Excellent program from an excellent radio program. Why the "Climate Town Hall" may have been better than an issue-dedicated debate; and how weather affects people's views of climate. Listen here.
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CNN's Chad Myers: “As a skeptic, I didn’t deny climate change existed. I was questioning the data behind the science. One big number ultimately changed my mind.” See it here.
they say climate change
is moving up voters’ priority lists; but the m.c. from wisc. sez, sure, her constituents are concerned, but they want more moderate steps, maybe one of those technological “fixes” that the tech whizzes must be cooking up, b/c it’s so important to get it on-line in time, right? in the meantime, our county has seen “flooding that isn’t consistent with its flood- plain maps”; “some recently-built homes near coal creek have flooded ‘two or three times,’” sez the zoning director, but they “are considered to be in the 500-year floodplain” – meaning they shd flood 2-3 x /millennium. so the county wants to buy them out using fed $$, but only houses in the 100-yr floodplain are eligible. the deputy dir. of public works admits: “that’s obviously a sore spot.” but today the sun comes up again, unimpeded by clouds & ready for action. sept. 5: hi 96f, norm 86 lo 66f, norm 59 – no, like i keep saying, that doesn’t prove anything: weather is not climate until it’s a lot of weather from a lot of different places over a lot of time, so i’ll keep taking measurements as long as i can to get as much climate as i can. the russians do this: now they say this summer was the warmest ever in the russian arctic & “similar results are found in greenland, alaska & the e. canadian arctic.” russian envio ministry: “climate change will bring epidemics, drought and mass hunger to russia if left unchecked; melting permafrost in the arctic could release radio- active substances, siberian forests increasingly fire-prone & far east, flood-“ well, we’ll see. tho i notice anchorage is in severe drought & alaskan communities running out of water – but seriously? i’m so tired of hearing melting glacier this & thawing permafrost that & rising water temps t’other that i could get hot under the collar if i weren’t careful. meanwhile – in bahamas, 30 dead & "literally hundreds, up to thousands, of people are still missing," body bags & coolers; boats heaped up like flotsam; in florida, “residents should switch from hurricane mode to heat safety precaution”; lake ngami (botswana) is turning to mud; the livestock who don’t die of thirst get trapped in the mud as they try to get a drink of water; 4.2 m acres of forests carbonized in bolivia so far; record rainfall in central japan, mumbai, niger, & people are drowning (“that’s it – time to go!” sez a survivor) i say that techfix is gonna have to come on like a ton of bricks, that deus-x model karbon kutter – b/c the dea gaia is not stopping: if you poke a snake w/a stick as the saying goes, the pythoness gives you a saying right back, sniffed up from the methane bubbling from the source What is “nature writing” anymore? For that matter, what is “nature”?
Nature writing has always been designed to reassure us. Despite the ups and downs of history (it seems to say), one can always repair to a vernal wood for some straight-up soul refreshment. Wordsworth’s voice in his earlier poems is that of a therapist – or a pastor with a degree in social work. You can depend on the cycles of nature. Always. That is, until you can’t. If formal poetic conventions were disrupted by modernism and modernity, then other modern processes have disrupted what a lot of writers write about – viz., the natural world, considered as non-peopled and non-urban. All that is solid melts into air, and the air temp is radically different than 200 years ago. You can write about melting glaciers, shrinking lakes, and dying forests, but who the hell wants to read that? Or you can write about the species of animals that are left (house sparrows as symbols of transcendence?), but that can be a downer, too, if you’ve been paying attention for any length of time. Nowadays, nature is a moving target (literally). Or, said another way, physical processes have been affected by modern history as much as human ones have. In the world of climate chaos, Nature (writ large) can no longer be eternal or associated with an unchanging Spirit. Panta rhei – everything flows – or at least changes, including the Polar Vortex and the Gulf Stream. So the nature of nature writing has changed, even while reader expectations are lagging behind. We still want to be reassured that wilderness exists, preferably pristine wilderness. There is absolutely no reason that “Nature” – the make-up of the surface of the earth) should hold still for us; nor should we be surprised that it does not. The earth didn’t stay still for the dinosaurs or all those organisms in the Cambrian shale. Maybe they’ll find us fossilized – but hopefully not our writing. At least, not yet. So, should we simply avoid nature writing, post-Holocene? Or maybe get rid of the category “nature” altogether, with its implication that human (and therefore culture) are somehow removed from the physical, beyond the reach of the world. In a post-human(ist) poetics, in a contemporary poetry that truly is contemporary, there is no longer the option of not writing about geophysics, at least implicitly, since climate affects everything else and increasingly disrupts everything else. How do we adhere to generic conventions when abnormal is the new normal? Sure, the small rains down can rain, but more often they’re no rains – or torrential downpours. Or perhaps we could write about the changes we see in front of our face – in people, as well as in “rocks, and stones, and trees.” Generalized anxiety, scapegoating, helplessness. These are most immediately seen in our politics, and nature poetry has never succeeded in being apolitical. It might be even more honest to write about nature outside the earth – other planets, cosmic dust, red shifts, black holes, dark matter – since none of that is going away because of climate breakdown on the surface of the earth. The moon as moon, not symbol. Or below the surface of the earth. Or the behavior of subatomic particles, which will continue behaving in weird ways after we’re gone. Charles Olson claims that the writer can give to their work “a seriousness sufficient to cause the thing he [sic] makes to try to take its place alongside the things of nature.” This is a highly conditional statement: sufficient to cause to try to take alongside. The verb “cause” is maybe the most interesting, as it implies something occurring apart from human intervention. “He” makes, but “it” tries. A poem with a life of its own. The modernists (some) thought literature exists apart from the audience and so shouldn’t take it into account. What I’m imagining here would be the ne plus ultra of that idea, since it would imply a literature existing after people (or at least after writing). If a poem is left in the forest, does it make a sound? or an image? It can certainly take its place alongside the calls of whatever animals are around, and the authenticity of falling trees. i see in the paper where
they want to pipe co2 from jeffrey power plant near topeka, 1 of the largest single- point co2 emitters in the country, to s.w. kansas: some to store underground, some to be “used for some- thing called enhanced oil recovery. that means injecting co2 into the ground on 1 side of a deposit to push hard- to-reach oil & gas to- ward a well on the other side.” so, co2 emissions can be used to create more co2 emissions! that’s what i call a market-based solution. & if i lived in garden city, say, i’d think about what that means; if you live in hawai’i, you broke or tied 87 heat records from 5/16-8/31 w/ little rain, hi humidity, feeble or absent trade winds; if denver, got yr first 100 f temp in sept.; but we 1st-worlders still live in a garden, even in the city; we all live in heaven compared to what could come – to what’s happening else- where – “govs take panicky measures as floods ravage states” in nigeria (“you may also like: ‘erosion exhumes dead bodies in kano’”); port elizabeth, s.a. hits lowest aug. rainfall mark ever; deadly floods in s. morocco – while here it’s 9 f + normal & the lo 14 f + normal & the sun shines for more days at a stretch than it has in weeks, still the lake’s at its highest level ever; tho still other reservoirs all over the world are at their lowest & getting lower; tho the great lakes swell so big they breach their shores: higher temps, more evap, more rain, more water all year long (flooding in downtown chi, sewage spewing forth into detroit floodwater) & if you can put a man on the moon, you can whip up a deus ex machine, a “technological fix” that will come on like a ton of bricks & “become economical” just in time to save us. meanwhile, dorian wins the prize for highest land- fall windspeed for any atlantic hurricane; it’s scraped the islands clean; it’s the 5th cat 5 in the last 4 yrs; now it’s weakened, but looks to clip the s.e. coast as it lumbers north; a little faster, a little farther west, it wld’ve hit d.c., baltimore, maybe philly, nyc as it turned n.; 1 doesn’t want to think about what might have been or what might be or has very good odds or is – like doggies sickening & dying from dips in lakes, pools, & seas w/ bluegreen algae blooms, wch thrive in heat & drink in CO2 (i know i promise not to talk abt animals but for some these are more than just animals) i saw mr. & mrs. blake in the backyard, gardening nude by the light of the moon, their ghost dog lying along- side; they have not given up, they did not get the memo, they have never heard of chiggers. william winks at me, says (telepathically), “you cannot evacuate time,” & smiles So what will happen between this unusually warm November and an unspecified but nearing future when it will have warmed however many degrees Celsius above this present stretching global mean / asking for a friend
I feel tense give me a / tense such as actions that will be completed before some other event in the future / plot a line: A (present)—B (future) / and place the future perfect somewhere between those points / but who knows what ontological status B has now is the problem If we don’t know where we are going how will we know when we’ve gone too far / #capitalism / to make our future perfect there must be a deadline we work towards / now to then / the breach coming between we choose I choose you I choose all of you let’s do this now and then Say: we will always have been living in the future like this / say: we will have always been pondering the course of history unfolding / say: our descendants will have always been thinking / what were they thinking / when thinking about us in all those thoughtful days to come / but There is no future imperfect in English / there is no tense in which what is to come is not deadline but / state of continuity / I want to state some continuity / look at the climate and say / my grammar did this to me / my grammar and / my economy ------------------------------------------- Stephen Collis is the author of a dozen books of poetry and prose, including The Commons (Talon Books 2008), Once in Blockadia (Talon Books 2016) and Almost Islands: Phyllis Webb and the Pursuit of the Unwritten (Talon Books 2018). Current research on the climate emergency and human and other displacements is involved in two in-process projects: Future Imperfect (poetry) and A Sestina for Max Sebald (prose). He lives near Vancouver, on unceded Coast Salish Territory, and teaches poetry and poetics at Simon Fraser University. so hurricane dorian
ties the record for sustained winds & gusts (congratulations!); it stalls out over the bahamas, where it’s wiping out at least one island; may turn out to be the biggest ever on earth. sure sure, thoughts & prayers for the poor people there, as always. but this feels different, feels like spotting a tyrannosaurus in the front yard – large, epochal, personally threatening. then again, it may head back out to sea – the u.s. is exceptional, the exception to climate chaos, exempt. sure we have natural disasters now & then, here & there, but most of the country is fine most of the time, right? yeah, kinda. but vegas goes 24 days over 105 f (new record); hottest, driest summer on record for anchorage; all-time sept hi temp for salt lake city – on sept 1. dorian’s the big story, so we won’t mention 1000s of thais stranded by tropical storm podul; or the 10s of 1000s of homes collapsed by flooding in sudan; or boreal forests ablaze in siberia (arctic con- flagrations released 180 megatons of CO2 as of 8/18); or tropical forests burning in s. america (brazil, bolivia govts. “incentivizing” slash-and-burn), africa, or indonesia; or highest max temps ever for jan-aug in australia + less than half the normal rain; or coldest summer ever for moscow. maybe the majority is right: we’re living in heaven, compared to what’s ahead, so enjoy yr time in heaven while you can. karachi, however, is not: it suffers a plague of flies & mosquitoes after the monsoons: they cover every surface, invade every open space: “they’re hounding people. you can’t walk straight, there are so many flies everywhere”: another “i’ve-never-seen-it- this-bad” moment. take it to the supreme court, you say? in fact, somebody has – to try to force govt to do something not nothing. nothing & no one stops it; we are the asteroid, the super-volcano, the force of nature wiping nature clean, o earthlings – take me to whoever is your leader, reader |
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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. |