Spring Bee Hiving Moon
Despair. It’s easy to find among those who follow climate science and climate change. Or, immigration. Or, poverty. Or, war. Or, availability of medical services in the U.S. even with Obamacare. Or, agriculture as usual. And no wonder.
Climate science shows that we have 3.6 degrees of warming baked-in with the current carbon dioxide load in the atmosphere and that if things don’t change drastically by 2050 that number could increase between 2 and 6 times, or just to be brutal, between 7.2 degrees and 21.6 degrees! And, current measurement shows co2 emissions increasing, not decreasing.
That’s due in part to fighting poverty in the world’s two largest countries, India and China. Their growing economies have coal burning or wood burning energy use at their heart, plus as their middle-classes grow they all want cars.
The American way of agriculture, so productive and revered throughout the world, depends on two unsustainable practices: the constant injection of chemicals and herbicides into and onto depleted soil and irrigation using aquifers with very slow recharge rates.
You understand these issues, I’m sure you do, and you probably find them as far from solution as I do. So why don’t we just go on that final road trip? In an electric car of course.
We won’t go on that final road trip because the last thing to escape Pandora’s box was hope. And, yes, hope is an anodyne or can be, I know that. But the long read of history suggests it is the doomsayers whose predictions prove overblown. On our way in to see Mountaintop yesterday we drove past the local 7th Day Adventist church. In their denominational history is an American story of the end predicted, and re-predicted, then re-predicted again. Here’s a line from the Wikipedia piece on Millerism: “October 22, 1844, the day Jesus was expected to return, ended like any other day [28] to the disappointment of the Millerites. Both Millerite leaders and followers were left generally bewildered and disillusioned.”
Malthusian estimates of the final carrying capacity of the earth have been overturned time and time again. Even the mad doctrine of mutually assured destruction lived up to its policy promise rather than its often contemplated nuclear holocaust. The War to End All Wars. Well, we know how that turned out.
We’re very good at despair because we project potential disastrous scenarios into the future as if the most extreme occurrences are the most likely. In fact, the opposite is true. The most extreme occurrences are just that, most extreme. They are the black swans of human culture. Yes, black swans happen, as the book of the same name shows, but they are rarely the black swans we have predicted.
Who, for example, would have predicted that one man, Thomas Midgley, would produce two chemicals that threatened millions of people, unintentionally? Midgley is the man responsible for lead in gasoline as a successful anti-knock agent. He also invented Freon, non-toxic itself, but in combination with chemicals in the upper atmosphere it creates an ozone eater. It produced the well-known ozone hole. BTW: “He contracted polio when he was 51. As he lost the use of his legs, he invented a harness to get himself out of bed. On Nov. 2, 1944, he tangled in the gadget. It strangled him.” Engines of Our Ingenuity, #684.
Our current Thomas Midgley is laboring away somewhere right now, solving some problem with a lethal solution. Only he or she doesn’t know it.
But back to despair. It is the emotional equivalent of Midgley’s harness. It begins as an assessment of possibilities, moves to an acceptance of a certain gloomy situation, and ends as a tangle in which some of us, like Midgley, end up strangled.
(Pandora, Rossetti)
Here is the nub of hope, anodyne or not. What is most disastrous has not happened. Today we can choose to live differently, live toward the possible solution rather than wrap ourselves in seemingly inevitable defeat. No amount of despair will move us toward a better tomorrow. Just a bit of hope can. This is not pollyanna thinking, it recognizes life has crushing defeats and sorrows. The question is one of choice. Do you choose to live toward the bleakness or toward the sunrise. As for me, I’m turning toward the east.