The juncos are significantly rounder this morning, their white underparts puffed out, looking like tiny snowmen wearing a jacket and tails. It’s cold, finally – the weather that affords us New Englanders bragging rights. None of this forties business, yesterday it was one degree at nine o’clock. But the ice and snow doesn’t bring the resounding relief I’ve been wishing for. There’s still the eerie undertone, the understanding that the patterns we’ve attuned ourselves to, the old rhymes and country lore are fast becoming obsolete.
On one of the coldest days this year I went to a lecture on climate change given by the Nature Conservancy’s Climate Change Adaptation Leader for the Berkshire region. He was reporting on the organization’s prognosis after the Durban conference, which, not surprisingly, is dreary. Not the technology, not the possibility – we have astounding technology and resources to both arrest climate change and adapt to the effects already in place (like increased moisture due to warmer seas, resulting in more extreme storm events like Irene and the Halloween snowstorm). What’s dreary is the business of it all.The good news out of Durban was that all involved agreed we need to address climate change, and significantly reduce carbon emissions. Hooray! A start. However, the amount by which emissions are to be reduced shall be decided by 2015, and not implemented until 2020. The greenhouse effect is not linear, it is a phenomenon of positive feedback. The longer we wait the more drastic our actions will have to be, and the greater the resistance there will be to implementing them. Blast.
Driving home, Aric, who works educating about sustainability and behavioral change in consumption and waste, wondered out loud, “we who work for the environment are just another one percent – how do we convince people to care? Everyone is trying to convince everyone else of the significance of their cause – whether it’s a product, an activity, a charity, a livelihood…” It’s a good question. And in the question lies the problem – “the environment” is not a cause.
It’s not another discipline. “Environmental Studies” is a worthy course of study, but its title is misleading. The phrase, “getting back to Nature” makes me seethe. We were never out of it. The fact that we think we are, at times, to me seems quite literally insane, as completely out of touch with reality. We can be more attuned to our surroundings, but we are never out of them. It may be a statement of the obvious to say we depend upon a healthy and generous environment, but for the most part we live as if we don’t.
We are porous, with ill-defined borders that embed our surrounding ecology within us, from food to breath. A constantly shifting and sifting system, that is not romance but fact. We have a hundred unseen systems within systems, as does every organism.
‘The environment’ is the canvas upon which every single action and breath is painted. From buying shoes to brushing my teeth, calling my mother, getting an oil change, breathing and dying. It is not a cause, it is the fundament of all causes. Many ills need to be addressed, not prioritized but addressed from all levels by all manner of people. But no one “doesn’t have time” for the environment; you are the environment.
Truly, truly, when we work to save and secure the environment we rely upon, we work to save and secure ourselves. The planet itself doesn’t care, it was still Earth when mostly sulfur and volcano and heat. Covered in ice is as “natural” as a verdant Eden. And all will fall away, eventually. Perhaps that is a reality we all need to contemplate. And no great work is ever sustained by guilt and fear, only by loving optimism and conviction.
But first we all must understand the urgency.
A few resources:
1 comment:
Yessss a wonderful cause to write about here climate change is a serious issue we need to champion rock on H,,,,....
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