Fire Away!

March 4, 2024: Here’s a clip from an article in the NYTimes the other day about the unprecedented wildfires in Texas:

Citation:  Historically, it has been humans who have outpaced the natural world. From arrowheads to artificial intelligence, our species has progressed steadily faster than geologic time. But now, geologic time — specifically, atmospheric time and ocean time — is moving as fast as we are, in some cases faster — faster than technology, faster than history. The world we thought we knew is changing under our feet because we changed it.

I’ve been reading, like a lot of us, about climate change for at least 25 years. And before that we all knew about the greenhouse effect—that’s a phrase from the 1960s at least.

My point being that nothing is new in all the news; it’s the same thing—we’ve gone too far, things are out of control, the End is Nigh. So reading about it is apocalypse-porn or End Times porn. All porn all the time, meaning same-old.

But this quote above is something new, or a new way of thinking. I’ve been thinking a long time that one reason humans have not hearkened to the emergency is that it’s old hat, so we think there’s nothing new in it. An ongoing crisis ends up being no crisis at all but just everyday life.

But the quote above is about how we started off changing the earth and now it’s changing us. This struck me since it’s symbiotic, showing the interrelation between humans and our planet. Turns out we cannot change the earth without it changing us—one hand washes the other. What we do is done to us, and vice versa.

With such a simple statement that seems so obvious, we might enable ourselves to finally get it. That is, that we are being changed. We are not simply suffering the consequences of climate change, reacting by fighting fires or recycling or driving an EV. We still think we are doing those things, as if we had a choice in the matter. A choice to believe or not believe in climate change, a choice to respond or ignore.

But what if we don’t? What if these things we think of as choices—recycling, driving EVs, demonstrating—are not choices but consequences, actions imposed on us by the changing earth? Then our whole green politics is not our choice; it’s what the changing earth is changing us into.

Maybe this isn’t after all the Anthropocene, as the scientists tell us—the era in which humans demonstrate we really can change the earth. What if it’s the Interpocene, the age in which the relationship between earth and humans is, finally, made manifest? This would mean our thinking, our policies, our politics, our choices, are all embodied earth, quite literally the earth speaking through us.

In this case we would no longer think in terms of those who choose to accept climate change and those who refuse. We would instead talk in terms of those who have been pushed into action by the earth, and those who have not.

Unless it’s the earth choosing to keep half of humanity asleep to the danger. . . .