I long for the days of disorder. I want them back, the days when I was alive on the earth, rippling in the quick of my skin, heedless and real. I was dumb-muscled and angry and real. This is what I long for, the breach of peace, the days of disarray when I walked real streets and did things slap-bang and felt angry and ready all the time, a danger to others and a distant mystery to myself.
I did not trust the era I lived in, nor did I want to live in it. The twentieth century had been the most violent in human history. The amount of killing had no precedent, and I had the feeling it was about to get started again, and once more by those who had never gone to war but gloated over the graves they spread through a neocolonial world.
Even with the many successes of the black freedom movement in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the betrayal of Reconstruction haunts American democracy. The nation still lives with the competing legacies of democracy and authoritarianism bequeathed by the rise and fall of the Second American Republic. The overturning of an interracial democracy and the unrestrained triumph of capitalism and imperialism in the United States created a political thermidor that ultimately affected other groups as well -- indigenous people, women, immigrants, farmers, and workers -- in short, all Americans and democracy itself. Until the second Reconstruction of American democracy in the 1960s, which unleashed other progressive social movements as well, the United States was not a democracy but a racist, authoritarian state comparable to European colonies in Asia and African and its lingering vestige, South Africa.
Our own era is one of renewed challenges to American democracy, including the revival of voter suppression, the overturning of women's and gay rights, unprecedented economic inequality, and a resurgent domestic and global authoritarianism that defies democratic governance.
...
Today, unregulated capitalism threatens not only democracy but the very existence of human beings and a livable planet.
In Donna Haraway's paradigm of climate change denial, game-over people rushed to a conclusion of despair, while technofixers doubled down on the false hope that humans would fix this, despite daily evidence that those with the power to do so weren't even trying. Haraway proposed a third option: "staying in trouble". It was a simple but powerful concept: only by allowing oneself to exist within--to fully feel--the terror, sadness, and strange beauty of what was happening could one develop new ways of to live through it. When the early poet Imru' al-Qays, chronicler of climate grief back when it was simply called grief, came across the ruins of his own world, he stood with them for a while. That's how he began to endure the loss. Only by first allowing himself to experience the damage could he then carry on and create from the wreckage a new form, something like a song.
Worlds ended all the time. I thought of captions I'd seen beneath photographs of the sky this morning: End of the world, they said. Apocalypse sky. It looks like a movie. People were understandingly struggling for ways to describe the situation, but there was an egotism to such proclamations that I didn't feel comfortable with. The idea of a singular apocalypse suggested that there was only one world, only one end. The notion of the end of the world was itself a flexible one: Earth had already experienced five extinction-level events, and it was at the start of a sixth. The past two decades alone had seen several historic tsunamis cause mass death of people living along the coasts or islands of the Indian Ocean, the Sunda Straight, the Java Sea, and parts of the Pacific. Historically, volcanoes had been common world-killers: in the Permian era, about 250 million years ago, a volcanic eruption killed approximately 90 percent of all species on Earth. There were all sorts of ways the universe could end you: earthquake, flood, plague. The one with the dinosaurs. And of course the human-made apocalypses: war, genocide, chattel slavery, climate change, the list was as unending as the world. The end of humans had begun the moment someone decided to burn coal for fuel. Or perhaps the root was in one of the many moments when people decided to keep burning it, even though we all knew where this was going.
In the early 2000s, sociologist Kari Marie Norgaard studied a Norwegian town that had been severely impacted by climate change via a dearth of snow. She found that, even when met with irrefutable evidence that their environment was transformed for the worse, many residents appeared to ignore what was happening. They wouldn't talk about it. It wasn't a lack of emotion that silenced them; it was the intensity of their feelings. "The word ignore is a verb," Norgaard wrote... Although ignorance might appear to be passive, Norgaard wrote, in the case of climate change such behavior is the product of a complex, systemic social reaction that allows humans, in the face of potential extinction, to downplay our feelings so that we can continue to go about living our lives. In order to conform to social or community norms people might ignore massive events like climate change, even when faced with blatant and unavoidable evidence of the event. They might modulate the way they talked about such events in order to uphold their own internal narratives about themselves or avoid talking about it at all in order to assuage feelings of guilt. Or, they might simply disregard reality as a way to cope, to keep going. Sociologists called these behaviors "emotion management".
This horror has no conclusion. It will not end in my daughter's lifetime or even the lifetime of any decedent she can hope to love. She will know no other future outside this claustrophobic emergency, this coffin we are all now pounding on the lid of. She will know death and pain with unthinkable intimacy and likely become inured to the suffering pouring forth from every region of the world in order to keep going. No matter what ideologies arise, what myths we embrace, what technologies we invent, what dreams we offer, this crisis is effectively our eternity.
When I look at her fragile, beautiful face, when I watch her hold a pinch of dirt from our garden and go soft and quiet with mystery, I agonize over it. What will she think of us? What will she think of the expanding deserts, lost soil, acid seas, poisoned land, baking heat, horrific diseases, and a horizon black with storms? I imagine her asking me someday with the hot fury of a teenager's clarity, Was it worth it? Was a raped and murdered world worth it for a few decades of excess? How did you let this happen? You all knew. Everyone knew. She will gaze up into this haunting vortex, the consequences of what was done in just a single human lifetime, with nowhere to run or hid or escape this uncharted and endless future.
When my mother arrived from California, I sat there on the starched sheets holding my baby, and my mother held me, and I cried uncontrollably, because I finally understood how much she loved me, and I could hardly stand the grace of it.
In the cosmic calendar of the universe and life, with the Big Bang beginning on January 1st, almost fourteen billion years ago, when a supercharged universe-dense speck of energy blew open at the speed of faster-than-light and a trillion degrees Celsius, an explosion that had to create the space it exploded into since there was no space, no something, no nothing, it was near the end of January that the first galaxies were born, almost a whole month and a billion years of atoms moving in cosmic commotion until they began to flock bombshell-bright in furnaces of hydrogen and helium we now call stars, the stars themselves flocking into galaxies until, almost two billion years later, on March 16th, one of those galaxies, the Milky Way, was formed, and a six billion year summer passed in routine havoc until, at the end of August, a shockwave from a supernova might have caused a slowly rotating solar nebula to collapse -- who knows? -- but in any case it did collapse and in its condensed centre a star formed that we call our sun, and around it a disc of planets, in some cosmic clumping thumping clashing banging Wild West shootout of rock and gas and headlong combat of mater and gravity, and this is August.
Four days later the earth came about, and a day after that its moon.
September 14th, four billion years ago (or so some think) came life of sorts, some intrepid little single-celled things that invited themselves into existence in a moment of unthinking and didn't know the holy mess they'd make, and two weeks later on September 30th some of these bacteria learned to absorb infrared and produce sulfate and a month after that the greatest feat of all, to absorb visible light and produce oxygen, our breathable liveable lungable air, though the earth was still lungless for a long time yet, and on December 5th came multicellular life, red, brown and then finally green algae which spawned in boundless fluorescence in the shallows of sunlit water, and on December 20th plants found their way to the land, liverworts and mosses, stemless and rootless but there nonetheless, then hot on their heels only thousands of years later the vascular grasses, ferns, cacti, trees, the earth's unbroken soil now root-snaked and tapped, plundered of moisture soon restocked by the clouds, looping systems of growth and rooting and growth again, competitive barging and elbowing for water and light, for height, for breadth, for greenness and colour.
Christmas day, though Christ's not born yet -- 0.23 billion years ago, and here come the dinosaurs for their five days of glory before the extinction event that wiped them out, or wiped out at least those landlubbing ones, the plodders and runners and tree-munchers, and left in their absence a vacant spot: Wanted -- land-dwelling life forms, no time wasters, apply within, and who should apply but the mammalian things, who quicksharp by mid-afternoon on New Year's Eve had evolved into their most opportunistic and crafty form, the igniters of fire, the hackers in stone, the melters of iron, the ploughers of earth, the worshippers of gods, the tellers of time, the sailors of ships, the wearers of shoes, the traders of grain, the discoverers of land, the schemers of systems, the weavers of music, the singers of song, the mixers of paint, the binders of books, the crunchers of numbers, the slingers of arrows, the observers of atoms, the adorners of bodies, the gobblers of pills, the splitter of hairs, the scratchers of heads, the owners of minds, the losers of minds, the predators of everything, the arguers with death, the lovers of excess, the excess of love, the addled with love, the deficit of love, the lacking for love, the longing for love, the love of longing, the two-legged thing, the human being. Buddha came at six seconds to midnight, half a second later the Hindu gods, in another half-second came Christ, and a second and a half later Allah.
In the closing second of the cosmic year there's industrialisation, fascism, the combustion engine, Augusto Pinochet, Nikola Tesla, Frida Kahlo, Malala Yousafzai, Alexander Hamilton, Viv Richards, Lucky Luciano, Ada Lovelace,
crowdfunding, the split atom, Pluto, surrealism,
plastic, Einstein,
FloJo, Sitting Bull, Beatrix Potter, Indira Gandhi, Niels Bohr, Calamity Jane, Bob Dylan, Random Access Memory, soccer, pebble-dash, unfriending, the Russo-Japanese War, Coco Chanel,
antibiotics, the Burj Khalifa, Billie Holiday, Golda Meir, Igor Stravinsky, pizza
Thermos flasks, the Cuban Missile Crisis,
thirty summer Olympics and twenty-four winter,
Katsushika Hokusai, Bashir Assad, Lady Gaga, Erik Satie, Muhammad Ali, the deep state, the world wars, flying,
cyberspace, steel, transistors,
Kosovo, teabags, W.B. Yeats,
dark matter, jeans, the stock exchange, the Arab Spring,
Virginia Woolf, Alberto Giacometti,
Usain Bolt, Johnny Cash,
birth control,
frozen food,
the sprung mattress,
the Higgs boson,
the moving image,
chess.
Except of course the universe doesn't end at the stroke of midnight. Time moves on with its usual nihilism, mows us all down, jaw-droppingly insensate to our preference for living. Guns us down. In another split second millennia will pass and the beings on earth have become exoskeletal-cybernetic-machine-deathless-postbeings who've harnessed the energy of some hapless star and are guzzling it dry.
If the cosmic calendar is in fact all of time, most of which has not yet occurred, in another two months any number of things could have happened to the cool marble of earth and none of them promising from a life point of view -- a wandering star could throw the whole solar system out and earth with it, a meteor strike could cause mass extinction, the earth's axial tilt could increase, the flexing and drifting of orbits could eventually eject some planets, and in all events it'll be in roughly another four months, five billion years, that the sun will run out of fuel, expand to a red dwarf and consumer Mercury and Venus. Earth, if it survives, will be scorched and arid, its oceans boiled dry, a cinder stuck in an interminable orbit of a white dwarf dying sun until the whole show ends as the orbit decays and the sun eats us up.
And this is just the local scene; a minor scuffle, a mini-drama. We're caught in a universe of collision and drift, the long slow ripples of the first Big Bang as the cosmos drifts apart; the closest galaxies smash together, then those that are left scatter and flee one another until each is alone and there's only space, an expansion expanding into itself, and emptiness birthing itself, and in the cosmic calendar as it would exist then, all humans ever did and were will be a brief light that flickers on and off again one single day in the middle of the year, remembered by nothing.
We exist now in a fleeting bloom of life and knowing, one finger-snap of frantic being, and this is it. This summary burst of life is more bomb than bud. These fecund times are moving fast.
May I say this to you? I think we may be watching a prelude to our nation's ultimate fate. Civilization follows the sun. We have scorched our way to the other end of the continent. No matter how much we took, no matter how many living things we killed, there was never enough. The molten ball descending into the Pacific has overtones that make me shudder.
I have no doubt I am standing on the edge of mortality. But for some reason I do not fear it. Perhaps the greatest loss in my life is not what I did but what I did not do. I hear a rumble of thunder in the distance, and I wonder if a great army has been sent to drive me from the Earth. I know better. War is a confession of failure, and its perpetrators are the merchants of death, not because they are killers but because they never had the courage to lead a decent life.
Among my fondest memories of those years are our suppers together where she would tell me about the books she had read. I cannot quite remember how it first happened, but gradually we fell into somewhat of a ritual. After finishing a novel she liked she would retell it to me over dinner. Her memory was prodigious, and she had the sagacity of Miss Marble. No detail was small enough to escape her attention. The way she parsed every scrap of information would have put the most meticulous detective imaginative to shame. From the first course to the dessert she would narrate a whole book back to me, footnoted with conjectures and predictions. I must say I learned to enjoy those little mysteries. But only in her passionate rendition. It was so lovely to look at her, lit up, lost in her storytelling. She was so captivated by the plot and I was so captivated by her that the food on our plates would go cold. How we would laugh when we noticed! She always asked me to guess who the killer was, and it was never the butler or the secretary I offered up as prime suspects. This made us laugh even harder, while I pretended to reprimand her for having made our food cold.
“𝐼𝒻 𝐼 𝑔𝑒𝓉 𝒹𝑒𝓂𝑒𝓃𝓉𝒾𝒶, I’d like my family to hang this wish list up on the wall where I live. I want them to remember these things.
"Thinking about his wife, Ludding can say to Addington, “I have not given her all of myself. But I have given all that I could. I can say that before the universe.” That remaining part of himself he has given to no one."
Climate change isn’t a problem that can be solved by summoning the “will.” It isn’t a problem that can be “fixed” or “conquered,” though these words are often used. It isn’t going to have a happy ending, or a win-win ending, or, on a human timescale, any ending at all. Whatever we might want to believe about our future, there are limits, and we are up against them.
Reaching net zero in the U.S. will require putting such wrangling aside. It will require building out the transmission system while, at the same time, expanding its capacity so that hundreds of millions of cars, trucks, and buses can be run on electricity. It will require installing tens of millions of public charging stations on city streets and even more charging stations in private garages. Assembling the electric cars and trucks will, in turn, necessitate extracting nickel and lithium for their batteries, which will mean siting new mines, either in the U.S. or abroad. The new cars and trucks will themselves have to be manufactured in an emissions-free manner, which will involve inventing new methods for producing steel or building a new infrastructure for capturing and sequestering carbon.
The list goes on and on. The fossil-fuel industry will essentially have to be dismantled, and millions of leaky and abandoned wells sealed. Concrete production will have to be reëngineered. The same goes for the plastics and chemicals industries. Currently, ammonia, a critical component of fertilizer, is produced from natural gas, so the fertilizer industry will also have to be refashioned. Practically all the boilers and water heaters that now run on oil or gas, commercial and residential, will have to be replaced. So will all the gas stoves and dryers and industrial kilns. The airline industry will have to be revamped, as will the shipping industry. Farming is responsible for roughly ten per cent of America’s greenhouse-gas emissions, mostly in the form of nitrous oxide and methane. (Nitrous oxide is a by-product of fertilizer use; methane is released by rotting manure and burping cows.) Somehow, these emissions, too, will have to be eliminated.
All of this should be done—indeed, must be done. Officially, the U.S. is committed to reaching net zero by 2050. But a task of this scale has never been attempted before. Zeroing out emissions means rebuilding the U.S. economy from the bottom up. Perhaps Americans recognize this, perhaps not. In early July, at a time when much of the country was baking in ninety-five-degree-plus heat, the Times took a poll of registered voters. Asked to name the most important problem facing the nation, twenty per cent of the respondents said the economy, fifteen per cent said inflation, and eleven per cent said partisan divisions. Only one per cent said climate change. Among registered Republicans, the figure was zero per cent.
Climate Change from A-Z
Elizabeth Kolbert
The New Yorker, November 28, 2022
The late-afternoon light was golden, molten now, pouring across the glass and stone buildings arrayed around the site, every surface incandescent. Before him the vastness of the emptiness of the hole in the city was inflamed with human noise and aspiration. An arrow's point of sparrows lifted from a nearby roof and wheeled into the deepening blue unopposed. The moment would last forever, or until everything contained within it was completely destroyed.
In “Fellow Creatures,” the philosopher Christine Korsgaard maintains that our treatment of other animals is a “moral atrocity,” but she also argues that nonhuman animals are not moral beings; that people are distinctive in being able to reflect upon their moral reasons and considerations and those of others. We’re not just aware of things; we’re aware that we’re aware of them. We’re uniquely aware too that others have independent interests and perspectives that may be worth respecting. So some philosophers will say that people who ascribe moralized emotions to their pets are indulging a sort of fiction.
What’s plainly not a fiction is that animals can suffer. The quality of the life of a dog or a cat is a matter of the quality of its moment-to-moment experiences. They have no projects to complete; their lives have no narrative arc that matters to them. They do not fear death in the way we do: As far as we can tell, they do not have the concept of death. That’s why the sorts of reasons a person might have for going on even after existence has become a source of pain don’t apply to them. We can ask people whether they want to undergo an arduous treatment that might prolong their days by some amount or whether, say, they prefer to enter hospice care. Your mother and her sisters evidently faced a decision like that. That’s not a question you can pose to your dog.
What you owe your dog is a life worth living by the standards that are appropriate to a canine existence, attentive to what matters to a dog. So you shouldn’t organize treatments that will simply extend a period of suffering, even if you can afford to do so without jeopardizing your own quality of life. Some people, hoping against hope, subject their animals to excruciating courses of radiation and chemotherapy in an effort to buy a few more months of companionship. They ought to do what human beings are capable of doing but often fail to do: reflect on their actions. They should think about whom they’re really helping, about whether this costly form of care amounts to cruelty.
If your dog is entering a final decline, marked by debility and suffering, and, out of concern for his welfare, you choose euthanasia, you will not be letting him down. He has no expectations to disappoint. There are no promises you have made to him. His loss will matter a great deal to you. Don’t make the experience worse by thinking that you have done him wrong.
You say that I desire only to rule or ruin... I planned to do neither, but I did endeavor to put before the country a platform of principles, and to inaugurate an organization, which will sooner or later, succeed in crushing our monopolies, and speculators in the necessaries of life such as grain, by whom the farmer, producer, and the laboring men, the consumers are alike robbed.
Benjamin Butler
I begin to doubt whether anybody can be President, of either party, who is not a slave of the same ring... Associated capital brought in contact with the Government by the war naturally affiliated with the Republican party then being in power, not because of any principle of the Republican party, but because the Republican party was in power... as soon as it is apparent that the Democratic party is to be in power, the same associated capital will become connected with that power, and will control its action.
Benjamin Butler
I note what you say about the prejudice that exits in the South in regard to myself... The people in the South remember that I carried on war against them when they were my enemy and the enemies of my country... When I am called to make war, I kill slay, and destroy my enemies in every way I can... I am sorry I did not do it better, and more of it, because that would have saved a great many valuable lives on both sides... I make peace the same way that I make war... When I am at peace, I am at peace all over, and I don't have any sleeping prejudices against those with whom I make peace because they were once my enemies.
Benjamin Butler
Age has brought me little if any wisdom. I knew more at twenty-one than at forty. Why is that? Because at age forty I was dumb enough to believe I knew anything at all. The only lesson I've learned in life is that the human personality does not change, and our propensity for destroying the earth and our fellow man is stronger and more wanton than it has ever been, and if the incineration of our cities and civilians and the increased lethality of our weapons during the last one hundred years has not taught us that, nothing will.
An aberrant social contract in American was created when the first British ships set sail with their cargo of slaves packed like spoons belowdecks, a repository of bilge and rotten rations and the stench of sweat and feces and corpses and stillborn infants and raped women who killed themselves by chewing open their veins. My ancestors, an elite group, profited from those ships. Culpepper's Cockney ancestors did the dirty work. They threw their souls over the gunwales, along with the corpses they pulled with ropes out of the hold every morning, and later were the custodians of the whip and the branding iron in the sugarcane fields where I grew up, and forever after were taught by the oligarchy that Black people were their enemy, lustful, subhuman, idle and mendacious, respondent only to the pillory: the only human beings lower than themselves and, at the same time, the only creatures over whom they could have total power, and none of that has changed, no matter what we tell ourselves.
