For the past week I have been digging, hauling, weeding and planting. We have a good-sized family garden and there is lots to do. I also harvested chervil and an oriental green that I managed to over-winter. That was a pleasure, I can tell you.
What I write about on this blog began as journal notes quite a few years ago, during years when I was still a university professor. My life has significantly changed since then, but what I wrote in 2006 may be what others will find of use. These days when life feels surreal I work on even one of the problems I believe our world now faces. Small things that are within my abilities and opportunities. I do so not because I can convince myself the effort will be successful. I do so because I believe working on these problems is somehow the right thing to do.
May 17, 2006
It feels to me that I should be keeping a journal of the end
days. I am reminded of Anne Franke. I am reminded of Daniel Defoe’s Journal
of the Plague Years. I am reminded of Anton Chekhov’s Cherry Orchard.
I am reminded of the citizens living near Chernobyl who watched the nuclear
reactor glow a beautiful orange as they sipped wine on their apartment
balconies just hundreds of feet away. I am living in such times. Or at least
that’s what it feels like to me.
Here I sit, typing on my laptop on a comfortable,
second-story bed in our lovely stucco home in our lovely neighborhood. Around
me are signs only of comfort, plenty, success, and security. And yet inside of
me is an awareness of something coming that will make an end of all of this.
Call it Peak Oil. Call it Global Warming. Call it radioactive contamination, or
environmental pollution, or genetically modified monocultures that fail to
withstand a plague of insects, or diseases that have modified themselves to
feed off the new GMO’s. Call it human overpopulation, or compromised water
supplies. Call it revolution, or terrorism, war, or “Let’s Drop the Big One
Now.” I can take my pick or choose to entertain an awareness of them all that
threatens to numb me into immobility. Which awareness is most real? The
immediate awareness of my privileged state? Or my awareness of the myriad
challenges facing our planet that quickly, or more slowly, will make my present
comfort a thing of the past as surely as the sphinx is a thing of the past, or
Stonehenge, or China’s Great Wall.
What I wonder is if other people in our community are
secretly having thoughts like these. Precious few of my friends or neighbors
give any sign of this state of mind, though there have been interesting
exceptions.
Like when A— and I got into a strange conversation about what
our children would do once public school years were over. I argued that college
as we know it would not exist in 10-12 years and that young people would find
themselves valuing knowledge of a trade, and would be intent on learning skills
like plumbing, carpentry, scavenging, farming, sewing, weaving, dying, cooking
and food preservation, herbalism and home health care etc. A—agreed. His way of
describing what was coming, if “global dimming” was truly a reality, used words
something like, “At that point, nothing we do will matter.” And those words
came from a man who works very hard to be glib, to seem unconcerned and unmoved
by what is approaching, and to project an air of affable jadedness as if it
could shield him from all trouble. What broke through his veneer? He’d watched
a public television Nova program about Global Dimming the night before and
brought up the program in a conversation with me. Something he saw and heard
during the hour of television cracked through his façade enough for him to
start this highly unusual conversation with me the following day.
Moments like this of shared awareness of coming trouble take
on a surreal quality. For a moment, two or more of us contemplate realities
that seem to contradict our immediate surroundings. The moments are temporary,
and soon the present physical reality presses down upon us as if chiding us for
our lack of faith in its ability to prevail. And we slip gratefully back into
conversation and behavior that again pretends the immediate present is what is
most real, temporarily staving off our internal awareness of looming change.
The other reality that can snap me back into the mirage of
present safety comes from conversation with my son. He’s six. Though he
knows a little about the troubles facing our planet, basically he’s a happy kid
who wants to play with his Transformers. I look at him and think doesn’t he
deserve an untroubled childhood? Shouldn’t I be happy for his sake? Shouldn’t I
pretend as long as possible that all is well so that he has as many years,
months, weeks and days of privilege as possible? Though I know, even as I
entertain these questions, that they are just another way for me to hide my
head in the sand. Really, what my son deserves is knowledge shared with him
gently and wisely that will prepare him in as many ways as possible for what is
coming. He will want to survive. He may be part of helping others to survive. He
may be part of bringing healing to our planet—but only if we share with him
what we know of this threshold upon which we stand.
[The painting is by Salvador Dali. It is called "The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory."]
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