I left work at 3 o’clock yesterday so I could do a few dishes before starting dinner (delicious old school comfort food recipe below).
Outside my office the air was strangely gray. In place of the normal clear, intense blue of a Pacific Northwest summer, the sky was filthy with smog and particulates from the fires in Western Washington. A faltering breeze – as dry and warm as if it had wandered in from some far off desert arroyo – searched through the plantings along Boren Avenue as I walked.
This morning the sky is the same. Grim and smudgy gray, it’s filled with foreboding. The promise of more heat is sinister: the Weather Channel is predicting a high of 86 today, continuing a string of weeks where the temperatures have been challenging the patience and fraying the nerves of us PNW amphibians. It’s also frankly dangerous.
Air quality was at unhealthy levels for sensitive groups including children, the elderly and people with respiratory illness Tuesday, several clean-air agencies in Puget Sound said.
In the before times I would have inserted the standard progressive disclaimer here. Remember it? It went like this: “weather isn’t climate change, and we can’t attribute any one hot day or flash flood to global warming.”
Well no more. It is well past the time for careful qualifications and footnotes. We Democrats love our precision verbiage and cautiously caveated turns of phrase, and normally I’m all for a spirited debate with annotations, cross-references, and citations.
But with climate change, I’m done mincing around. I’m through with couching my language and I’m calling it: the ghost ship of climate change has sailed into harbor and dropped anchor. It’s here.
While the president* calls a former trusted adviser a “dog” on Twitter – while his former campaign chairman’s federal trial for tax fraud and money laundering moves into its last phase – while the lawyer for a sex worker who bumped uglies with the Commander in Chief preens and plans his run for the presidency in 2020 – while the rough beast that we watched slouch into Washington last January continues to despoil his fetid lair in the West Wing – this is happening:
Worldwide record-breaking heatwaves, which produced this stunner: Quriyat, Oman, posted the world’s hottest low temperature ever recorded on June 28: 108.68 degrees.
Rampant, terrifying wildfires.
Millions (not thousands – MILLIONS) of people evacuated from flood waters in Japan.
That’s climate change. That’s now. That’s everywhere. We have reached the proverbial no place to run, no place to hide moment.
If Seattle is sizzling and the Arctic is catching fire, what next? More of the same, and worse, and more and worse and soon we’ll reach that point where, quite suddenly, there’s a seismic shift, and we jump to a higher orbital.
Of course, with global warming, there’s no analogous jump back down, and no quick, discontinuous way back to “normal,” where we came from.
Things fall apart. The edges fray. The space of time between events will get narrower. There will be less time to regroup, regrow, rebuild. Resources will become scarcer. We’ll run out of time, money, materials, and hands to do the work.
It won’t be too long now before we are overtaken by the scale of what we have to mitigate. We’ll be battered and bruised, scrounging for assistance, for federal funding, for volunteers, for sandbags, for water trucks, for firefighting equipment, for the energy to go on.
Low-lying towns will become uninhabitable. The land will be boggier, the river higher, the storm surges unmanageable. The drains will overflow and the muck will stink and the mold will grow black and thick on the window sills.
Ancient diseases for which we have no natural defense will emerge from the melting permafrost. Ticks and other biting insects will continue pushing north, a steady march of pestilence with the potential to turn Biblical in the blink of an eye.
Coastline will crumble, the sea gnawing back the land it once gave up through sedimentation and uplift. Foundations will split, houses wash out to sea.
Neighborhoods burned out by fire won’t come back. The insurance costs will be too high – the risk too great – the fear too raw and recent.
The heat won’t stop. The weeks after months of punishing heat and drought when planes can’t take off, the pavement buckles, and it’s dangerous just to go outside will push people north, to where they think there’s some respite.
People will start arriving, suddenly, in droves. Local tensions in far-off places we’re not paying attention to now will lurch into violence. There will be more fighting, more clawing for resources, more ethnic cleansing, more refugees, less global security.
People – a lot of people – will die.
Donald Trump could not be a worse president* if he tried. Tragically – or is it a cosmic joke so profound we can’t yet wrap our heads around it? – his election and his planet-defiling policies come at the worst possible time for the future of our species on this precious pale blue planet.
The damage Trump is doing to our political system may well not be fixable, and the time that we will need after the midterms to try and claw some ground back from his regime is sucking precious energy away from the fight for more and stricter emissions controls, green infrastructure initiatives, development of carbon capture technologies, wide dissemination of wind and solar grid, and more.
Everything that we need to do to slow or halt climate change and mitigate its effects still needs to be done, and our global climate is deteriorating rapidly. This moment feels like a precipice, and I fear we are about to tumble over the edge.
Back in the 1970s, when I was a little, my mother relied heavily upon Ellen Buchman Ewald ‘s “Recipes for a Small Planet: High Protein Meatless Cooking” for our family meals.
We already knew way back then that industrial beef production was unsustainable. We were starting to get a clue that the climate was changing, too. Did we take our eyes off the ball? Did we get bamboozled by big industry and big oil? Did we get too attached to our cars and our delicious air conditioning and our endless supply of cheap plastic gewgaws?
Yes to all of that, and I am sure more. But whatever happened, here we are. The climate has changed and our current political circumstances don’t look too promising for taking immediate bold action.
These days when I’m feeling defeated and melancholy, I like to make comfort food for dinner. Here’s my approximation of Buchman Ewald ‘s delicious Complementary Bean Pie. Try it some night soon for dinner – it’s delicious!
Complementary Bean Pie
- 3 cups cooked short grain brown rice
- 1 1/2 cup cooked white or pinto beans (if using canned, choose low sodium and drain thoroughly)
- 2 medium or 1 large onion(s), sliced thin across the equator
- 1 tbsp butter
- 2 eggs, beaten
- 1 cup milk
- 1 cup grated cheese (I prefer a sharpish cheddar)
- 1 tsp salt
- 1 tsp dried tarragon (substitute thyme or dill if you dislike the flavor of tarragon)
- 1/2 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
Preheat the oven to 360 degrees and lavishly butter a heavy glass or stoneware pie plate.
Sauté onions in butter until golden. Beat milk into eggs, then stir in the cheese, salt, tarragon and Worcestershire sauce. Fold in cooked onions, rice, and beans.
Pour the egg mixture into the prepared pie dish. Bake for 30 minutes in the preheated oven or until set and edges are brown. Let cool for 10 minutes before slicing into wedges to serve.
This pie is crustless, but you can also make it with a standard pie crust that you’ve blind baked for about 15 minutes.
Serve with a fresh green salad and a glass of whatever wine you fancy. Beer is nice with this pie, too.