What's a Poet Doing Writing About Climate Science?

I sometimes wonder myself

Hello, and welcome to The Climate According to Life, where I’ll be writing about the climate from the standpoint of living things. I want to tell you a little about myself, how I came to this project, and what you can expect from this newsletter.

I became aware of the climate over 25 years ago after reading Bill McKibben’s 1988 book The End of Nature, which profoundly affected my thinking. In 2015, when Shell Oil began positioning their Artic drilling fleet up and down the Northwest coast to provision them for exploratory drilling in the Chukchi Sea, I quickly joined the movement that had sprung up to try and stop them. Our strategy was simple. Shell had a brief summertime window of ice-free sea to work within and we had to delay them somehow long enough to make them miss it. This, of course, had to be done at sea, and thus was born Kayaktivism. I started writing articles for the regional alternative weekly and helped with media. I also climbed in lots of kayaks to harass vessels in ports from Bellingham to Everett to Seattle to Portland. I’m in the lime green kayak off to the right.

We of course were no match for the massive ships and the various maritime navies of public and private security vessels escorting them in and out of harbors. But we did bring enough international attention to put weigh on their eventual decision to scrap their arctic drilling plans. We also demonstrated what is possible when people come together creatively and doggedly to stand (or paddle) between the places they love and the industrial infrastructure that threatens them.

I continued my activism in other areas, pushing for dam removal on the Snake River, fighting for Orcas and travelling to Standing Rock to lend support and write dispatches. I also gave more time to poetry, finally assembling my first collection of poems and essays, The Silence of Vanishing Things, in response to the extinction crisis and the human silence cemented around it. But my enthusiasm for climate activism waned. Economic boosterism seemed to have taken over the narrative, and I’d begun to realize just what we were asking of the lands around us, and the creatures that live there, in trying to power our ever-growing economies with the ambient energy of sunlight and wind currents.

Then, in summer of 2019 my understanding of climate—what it is, how it works, and what it needs from us—underwent a revolution. I attended a series of workshops at the Global Earth Repair Conference and had my eyes opened to a side of climate that I’d never heard mentioned before. I learned, for instance, that as important as atmospheric CO2 concentrations are, water cycles lie far closer to the heart of Earth’s climate. It’s a water planet, after all, and living landscapes, also mostly water, are what moves the water (and heat) around, helping to cool, hydrate and stabilize the climates we live in and experience. I learned that soil is really a living sponge, a water holding medium in a virtuous love affair with life (and therefore carbon.) And it’s life that makes the sponge, holding the mineral grains apart, creating the spaces for water to collect. The more water in the soil, the more life it can grow. The more life it can grow the more carbon it can draw down and the more water it can breathe into clouds and future rain, helping grow more life, circulate more water, build more climate stability, cooling and hydrating along the way. I thought of the phrase I heard at Standing Rock: Mni Wconi, Water is Life. So it seems with climate.

I was especially struck by the comments of renowned Spanish Meteorologist Millan Millan. He recalled a time when science held what he termed a “two-legged” view of human-caused climate change, one leg for CO2 and the greenhouse effect and another for what he called “land change” and hydrologic effects. Land change is a scientific term for how the land and what’s living there (or not) affects the local climate. It turns out that when we damage land through things like logging, agriculture, grazing, mining, urban and suburban sprawl, we damage climate. In 1969 he helped edit one of the world’s first international climate reports, Inadvertent Climate Modification: Study of Man’s Impact on Climate, a collaboration of MIT and the Swedish Academy of sciences. It’s there, he said, where he ascertained it.

Upon returning home from the conference I immediately bought a copy and sure enough, there it was. The first paragraph of the introduction listed, amongst the “major areas” for consideration, Climatic effects of man-made surface change. In the table of contents, under Effects and Impacts, the first of the three chapters was titled, again, Climate Effects of Man-made Surface Change. The other two chapters were about the atmosphere. And under Man’s Activities Influencing Climate I saw a section on Land-Surface Alterations.

What happened to the land-change leg? Was it disproven, amputated, merely forgotten? And if damaging land also damages climate, what does that mean for the “green” energy infrastructure solution, which is hugely land intensive? But mostly I wondered, why don’t we know any of this?

I knew the answers likely lay deep inside the science, which meant I had a lot of researching to do. I would need to understand surface heat fluxes and radiative forcing, hydrologic cycles and global circulation models, atmospheric chemistry and soil microbiology. And I would need to study past climate reports to tease out how science went from a two-legged, landscape-plus-atmosphere formulation to the one-legged, CO2-only model we operate under now.

It was tough going at first, my quatrain-trained brain rebelled. But my forty-year-old Bachelor of Science degree in Environmental Health from Colorado State University emerged from the mist to help me, and over time it got easier. Then it got interesting. Then exhilarating. I was rediscovering Earth. It was like John Muir’s observation, “when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything in the universe.” I picked out the climate and found it hitched to everything on Earth, particularly living things, like trees and soil microbes, even whales, reindeer, prairie dogs and dung beetles, but also physics: time, planetary cycles, light energy. I realized that more than a thing, climate is a verb. It’s something the living Earth does.

Four years later, though still a neophyte in the world of science, I’ve managed to find some answers to the questions above and feel competent enough to write about them. But this newsletter isn’t only about my thoughts. Numerous scientists and thinkers have been scouting this territory for years and decades, and I want to introduce you to some of them. They inform a growing movement of citizens around the world coming to understand Earth’s climate for themselves, forming organizations, hosting conferences, teaching classes and beginning the work of restoring the climate by healing the Earth. Indeed, a movement seems to be cohering, a living-climate movement if you will, and I hope to cover it here.

Not all posts will be about climate. After all, life is about more than its climate. I’ll try to post once a week, sometimes with scientific and political analysis, sometimes with poetry, and often with various combinations thereof. Comments are encouraged, especially those that add new information to the subject, or ask interesting questions. I intend to keep subscription free but please, if you like what you find and are able, do upgrade to paid so I can afford to devote the time that’s needed for this project.

And thanks for reading.