“we need yr leader-
ship, young people,” sez the senator over his reading glasses. but greta t. is having none of it: “pls save yr praise – we don’t want it. don’t invite us here & praise us without doing anything about it. honestly, this kind of meeting doesn’t lead to anything” so, it takes someone w/ autism to cut the bullshit. fine. the ancient greeks called it parrhesia meanwhile, here, @ 38° 58' 18" n / 95° 14' 6" w, we reached 92 f yesterday (norm 81); lo, 69, norm 54; sept rain: 0.47” norm to date: 2.51, & our “second august” more than halfway over – tho doesn’t mean there won’t be a third . . . (only 77% humidity, 9 a.m. – not bad): caused by same hi pressure dome that’s caroming tropical storms out into the atlantic, away from these united states – apt metaphor for our sense of ex- emption – unearned, since yet another deluge hits dakota farm country; record heat in hawai’i; baton rouge sees hottest sept. recorded; wettest sept. so far in green bay; & the n. hemisphere endured hottest summer in history. but now let us use our writerly imaginations to picture masses of humanity arising, friday at noon, & walking forth from office & workshop, 1,000 empty kitchens 1,000 mill-lofts gray, & leaning against some tall building – say, exxon-mobil hq. – until it falls over: tropical storm imelda will have saturated the ground (most since harvey), so the base will already be loosened (we will say “timber!” in the interests of fair play); & the senators won’t be able to get a burger to go b/c the staff in the cafeteria won’t be there – they’ll be w/everyone out front – waving signs or throwing week-old dinner rolls through the windows. we have to demonstrate there is no center of the world any more, only new coastlines, tinderfields, flood plains, desertifications & melt: that’s why it’s called a demonstration, or call it an experiment, which means “experience” – tho u.s.americans only experience a sliver: new s. wales farmers, desperate for rain, get hail instead, wipes out crops; "what are you doing? are you clearing around the property? your gutters? you need to be thinking about this. What is your plan for your pets? Your stock if you have stock?” meanwhile, torrentialing in e. spain, w. norway, trains shut down in germany; state of disaster (drought) declared in zimbabwe; zambia will have to import electricity, since hydro dams don’t have enough hydro to spin turbines; slash & burn in borneo, sumatra, 1k wildfires, smoke spreads over s.e. asia; & o yeah, flammable lakes in siberia – that one’s a gas. no, you’re right, you have no control of the outcome, it’s true; but you don’t do what you can do do you?
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David Wallace-Wells scared the crap out of me, and he should scare the crap out of everyone in the same way that air raid sirens go straight to the nerve centers of those within bombing distance. That’s why, in my new fugly fishbook, In Search of Monster Fish: Angling for a More Sustainable Planet (University of Nebraska Press), Wells figures into the most pivotal chapter. That’s where I’m fishing for stingray and tarpon in the Gambia and trying to figure out what I’m really fishing for when I get smacked in the face by epiphany. It’s the moment in the narrative when everything changes due to a thought offered by fishing writer Thomas McGuane. I won’t get into that major revelation now, but here’s the point where DWW fits into the equation: "… it’s not like we’re guaranteed more than a century on this planet anyway. As I’ve been pointing out, at the rate we’re going, we won’t have any ice caps left in a century. Add to that the reality that we are past the tipping point of a pH level of 7.8, plus the fact that all that melting ice contains carbon that can evaporate as methane, which is almost thirty-five times more powerful than carbon dioxide in veiling the atmosphere with greenhouse gasses, and we get David Wallace-Wells’s apocalyptic warning from New York Magazine: 'we have, trapped in Arctic permafrost, twice as much carbon as is currently wrecking the atmosphere of the planet, all of it scheduled to be released at a date that keeps getting moved up, partially in the form of a gas that multiplies its warming power 86 times over.' Wallace-Wells expects such heat to come stock with severe drought, phenomenal floods, dire diseases, imminent crashes in world crops and the human immune system, terrifying plagues of insects, debilitating ozone smog, and mass-die offs of marine life from ocean acidification. And as the journal Geophysical Research Letters points out, there are also 32 million gallons of mercury, which is 'a potent neurotoxin and serious threat to human health,' thawing out in the Arctic right now." Cheery stuff, eh? But whatever the case, that’s what we’re looking at. So even if we get it together by cutting all carbon emissions, going full on solar, cleaning up all that plastic in the ocean choking the whales and sullying the shores, and even if we cure cancer, we’re still gonna be walking around with or without gasmasks on and giving birth to children with defective genes in an ever-melting, nonstop neurotoxic soup-- (Imagine: when I was invited to write this guest blog, it came with the statement, “We could use your upbeat presence!”) Okay, that’s what we’ve got, that’s where we’re at, so what’s the solution? Answer is: We’re out of time. Answer is: There ain’t no solution. Answer is: This is the Disenlightenment, an era in which “fake news” and corporate mendacity have run out the clock and confused masses capable of demanding drastic action now—to the point that hundreds of millions of citizens in this country alone are impotent in our objections, so we might as well just live the American Dream by gassing up our SUVs, spraying more Monsanto on our lawns, and going out for sushi at every sub-suburban strip mall in Interstate Oklahoma as world tuna populations continue to crash (80% in 40 years), as wild salmon continue to crash (less than .5% of Alaskan chinooks returning to native streams), as all the Aleutian halibut flee for colder waters while deep-sea, bizarro blobfish hijack the biomass-- (Okay, still not as “upbeat” as I could be…) But the thing is, even though we’re going to hell in a handbag, we can do better than this. We can try to slow our slide. But where to start when Brian Merchant notes in his 2015 Motherboard article “Apocalypse Neuro: Why Our Brains Don’t Process the Gravest Threats to Humanity” that our brains are not “wired to process slow-moving crises like climate change” because they’re programmed to react to immediate, in-your-face threats rather than those that take years to develop? As Merchant states, “Humans have, historically, proven absolutely awful, even incapable, of comprehending the large, looming . . . slowburn threats facing their societies . . . Our grey matter is set up to instruct us to cope with the here-and-now, and flails in the face of long, uncertain future threats.” Well, there’s part of the answer right there, which I also address in In Search of Monster Fish: “We need to face the damage we’re doing with the intensity of those cigarette packages that show graphic images of blackened lesions and infected gums. Because looking away from what we’re doing, refusing to register the consequences of our actions, that’s just suicide.” Yep, that’s right, we need to be freaking out! We need to be screaming in the streets! We need every school kid in America and Canada and Greenland and Siberia to see photos on their cereal boxes of cities sinking into the seas and mass migrations of emaciated refugees groveling for a suck of mud. We need to scare the crap out of everyone we can on this planet to get the message through our thick skulls that there’s nothing more important right now than patching up this jalopy we are driving to death! Fear-mongering, however, is for unconscionable authoritarians running for office who know the reach and teeth of propaganda and is best used for throwing competition under the bus. I’m talking “scaring the crap out of people” in an optimistic sense. Through campaigns to educate, inform, get real, transcend! I’m talking getting past the B.S. and getting down to business with the 121,356 things we need to do right fracking now! I’m talking about seriously taking a serious look at the solutions outlined in In Search of Monster Fish! “Radical! Revolutionary! We can’t have that!” That’s what the naysayers say. But remember, they want us to remain lazy, ignorant, incapable of making informed decisions. That’s where they get their power: through the Slothery of the fact that there are those among us who will gobble up whatever we’re fed. OMG, I’m starting to sound like a raving, ranting conspiracy theorist, but that’s the point, and that’s what this sixth-extinction planet needs to appeal to people’s most raw emotions. Because get this: there is something we can take from the white supremacists, the climate change deniers, the birthers, the NRA, and even the GOP… a way of talking to a base, a way of overloading the circuit boards, a way of getting at the most important triggers human beings are programmed to react to so that we can survive. Not through lies and manufactured caravans, but through the damn truth—which is that we don’t have to give up the possibilities in all this fantastic beauty we’re frittering away! That’s what I’m talking about!!! So who’s on board? What are you waiting for when nothing less than doing something is unacceptable for your born or unborn children? Or children that aren’t even yours, who you don’t give a damn about because you can’t envision them? Or can you? (Hell, I care more about animals) And if you do give a crap, what are you doing to counteract complacency? Nothing, something, not enough? Anyway, just saying…. ________________________ Mark Spitzer, novelist, poet, essayist and literary translator, received an MA in creative writing from the University of Colorado. After living on the road for some time, he found himself in Paris, as Writer in Residence for three years at the bohemian bookstore Shakespeare and Company, where he translated French criminals and misanthropes. In 1997 he moved to Louisiana, became Assistant Editor of the legendary lit journal Exquisite Corpse, and earned an MFA from Louisiana State University. He is now associate professor of creative writing at the University of Central Arkansas. His most recent book is In Search of Monster Fish: Angling for a More Sustainable Planet (U of Nebraska Press 2019). hi’s abt 10f > norm
lo’s + 15: w/every new wild swing you wonder is this the new “new normal”? just add one month to summer, a few more weeks of humidification & heat indices until . . . what? it cools off? blizzards? well, the teenagers notice: “it’s like a dystopian novel, to grow up seeing the world fall apart around you & knowing it’s going to be the fight of your lives to make people stop it.” 57% in u.s. are “afraid” but 54% are “motivated”; 79% of adults “accept the scientific consensus,” 86% of teens – and 4 in 10 of them think climate change “a crisis” & facing it requires “major sacrifices from ordinary americans” . . . which means 6 in 10 think it isn’t and doesn’t . . . “it’s hardly ever brought up at school”; you can’t talk w/yr family abt it; “the wealthier you are the more protection you have,” sez the african-american hi-schooler – and the same could go for countries too: if you’re bahamian, you you may not know where your family is; if maharashran, you may not have a home to go to; if mozambiquan, 6 mo. after cyclone idai, you probably lack food & you may be living in a refugee camp (77k are); if native alaskan, you may have to collect sea water to flush the toilet or watch yr home slide into a sinkhole or the sea . . . but meanwhile 3 out of 3 pigs think their house will hold up despite all the huffing and puffing . . . but as for the piglets: ¼ of them have: walked out of school attended a protest written a letter & are scared and mad and may look you in the eyes & say so "It took constant demonstrations from ever larger groups like Extinction Rebellion, and led by young activists especially from the communities suffering the most, to ensure that politicians feared an angry electorate more than an angry carbon lobby." Or feared constant economic disruption. That's just it - the world is run by people who know the very worst effects of climate change will do little more than inconvenience them during their lifetimes. For those under the age of 30, not so much.
Read the whole essay here. The announcement by workers at Amazon corporate headquarters that they would participate in the Global Climate Strike* a week from today got me to thinking: What if all the writers in the world participated, too? We might as well – our books will stop getting distributed if Amazon’s on strike!
Would that “make a difference”? Well, if the Strike includes writers of commercials and advertisements, the global economy will collapse, and the climate catastrophe will be minimized – at least for those born about 7 generations from now. If it includes writers of television programs, talk radio, news programs, etc., it would constitute a serious disruption. A lot of us teach, and maybe some of us won’t, on Friday. That will upset parents with kids in primary and secondary school. Postsecondary, the administrators won’t notice, and the students will be glad. Maybe the administrators will be glad, too. The cessation of fiction-production will stop a tiny gear in the great capitalist machine, which will keep on humming (and emitting) nonetheless. But if you actually “let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine”** – by, for instance, disrupting the ordinary functioning of commerce by gluing your hands together and blocking a major highway or shutting down a busy airport – then you’ll get the attention of the powers that be. And you may get run over or tear-gassed. Global literacy rates are undoubtedly higher than they were 200 years ago. But are reading rates? As in short stories, poems, essays? I’m not so sure about that one. If we all go on strike, even indefinitely, I’m not sure how many people would notice, or, of those, how many would object strenuously. A protester against Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses admitted to a BBC reporter he had not read the novel: “Books are not my thing,” he sheepishly confessed. Having said that, there are a lot of writers in the world – possibly more than readers. If all those folks struck – just walked out – then yeah, that would make a difference. Because writers are also bus drivers, data engineers, nurses, farmers, etc. But I’m not convinced that our work as writers can tip the needle one way or the other. It is only in our lives as citizens, as agents, as people that we can do that – maybe. If you’re serious about doing whatever yr small self can do to resist extinction, I don’t think this is a struggle you will be able to put on your resume. So, how about this?: We stop working & consuming in the fossil fuel economy for one afternoon – including not driving. We bike, walk, or ride our horse to the nearest rally. The rest of the time (if any) we devote to writing about the climate crisis, and we send what we’ve written in an Email to Exxon-Mobil’s Shareholder Relations Dept. Or better yet, we call their Institutional Investor number (+1) 972-940-6724 and read it to them over the phone. (Exxon-Mobil is the largest CO2 emitter among U.S. Corporations) That may not reduce CO2 emissions, but golly will it ever be fun! See you next Friday! ------- * Click on the link to see if there’s something going on near you. For instance, if you live in Lawrence, Kansas, U.S., there is. ** I think some writer said that. Tuesday's post (Sept. 17) will be by writer, teacher, and monster fish enthusiast Mark Spitzer. To get you started, I'll quote some of his forthcoming book Investigative Creative Writing: Teaching and Practice:
“I kept on studying environmental subject matter until eventually I was teaching it – which, I’ve realized, might be the most important thing I can do on this planet. Because our planet is in severe decline. The ice caps are melting and the experts agree that we won’t have this global cooling device in a century. Climate change, carbon dioxide, and acidification are taking their toll, so if we don’t do something soon, we could lose this platform we take for granted – a point I make because I’m scared of what we have to lose. I’ve made a study of what our greed and ignorance is doing to this planet, and I can see the direction we’re going in. Because of that, I’m committed to doing as much as I can to preserve and patch what we have left through the influence I can have via my writing and teaching of writing.” Tuesday, Mark offers some thoughts on climate communication. my college professor sd
“always write about some thing.” meaning: avoid abstractions, go for eyes that can di- late hair that can rise if it must, etc. or floods that can drown & fires that can scorch, maybe: there’s too much material in this material world . . . synonyms for flood (n): alluvion, bath, (bath?), cataclysm, cataract, deluge, in- undation, Niagara (as in “a veritable niagara”?) overflow, spate, torrent related words: cloud- burst, discharge, gush, out- flow, outpouring flux, washout, cascade, excess, glut, overabundance, oversupply, superfluity, surfeit as seen in: laos (14 dead); niger (57 dead, 12k houses, 5k acres crops destroyed; gujarat (4 dead); most rain ever in everett (wash.): + 330k japanese homes w/o power, post-lingling 7 million people dis- placed by extreme weather events in 1st 6 mo of ’19 – & this pre-dorian synonyms: squall, tempest “to imagine the combination of 200 mph winds & 20-25 ft sea surge, torrential rain power & communications out, & you have – and this is no cliché – the perfect storm” (though it may become repetitive), w/ 17% of bahamians homeless, thousands missing. synonyms for fire: conflagration, holocaust, inferno, blaze, flare-up related words: backfire, bonfire, brush fire, campfire, forest fire, wild- fire, arson observed in: colombia (nr cali), bolivia, brazil, congo, russia, alaska, while 80 infernos blaze in queensland & 50 flare-ups in n.s.w.; don’t bet on soybeans in brazil, reuters implies; river shipping hazardous in e. china, water levels lo; namibia, angola, botswana declare drought emergencies; & they are relocating fish in australia, operation “noah’s ark,” sailing across land in search of more water; & fewest sheep alive in 100 yrs. synonyms for drought: dearth, deficiency, crunch (crunch?), failure, famine, inadequacy, inadequateness, insufficiency, lack, lacuna, scantiness, paucity, scarcity, shortage, under- supply, want – all referring to water, all revealing the inadequateness of words in the lacuna of the eclipsed world _______________ * ambient, atmosphere, clime, context, contexture environment, environs, medium, milieu, mise-en-scène, setting, surround, surroundings, terrain Who caused climate change, the human race, or only 1% of it? And if the latter, how were they able to get away with it?
In other words: Is climate change an accident of history, or is it the teleological result of human nature playing itself out? There’s the question of individual free will, but then there’s the question of whether the species has a collective will. And do all the individuals, exercising their “free” will – which obviously is influenced by psychobiological factors – cancel one another out? Or add up to a collective death drive? Or could all this have been prevented? Who would have done it - and why? Our evolutionary psychology makes us very bad at dealing with abstract problems involving more than a couple of hundred people – let alone a global problem involving all the people in the world – especially when problems at the local, visible level are more pressing, and the rewards more palpable. This propensity is quite understandable, if you’re afraid that you or your child will be shot by the cops tomorrow; or you’ll be deported; or you don’t know how you will pay the heating or medical bills, then you’ve got more pressing life-and-death issues to deal with. But most of us just don’t want to think about impending climate catastrophe, even if we think there’s something we can do about it. Are people capable of facing up to the climate emergency? And mitigating it – at least for future generations? It’s something I wonder about. And a very good topic for writers to explore. How would you do so? Alternative history? Lyric poem? Problem play? Is the pavement too hot for little Bowser's paws? No prob - there's a technological fix! “we’ve talked about these
things occurring in decades or in centuries, but … it’s happening right now and it’s visible right now and it’s noticeable right now,” sez the univ. of alaska climatologist – “so, in one sense, it’s really bad, but people tend to kind of step up and do something about it when they feel a sense of urgency, and there really is a sense of urgency right now.” i hope that’s right. but half the u.s.american people go “harumph! i’ll see it when i believe it!” & our president sez we can’t let evacuees into the u.s. from bahamas b/c they might be drug dealers (which to him, means they might be black); expect more climate refugees to be turned away in coming years, including u.s.americans meanwhile time & tide stop for no one: the remains of dorian whack halifax – ½ million w/o power – while typhoon racks japan, korea; 100k homes destroyed by floods in sudan; mumbai inundated 1ce again: “unlike in the past, there wasn’t much anger. it is likely that the people have now started taking it for granted that every monsoon, the city will be shut a couple of times due to heavy waterlogging”; (let them hate as long as they fear, right?) & 28 people killed & 370k homes damaged in alluvion in thailand; highest early sept temp ever for beijing + heavy rain + strong winds; “the summer that will never end” in alabama, record 99f in mobile; 1500 dead in france of this summer’s heat; more burning in bolivia: govt has encouraged land burning for ag, now the defense mister sez: "this is a macabre game. we put out the fires and there are people behind us that are starting them again,” which is not a bad analogy for the climate crisis everywhere & the people in charge are the people igniting the world I’ve written a lot on this blog about writing. And specifically, reasons for writing when the nature, status, and future of writing, publishing, and reading are at best highly uncertain: in the era of climate chaos, all bets are off. The literary institutions already totter, the ceremony of ignorance is drowned. Whatever writing was, it won’t be long.
It seems to me that the reasons for writing in such a period are also the reasons for living therein. For instance: Gratitude. To God(s), to others, to the earth, to oneself. This is not a theme explored very much in U.S. literature. But we thank people who are dying, and vice versa, so why not do so when your world may be, too? Gratitude acknowledges that much of what one enjoys is the result of chance – accidents of birth, upbringing, location, timing – in other words, that one is beholden. And that all of those things will be taken away, sooner or later – or returned, depending on how you look at it. Be here now. Curiosity. If you like narrative, you want to know what happens next. If you really like narrative, you’ll keep reading even if you know the ending – even if the ending is not a happy one – and then read the sequel. The only reason I can think of to be unsettled by the thought of my consciousness’ evaporating or winking out after death is the notion that I won’t know what happens next: that was the last episode, but the series hasn’t been cancelled. But if it has been cancelled, don’t you want to see the season finale?? Observation. The phenomenological philosophers thought of artistic consciousness as an ethos: it implies attention to things for their own sake in the present, rather than their utility to oneself in the future. People who have terminal diagnoses report being more intensely aware of their surroundings, their loved ones, their lives, than they were before. In contemporary “western” culture, observation is often what writers do, and often it is the extent of what they do. Or they make observations about language itself (and all the social implications thereof). Perspective. Contemplating world-historical events can make our quotidian, routine lives look rather paltry. Climate change is shaping up to be the world-historical event (and maybe the final one). Kinder makes y’think, don’t it? Certainly puts things into perspective – makes you take stock. I have that “pale blue dot” photo, the picture of earth taken from Voyager 2 from the edge of the universe. We’re barely a pixel from out there. We’re barely a pixel even here. Said another way: if you knew the earth were going to be hit by a giant meteor that would destroy all life on earth, and Elon Musk invited you to join his party in the spacecraft that was taking off beforehand, would you go? Would you want to see it happen, knowing that the food and water on the ship would run out b/c there’s no place to go? Even if you had to talk with Elon Musk? Talk about epiphanies . . . Seeing the lights go out AND seeing how smoothly the rest of the universe goes about its business – that experience might finally give one an inkling of who one is and how things are. But what if we could start doing this on the ground? That is, what if we could look in the mirror and see the giant meteor? Who knows – it might make some folks wake up. |
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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. |