Just today, a new IEA (International Energy Agency) report issued a bleak warning about the climate future, stating that the window of staving off the worst consequences is extremely short: five years. Based on what I’ve read elsewhere, I have little reason to doubt this latest bombshell. Based on what I see around me, I have little reason to doubt that the worst is the most likely outcome. With our collective attention focused more on economy than ecology, and with a huge chunk of the American electorate in climate denial mode, I see little reason for hope. Frankly, I doubt that the report will make it onto the evening news.
As I wrote in my last post, The Blog is Occupied, we are deeply enmeshed in systems beyond our control that limit our ability to make meaningful change on a large scale. Like I said, I see little reason for hope.
In their darkest dreams, I would bet that Al Gore and Bill McKibbon feel the same way, although they dare not say it out loud.
So now what?
For better or worse, we are here, still living our lives in the shadow of all this impending doom. We still have to look our children in the eye and encourage them when they are sad. We still have to attend to the daily business of putting food on the table and a roof over our heads. We still have to care for our elders, tend to the sick, help those who need it, feed the dog, brush our teeth… We still have a life. Impending doom or no, we are still here.
Even without impending climate doom, we all really live in a shadow all the time, but we tend not to talk about it and we try not to think about it either. That shadow is our own mortality. Someday, I will die. You will die. Our children will die. Their children will die. The only question is when and how, not if. Death and life go hand in hand, but in our modern industrialized culture, we worship youth and pretend death doesn’t exist.
I think that pondering our own mortality can actually help us deal with whatever ecological future awaits us. Ask a terminally ill person about their condition, and the response is likely to be that the illness caused them to sort out what is really important in life from what is not. Relationships with loved ones become central. Simple pleasures become profound. Fluff and false values fall away. Only the real remains.
Facing our own mortality, even if it is not as imminent as for a terminally ill person, can help us sort out of our values too. What is truly meaningful for us? What is most important? How do we wish to spend our limited time? To quote Mary Oliver, “What do you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
By facing climate reality, we can expand these questions to include our relationship with the Earth. How do we wish to live? Are our ecological values a part of the core of who we are? What does that mean for our lives? I don’t think the Earth itself is in a terminal state (at least on the timescale of the next few million years). Earth will adapt, and go on. New species will evolve to live in a changed climate. Change is the fuel of evolution. Earth will heal, mostly after humanity has met its collective mortality as an extinct species.
Does that mean that all our eco-efforts are in vain? Does that mean that we should give up and not work to limit the damage of climate change in our own lives and the lives of our children? Or cease our activism entirely? Absolutely not.
By doing what we can, both as individuals and groups, we can live with integrity toward the Earth itself. We can let go of the individual guilt that ecologically aware people tend to feel. We can live day to day, counting our conscious relationship to the Earth among the most meaningful in our lives.
The serenity prayer may be a cliche, but its wise advice to do what we can and not confuse it with what is beyond our control is very applicable to our lives on a changing Earth.
This is life beyond rosy-glasses hope. This is real life. Lived with integrity. Lived with honesty and guts. No matter what happens. Do what you can. Lose the guilt over things beyond your control. Each of us is here, awake and alive in this tiny splash of time in the ocean of Earth’s history. We are part of a grander story that stretches beyond us into the deep past and far-distant future. So we treasure our days. We treasure our relationships. We treasure the simple pleasures of gazing at the moon or watching a bird at the feeder. We walk the sacred green Earth with integrity.
No matter what.
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