A Year in The Climate According to Life

and a look ahead

The year started out on a sad note. On January 12, Millan Millan, who I had written about so much in 2023, passed away after a bout with with COVID19. Those familiar with his work know that he showed how deforestation and land degradation in the Western Mediterranean Basin had robbed the summer storm system of the needed moisture to make rain. The towering thunderheads that once rose against the inland mountains on summer afternoons are vanishing, leading to a downward spiral. As the storms fail, the aquifers dry up along with the land, worsening the situation. Further, every failed storm-formation sends the unprecipitated heat and moisture back out over the Mediterranean Sea, resulting in a greenhouse effect. The warmed sea then supercharges storm systems come autumn/winter/spring, resulting in not only regional flooding, but flooding as far as central Europe, as storm tracks from the Atlantic Ocean dip south over the Mediterranean Sea before veering northwest into Europe. Interestingly, all three events occurred in 2024. In fact, I received a note from someone in Spain looking to investigate the correlations between Millan’s theories and the flooding this year in Valencia. Hopefully, in 2025 he will have something to tell us about his findings.

Millan’s work continues to reverberate. I hear from people as far as South Africa describing similar situations to what he so thoroughly studied in his homeland. One such correspondence resulted in a piece called Another Mediterranean Climate Mystery, which applies Millan’s observations in the Western Mediterranean Basin to the drought in Santiago, Chile. It began one day when I received a note from a Chilean forester named Diego Gonzales Carvallo, who wrote “Here in Chile we can find water cycle examples just as you describe. Andes Mountains effect.” Millan, who participated in our early email correspondence wrote me later, saying “Everything fits with his observations,” adding, “There are far too many places where all this is happening, I am afraid.” Diego concurred. “Yes, what Millan showed in Spain and we made the case for in Santiago de Chile is something that happens all around the world where we have a mountain range and the sea. California, Spain, South Africa, India. I have talked to a lot of hydrologists and see the pattern.” That’s a lot of failing hydrology. But it’s a also a massive opportunity for climate restoration.

In March I took a deep dive into the work of Roger A. Pielke Sr, in a piece called Are Ecology and Climate the Same Thing? Roger Pielke Sr. was the first scientist I encountered when, years ago, I began to research this topic. One day I googled “land change and climate” and he showed up at the top of the listings. It was for good reason, as he has done a lot of work on land change and it’s affects on regional and local climates, spanning decades. He also proved to be enormously patient with the stream of questions I sent his way. It was news to me that land degradation changes climate in fundamental ways, and I wanted to understand how it all worked. Some time later, I attended an online conference called Climate Landscapes, during which a paper was making the rounds in the chat-room with an evocative title: Ecology and Climate of the Earth—The Same Biogeophysical System. I tracked down the paper, and discovered it was authored by Roger A. Pielke Sr. He seemed to have brought together in a single, bold statement the many strands I had observed in his thinking. The subsequent piece was fascinating to research and write, and continues to be my most popular.

In April I was thrilled to be interviewed by Dougald Hine for his project, A School Called Home. I first met Dougald in 2010 when I answered a call for submissions for the first book of the then fledgling Dark Mountain Project. I was particularly honored, as they placed my poem at the front of the book, introducing the words to come, which at 26 volumes are still coming. Few people are as agile in thought and language as Dougald Hine, and it was a complete pleasure to prowl around with him in this territory I refer to as the living climate. I gained some fresh concepts, one of which is the notion that the CO2-only, model-derived narrative of Earth’s climate has created a kind of dashboard thinking, by which with the turning of a few nobs we think we can “fix” our climate problem. The problem is we’re not dealing with a machine, but something very much alive. And that includes human culture.

Here’s the poem

I Went Looking for the Wild One

I went looking for the wild one, the howler, the vatic 
tramp, the one for whom the wounded hillsides
are inner burns, whose blood is stained
with the old love-wine of poet and earth—
warrior poet, slinging battle flak out at the static,
shattering polite conversations everywhere.

I looked in the anthologies, listening for echoes, traced for
signs in the quarterlies, magazines, best-ofs. I learned it’s
been a good year for poetry, grants and awards coming in,
contests and prizes proliferating. The wise grey consensus
counsels a return to the classics.

Meanwhile, poor scientist holds extinction
in a palmful of numbers
with nothing but data
to howl with.

I was also privileged to attend the Embracing Nature’s Complexity conference, organized by the Biotic Pump Greening Group and hosted by the Technical University of Munich. There I gained a heightened understanding of complexity, not just as a complicated mix of things and events, but as a fundamental principle of life. Indeed, one could say it’s complexity upon which life seems to rest.

In June, I stumbled into a series for which I had no name and didn’t finish. It began with a trip into space to compare Earth’s climate with the other climates of the solar system, showing by comparison that Earth’s climate is what it is because of the influence of life. This then led to the irony that the world’s chief climate agency, the IPCC, declares for it’s Assessment Reports, The Physical (non-life) Science Basis, requiring another piece to explain what that term might mean. But that left the question of how the Physical Science Basis affects the way we look at the climate, requiring a third essay, which ended with the image of a bridge between society and science, across which the Physical Science Basis marched with ease and the biological basis, or the climate according to life, got left behind.

There’s a good bit more to the story, however, and I look forward in 2025 to picking up where we left off. And now I have a name for the series—Why Don’t We Know This? When the series picks up again, we’ll probe deeper into the question of why we have the climate narrative we do.

I still think of things I read in Stagtine, a book I reviewed in July. Deftly written by Daniel Firth Griffith, it tells the story of a young couple trying to find their way out of the human/non-human disconnect through regenerative agriculture, only to run right into it’s foundation—the power imbalance between humans and non humans. “How,” Griffith asks, “can animals learn to self medicate and epigenetically adapt to landscapes if they are forever told where to go, how to live and what to eat?” And how can anyone know the optimal relationship between land and animal if it’s never given the freedom to develop, if one never allows “the intergenerational play of evolution in place?” It can be done, but to find out how, you’ll have to read the book, which I heartily recommend.

The reason I had to break off the series I started in June was because local forest issues called my attention. The race for Lands Commissioner of Washington state was heating up, and we had a champion for forest preservation named Dave Upthegrove vying for the spot. For the remainder of the year, much of my energy was devoted to writing about the race and the forests at stake, both locally and for this newsletter. Happily, on November 8, I was able to report that Upthegrove prevailed.

Unfortunately, the same battle, in which older, mature forests are targeted for logging under the rubric of “forest health” is unfolding at the federal level, with new amendments by the US Forest Service aimed at logging vast acreage of mature and old growth forests to “protect” them from wildfire. Indeed, this push is unfolding globally, often unwittingly driven by a climate narrative that reduces forest ecosystems to carbon machines, in which their eco-hydrological complexity is lost, and the natural processes of fire are demonized. Tackling this narrative, teasing out the true meaning of “forest health,” and the true value of forests in terms of climatic and ecological stability, will be a main focus of this site in the first part of the coming year.

One can hardly say the coming year without taking into account the coming new administration and congressional majority. The work of protecting biotic integrity is about to get harder, but at least the outlines will be clearer. Into this dynamic I posited nature as a third thing. That is, as something neither left nor right, Democrat or Republican, blue or red. Nature, or this more-than-human world we share the earth with, is ultimately diminished when squeezed into political narratives. It would be more fruitfully understood as a refuge from these modern, often artificial, categories. We speak metaphorically of “common ground,” but there is only one thing that actually is.

I think this is one of the ways science can help us. A fact is a fact, no matter which side you look at it from. That fact may appear a bit differently depending on how it’s looked at, but that fact itself remains unchanged. It is a third thing in its own right. And for a democracy, it stands to be a very helpful thing.

But it’s not the only thing. There is a side of nature that can’t be accessed by fact, a kind of knowing that defies measurement and reduction. The facts add up to something, and for me, that something carries the immutable sense of the sacred. In my first book, The Silence of Vanishing Things, I wrote “for every scientific truth there is a poetic truth” and still believe it. All of which is a roundabout way of explaining why I frequently drop poems into the feed.

For sure, the biggest pleasure in this year of writing on the living climate are the encounters made and friendships gained. We of the biological climate are a small and scattered tribe, but we are finding each other. When the subject is life, friendship and high regard come naturally, something I am hugely grateful for.

There’s more to say here, of course. I’ve only been writing about my own personal work on this site, but what about the world at large and the work of others? How is the climate according to life faring in the broader climate narrative? Is the recognition that what we do to the land we also do to the climate breaking through? That’s what we will explore in the next post.

In the meantime, here is a poem about one of my favorite creatures.

No one asks the heron
     in the mirror-calm water
on its twigged legs, head cocked
     seeing precisely: in. 
Tiny spiral shells rock 
    as they wander the mud floor
between its wide, webbed feet.
    Translucent krill float through 
its watery window.
    Its image is there too
but it doesn't see it
     does not care
so when the fish it wants
     slides beneath its Miocene eyes
it sees and strikes
      the only answer it needs.

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