Climate Bear and Rowboat

Extrapolations — Official Trailer | Apple TV+

In the above trailer Edward Norton’s character Jonathan Chopin says “I think it helps to look at climate change like a bear. The whole planet’s been wrestling with the bear for decades. So far, the bear’s been kicking our ass.”  This reminds me of the end of my September 11, 2019 post, “It is like a grizzly bear has trapped us in a cave. We can stay in the cave and starve, or fight him by trying geoengineering, and maybe some of us will live.” Unfortunately, according to Bill McKibben’s comments below, geoengineering may come sooner than many think.

Last week I was in a discussion about the climate emergency. I said conditions are changing fast according to the ancient laws of physics for which human ideas and beliefs are irrelevant. Specifically, I’m referring to sea surface temperatures, melting at the poles, etc., etc., etc. Jason Box said in a July 2016 post I wrote, out of the ten possible scenarios on climate change, nine result in loss of society as we know it. He said this across a table from me at PLAYA, and gave me permission to post it. In another post, I included a video of UN Secretary-General António Guterres saying, “We are on a fast track to climate disaster.” As I wrote before, former Harvard Fellow Ye Tao noted, “two degrees is already passed [no matter what we do]” and “At three degrees C [ above year 1850 baseline] we’re talking about planetary scale biological annihilation of any multicellular species [ . . . ]”

Given all these problems, the group wanted to know what is the one thing people can do? Absent an Alan Turing-style techno-solution, my answer was to focus on one’s spiritual health. Of course, instead of the millions of lives Turing saved, the number would now be in the billions. However, this may not be possible in the time we have as Big Oil and their poltical puppets globally are stealing time for solutions from all human and nonhuman creatures.

Regarding spiritual health, according to translator Coleman Barks, Rumi said, “Submit to a daily practice.” In the film Rumi, poet of the heart, Barks says, “When [Rumi] died. members of every faith in Konya [Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist] came to his funeral honoring him as they felt a way of deepening into their own faith.” Barks gave me permission in 2017 to include his translation of Rumi’s “An Empty Garlic,” and it is one of the most-read posts here.

Since I mentioned the bear, another image is the climate rowboat. Imagine trying to row safely to shore above Niagara Falls (3 C) with one oar locked in one side. You can’t because the boat spins in awkward circles as roar of falls gets louder. That’s us.

My favorite recent climate resources are Mel Gurtov’s “Climate Crisis Is Heading Towards Catastrophe” in the April 5, 2023 LA Progressive, for summary and clarity,  and two of Bill McKibben’s recent Substack posts from The Crucial Years. They are “Truly ‘Uncharted Territory’” from April 2, 2023, and “Just say no” from April 7, 2023. In the first post, McKibben notes,”As one scientist put it, the Antarctic current is ‘on a trajectory that looks headed towards collapse,’ and not on a scale of centuries, or even century. On a scale of decades and years [ . . . . ] Jim Hansen, the planet’s greatest climatologist, has suggested we could see temperatures pass, at least for a time, the 1.5 degree temperature mark [due to a strong El Nino] [ . . . . ] After that, we may well be in territory where only truly terrifying interventions like solar geoengineering will suffice.”

McKibben’s second post above shows why the climate rowboat spins in circles. He wrote, “Canada’s Justin Trudeau remains perhaps the most honest— [ . . . . ] Describing Alberta’s tarsands, he said ‘no country would find 173 billion barrels of oil in the ground and just leave them there.’”

McKibben’s April 2, 2023, Rolling Stone article is also interesting. In “This Simple Math Problem Could Be the Key to Solving Our Climate Crisis” he wrote, “If we are to meet the climate targets set by scientists, we have to leave 90 percent of the fossil fuels we have discovered underground. And at current prices that means stranding about $100 trillion worth of assets in the soil. [ . . . . ] $2.8 Billion — Last year, we were hit with a staggering number: $2.8 billion is how much profit the fossil-fuel industry has earned daily for the past 50 years.” It seems these guys love money far more than their children and grandchildren, or yours.

I’m grateful the literary journal Months to Years published my poem, “For Mrs. Savage, 1967,” and I appreciate Rena Priest included my poem “Three Sockeye in Columbia River, Oregon” in the anthology I Sing the Salmon Home: Poems from Washington State.