Page 175 - Dark Matter Issue5 Part II

Lise Weil

After Word: Kathleen Dean Moore’s GREAT TIDE RISING: Towards Clarity and

Moral Courage in a Time of Planetary Change*

This may be the most important book of nonfiction I have read in recent memory.

Glutton for naming-things-as they-are that I am, it was definitely among the most

nourishing. Moore’s subject is our situation as humans in a world on the brink of

unimaginable and possibly horrific change brought on entirely by our way of life. A

philosopher, Moore ponders the moral implications of this situation. A naturalist—not

the armchair kind, but the kind who sleeps under the stars in cold, wet and wind—she

details the landscapes and seascapes we are so rapidly losing along with their

residents, and she does so with a poet’s gift for language. I have not encountered

before this combination of razorsharp philosophical clarity, scientific precision, and

poetic intimacy.

Above all this book is a wake-up call, of the most vehement kind. Remarkably, it was

written before the new U.S. administration took over (though Rex Tillerson shows up
twice). If they read books, if they had the capacity to respond, I would want it put in in

the hands of every member of that administration, of every Republican congressman

and senator in office, as I can’t help feeling it could soften the hardest of hearts. That’s

because it is so palpably driven by love: unbridled love for the inexpressibly beautiful

world we are losing, and also for Moore’s young grandchildren, who are already

cognizant of those losses (the book opens with her three-year-old grandson fingering a

dead starfish). But make no mistake: this love is not tame or domesticated. This is love

that rages, that expresses itself most eloquently as outrage.

....this world is astonishing, irreplaceable, essential, beautiful and fearsome, generative,

and beyond human understanding...This is the wonder-filled world that we are

destroying, the lyric voices that we are silencing, the sanctity that we are defiling, at a

rate and with a violence that cannot be measured because we have only the paltriest

understanding of the world’s multitude of lives.

Moore suggests instead of “Anthropocene” we name this age we are entering the

“Obscene era. The name is from the Latin: ob- (heap onto) and caenum (filth).” Her

outrage is directed in part at our silence in the face of this obscenity. Talking about it,

feeling it, Moore writes, would mean we “have to turn away from [our] glittering lives.”

Talk of adaptation is part and parcel of the obscenity. As CEO of Exxon, Rex Tillerson

insisted: “we can adapt to climate change.” Moore exposes this as the cynical, self-

serving lie it is. Who is this ‘we’? she asks. “Is it African children on failing farms? Is it

northern people on melting ice? Is it coastal residents of Bangladesh? Or is it Rex

Tillerson, who earned $40.3 million last year?” ‘Adaptation’ projects allow “the