Dear Citizens and Elected Officials:
I was supposed to write, this morning, about the largest solar power project east of the Mississippi, something I’ve been “excavating” over the past two weeks, trying to understand how it happened in the state of Virginia, and not Maryland. In Spotsylvania County, no less, where the only needed permits remaining are from the county, home to some of the bloodiest Civil War battles in 1863-1864. It’s for 500 MW, on more than ten square miles and for a million or more solar panels, more than twice the size of the largest ever built in Maryland. It involves some of the biggest names in American IT-Silicon Valley corporate history. How did it happen in a state not known, or on the map, for solar pioneering?
But along the way Bill Hubick, of the Maryland Biodiversity Project (here at www.marylandbiodiversity.com) wrote in the spirit of a quandary which had just been posed to me, and all of us, by the great writer, Elizabeth Kolbert, in the October 15, 2018 print edition of the New Yorker: “Now you see it: How to write about the natural world when it’s vanishing before your eyes.”
It’s something we can’t escape: how and when to tell the young, how can we keep our spirits up in the light of the grimmest latest scientific findings, and the even grimmer politics…
Well, here was my answer to Bill and “Melissa,” another good conservationist from Western Maryland: To be clear, I alone am responsible for the political edge to my “advice.” Bill and the Biodiversity Project transcend that and probably want to keep it that way. But, as I’ve found out, even sticking to the scientific findings can set off the optimist-pessimist debate, and the “when to break the news to the kids,” dilemma, posed in Kolberg’s writings. And, I must add, it is usually the pessimists who get silenced, from a mixture of motives.
Perhaps we can agree, however, since the direction of the wind is so clear, with the declaration of William Lloyd Garrison, the great abolitionist, many years before the American Civil War: “There is no need to trouble ourselves about the vanes; let us raise the wind.”
Yes, you're zeroing in on the dilemma Bill. I follow Elizabeth Kolbert's work, she of The Sixth Extinction, and here's a chronological list of her stories at the New Yorker:
I've always admired not only her clear writing, without compromising the science, but also her unflinching look at the reality of how things are going downhill for nature and us, tangled together.
One of her most recent ones, in the Oct. 15th print edition, was "Now You See It: How to write about the natural world when it's vanishing before your eyes." This was, then, a week after the
IPCC report on the consequences of just 1.5 degrees Centigrade of warming, signed off on on Saturday, Oct. 6th, in Inchon, Korea, of all places. Here at
www.ipcc.ch/…
Just four days later Hurricane Michael destroyed miles of Gulf Coast structures. I viewed the eight minute fly over in the wake of it- saw that on the Weather Channel. It didn't need any commentary: it left one speechless.
The most ominous part:
"Arctic soils contain hundreds of billions of tons of carbon, in the form of frozen and only partially decomposed plants. As the region heats up, much of this carbon is likely to be released into the atmosphere, where it will trap more heat - another feedback loop. In the Arctic ocean, vast stores of methane lie buried under frozen sediment. If these stores, too, are released, the resulting warming is likely to be catastrophic. 'The risk of an Arctic seabed methane pulse is one of the greatest immediate risks facing the human race,' Wadhams. writes.
'This is definitely disaster movie material' is how Serreze puts it." {These are two Arctic scientists with books out - "A Farewell to Ice" and "Brave New Arctic."
Well there it is, your dilemma Bill. I see nothing that we can do to prevent this, even if we were to adapt the massive policy and political shifts that would get control of the rate of release over the next 20 years. The great Arctic melt looks already baked into the thermal equations; I would add that unknown meteorological changes might add some additional horrors, like a shift in the Gulf Stream. Not "Day After Tomorrow” level," but bad enough especially for Europe.
Kolbert poses the dilemma: ignore it and party like there is no tomorrow, or dig in and push for the biggest changes we can make in policy and politics - and I would add, keeping our own honor and sense of humanity intact. Pretty close, I think, to the code put forth by Albert Camus for the doctor in "The Plague." And pretty close to two movies that I've written about, however obliquely, over the past three months: Dunkirk and The Darkest Hour.
In the Darkest Hour, the cinematic license is granted to overrule history: Churchill, torn between the lagging politics leaning towards a settlement with Hitler in the face of the likely invasion of Britain, and the starkest of realities, that is, Britain standing absolutely alone, consults "the people" on the London Underground, the subway. (Never happened in reality.) There the "commoners" all have the backbone to reject a treaty, including a young girl, who scorns the "accommodation": - "Never!"
The sequence also includes Churchill reciting a classic of English Literature, Macaulay's “Horatio at the Bridge,” a poem of heroic defiance based on ancient Roman history (by Livy). Just after the girl's "Never," Churchill begins reciting the poem, and Marcus P - my sense he is a West Indian young black man - completes the passage for him by memory...a hand clasp follows, a grateful nod across race and class and generations, based a common bond of literature and history, the irony of which, despite the imaginary scene, cannot be lost on our fragmented, "no common denominator" times. Here at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3sikpgjoKVQ
And I think that's where Kolbert comes out. The consequences may not be avoidable, but our duty is clear: fight for the scientific truth over all the evasions, and for the biggest policy changes that can eventually reverse the warming. And I think we are talking long term contingencies, that the climate might eventually, in centuries or eons, right itself.
To me, that's always meant a head on clash with the Republican Right and its Koch like Libertarian allies, because their stubborn ideology takes all the tools of progressives and climate experts out of our hands, and quite deliberately so: taxation, regulation, "mobilization" as for WWII...and the run-up to it in the New Deal...and especially, the blend of spending and jobs which would be the answer, in good part, also, to the multitude of ailments in rural Red State America: morale, drugs, lack of public purpose, abandonment, physical decay...( And yes, I am aware that Churchill is a hero of the American Right; that doesn't change the virtue of his stance in 1940. Beware of ideological purges of history.)
Somehow, the more I think about the Maryland Biodiversity project, I think you can engage the young not on the plane of Camus' existentialism, but in the spirit of citizen- scientists (as I heard on the “restoring” the American Chestnut talk at the Appalachian Research labs this past Thursday evening), because this project, mapping and listing all the species remaining today, we think some 17,000 plus in Maryland alone, should have been done in every state simply on the basis of where we are in the evolution of the human-nature tensions, which would be there, on troubled ground, even without the great additional calamity of Global Warming, and also taken up in the spirit in which I've been writing about it: an absolute, urgent necessity, with all the ethical and emotional charge that our great abolitionists urged their cause with, Fredrick Douglas, son of Maryland, and William Lloyd Garrison, son of Massachusetts.
My own temperment and life story incline me to sharing the grim situation with the young just as soon as they are capable of handling it, and I'm sure we'll get a great debate on what that age ought to be. It’s like adoption: every human needs to know where they came from, who their parents were (and the troubles they are in...) However, since their future is directly involved, and I can imagine that when they are 40 amidst the likely ugly adaptations, they'll be pretty mad at us, looking back, if they feel we've hidden the truth from them on the grounds they couldn't handle it. The savviest are already angry on what we have done to their prospects, and not just on environmental matters. Many already have the right instincts; what they are missing is the policy and political guidance about what and who stand in their way.
And, as I've written before, given any clear-eyed look at the spectrum of causes that make up the "Progressive Movement," it would be difficult to get a consensus from all the various camps on what the great unifying issue of our time would be, closely related to what each sees as our most pressing source of trouble: GW, patriarchy, gender binaries, deep racism, anti-immigrant sentiment, economic inequality. This reality, I believe, is what makes the Churchill in the "underground" such a poignant piece of film making...Fiction to be sure, but the idea of one of our Presidents riding "the Washington Metro" to seek guidance...well...a fantasy of leadership, no doubt.
Right now, the "unifier" is anti-Trumpism. But it's not enough to govern effectively, and its not clear yet if can triumph at the polls. In Maryland, it doesn't look like it can yet topple the dominance of one of the oldest founding, building blocks of the Right: "No New Taxes!" going back to Proposition 13 in California in 1978, which I still remember vividly as the alarm bell for the left.
Everything that Kolbert has so beautifully dramatized for us, in her low key yet stark realism, has failed to carry us over that stubborn policy reef, which looks so ridiculous and parochial in light of what we are weighing in the great scales of time and evolution.
Best,
billofrights
Frostburg, MD 21532