Yet awareness of the unstable climate that's challenging all our prospects can only be increasing. In the seasonal patterns, what are we about to start seeing? (Could the forecasts of climate catastrophe still end up mistaken?) What I've lately most noticed are the long autumns that linger into traditionally winter months, in particular 2011/2012, the winter that barely took hold at all. That January near Ely, Minnesota-- whose winters have the reputation of the frigid sub-polar kind with a higher and higher snowpack-- exhibited the merest bare ground with cold glitter on it as I worked in or out of the parked car, laying in the multi-toned canopy of spruce that would shelter my favorite bird of recent times, the strutting spruce cock, whose illustration is still in stages of finishing two years after I started it; the work awaits the reappearance of bare forest floor these weeks with our persistent fields of drifts this year.
Yes, winter conditions fluctuate naturally from year to year. In April 2012 a visit to the Canadian shores of Lake Superior further evidenced the winter that had never been, with forest duff as dry as the lining of a scarecrow's pocket in a sun-withered corn patch, the ferns of the 2011 growing season standing brown like cornstalks under the firs and cedars. However Lake Superior itself oftener and oftener reveals boulders and rock ledges that used to stay covered in water; this is attributed to faster evaporation following from markedly shorter seasons of ice cover. But yes, last fall the water stood a bit higher.
The winter of 2012/2013 was closer to the old norms, with recurrent snows and a generous snow pack, sub-freezing weeks and snowfalls showing up even into May, so that teens and young adults exclaimed at what a cold winter this was but the older ones said no, this was actually typical of what once was, this hasn't been such a brutal winter.
Now we have this long defiant snow season, when the influence of the North Pole is skewed way down over North America, and temperatures this far north in late March demand a parka hood or knitwear for a person's head if you're walking some mornings or evenings. This was my first winter when I've ached deep inside my back for several days running; it was almost certainly my lungs, after heavy breathing from skiing along the open road when the temps never even neared 0 Fahrenheit and northwesterly winds skated over field after field. Eastern Europeans and Alaskans meanwhile utterly lacked any of the protracted freezing that would keep up their Olympic ski runs or sled trekking. Here in northern Minnesota between the snow-shrouded meadows as we peel off our coats we're asking each other what June this year might look like or whether there might not be much growing season, though we're not really worrying since summer has always come back in due force.
Feeling that a recent popular advisory, the Rolling Stone piece titled "Global Warming's Terrifying New Math" will soon have been widely shared and digested, I was fascinated to attend a hearing in Duluth on March 20th for a proposed expansion of an oil pipeline, Enbridge Energy's Alberta Clipper which would cross this state's northern third. The line is taking heavy crude oil down from what once was pristine taiga forest in northern Alberta, into the Upper Midwestern states where Superior, Wisconsin will be a hub for distribution to refineries eastward and south. At the same time the scientists studying the dilemma for its carbon implications point to the requirement for our survival's sake that we leave all possible petroleum reserves in the ground or else push earth's climate into a regime of tumult and extremes that will take down civilization.
I read after the hearing that opinions had been about half for, half against the plan to increase the existing pipeline's shipping capacity from 570,000 to 800,000 barrels of oil a day. While I sat in the hotel ballroom among the 300 or so who were there to listen or testify I heard four or five testimonies opposing the project on the basis either of hazard to water from leaks or spills (they occur with every pipeline, sooner or later) or to the climate. Most emphatic were the president and CEO of a local solar energy company who called the Alberta tar sands project 'a lethal carbon bomb' and the young lady who spoke after him who, in her thin high voice, avowed that 'a barrel shipped is a barrel burned.' Each of these testifiers asked the reps for Enbridge in separate wording: how do you react to knowing that?
For any veterans of civil disobedience, all that I witnessed at this hearing probably seemed unremarkable. But, as if I were listening to the soundtrack of a drama without video, I noticed how each of these two testimonies led straight to a dumbstruck silence on the part of Enbridge's panel of engineers and attorneys. Everyone present must have been thinking: so what are they gonna say to that? What do the energy-sector jobs and sports and music sponsorship which Enbridge had funded matter against a carbon outflow that, sector by sector, causes the whole gross economy to tatter and come undone? And that helps drive whole regions into mega-drought and food insecurity or outright famine? Then, just as many of us were beginning to formulate our versions of the answer, the attorney in tones of pained patience, probably reading from a prepared rejoinder, said that the people of America have said that they want an increasing domestic supply of oil and gasoline to assure the supply of...whatever, name anything you can think of. And so that determination measured entirely in dollars settles it; of course pipeline expansion is what we will do.
Petroleum pipelines and mining ventures, high-rises and new sports arenas, water diversion schemes and highway interconnections will continue burying and polluting soils that have given root to ourselves and more than ourselves as long as resources remain to do these things because too few of us know how to quit at our investments, whatever these might be. Our prehistoric ancestral societies' expansion schemes appear to have brought on die-offs and dispersals in so many cases where limits to growth were reached, in food-growing terms especially. Weather that stunts and kills food crops is a direct threat to those of us living now.
The winter of 2012/2013 was closer to the old norms, with recurrent snows and a generous snow pack, sub-freezing weeks and snowfalls showing up even into May, so that teens and young adults exclaimed at what a cold winter this was but the older ones said no, this was actually typical of what once was, this hasn't been such a brutal winter.
Now we have this long defiant snow season, when the influence of the North Pole is skewed way down over North America, and temperatures this far north in late March demand a parka hood or knitwear for a person's head if you're walking some mornings or evenings. This was my first winter when I've ached deep inside my back for several days running; it was almost certainly my lungs, after heavy breathing from skiing along the open road when the temps never even neared 0 Fahrenheit and northwesterly winds skated over field after field. Eastern Europeans and Alaskans meanwhile utterly lacked any of the protracted freezing that would keep up their Olympic ski runs or sled trekking. Here in northern Minnesota between the snow-shrouded meadows as we peel off our coats we're asking each other what June this year might look like or whether there might not be much growing season, though we're not really worrying since summer has always come back in due force.
Feeling that a recent popular advisory, the Rolling Stone piece titled "Global Warming's Terrifying New Math" will soon have been widely shared and digested, I was fascinated to attend a hearing in Duluth on March 20th for a proposed expansion of an oil pipeline, Enbridge Energy's Alberta Clipper which would cross this state's northern third. The line is taking heavy crude oil down from what once was pristine taiga forest in northern Alberta, into the Upper Midwestern states where Superior, Wisconsin will be a hub for distribution to refineries eastward and south. At the same time the scientists studying the dilemma for its carbon implications point to the requirement for our survival's sake that we leave all possible petroleum reserves in the ground or else push earth's climate into a regime of tumult and extremes that will take down civilization.
I read after the hearing that opinions had been about half for, half against the plan to increase the existing pipeline's shipping capacity from 570,000 to 800,000 barrels of oil a day. While I sat in the hotel ballroom among the 300 or so who were there to listen or testify I heard four or five testimonies opposing the project on the basis either of hazard to water from leaks or spills (they occur with every pipeline, sooner or later) or to the climate. Most emphatic were the president and CEO of a local solar energy company who called the Alberta tar sands project 'a lethal carbon bomb' and the young lady who spoke after him who, in her thin high voice, avowed that 'a barrel shipped is a barrel burned.' Each of these testifiers asked the reps for Enbridge in separate wording: how do you react to knowing that?
For any veterans of civil disobedience, all that I witnessed at this hearing probably seemed unremarkable. But, as if I were listening to the soundtrack of a drama without video, I noticed how each of these two testimonies led straight to a dumbstruck silence on the part of Enbridge's panel of engineers and attorneys. Everyone present must have been thinking: so what are they gonna say to that? What do the energy-sector jobs and sports and music sponsorship which Enbridge had funded matter against a carbon outflow that, sector by sector, causes the whole gross economy to tatter and come undone? And that helps drive whole regions into mega-drought and food insecurity or outright famine? Then, just as many of us were beginning to formulate our versions of the answer, the attorney in tones of pained patience, probably reading from a prepared rejoinder, said that the people of America have said that they want an increasing domestic supply of oil and gasoline to assure the supply of...whatever, name anything you can think of. And so that determination measured entirely in dollars settles it; of course pipeline expansion is what we will do.
Petroleum pipelines and mining ventures, high-rises and new sports arenas, water diversion schemes and highway interconnections will continue burying and polluting soils that have given root to ourselves and more than ourselves as long as resources remain to do these things because too few of us know how to quit at our investments, whatever these might be. Our prehistoric ancestral societies' expansion schemes appear to have brought on die-offs and dispersals in so many cases where limits to growth were reached, in food-growing terms especially. Weather that stunts and kills food crops is a direct threat to those of us living now.
Our communications network wraps around the world, but our interconnectedness does not protect localities from localized or regional disaster. Local and regional crises reverberate into international burdens. The Bible of my Christian forebears tells of the Tower of Babel, a legend borne out of Hebrew and Mesopotamian traditions in which people built a temple or ziggurat aimed into the heavens, based upon the assurance of a common language. But God somehow, exerting divine will through the nature of the peoples, decreed that the attainment of heaven was not to be. In The Greater Trumps, first published in 1932, the British theological novelist Charles Williams revealed, through a character's vision, a conception of the Tower of Babel as a linkage of hands:
"Somewhere, very vaguely, he would think that he saw in front of him, fashioned of the mist...the great Tower which reached almost out of sight, so loftily it grew up and then always--just as his dimmed eyes strained to see the rising walls--tottered and swayed and began in a horrible silence to fall apart, but never quite apart. It was raised by hands which, from within the rising walls, came climbing over, building themselves into a tower, thrusting those below them into place, fists hammering them down, so that the whole Tower was made up of layers of hands. But as it grew upward they changed; masonry below, thinner levels of masonry above, and, still above, masonry changing into hands, a few levels of moving hands, and (topmost of all) the busy working fists and fingers. And then a sudden spark of sunlight would fall on it from above and the fists would fall back out of sight, and the hands would disjoin, swiftly but reluctantly, holding on to each other till the ruin tore them apart, and the apparent masonry, as it was rent by some invisible force, would again change back into clutching and separating hands. They clung together fantastically; they shivered and writhed to avoid some principle of destruction that lurked within them,..."
Pricing for food, shelter and transport may start the undoing of the world economy, analogous to the tower, in our near future. If excessive hot sun, precipitation and ever-less petroleum fuel to grow the gigantic grain crops a humanity of billions needs in order to eat are our foreordained destiny, why are we still building everyday cars so they will go above 80 miles per hour, and why are we still advertising gasoline toys bought in at least half of cases by thrill riders? Because desperation was the only condition that ever cured people of their most spendthrift excesses. And yes, many people are over-booked with work and speed out of habit to try to save on travel time. And even though the industry-based drive for conformity, ease and time-saving has herded the peoples of the earth into a tower of babble or a culture of interconnected mega-cities, many, many cherished differences and aching disparities have seen to it that we keep falling loose, disconnecting, as well. Desperation due to an overburden of people may somehow, in some drastic ways help thin the ranks.
"Somewhere, very vaguely, he would think that he saw in front of him, fashioned of the mist...the great Tower which reached almost out of sight, so loftily it grew up and then always--just as his dimmed eyes strained to see the rising walls--tottered and swayed and began in a horrible silence to fall apart, but never quite apart. It was raised by hands which, from within the rising walls, came climbing over, building themselves into a tower, thrusting those below them into place, fists hammering them down, so that the whole Tower was made up of layers of hands. But as it grew upward they changed; masonry below, thinner levels of masonry above, and, still above, masonry changing into hands, a few levels of moving hands, and (topmost of all) the busy working fists and fingers. And then a sudden spark of sunlight would fall on it from above and the fists would fall back out of sight, and the hands would disjoin, swiftly but reluctantly, holding on to each other till the ruin tore them apart, and the apparent masonry, as it was rent by some invisible force, would again change back into clutching and separating hands. They clung together fantastically; they shivered and writhed to avoid some principle of destruction that lurked within them,..."
Pricing for food, shelter and transport may start the undoing of the world economy, analogous to the tower, in our near future. If excessive hot sun, precipitation and ever-less petroleum fuel to grow the gigantic grain crops a humanity of billions needs in order to eat are our foreordained destiny, why are we still building everyday cars so they will go above 80 miles per hour, and why are we still advertising gasoline toys bought in at least half of cases by thrill riders? Because desperation was the only condition that ever cured people of their most spendthrift excesses. And yes, many people are over-booked with work and speed out of habit to try to save on travel time. And even though the industry-based drive for conformity, ease and time-saving has herded the peoples of the earth into a tower of babble or a culture of interconnected mega-cities, many, many cherished differences and aching disparities have seen to it that we keep falling loose, disconnecting, as well. Desperation due to an overburden of people may somehow, in some drastic ways help thin the ranks.
A thing I wonder each day is whether earth's loneliest, remotest, least-peopled places will in these times of difficulty retain their status as middle of nowhere. Will the most built-over lands on earth keep on being centers of everywhere, hospitable to survivors of the future, because of amenities that linger there, or will a great many of them turn into wastelands? I wonder this because I live in a depopulated region, a farming area that still supports wolves, pine martens and fishers, and am there by my choice, which gives rise to the art I do. It's about the living things that always took care of themselves, that I regret in so many cases are being crowded out of a homeland surpassingly beautiful in the eyes of city and country folk alike. Climate catastrophe threatens these plants and animals with extinction, ultimately, yet a collapse of our affairs may also mean salvation for some of the birds, beasts and wild herbs. I love the North with its icy breath as a consequence of my own history, but also because of the body efficiency it promotes for a robust type like myself--I burn up what I eat better than ever before. I adore the austerity shown by the frizzy, velvety and leathery low plants best adapted to these rocks and sands and peat bogs. I love the hidden adaptations in northern plants and animals to cold, poor soil, beset by frigid black nights, from the food-finding strategies of the carnivores to the capacity to grow only in slight increments, like a 50-year old swamp spruce that looks hardly bigger than a long-handled mop with handle stuck in the ground.
Austerity is found among plants and creatures of hot deserts as well, and they have their champions as they should. A citizen of cold deserts might, on immersion in southerly deserts of cacti and sage, learn to feel his or her inner kit fox and make a home there, but so far I want to speak for the little half-forsaken things that stand and quiver before a northerly wind a thousand or two miles closer to the Arctic. What will be our fate?
Boreal and Black-capped Chickadees of Canadian/U.S. Border Region and Northward
a wonderful read ,by an insightful ,highly skilled wordsmith
ReplyDelete