birthright was that Nature was always there for us to return to, in
the wake of human-centered activities, only to have to painfully
accede to this new reality, this daily loss of real beauty, of
possibility and sustenance? The summer will no longer be the lazy
time of ripening, but a time of scarcity and flight, of parching and
desolation. Evanescence of the kind we were used to was seasonal;
now, for all we know, it is permanent. We have begun to see the
vanishing, and ironically are so much less prepared than those now
being born into apocalypse as normalcy. They will grow up hopefully
with an attitude of survival appropriate to meet this crisis, not
torn by the aching sensibility of all that is being lost. 20 years
ago it was arguably speculation, 10 years ago it was undeniable fact;
only this year, this past 6 months really, has it dawned on the
average person. People who care feel powerless. Those who don't
care or who actively obstruct awakening to the crisis should be
branded criminals. What could rise to a higher crime, a crime
against humanity in the truest sense, than to obscure for others the
gravity of this climate crisis?
I keep being reminded for some odd reason of H.D.'s (Hilda
Doolittle's) "The Walls Do Not Fall", a poem (or part of a poem..) I
absolutely remember nothing of other than the message that the
alienation and disillusionment befalling mankind in the post-modern
era left women largely unscathed because the edifice was not of their
making. I don't know why this keeps coming back, except for maybe in
the sense that the coming generations in this era of devolving
climate stability similarly will have no business bemoaning a loss
they never knew.
I feel as though the lesson told so tellingly in Jared Diamond's
"Collapse", particularly about Easter Island's deforestation, needs
to be writ large. What kind of fiction was being put over on the
people who cut down the last trees on the island in the services of
these absurd statues, forever dooming them to an inability to fish
for food from boats in the waters off the coast? And how long was it
before the bereft people rose up against the chiefs who had sponsored
the destruction, began cannibalizing eachother and toppling the
statues? At what point in this story are we today, as 500,000 flee
their homes from wildfires in California, as the crops in Georgia
turn to dust, and more quaintly, as the brooks that powered the
dreams of my young life in the Adirondacks run dry..
