• The American south, where winter is typically more of a fashion opportunity than an actual season (why do home sapiens look so good in layers?), is covered in up to an inch of ice, with nearly a half million homes out of power. And where “It’s not unreasonable to expect that Atlanta- sometimes known as ‘the city in a forest’- could lose a quarter of its trees in this storm.” (http://www.usatoday.com/story/weather/2014/02/12/atlanta-trees-ice-storm/5432571/)
• A record summer heat wave on the heels of “Australia’s hottest year on record.” And not just the humans are suffering: “Bats are said to be dropping from trees en masse and kangaroos are collapsing.” (http://rt.com/news/record-heat-australia-animals-388/)
Given my personal history, it is perhaps no surprise that, for me, climate change is finally starting to sink in. Baltimore has been my home now for over twenty years, but, if I may be permitted to deploy the cliché that “home is where the heart is,” I have at least three more: the American south and North Carolina in particular, where I was born and where the paternal side of my family still lives, and where one of the enduring loyalties of my life, Tarheel basketball, lives and breathes (I still have the certificate from my participation in Dean Smith’s basketball sleepaway camp which pronounces me a member of the Carolina basketball program forevermore; if the forevermore part wasn’t on the certificate it was implicit, and overrides my subsequent failure to obtain admission as a UNC undergraduate.); England, where I traveled with my father and Bucky (his Mom) during my eighth grade year to explore the Gaither family genealogy, and where, not inconsequentially, I visited Wimbledon’s Centre Court, a pilgrimage that left its lasting imprint in the form of my steadfast commitment to serve and volley tennis despite never once having set foot on the grass courts for which it (my serve and volley game) is ideally suited (I play hard court tennis, a sport built from the forehand up; that my forehand is roughly as reliable as the Millenium Falcon’s hyperdrive unit explains why, despite a semi-booming serve, a steady slice backhand, and a poor man’s McEnroe feel at the net, I have yet to beat Steve. Hope, though, springs eternal; I may not have a new forehand, but I do have a new racquet!); and Australia, especially Western Australia, where I spent my junior year abroad, and where, having gone to boarding school with my sister and then to college with two buddies from boarding school, I was, for the very first time in my life, alone. Making Australia my introduction into the (solo) art of dying.
Up until now my approach to news of climate change had been that of a faithful initiate into The Tao of Pooh:
“ ‘How… will you know what’s going on in the world?’ I said.
‘By going outside,’ said Pooh.
‘Er…well….’ (Click.) ‘Now just listen to this, Pooh.’
‘Thirty thousand people were killed today when five jumbo airliners collided over downtown Los Angeles…’ the Radio announced.
‘What does that tell you about the world?’ asked Pooh.
‘Hmm. You’re right.’ (Click.)”
It is, however, more difficult to ignore the news when it’s about one’s very own assorted Hundred Acre Woods, and even more so when one can catch the (bad) news simply ‘by going outside.’ So while, like Pooh, I remain very interested in what’s for breakfast, I am also increasingly inclined to sleep with one eye open and fixed upon the existential threat of climate change. (I would note, before moving on from The Tao of Pooh, that ‘five jumbo airliners collid(ing) over downtown Los Angeles…” is eerily similar to the events of 9/11, as if the author, Benjamin Hoff, foresaw the 21st Century’s foundational event; in clicking the narrative off at precisely this point, Hoff as prophet would seem to preemptively cancel the preemptive wars that followed, but really just descends into the ultimate solipsistic act of closing one’s eyes in order to undo the world beyond one’s eyelids. Taoism’ s Wu Wei, or not doing, is no excuse for not paying attention.)
The problem with recognizing climate change as an existential threat is that it’s not the first such threat to our species in this epoch when there have been enough of us around to weather even e.g. the Black Death. That problem has to do with the nature of that first threat, nuclear annihilation. Having staved off the most likely nuclear doomsday scenario, the escalation of the War between the United Sates and the Soviet Union from Cold to Hot, existential threats of the man-made variety, which climate change most certainly is, just don’t seem particularly threatening. We have already gazed right into Nietzsche’s abyss, it gazed back into us, and we didn’t blink.
But, re: climate change, the comfort taken from winning the Cold War is as false as a Hoff-ian sticking of one’s head in the sand. In taking this comfort we are making the same category mistake lamented in the old Valvoline commercials: “Motor oil is motor oil.” I.e. all existential threats are not created equal. Nuclear annihilation, unlike climate change, had a built in solution in the form of mutually assured destruction (MAD). Once both sides had enough nukes, neither side could ever use them. Nuclear weapons existed in order not to, twisting Shakespeare’s most famous line into “To be is not to be.” However irrational the stockpiles of nukes that could incinerate the planet umpteen times over appeared, the stockpiles existed precisely because the players involved were all rational actors.
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But if the world gone MAD was essentially rational, then climate change is an altogether different form of madness: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” This Narcotics Anonymous slogan fits the current form of our addiction to oil to a T (an addiction acknowledged by none other than George W. Bush!). That form is the expectation that we can go on consuming mass quantities of oil over and over again and get different results as long as we reduce, reuse, and recycle, which is like a heroin junky pinning his hopes on the needle exchange program. Harm reduction is well and good, but us oil junkies need to go cold turkey. Which isn’t hyperbole. A sustainable climate would require Americans to leave a carbon footprint just 3% its current size, which cuts close enough to cold turkey to count like so many horseshoes or hand grenades. (http://www.manicore.com/anglais/documentation_a/greenhouse/quota_GHG.html)
Narcotics Anonymous and its cousin Alcoholics Anonymous, with their emphasis on surrender to a higher power (Step 3), work for so many because, in the words of Carl Jung, “Sobriety requires a religious or spiritual experience or ‘conversion.’” Like cures like. Just so, addiction, an irrational disease, requires an irrational cure. And the varieties of religious experience, as documented by William James, meet precisely this criterion: “Your whole subconscious life, your impulses, your faiths, your needs, your divinations, have prepared the premises, of which your consciousness now feels the weight of the result; and something in you absolutely knows that that result must be truer than any logic-chopping rationalistic talk, however clever, that may contradict it.” This is no discredit to religious experience; if nothing succeeds like success, then nothing cures like a cure. The proof, as they say, is in the pudding.
The question, then, is where does climate change’s “irrational” cure lie? The various great spiritual traditions may offer a clue. In my own tradition, the clue reads thusly: “Truly I tell you, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it.” In the Tao Te Ching, as quoted in The Tao of Pooh, the clue reads “Return to the beginning; become a child again,” and something similar is likely to be found in each of the traditions. Following this lead in search of a cure for climate change brings us to a children’s picture book, the very first line of which is:
“I am part of all I see,
And all I see is part of me.”
It is, of course, all too easy to dismiss the book, All I See Is Part Of Me by Chara M. Curtis with illustrations by Cynthia Aldrich, as so much “New Age claptrap,” to borrow a phrase from Terry Eagleton. The beauty (or curse) of such labels is that they enable us to categorically dismiss entire schools of thought in one fell swoop, leaving our own Weltanschauung unquestioned and completely intact. The Weltanschauung in play here, the one that automatically labels “I am part of all I see, And all I see is part of me,” as daft, is that lynchpin of modern western civilization, Cartesian Dualism.
As everyone knows, “The Lord Giveth, and the Lord taketh away.” Under the cogito’s lordship we have been blessed with the fruits of the scientific method, e.g. penicillin and electricity. It is nice to be able to turn on the lights, the heat and the internet while not having to worry about polio. But in the bargain, we are losing our ecosystem. It is also nice to have a planet to live on. But if our still-accelerating carbon footprint is any indication, the cogito’s signature accomplishment, the scientific method notwithstanding, is a great forgetting. We have, rather manifestly, forgotten the whole taketh away part of the equation. In our “addiction to oil” we are like a scratched record constantly (and, per Al Gore, “conveniently”) repeating “The Lord Giveth,” leaving the earth looking much like the mutilated stump at the end of The Giving Tree. In our devotion to the cogito we have “forgotten” that “the Lord taketh away,” even as the cogito’s scientific method reminds us that “for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.”
Which makes the cogito’s great forgetting more accurately a great repression (and climate change the return of the repressed). What we’ve repressed, what lies outside our current probables and possibles, is that “We are the World,” a proposition that can only be put forward in pop music and children’s books. (To the degree that “We are the World” worked, i.e. raised money for Live Aid, it had much more to do with our love for Michael Jackson than for our neighbor, much less our enemy. When I was in the second grade I wanted to be Michael Jackson, which meant being able to moonwalk, wear fabulous zippered jackets, and be adored by millions of fans, and had nothing to do with feeding millions of hungry people, many of whom, if “Weird” Al Jankovic’s cover of Jackson’s “Beat It” (i.e. “Eat it”) was to be trusted, lived in Japan.)
If one can define something by what it isn’t, than the meaning of “I think, therefore I am” is simply the negation of “I am part of all I see, And all I see is part of me,” giving us another answer to David Foster Wallace’s question, “What the hell is water?”:
“There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says ‘Morning, boys. How’s the water?’ And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes ‘What the hell is water?’”
Water, for our purposes here, is Cartesian dualism. For us land dwellers, it is the very air we breathe, which is why we literally choke on “I am part of all I see, And all I see is part of me.” As true believing Cartesians, it is noxious gas. The cure for climate change is hidden in plain sight in a children’s book because children are the last one’s left who haven’t yet internalized the cogito. Children, our only hope, are natural born (Cartesian) skeptics. If we “return to the beginning,” we just may find that “everything old is new again.”
Like Bugs Bunny, with Descartes and the cogito we took a wrong turn at Albequerque. Assuming we can all agree that the destruction of the biosphere is a wrong turn. It is always tempting to conclude that this was simply how things had to be, that this particular human journey was required if we were to learn the necessary lessons. But this way of thinking is a peculiar (convenient?) form of whitewashing which, more than anything, dishonors and disfigures the memories of those who have suffered, as if their suffering was some form of valiant human sacrifice on our behalf when in truth it was and remains a horror story. Not to mention the fact that it is yet unclear if we will learn the preordained lessons in time.
In Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews, James Carroll analyzes the “two-thousand year course of the Church’s battle against Judaism” with the basic assumption that something went horribly wrong and, more radically, it could have gone very differently. Carroll looks to a past that might have been otherwise in order to stake a claim on a future that yet may be: “To ask what was the alternative to European Christianity’s hatred of Jews in the past is to assert that such hatred is not necessary in the future.” Following Carroll, we must refuse to paper over the disastrous legacy of the split between mind and body as some sort of necessary dialectical step. We must assert that it is this very split which now sees us fast approaching a biological tipping point like light accelerating towards the event horizon beyond which lies, inexorably, the black hole. Borrowing from Carroll, to ask what was the alternative to the Cartesian manipulation of the physical world in the past is to assert that such manipulation is not necessary in the future. If the future has always belonged to those asking the right questions, then whether or not we have a human future depends on being prepared to ask just this. And fast.
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