost futures. That sounds right to me. But where to begin? Some folks do ritualistic things – a “grief jar,” an altar, keening, etc. Some people have gotten a lot out of Joanna Macy’s “Work that Reconnects” system. But I also think this is a place where writing could prove very important. Is there a way to write about grieving without falling into banalities? Or becoming mired in grief? And what if the thing being grieved seems intangible, amorphous, or far away? Like “the climate” or “nature” or “humanity”? Or just the way the world was when I was a kid? Words about the end of words, the end of worlds. Or maybe something very minimalist. Or fables. Some writers do litanies – lists + anaphora. That seems like something that would work best in the context of ritual. Some write nostalgically about the past. OK. But we need to realize that, when we say “nature,” what we really mean is “the Holocene Epoch.” Nature – including life on earth – in the past has looked very very different from what it is now, which is very different than 100 years ago. The emergence of the Holocene wiped out a lot of species, and so has our species. So, when we say “nature,” we really mean “us.” Whether we know it or not. When I was growing up, doing the Stations of the Cross was a way of imagining the worst. Feeling the physical suffering of Jesus and the emotional suffering of Mary. And what was it Christ said to the women lamenting along the route, as he dragged his cross? “Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for me, but weep for yourselves, and for your children.” . . . at least occasionally, you might wish to read this article about the IPCC's new report on the effects of climate change on the world food supply - and how changed ag practices might extend it.
the neighborhood peewee
usually sings on our street, never south of 26th – if you notice such things you start to notice such things: you can tell how much rain fell by looking at places it usually collects, those which are more, those, less shallow. july, hottest terran month on record marked the first normal u.s. rainfall mo. this yr. – except for douglas co., ks., apparently: last week the airport got 3” but we got 8, just west of here, 12: that’s how it goes: everybody knows: microclimates normalized & wacked-out: the interior of b.c. hotter than here – kamloops is 95 f – just in time for hot nite in the city & ribfest! meanwhile, “a tornado ripped past a new jersey office, baltimore has been hit w/flash flooding & > 700 flights cancelled @ the three airports in the n.y. metro area, as t’storms batter the east coast” – this sort of thing hardly seems worth mentioning anymore, so from now on i won’t; but copperhead bites up 83% in texas since last year? – now that’s news. esp. since (sez the w.s.j.) herpetologists say it probably has something to do with climate disruption. as do the deluges: 441k tons-worth of rice lost in bangladesh as fields are washed away, even as the i.p.c.c. sez "food security increasingly affected through yield declines – especially in the tropics – increased prices, reduced nutrient quality, supply chain disruptions"; meanwhile i ask a friend from maharashtra if people back home talk about the drought – no, of course not, not in that state: they talk about the floods: 140k people evac’d (“wall and building collapse, breaching of dams, landslides, floods & lightning”); + 5x normal rain in karnataka; wettest 24 hrs. ever in tamil nadu (36 in., in fact – we need this kind of particularity); 30k people forced from homes by rising waters in myanmar, roofs floating like boats in the water: “than aye, 42, diabetic & partially- sighted, struggled to escape the deluge”; & the droughts: olas de calor in tamaulipas, mexico & castellón, spain (107+f in both); in rural queensland, “morale is low, businesses struggle to stay afloat as residents tighten their purse strings. some farmers won't plant any crops at all this coming season” – all due to “the worst drought in recorded history” (hard to “stay afloat” in a drought); while in n.s.w., trains ship in 725,000 litres water / day to enable coal mining to continue; & elsewhere, “the world’s largest forest has been on fire for months,” smoke spreading from the urals to the cascades. the smoke smell in yr clothes; mildew on ceiling; dust in yr eyes; scent of dirty clothes crossed with rotting vegetation one gets after a flood; absence or presence of a particular bird: all the little ways life can be different, in a moment Jem Bendell lists three stages in developing what he calls “deep adaptation” in response to climate change. The first is “relinquishment” – what others might term “acceptance and grief.” Indeed, the phrase “climate grief” is showing up more and more: that is, a sense of bereavement and sadness over the changes that have already happened in the more-than-human world (diminishing number of elephants or some bird species, for instance), not to mention the big changes to the human world that appear to be on their way.
If we are clear-eyed about it, though, we are grieving for the end of the world as we know it (and we don’t feel fine). Life is poised to become much more difficult, more crowded, hungrier, thirstier, sicker, hotter, and much more expensive, esp. for the poor. As Isabelle Stegners says, the issue is not avoiding catastrophic climate disruption – we can’t do that any ore. The issue is whether or not societies descend into barbarism – and thence to despotisms of various kinds. Indeed, that’s happening now, in much of the global south. Who’s mourning for the people in the Ganges delta who are already being displaced? Other than those people themselves? I’m not good at mourning. It took me about thirty-some years to cry after my mother died. And I guess the nature and extent of the losses to the earth are not concrete enough or near enough to me for me to really feel torn up emotionally. Or I’m so used to thinking about and looking at them that the shock factor has worn off. It’s more like a seeping melancholy or malaise. Over ash trees and white pines and elephants. For seasons. For predictability. I’d like to think some of that gets into my writing related to climate catastrophe, along with the fear and anger. Are there poems, novels, plays that have helped you grieve for species other than your own? Or helped you grieve for the loss of the foreseeable future? Or indeed, for anything or anybody? If so, please share in the comments! “in eastern n. carolina,
where I grew up,” writes the journalist, “climate change was never a polite topic of conversation.” or in large northern cities. or western suburbs. or liberal, midwestern college towns. but, as he says, “govt. that’s not protecting its citizens from the challenges of climate change (property loss, food system collapse, increased intensity of storms, flooded infrastructure, extreme heat, economic disruption) is not acting in the interests of its citizens” (& the citizens, one could argue, are not actively protecting themselves or their kids or grandkids or neighbors); but how – the rich won’t permit them- selves to be taxed; even if they did, would there ever be enough re- sources or re- sourcefulness to “harden” our infra- structure or inner structures enough? maybe the shrinks are right: we can’t see anything this threatening, so over- mastering, so clearly bent on our obliteration – can’t think of an “us” beyond clan & land – can feel the loss of 31 to gunfire, but not millions hammered by drought, then storms that destroyed meager harvests in southern africa . . . unless of course you’re them; can’t admit we were just wrong: too dangerous to our self. funny weather we’ve been having, huh? july 2019 the hottest month ever on planet earth. it doesn’t rain in “high summer” around here, not much, but now we get in- undated: i’m writing from a coffeehouse, as power’s out at home – and a home- less man pushes a shopping cart in the rain, a bicycle tire hangs from its side. you can’t afford to think about it you’ll go mad or hide all the time or yr heart will stay too broken to pump like nature meant it to. can’t think about 11.2 m acres (17,500 sq mi) lost to the boreal forests of siberia so far, as of yesterday (greenpeace russia: “the size is now hardly manageable. the fire is already too big”); don’t think, new mexico, abt yr water supply’s being low as eritrea’s; don’t listen when the arctic specialist sez “i’m losing the ability to communicate the magnitude”; it’s hardly manageable, too big: 122 f + 85% humidity for hajj – soon everyone will be bowing at the kaaba in spacesuits; soon everyone will be praying to something or somebody just trying to make it o.k. “words are so fucking sad”: they can’t do justice by them selves Thanks to Oliver Hall for this quote:
“I know the world is bruised and bleeding, and though it is important not to ignore its pain, it is also critical to refuse to succumb to its malevolence. Like failure, chaos contains information that can lead to knowledge—even wisdom. Like art.” Members of the Sunrise Movement occupy the office of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. Did they recite poetry there? It occurred to me that a lot of my blog posts have been dancing around the question of the social “efficacy” of literature. That is, can literary writing (or any art form) incite people to action in the rest of the world and of their lives? Specifically, in this case, to militate for the mitigation of or adaptation to climate change.
Take poetry (please!). Prior to the nineteenth century, the question of whether poetry could be effective both aesthetically and politically would have seemed like a no-brainer, when you had people like Dryden, Pope, Swift, et al. writing politically and socially pointed poems that were read by a significant percentage of social elites. But by 1821, that sort of impact was neither obvious nor sufficient, prompting Shelley to declare that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” Poets went from possibly making an impression on social and political debates in England to handing down laws for the entire globe – quite a jump! It is born of the anxiety that poetry had become a private, interior thing, rather than a public discourse. Literary and political discourse increasingly became thought of as different from, even opposed to, art. “Propaganda,” in our modern sense of the word, came into usage in the 1820s as well, and it wasn’t long before it was thought of as the antithesis of poetry – true poetry, that is. When W.H. Auden wrote that “poetry makes nothing happen,” he meant politically. And by the time he wrote it, he was A-OK with that; indeed, the statement arose from a long tradition that assumed poetry’s importance lay precisely in its lack of political or social efficacy. From Théophile Gautier’s art pour l’art to John Crowe Ransom’s statement that poetry’s usefulness lay in “its perfect inutility,” the assumption was that Poetry was both apart from the World and superior to it – not unlike the City of God vis-à-vis the City of Man, in Augustine. Clearly poetry makes something happen – people have attested to its importance in their lives, and who can say nay? The question is how that something relates to what happens in the streets and at the polling stations. In other words, it doesn’t make the same things happen that political organizing does. The question for our purposes is what those personal effects have to do with personal decisions, and what the politically/socially engaged writer can or should do with the information. It seems to me that any answer to that question has to consider both the textual form and the social form of the work of art. A poem (or play or story) can reassure you that what you think you already know is true. Or it can challenge your world-view. It can draw a picture or tell a story of utopias and dystopias, victories and defeats. In addition, a poem can be sent via letter or via internet meme: the first will reach a limited audience, the latter, a larger one. And a poem read aloud at a rally is different than one read in silence by oneself at home. So: does writing about one’s feelings about climate change purge you of those feelings and make you more “well-adjusted”? Or does it make you more pissed off than you were before? Is it a sublimation of political action? It’s easy enough to say, “I’m not a political organizer, I’m a poet; they do their job, I do mine” – even if there is a crying need and dearth of organizers and a glut of poets. Or does it galvanize you into organizing your community – and possibly leave poetry for the morrow to do so? Perhaps it can empower you merely by being “a focus of repose for the will-driven intellect” (Ransom again), thereby recharging one’s spiritual or intellectual batteries for the struggle. How to write literature that will do any of these things is another question. Upton Sinclair struggled mightily trying to decide on an ending to his novel The Jungle. Should it end with Jurgis Rudkus still in prison (“to arms – help comrade Jurgis – we must crush injustice!”)? Or with the victorious socialist majority celebrating their victory over capitalism (“¡Sí, se puede – ándale!”). The first risks creating despair (“the socialists are never going to win – the bosses have the guns and jails”), the second, complacency (“see – the revolution is already happening – without me!”). To my mind, asking poetry (or any art) to do political work is putting a lot of pressure on it – just as asking political organizers to turn their work into an art form would put a lot of pressure on them (and limit their effectiveness in the process). But climate fiction helps to give the effects of global heating a local habitation and a name – it helps me envision where we’re headed. And essays and poems often make me regard my values and actions – how I live my life in the light of my own mortality, not to mention that of most of the things I value. Maybe the best answer is to read a lot of different kinds of stuff – from scientific reports to concrete poetry, from science fiction to image+text work. If you’re a writer, you’ll write what’s important to you. It may or may not prompt you to any further actions; that’s likely to depend more on your disposition and understanding than on your art. But I encourage you to experiment – with what you write about (if anything), how you write it, and how you convey it to other people (if you decide to do so). All of these things are up for grabs in a way they’ve never been before. so mass shooters kill
29 people, & non-mass shooters kill a lot more in lots of one’s and two’s; & studies hath shewn: “one standard deviation of temperature increase leads to a 4% increase in interpersonal violence and 14% increase in group violence.” meanwhile, the good news is: they say our sewage treatment plant is fixed! but raw sewage spewed into the river for several days (those downstream were warned, tho i don’t know whence they got their drinking water), & we were warned away from contact w/waters from the flood – more problems you might not think about – & fire engines towing boats – this was a new sight; water rescues necessary. the weather service had predicted a sunny week, then this! they predicted rain all day friday but barely a drizzle – weather = chaotic system, in the technical sense, & climate = chaotic (more and moreso) in the dictionary sense: thus predictions anyway become rather dicier. so what happens when people see their weather forecasts are clueless, too? but i don’t deal in forecasts: i show what’s happening now: e.g., australian outback running out of water, unusually warm in n.z., fatally hot in japan, a vietnamese village washed away (“vietnam among the most vulnerable nations to climate change impacts”), no tapwater in chennai, in gujarat, lakes dry up (“now there is no fodder or water and we can only watch our animals die”), in zimbabwe, "the situation is very pathetic" when the rains don’t come (& the young’uns have to pan for gold to survive), houses in alaska slip into sinkholes, as the west coast down to s.f. in serious drought (omg i’m soooooooo tired of hearing about the arctic this & the arctic that; but if you want to know what all those fires are doing to a neighbor- hood near you, read this) but what can you do? i know right? it’s just too big & some- body has to take the kids to soccer practice, and pick them up, & the sunrise movement sure isn’t going to. as the irishwoman said, “i can’t be asked” – too many things on my plate already, but at least i have a plate A very interesting article on how the media in rich v. poor countries depict climate chaos. Also, here is a site by Ken Lassman containing a wealth of scientific resources related to the emergency.
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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. |