When I started this page on Earth Day, April 22, 2023, my part of the world was somewhere on the other side of the Sun, tilted toward it, with green shoots rising all around under steadily strengthening light. Now I tilt away and watch the pale sun’s low, dim arc. It’s still deep winter, but the starting point, Earth Day, is only four months and twenty-some days away. It’s a good time to reflect and look ahead.
I’m glad I started this. It’s been a lot of work, but mostly fun work. It’s great to be able to write with perfect freedom about things I care about to people who take the time to read and even comment on the contents. Sometimes the pieces are even restacked and get around a bit. A community is growing that I find myself weaving into, and I like that I’m beginning to recognize names as I sign up for other Substack pages. I’m astounded at the range and vivacity of talent out there.
The piece I’m proudest of and which got sent around the most was my series on Millan Millan, and I’m grateful to him for his time and candor in answering my many queries. There is more I have to say about Millan, including a poem I made out of an email he sent me. For a future post, hopefully soon.
The piece I would like to have seen travel more was Burning for Water. In it I look at the overharvesting of our “working forests,” and the terribly dry conditions befalling forests in the Western US. But rather than looking only through the lens of Western science, I look through the lens of the Lakota phrase mni wiconi, water is life. I begin to notice life is also water, that where life has been taken out of the land by deforestation, the land is dry, and where life has been allowed to stay around awhile and develop, it’s moister, almost like a different country and climate altogether. Following this thread, and learning about forests and their relationship to climate, is something I’m looking forward to focusing on in 2024.
In the meantime I have three pieces in the hopper I’m eager to finish up. One began months ago, when after publishing the Millan series I got a note from a forester in Santiago, Chile saying “Here in Chile we can find water cycle examples just as you describe. Andes Mountains affect.” Since then the forester, Diego Carvallo, and I have been researching and exchanging information on the the history of land disturbance in Central Chile and it’s likely effect on the climate there, to be coming out as a post soon.
I’m also working on a post in follow up to The Earth is not a Sleeping Person, in which I describes how vegetation, via transpiration, lifts heat out of the lower atmosphere to the upper atmosphere where it has a better chance of escape. Now I want to explain how that upper atmospheric process works and also to discuss work by Russian Physicist Anastassia Makarieva that shows how climate models have been underestimating the global cooling effect of plant transpiration, and therefore underestimating the global heating effect of deforestation and other land disturbances.
Lastly, I’ll be writing a profile of Dr. Roger Pielke Sr, a Senior Research Scientist with the Colorado Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado in Boulder, a long-time advocate for the role of land in climate and it’s importance. In 2022 he published with two others a paper entitled Ecology and Climate of the Earth: The Same Biogeophysical System, in which he points out that ecologists and climatologist are essentially studying the same system, the Earth system, and that this reality is frustrated by the tendency of science to form disciplines and divisions. What’s interesting about his paper is that its central insight came early in his career, when he was encouraged as a graduate student to sit in on classes outside his discipline, meteorology. He sat in on an ecology class and realized they were looking at the same system he was as a meteorologist.
I got to take part in some podcasts. The first was with two members of the Ecomodernist Society of North America. I don’t know if we solved anything having to do with the climate, but it was interesting to me that we all three had the same desire: to do the least harm possible to what remains of healthy landscapes on Earth. It was a pleasure to turn to poetry and it’s place in this time of ecological peril when I joined poets Joanna Lilley and Rita Wong, and poet/moderator Carla Stein, for a panel discussion on the role of poetry in the climate crisis titled Re-think, Return, Reverberate. And I got to share ideas with the luminous Didi Pershouse as we discussed this nascent movement calling a life-based climate response, how to think and talk about it, and how to press it deeper into the mainstream. The answer, not surprisingly, was to let the organic nature of our subject have its way, and let things unfold of their own volition and magic.
I rattled my tin cup, and am so grateful to those of you who gave to help me continue this work. That support went directly into getting the three pieces mentioned into the hopper, and almost ready for posting. There’s a lot of research that goes into these postings. They’re not just my thoughts, but the result of study and analysis.
The situation in Gaza has troubled me quite a bit, as readers of this site have probably noticed. It’s not that I’m insensitive to the brutality of Hamas’ October 7th assault. My first poem on the matter, Calling For Water, describes my reaction to it in the first line: “That for which there are no poems. That which craters words/ before they can cohere.” But the poem quickly shifts to images of ashen bombardment as that is what so swiftly followed, and has continued. I still struggle over the appropriateness of speaking out about it on a site people come to to learn about the living climate. The temptation is to keep my head down and stay focused on the work. But something else inside says “no, speak up.”
War must seem like utter, inexplicable madness to other living things, something not really of this Earth. And with satellite guidance and communications technology, it increasingly isn’t of this Earth. Our weapons get deadlier, but what of us? Are we getting deadlier or more peaceful? What are we becoming as technology, rather than nature, increasingly modulates and directs our lived experiences?
Perhaps the question is, are we getting saner? And if we aren’t, and it sure doesn’t seem like it, how do we keep what sanity we have? It occurs to me here that biotically regulating the conditions for life on Earth isn’t all this planet does, it also weaves below, above and around us a subtle fabric of sanity. We’ve tried to step out of that fabric, treat it is a resource and manipulate it with increasingly sophisticated devices. Should we be surprised we seem less modulated, less able to cope with the complexities of living together in human society, quicker to rage and judgement and extremes?
It’s almost as if we’re mirroring the climates we’re destroying. Gosh, who would guess? Let us, in 2024, better mirror this miracle called life: interwoven, sane and mutually held.
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Thank you, Rob. I think you’re correct to notice that we are becoming the technology that is undermining our sanity. I’ve always been a big fan of sanity. Sanity in the sense of how Gary Snyder defines it in “The Practice of the Wild” (can’t find the quote at this moment!)--but you can imagine. I can’t stand this obsession with “emissions”--no one’s saying they’re harmless, but there’s too much blindness and corruption when it comes to simply changing the kinds of cars we drive--as if electric vehicles have no environmental/social impact, and as if electric vehicles aren’t tied into the same corporate insanity that gas ones are. I noticed the other day, it was really clear and bright out, how, when we look out the window we see the entire mountainside across from us covered in still-standing orangey-colored burned trees. Maybe the orange colour comes from fire retardant they were dumping to try to stop the fire and save people’s houses. (150 were lost last August.) We have those a block away from us, too. We were so fortunate, I still can hardly believe it. (thanks to firefighters putting up sprinklers.) In short, just to say, I agree with the sanity of your views, including those about the genocide in Gaza.
“It’s almost as if we’re mirroring the climates we’re destroying.”
Hotter, drier, angrier? Barren? Illusioned or disillusioned. I’m thinking of Baudrillard when he writes about the Desert of the Real: we create a barrenness by not appreciating the life we still have. Just as we will change ourselves into robots long before the robots take over, we will give up on finding life on the Earth long before Earth runs out of life.