Page 176 - Dark Matter Issue5 Part II

privileged [to] use their power and money to try to shield themselves from the worst

consequences of their own excess while imposing the costs of climate change on the

disenfranchised and displaced.” ‘Adaptation’ means the vanishing of entire species and

ecosystems. It means giving up on even trying to mitigate any of the losses. We

humans made this mess. Now we throw up our hands and say everyone has to live with

it?

The New York Times Magazine devoted an entire issue to climate change in April; its

focus was exclusively on adaptation. “We’re not debating if climate change exists, or

measuring its impacts, but telling stories about how we will—or might—adapt to its

effects,” explains the editor. As if stories about how we might ward off its most

catastrophic impacts did not exist, or were of no interest. “The most miserable truth

about this moment of the Anthropocene is the inevitability of it all,” writes Samanth

Subranamian, whose essay describes ingenious plans to build both up and down in

land-starved Singapore. Jon Mooallem speaks for the other contributors when he asks,

“How do we live with the fact that the world we know is going and, in some cases,

already gone?” “Pretty damn well,” would seem to be the answer, as he goes on to

demonstrate our seemingly infinite capacity, as humans, for normalizing and absorbing

the catastrophic. The message is reinforced by the “glittering lives” displayed in giant

ads on every other page of the magazine.

The root problem, I am convinced after reading Great Tide Rising, is not lack of

knowledge. Most of us in industrial growth societies know on some level how violent is

the effect of our way of life on our habitat and the nonhuman creatures we share it with.

In fact we’ve compiled an impressive amount of documentation of the damage. But we

don’t really feel what we know—or what we feel is not commensurate with that knowing.

Moore confesses to lapsing into this kind of denial herself ...sometimes I forget to

grieve. Sometimes I take it for given that this is the way of the world. I forget the call to

life, the urgency to continue that is built into every plant and animal, the reaching toward

life. I forget that in a different world, a better world, this level of human-caused

destruction would be unthinkable.

Part of what prevents us from feeling what we know, Moore suggests, is not wanting to

fall into despair. But despair, she points out, results from not feeling enough. If this is so,

then reading Great Tide Rising is a certain cure. Moore gets us to feel with her: rage,

outrage, and , inevitably, grief. Along with her we mourn the dependable comings and

goings--of birds, of flowers, of fruit, of seasons.

This year the swallows came back to Oregon before winter was finished. They followed

the coast, where the weather is usually mild and mayflies are hatching in the ponds. But

a terrible late-winter storm blew in and there were no insects in that wind. Have you