Category Archives: A Becoming Green

The Eleventh Hour

1 Sep 2022 By in A Becoming Green Tags: , , , , , , 1 Comment

A bright moon and stars illuminating night clouds and oak crowns.

Who would have imagined watching the collapse of human culture on television, the unreal news–the footage, the statistics of devastation and human suffering–flowing past on a small-scale screen, while, in another corner of the living room, our American household has paused for that welcome ritual known as “happy hour”?

As we ingest cocktails and hors d’oeuvres, our eyes follow the raging brown waters as we hear about the submersion of over one third of Pakistan, overwhelmed with floods.  Yes, as we sit there, a part of us considers what it would be like to stand in a landscape where everything is lost to muddy water.  How long would we last?

After a thorough segment on Pakistani suffering, the news shifts to Sudan, the African nation whose people have lost their crops to “climate whiplash,” in this case a combination of floods followed by droughts.  The crops they have planted are dying for want of water, whereas immense tracts of normally arable land are useless, a dead loss, because they are still submerged or saturated with water from last year’s floods.  The families have no farm animals or machinery to begin with, and, over the past year or so, they have had to watch their crops rot, to ration out what little remaining food they have to their hungry children.

A representative of Unicef is interviewed, who pleads on behalf of the suffering children of Pakistan.  The nation’s minister of climate change, a beautiful knowledgable woman, tells us that the cost of climate remediation is staggering.  Also that Pakistani sorrows proceed directly from the modern customs that people in our part of the world invented, built up, and at this point are hopelessly addicted to.

Every day at home and abroad, Americans witness and experience similar catastrophes.  Many of us accept the drastic shift that the developed world must undertake and reorganize around if our habitat, our families and societies are to survive.  Like so much else we have experienced since 2020, the accelerating pace of lethal natural disasters seems unreal.  Circumstances demand that all humanity pivot, and in short order contrive a more modest and sustainable relation to nature.

Yet, now, in the eleventh hour, it is easier to continue on in our habits than to grapple with a radical resolution, to acknowledge our inescapable dependence on Earth, and to stop engaging in all that we know is degrading the planet and intensifying the suffering multiplying everywhere around.

The Turn to Earth

7 Apr 2022 By in A Becoming Green Tags: , , , 1 Comment

Rural outbuildings near the Harbert Preserve.

One day soon, you and I will have to turn to Earth and put a halt to the planet’s degradation. The problem is, I haven’t put the date on my calendar.  Is today the day when the headlines are bad enough that I will put the date on my calendar, the date when I must begin living differently, because, if we don’t all get the date on our calendars soon, the human species might die?

Last week, I noticed a headline about birds nesting a month early.  They are doing this because the Earth’s temperatures are warmer.  So, the birds are adapting to a change in the air.  Their innate wisdom is what humans lack.  They listen to the air.  Humans do not.

This morning, as I read an article about Putin’s atrocities, a bit of bold text in the sidebar mentioned that it’s “now or never if the world is to stave off climate disaster.”  I was running late, so I couldn’t read more.  Now, though, I’m thinking about that little bit of text.  I hold such messages in one part of my mind, as the rest of it goes on normally.

I don’t suspend habit.  I don’t instinctively calibrate it, as the birds are doing.  If only there were a big red fire alarm switch to stop us “civilized” people in our tracks!  We need an unmistakable signal, a cosmic Amber Alert, loud enough to interrupt our customs and force us to stop.  If only there were a protocol for foreswearing our arrogation and turning to earth, reverentially caring for its life-giving elements and seeking its redemption as activists like David Attenborough are urging us to do.

The primitives’ oneness with nature being lost, we strain to recall the synergistic bond between nature and all human life.  Yet the turn to Earth can be something other than a return to an earlier, simpler, and yes cruder time.  The cosmic scale of the climate crisis dwarfs the individual, yet cosmic change depends on each of us harkening to a change in the air.

Stewards of a Tough and Tender Earth

8 Mar 2022 By in A Becoming Green Tags: , , , 2 Comments
Two spring flowers and a leaf growing out of colorless soil

While the air is still cold and the dune’s trees are bare, these inconspicuous flowers bloom in the sand.  They are useless as far as I know, the hepatica and spring beauty.  Deer don’t eat them.  The plants don’t need much: given leaf rot and water, voila! they bloom.

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Green America Will Prevail

5 Jun 2017 By in A Becoming Green Tags: , , , ,

Two cosmic figures regard the Earth, framed in a proscenium arch.
President Trump’s decision to pull the US out of the Paris climate accord embarrasses us all, partly because it makes no sense politically, but also because it reveals Trump to be shockingly out of touch with the direction of the country he supposedly leads.  In the end, his failure to support his own nation’s movement toward clean energy and environmental responsibility will matter mainly as another proof justifying those who view him as a laughingstock.  Far from halting the nation’s progress toward reducing carbon emissions, Trump’s decision will likely accelerate it.

Over the past few decades, green capitalism—that triumvirate of forces combining consumer demand, emergent technology, and corporate leadership—has gradually matured and gone mainstream.  Regardless of government action, green capitalism will soon be a determining force in the US economy.  It will transform Americans’ sensibilities and requirements as surely and completely as the Industrial and Digital Revolutions have.  Among the parties vainly urging the president to hew to the Paris accord were many large corporations who recognize that accommodating green values makes good business sense.  President Trump’s harebrained decision to cling to the past instead makes him look benighted and irrelevant.

The silver lining is the galvanizing effect his retrograde action will have.  In the US, major technological revolutions (with the exception of space aeronautics) typically begin in the private sector, generating new synergies between innovators and consumers.  American government is often many paces behind, facilitating and regulating change only after new technologies and ways of doing have taken hold.  Some sources of greenhouse-gas emissions in the US will decline only if subject to tougher state or federal regulation; others are highly responsive to consumer choice.  Ultimately, the Trump administration’s intention to sit out the fight for clean energy opens up a field where many more forward-looking actors will contend to prevail.  The work of easing the nation’s transition to a green future will fall to other and wiser American leaders.

Image: Wladyslaw T. Benda, “The Earth With the Milky Way and Moon” (1918),
from this source.