Page 177 - Dark Matter Issue5 Part II

seen a starved swallow, swinging by its claws, upside down from a wire? Have you

seen the frozen eye of a swallow?

Along with her, we mourn—and remember—the places and creatures that will never

return.

I remember when there was a meadow, complete with meadowlarks, where there is

now an asphalt parking lot for the new Home Depot. I remember the clam flat where

there is now a liquid natural gas terminal on rock fill at the end of Newport Bay....I

remember the heron rookery on the headland where there is now a subdivision called

the Rookery.

The dark, ferny-kneed forest and shy owls, the soft trails, the smell of pine and bracken

are gone-maybe gone forever from a sizzling hot future. I don’t know how to bear the

dead weight of this sorrow and of this shame.

I have often thought I would obsess less about climate change and our ongoing

desecration of the earth if I had children. I listen to the family upstairs--the little girl’s

peeling laughter--and imagine how reassuring it must be, how like a guarantee of

continuation. Laughter like this tells us all is well, or allows us to feel it, at least in the

moment. As both a mother and grandmother, Moore seems to know this state of grace,

to dwell in it often. But this does nothing to allay her own fear or dread. One of the most

poignant stories Moore tells is of a family Christmas tree expedition. Instead of snow

there is rain and the family is clad in yellow rainslickers. Out in the field, they choose the

most beautiful tree they can find. As grandpa chops it down they all yell “Timber” --and

granddaughter Zoey promptly bursts into tears. That night the child awakens crying and

her mother comforts her: “don’t be afraid.” But I knew that on this deep and starless

night, Moore writes, the whole world was awake and afraid. The child’s fears were the

world’s night terrors. Under a half moon, cattle licked dust in the desert. Bedrock

dissolved in the acid sea. Blue ice fell at the ends of the Earth. Saltwater snicked over

seawalls. We grown-ups had pronounced the world good, perfect in every detail, and

then we had severed it from its roots and hauled it away. Maybe we had already

twisted the great swirling skies into storms that would change the world forever.

What, then, should we do? How should we be? How should we live? There is no

shortage of answers in this book, and they range from the abstract to the very practical,

from small- to large-scale. One change that would fundamentally alter everything,

Moore writes, would be to replace a worldview of separation with one of kinship, to

understand that we are not lonely lords but rather kin in a family of living things, aware

in a world of awarenesses, alive in a world of lives.... How complicated and layered and

open-ended this kinship of humans with all of natural creation actually is, this beautiful,

bewildering family.