What does it mean to be alive right now?
Right now. Right this second, right this epoch, as mankind
alters the Earth beyond recognition.
In Arizona, in the summer, the pinyon pines don’t smell like
they used to, says Nikki Cooley, and the wind sometimes feels in
error, like it’s blowing the wrong way, at the wrong time of
year. She knows these are feelings, not data, but she is
measuring them nonetheless.
Cooley, 39, grew up without running water or electricity on Diné
Nation land, herding her grandmother’s sheep and sleeping in
corn fields. She became one of the first members of her family
to get a master’s degree, in forestry, and now she has her dream
job, co-managing a tribes and climate change program in Arizona,
acting as an emissary between her ancestral world and the modern
one that upended it.
“If you talk to elders, who are some of the most revered people
in our tribal communities,” Cooley says, “they’re like, ‘We told
you so, we have been saying this.’ ”
Scientists, too, have been saying this. Data, not feelings: A
United Nations panel reported in October that we have around 12
years to act if we want to keep the Quite Horrible from becoming
Truly Terrible. A report this month says that Antarctic glaciers
are melting faster than we thought. Also this month,
environmental dangers occupied the top three spots on a survey
of the biggest global risks, as compiled by the World Economic
Forum.
They told us so. Are telling us so.
[2018 was the fourth warmest year on record — and more evidence
of a ‘new normal,’ scientist group reports]
But here’s where you stop reading, because you have a mortgage
payment to scrape together. You have a kid to pick up from
school. You have a migraine. The U.S. government is in shambles.
You’re sitting at your desk, or on the subway, and deep in the
southern Indian Ocean, blue whales are calling to each other at
higher pitches, to be heard over the crack and whoosh of melting
polar ice. What do you even do with that?
Screw the epoch.
“I don’t believe it,” President Trump said of his own
administration’s November report, which stated that “climate
change is transforming where and how we live.”
How do we live? Day by day, mostly. Many of those days are spent
trying to be stable, happy, prosperous. Americans are
increasingly certain that human activity is causing global
warming, according to a report published Tuesday by Yale and
George Mason universities, but who has the willpower or the
luxury to always think generationally, geologically — to the end
of this century, to the uncertainties beyond?
“This is a great time to either collapse or to make great
changes,” says Rep. Alan Lowenthal (D-Calif.), a member of the
three-year-old Climate Solutions Caucus. “And we don’t know
which way we’re going.”
The midterm cycle flushed out nearly half of the 45 Republicans
in the caucus, a blow to its bipartisan stability, but it swept
in Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) — and suddenly Capitol
Hill was talking about a Green New Deal, about the waywardness
of the capitalist adventure.
“The world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address
climate change,” Ocasio-Cortez said Monday in New York, with a
doomsayer’s zeal. “And your biggest issue is how are we going to
pay for it?”
Climate change is a “huge issue,” the acting head of the
Environmental Protection Agency told a Senate committee this
month , but not our “greatest crisis.”
An issue, not a crisis. The charred graveyard of Paradise,
Calif., is an issue, not a crisis — unless, of course, you lived
in Paradise, Calif. The Cassandras among us look at Paradise,
smote by a wildfire without precedent, and see the future in
miniature: drought-stricken and ever more flammable.
We freak out, but go about our business.
The problem is clear, but it has yet to consume us.
And so there is no crisis, just an accumulation of curiosities
and irritants. Your basement now floods every year instead of
every five or 10 years. Your asthma has gotten worse. You grew
up wearing a winter jacket under your Halloween costume in
Buffalo, and now your kids don’t have to. The southern pine
beetle that once made its home closer to the equator is now
boring through trees on Long Island.
“There needs to be a few cold nights to freeze them, and we’re
having less and less of those,” says entomologist Claire
Rutledge.
“Stealthy effects” is the term Michael Paolisso uses. He’s a
professor of anthropology at the University of Maryland who’s
studied the Chesapeake Bay for years. He has a small house on
Deal Island, Md. When there is flooding in the county, school
starts late; bus drivers are advised not to traverse standing
water if both sides of the road are submerged, so what if you
have to go to work and your kids haven’t been picked up?
“They’re the day-to-day sort of grind,” Paolisso says of the
stealthy effects. “And soon people will be planning their trips
to town — our marshy areas and coastal peninsulas — based on the
tides.”
Climate change is more sly than time-lapse video of a
disintegrating glacier. It’s the creep of bay water into
ditches, and then onto roads.
It’s a smell. A nuisance. A crinkling of the calendar.
In the soybeans fields of Carrington, N.D., the first frost is
scooching from Labor Day toward October, while the last frost is
backing out of May into April. Charles Linderman has watched it
happen over his 43 years of farming there. A longer growing
season, right now, is good. “My concern,” Linderman says, “is if
it keeps going this way.” Cool-season crops such as barley would
suffer; milder winters might spare certain pests. North Dakota
could start to feel more like Kansas.
Being alive right now means rethinking boundaries, pushing on
the walls of your imagination. It means feeling around in this
world for another one.
If you have an infant daughter, she is expected to live 81.1
years, and so she will be here for 2100, a year that is no
longer mythical. She may see the world’s largest naval base, in
Norfolk, swamped by rising seas. If she lives in Phoenix, she
may feel nearly double the number of 100-degree days. During her
lifetime, the oceans will acidify at a rate not seen in 66
million years.
If it keeps going this way.
Alice Major has lived in Edmonton, on the edge of Alberta’s
boreal forest, for nearly 40 years. She remembers six weeks of
minus-20-degree weather; now the mercury sinks that low only
occasionally, she says. In 1949, the year she was born, the
planet had around 2.5 billion people on it, and it had taken all
of human history to get to that point. In her lifetime alone,
the population has grown by about 5 billion.
As Edmonton’s first poet laureate, Major has written a book of
verse titled “Welcome to the Anthropocene,” which is the name
given to this moment, this epoch, when humans have become a
planetary force. The anthropocene — whether it began with
agriculture, the colonization of the West, the Industrial
Revolution or the atomic bomb — was born of human ingenuity.
That’s what empowered us to create this mess, and what empowers
us now to see it.
So, how clever are we? Will we invent our way out of this? Alice
Major answers:
Immured in cities, we forget we live on a planet that is more
inventive than ourselves.
It’s possible to read the epoch itself like a poem. Rutledge,
the entomologist, has been knitting as part of the Tempestry
Project, which assembles yarn kits and geolocation data for
crafters to color-code a year of temperatures — rendering
climate change into a rainbow of pleasing wool colors, such as
“fjord” blue and “firecracker” red.
Each loop a part of a day, each row a day of the year. Lines
following lines.
“It’s a way to spend time with something,” says Rutledge, who
lives in North Haven, Conn., “to force yourself to slow down and
think about it, to manage the anxiety about climate change
because it’s just so overwhelming.”
That’s the riddle. To grasp the problem, we have to slow down.
To respond to it, we have to act fast. We have both no time and
more time, says climate scientist Kate Marvel. Climate change is
a slope. We can ease our descent. But we don’t think about it
this way.
“We want there to be a really simple story: You do this, and
then everything will be okay,” says Marvel, who works for NASA
in New York. “And everything is not going to be okay.”
That’s the opposite of what a mother says, the opposite of what
we all tell each other about the latest worry — about the job
interview in the morning, about the lump in your wife’s breast,
about a report in the newspaper screaming through a muffle of
data that we need to stop everything we’re doing and pull
together in the same direction, or else everything we are
building for our children may soon be overtaken by water or
fire.
Everything will be okay. We say it even when we don’t believe
it.
Maybe we should stop saying it. There is opportunity in this
acceptance. Marvel thinks we need courage, not hope. We must
know what’s coming, we must realize it will hurt, and we must be
very strong together.
Hold the problem in your mind. Freak out, but don’t put it down.
Give it a quarter-turn. See it like a scientist, and as a poet.
As a descendant. As an ancestor.
“It is an immense privilege to be alive at this time,” Alice
Major says from Edmonton. “We owe it to ourselves to try as hard
as we can to understand what’s going on. And to give meaning to
it. . . . Only by understanding our lives as meaningful can we
hope to create meaningful change.”
The wind feels wrong in Arizona, and Nikki Cooley listens to the
elders. The Diné know what it means to be driven from land, to
adapt, to survive from one epoch to the next, even though things
are not okay.
She is their daughter. A line following a line. She has figured
out how to be okay, for the time being. To give it meaning. The
feelings. The data. All of it.
“It does take an emotional toll,” she says, “but I have to
remember that these people keep going, and have been going since
the colonial settler stepped foot on this land.” |
