The End of Ice

 

The Climate Crisis is alive and thriving, a persistent embarrassing bummer that refuses to be wished away.  It is, by far, the biggest threat we’ve faced in the entire human saga.  We are, by far, the most unusual animals in the world, and we’ve bumbled and stumbled into a “deer in the headlights” situation of complete vulnerability.  The Climate Crisis shrugs with indifference, and faithfully serves us what we’ve ordered… rough justice.

In human society, there is a modest level of agreement that the crisis is real and intensifying.  There is vigorous disagreement over how severe the crisis may become, how quickly it may proceed, and whether there is anything non-idiotic we can do to soften impacts on the ecosystem.

Projections of long-term climate trends are based on computer models designed to predict how massively-complex natural processes are likely to interact over time, and how the consequences will affect life as we know it.  “Every single worst-case prediction made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) about the rise in temperatures, extreme weather, sea levels, and the increasing CO₂ content in the atmosphere have fallen short of reality,” wrote climate journalist Dahr Jamail.

Following this rapidly moving field of knowledge is not easy, because it’s a whirlwind of arguing experts, misinformation, hard truths, and shameless marketing gibberish.  The hard truths rarely appear in the daily headlines because they do not boost ratings, delight advertisers, or nurture consumer confidence.  Consumers are constantly fed steaming balderdash about progress and miracles.  Students might hear mild truths, if any (don’t scare the children!).  Many of the hard truth discussions are written for an audience of scientists, not general readers.  

Dahr Jamail is a journalist who is good at translating perplexing techno-jabber into ordinary English.  He is a Texas-born, fourth generation Lebanese-American.  In 1996, he moved to Alaska, where he got into mountain climbing.  As the years passed, he could see that the glaciers were melting and retreating.  The world was changing, and not in a good way.  In 2003, the fates called him to become a war correspondent in Iraq and Afghanistan.  In 2010, the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico seized his full attention, and he began covering the world war on our home, Earth.

Since then, he’s travelled extensively, visited highly impacted regions, chatted with locals, and received a full immersion baptism in bullshit-free reality.  He’s written more than a hundred climate stories.  In 2019, he published The End of Ice, a combo of fascinating travel journal, terrifying horror story, and voyage of personal growth.  The book allows readers to see and feel the painful changes that are taking place, from the perspective of direct, feet on the ground, experience.  Jamail is passionately interested in helping people understand the Climate Crisis.  Ignorance is curable.

In Brazil, he was amazed by the Amazon rainforest.  About one percent of the incoming sunlight makes it through the dense green canopy.  It’s always warm, and close to 100 percent humidity.  There isn’t much difference between day and night, or winter and summer.  The birdsong symphony is amazing.  Scientists have barely begun discovering the fantastic biodiversity of this rainforest.  A 25 day expedition discovered 80 new species.  Because of the rapid rate of destruction, countless species will go extinct before we learn of their existence.

This forest used to sequester carbon.  Now, because of drought, fires, clear-cuts, and development, it’s releasing more carbon than all of the traffic in the U.S.  Biologists who are overwhelmed by the stunning magnificence of the Amazon are deeply pained by the massive mindless destruction, and by the cold indifference of the world.  People have no connection to the planet, no connection with anything.

A week after leaving the Amazon, Jamail arrived in the Inupiat village of Utqiagvik, Alaska (formerly Barrow), on the Arctic Ocean.  The modern town is located east of the original village, which is decomposing, and collapsing into the sea.  The waves will eventually wash away modern Utqiagvik too.  Residents say that winters have been getting much shorter and warmer.  The sea ice is thinning, breaking up, and retreating.  Polar bears are gone. 

A gravedigger said that in the past, solid permafrost was just 10 to 12 inches (25 to 30 cm) below the surface.  Digging a grave took three days of strenuous chopping.  Now, it only takes five hours or less.  There are enormous deposits of permafrost scattered across the northern hemisphere.  As permafrost thaws, it softens and the land sinks.  In the thawing process, methane is released.  In 2017, enormous methane craters began blowing open on Siberia’s Yamal Peninsula, and in Canada’s Northwest Territories.  Big trouble is just getting warmed up.

NOTE: With warming, glaciers and ice “melt,” and permafrost deposits “thaw.”  To avoid looking like a dolt, never forget this!

Jamail visited Glacier National Park, home to a formerly thriving boreal forest.  A warming climate has delighted millions of hungry beetles, some of whom can now have two life cycles per year.  In the last 20 years, beetles have killed 40 million acres (16 million ha) of trees.  They kill fewer trees now, because fewer trees remain alive.  The latest serial killer is white pine blister rust, which has infected almost 85 percent of the trees in the park.

Another stop was Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, which is busy dying.  Because of warming and ocean acidification, most of the world’s coral will be gone by 2050.  Oceans are absorbing more than 30 percent of the CO₂ that humans emit.  Carbon in the water promotes the formation of carbonic acid, which is harmful to coral, mollusks, and some types of plankton.  Phytoplankton are tiny water plants that generate half of the planet’s oxygen supply.  All of my best friends are chronic oxygen addicts.

Florida is a state that should learn how to swim.  In the southern region, there are four national parks that “will be underwater in my lifetime.”  Sea level is rising because ice is rapidly melting, and because warming seawater expands in volume.  Salt water will eventually infiltrate the Florida freshwater aquifer.  Miami’s drainage system was designed to operate by gravity.  Rising sea levels and tides now prohibit the system from fully draining.  Many homes in South Miami are on septic systems.  These only work when they are above the water table.  When this is not the case, bathtubs fill with raw sewage — a delightful surprise!

Anyway, zooming out to the bigger picture, current trends do not suggest that we are hippity-hopping down the golden path to a brighter future.  “The last time there was this much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was three million years ago, when temperatures were as high as they are expected to be in 2050, and sea levels were 70 feet (21 m) higher than they are today.”  Back in those days there were trees growing on the South Pole.

“Even if we immediately stopped all greenhouse emissions, it would take another 25,000 years for the CO₂ now in the atmosphere to be absorbed into the oceans.”  So, the ice will continue melting, the seas will continue absorbing heat, the climate will continue warming, and the planet’s ecosystems will continue taking a merciless catastrophic beating.  Ignorance pandemics don’t <bleep> around.

As readers move into the book’s homestretch, Jamail stops storytelling and looks them directly in the eye.  It’s time for some heart-to-heart communication.  Writing this book has been very painful.  The folks he wrote about were not extremists, lunatics, or liars.  In addition to his travels and interviews, he’s spent lots of time gathering additional information online.  Paying close attention to eco-reality, year after year, is a miserable path.

Writers are often inspired by the hope that the work they do can inspire beneficial change.  They hope that readers will see the light if blasted with a firehose of truth.  Well, the world often enjoys taking long hard pisses on hope-filled dreams.  It laughs at their grandiose hope in promoting real transformation.  And so, the spurned dreamer hopes even harder.  Eventually, Jamail wondered if there was any point in writing.

Hope is a turd in the swimming pool.  Hope can’t undo the damage, or send the carbon back home, or resurrect the extinct, or make people care.  The worst is yet to come.  It’s time for grieving not hoping.  Jamail took a nose dive into a deep depression, and eventually emerged hope-free, a great healing.  He is now able to be present in reality, in the fullness of the darkness.  He learned that it is possible for acceptance and inner peace to reside in the same heart with grief and suffering.  “I have never felt more alive.”

 Jamail, Dahr, The End of Ice, The New Press, New York, 2019.  

Wild (republished as Savage Grace)

If you only have time for one sentence, hear this: Jay Griffiths’ book, Wild, is one of the most powerful books I’ve ever read.  Wild is a celebration of wildness and freedom.  It celebrates societies that work, societies that have complete respect for their ecosystems, societies that have survived for thousands of years without suffering destructive whirlwinds of mass hysteria.

Griffiths is a brilliant heretic and a proud one.  Her book shows us what happens when madness collides with wildness.  It helps us understand the dark injuries that destroyed our own freedom, and put us on the path to what we have become.  It is 350 pages of full-throttle outside-the-box thinking, written with passion and eloquence.  For outside-the-box thinkers, it’s just awesome.  For light sleepers, it might provide a life-changing wakeup call.

Griffiths was born in deepest, darkest England, a devastated island that was once a magnificent rainforest.  She was blessed with the precious curse and gift of having an active mind.  She excelled at asking penetrating questions that were not proper for young ladies (or lads) to ask.  The wardens were not amused.

During her teen years, she hung out with fundamentalist Christians, but what they were teaching could not survive rational scrutiny, and her mind was highly allergic to blind faith.  Painful clashes inspired her to run away.  She abandoned the normal life for which she had been trained.  “I lost a walled city but found a wildness and freedom.  I never regretted it.”

She wandered around the world, but life was not always easy.  “Following a passionate freedom can mean loneliness, penury, humiliation, for we live in a world where the caged hate the free.”  By and by, she floated away into a healthy dance with depression.  Depression is one of life’s valuable idiot lights, warning us that it’s time to pay attention and change paths.

One day, the phone rang, and a friend invited her to Peru, where she could hang out with shamans, use powerful medicine, and recover her lost soul.  So she did, and it worked.  The heavy black clouds soon dispersed.  She spent the next seven years working on her book, travelling from the Amazon to New Guinea, Australia, and Arctic Canada.

We routinely teach our children that wild people are primitive, and that their way of life is inferior and undesirable.  In so doing, we erect a brick wall that prohibits fresh wild notions from flushing the crud out of our wheezing, slobbering imaginations.  Instead, we teach our children to live like there’s no tomorrow, to shop till you drop, to leave nothing behind for future generations.

Griffiths understands that the brick wall must be smashed, for the sake of all life.  Her mind is a sledgehammer.  She takes us on visits to wild ecosystems that stood in the path of the all-devouring global economy.  She listened to the wild people, in a caring and respectful manner, hearing their pain, rage, and despair.  They had a healthy way of life before the invasion.  They needed nothing from us.  They simply wanted to be left alone. 

She took long treks through the jungle with wild people who possessed immense knowledge of the plants and animals.  They perceived that all flora and fauna have spirits (except for domesticated plants).  They saw that all wild beings were animated by the same life force, but different species appeared in different forms.  We were all equal.  When humans lived like equals, rather than masters, they didn’t gang rape their ecosystem, because that would have been inconceivable.

After days of hiking through a perfectly healthy land, a treasure of abundant life, they stumbled upon the town of Maldonado, the cash economy, the modern world — electric lights, pop music, abundant booze and drugs, discarded syringes, splatters of puke, and overflowing outhouses.  Everyone seemed to be mad.  “To me, the forest had been wildly beautiful and the town was a hideous wasteland.”

One chapter was devoted to the vast wildness of the sea, the place where all life began.  The surface of Mars is better known to us than the floor of our oceans.  The underwater world is a realm of immense beauty, and diversity.  Cetaceans, like whales and dolphins, are incredibly intelligent, and they live in an incredibly intelligent manner, exactly as evolution prepared them to live, wild and free, without technology (a brilliant strategy for long-term success).

The ocean is a place where primates have little business, beyond the shoreline.  Civilized primates have become abusive, ravaging the sea life, and filling the waters with toxins, sewage, garbage, and noise.  Climate change is making the oceans so acidic that catastrophic harm now seems very likely.  Wild people didn’t do this — even when they lived too hard, the harm they caused was far, far less than the harm caused by our way of life.

Missionaries were high on the list of people that Griffiths most resented, because their mission was to destroy wild cultures, and convert wild people into literate, employed, Christian consumers.  In Peru, four different missionary groups, using helicopters and speed boats, competed to find uncontacted tribes.  They knew that they would import deadly diseases, but they didn’t care.  In some places, half of the people died within two years of their arrival.  The priests blamed female shamans for the illness, and the angry people killed the shamans.

Common gifts for the converts included axes, tobacco, clothing, and mirrors.  Mirrors enabled people to see their own faces, and become more aware of their individuality.  Jesus saved individuals, not communities.  God lived in heaven, and the Earth was a realm of wickedness, so it didn’t matter, it was worthless.  Missionaries built roads into the jungle, which were soon used by miners, loggers, and other destroyers.  Separated from the family of life, the modern heart gets hard.

Missionaries forced the natives to surrender their sacred objects, which they burned.  Within two generations, traditional knowledge becomes extinct, because it is no longer being passed down to the young, who spend their days in classrooms.  Cultural genocide is emotionally shattering.  In one Brazilian tribe, over 300 natives committed suicide.

In Australia, the invasion of civilization has been devastating for the Aborigines and their home, but the elders maintain a sense of patience, for the noxious cities are nothing more than ugly scabs.  Whites have never possessed the spirit of the land, which remains alive beneath the parking lots and shopping centers.  With time, the disease will pass; the land will heal and thrive once again, to the best of its ability.

Humans are not domesticated, we are genetically wild animals, but so many have been tamed.  “Tamed creatures are dolt-minded and dumb, insipid and bland,” Griffiths tells us.  “The tame are trained only to hear the voice of their tamer, having ears only for command.”  Our wild genes scream in despair, as we go berserk with cage rage.  “Sensible habits and good road safety skills will keep you alive till eighty.  So what?  If you didn’t know freedom, you never lived.”

The myth of human superiority has constructed an enormous ecocidal monstrosity, and its ongoing self-destruction will result in unimaginable harm.  If we cannot find a way to return to our humble place in the family of life, we will have no future.  That’s the message here.

Griffiths, Jay, Wild — An Elemental Journey, Jeremy P. Tarcher, New York, 2006.

Don’t Sleep

One day, listening to the jungle drums on the info-stream, I heard that a study had concluded that the happiest people in the world were the Pirahã (pee-da-HAN) tribe of the Amazon (true).  I heard that some guy then went to visit them, to discover the source of their bliss (false).  I heard that his name was Daniel L. Everett, and the book was Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes (true).  My library had the book, and reading it was a rewarding experience (true).

Everett spent much of 30 years among the Pirahã (1977-2006), arriving long before the happiness study was published.  His three children were raised among them, on the banks of the Maici River.  The jungle was full of dangerous things.  All night long, some natives stayed awake chatting.  They rarely slept more than two hours at a time.  Sleepers became a playground for dozens of three-inch cockroaches (annoyances), and were often joined by eight-inch roach-eating tarantulas (beloved allies).

Acquiring food required the natives to “work” 15 to 20 hours each week.  They hunted, fished, foraged, and grew some manioc.  About 70 percent of their diet was fish.  They lived beside a major river that had not yet been emptied by commercial fishermen.  Villagers who visited cities were shocked to observe how much food the civilized folks consumed — three big meals a day!

The Pirahã were remarkably and genuinely happy.  They wore bright smiles, and laughed about everything.  Violence was rare, and so were angry outbursts.  They were amazingly tolerant and patient.  They were less pleasant to be around when traders brought them rum, and every man, woman, and child became blind drunk.

The people lived in a world that was spiritually alive, and they often saw and spoke with spirits that Everett was unable to perceive.  Sometimes spirits took the form of jaguars or trees.  Sometimes they spoke through a person in a trance.  Sometimes they provided the people with guidance or warnings.  Sometimes they killed people.  Many folks wore necklaces to protect themselves from evil spirits.

The natives spoke to their children like equals; “baby talk” was unknown.  Parents were not paranoid protectionists — kids were free to burn themselves in the fire, or cut themselves with sharp knives, in the pursuit of higher learning.  There was no spanking, and children were never given orders — nor were adults.  Pirahã teens were not confused, insecure, and depressed.  They naturally conformed to the ways of the community.  They were blessed to live in a stable sustainable society. 

The Pirahã language had no numbers, or words to express quantities.  They had no use for the knowledge of the whites, because their way of life worked just fine without it.  After months of daily classes, none could count to ten, or calculate the sum of one plus one.  Consequently, traders delighted in exploiting them, by underpaying them for jungle products. 

Indigenous folks who lived with the Brazilians and their money economy were known as caboclos.  Life in the culture of materialism infected them with madness.  When prospectors found a section of streambed rich with gold, other caboclos did not hesitate to murder them and swipe the treasure.  All that mattered was winning, by any means necessary.

They thought that the Pirahãs were lazy and stupid, because they had zero interest in pursuing wealth, or plundering their ecosystem.  But the Pirahã had a time-proven way of life that worked very well — wild, free, and happy.  They always had everything they needed, and life was more or less grand, hence the smiles and laughter.  Might this have been humankind’s “normal” state in the good old days?

The caboclos were more sullen in nature.  The demands of the money world were highly corrosive to their traditional culture, to the vitality of their ecosystem, and to their mental health.  They were less secure, and had real reasons to worry about tomorrow, because their survival depended on an ever-changing external system that was beyond their control. 

Everett was originally enlisted by the Summer Institute of Language to translate the New Testament into Pirahã.  He was not supposed to preach or baptize.  The SIL had great faith that the sacred words of the scriptures alone were all that was needed to illuminate the wicked souls of the heathens and inspire them to convert to the one true faith.

So, Everett spent much time at his desk, listening to recordings, thinking, taking notes.  He was a linguist, not an anthropologist, and he was on a mission from God.  “I had gone to the Pirahãs to tell them about Jesus…, to give them an opportunity to choose purpose over pointlessness, to choose life over death, to choose joy and faith over despair and fear, to choose heaven over hell.” 

Everett’s heroic efforts were vexed by the fact that no other language on Earth bore the slightest resemblance to Pirahã.  Learning it was devilishly difficult.  The villagers only spoke their native tongue, so no translators were available to assist him.  After years of struggle, he finally succeeded, and translated the Gospel of Mark.  He read it to natives, and none saw the light.  It had no effect.  Only one item in the scriptures captured their complete attention: the decapitation of St. John.

Pirahã culture was focused entirely on the present.  Their way of life was the same as it was 1,000 years ago, and would remain the same for the next 1,000 years.  So, there was no reason for history, and fear of the future was silly.  They lived in the here and now, and believed what they could see.  An event was only real if a living person in the community had been an eyewitness to it.  Thus, Everett’s stories about an ancient miracle worker named Jesus were purely meaningless. 

One day, Everett gathered the folks together and delivered a testimonial.  He had once been a hairy hippy, lost and confused, poisoning himself with drugs and booze.  Then, his stepmother committed suicide, he saw the light, accepted Jesus, and his life became better.  When the story was finished, the Pirahã all burst out laughing.  “She killed herself?  Ha ha ha.  How stupid.  Pirahãs don’t kill themselves.” 

His perplexing objective was “to convince happy, satisfied people that they are lost and need Jesus as their personal savior.”  Missionaries had been trying to convert the Pirahã for nearly 300 years, without saving a single soul.  The villagers insisted that they had no desire to live like Americans, and they begged him to stop talking about Jesus.

By the late ‘80s, after ten years of failed efforts, Everett realized that he had become a closet atheist.  “I would go so far as to suggest that the Pirahãs are happier, fitter, and better adjusted to their environment than any Christian or other religious person I have ever known.”  

He remained in the closet for 20 years, in constant fear of being discovered.  Finally, he confessed, and his family broke apart.  Today he’s a professor in the US.  He helped to create an official reservation for the Pirahã, so that they will forever be safe from greedy materialists (true?).

Everett, Daniel, L., Don’t Sleep – There are Snakes, Pantheon Books, New York, 2008.