I don’t need to tell you that the latest IPCC report is absolutely terrifying. You already know that. Read AKALib’s summary anyway.
This diary was written in the full knowledge that there is hugely alarming climate news staring us in the face. Nevertheless, I want to respond with beauty and resolve instead of despair.
In yesterday’s Climate Brief, this remark by climate scientist Michael Mann really stood out:
History is the record of what we’ve learned, of how and where we learned it, of the ways we took those lessons and applied them to our lives going forward. History is embedded in documents, in books, in buildings, in places, in human traditions and societies. Lose history and the past turns to a swirling murk within which our pareidolia has free rein.
In losing our history we also lose our future. Our capacity to plan ahead is built on our ability to recognize patterns, learn from our mistakes, assess risks, perceive connections. History lets you ask: my ancestors more than five generations back made my life possible, even though they never met me; what are I doing to make my descendants’ lives better? History lets elders plant trees under which their great-great-grandchildren can sit.
The link below will give you a little tour of some of the places around the world where our connection to the past are in danger.
The Heritage Sites Threatened By Climate Change
American historical sites are no exception. Back in 2016, Alex Bryan, a climatologist with the Northeast Climate Science Center, was working at Jamestown, site of the first permanent European settlement on this continent. He noted that:
...the sea level has risen more than half a foot in 50 years. A one and a half-foot rise in sea level would put more than half of Jamestown Island under water.
According to Bryan, this is one of the biggest challenges facing the park. “Sea-level rise and elevated storm surge allow waves to push further inland, causing immense erosion, flooding and saltwater exposure to park areas and historic sites that have never before experienced these conditions.”
For example, Jamestown’s most visited landmark, James Fort, is an active archaeological site located just feet from the tidally influenced James River. “One corner of the triangular fort is already in the river – which goes to show the urgency of understanding sea-level rise in the park,” said Bryan.
It’s not just buildings and statues.
An ecosystem is a historical record of thousands of years of evolution; the story of the land’s slow changes and the gradual adaptation of living things. A forest fire, an oil spill, a catastrophic drought — these destroy not just millions of trees and animals and bugs, but all the relationships between them.
As I read about these losses, I am reminded of “The Lost Mariner,” Oliver Sacks’ case study of Jimmie G., an amnesiac sailor who — perhaps due to his abuse of alcohol — existed in a continuously fluctuating present where bits and pieces of a life once lived floated past on the current, utterly detached from one another. Sacks opens his article by quoting the filmmaker Luis Buñuel:
You have to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realize that memory is what makes our lives. Life without memory is no life at all… Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it, we are nothing.
For me, memory and continuity are bound inextricably with music. Musical styles have undergone their own version of Darwinian evolution as humans have taken them around the planet; there is a world of history in every song.
How sad to learn that some of the most revered forests in Europe, whose trees have given us the spruce bodies and soundboards for the very best stringed instruments and pianos, are now under threat from the consequences of our 2-century CO2 drunk:
Climate Change Is Killing Beautiful Music, Too
The trees that make the world’s best pianos and violins are in danger.
In addition to climate change, there is a more pressing threat: Ips typographus, the small, dark, pill-shaped European spruce bark beetle. These insects penetrate the bark, reproduce, and suck the sap until the tree dries up and dies. Under normal circumstances, healthy trees have defenses against the beetles, which keep their population in check. But at the end of October 2018, the most powerful wind storm ever recorded here, known as Vaia, destroyed almost 100,000 acres of woods in northern and northeastern Italy. Gusts of over 120 miles per hour felled millions of trees. These carcasses, still rich in sap but defenseless, fed a beetle explosion, despite efforts to remove the logs as quickly as possible. Now, with a full-blown outbreak of spruce bark beetles, even the healthy trees are at risk.
Red-brown patches can already be seen on the slopes of valleys in the region—standing trees, desiccated and dead. “The bark beetle can equal and even overcome the damage caused by a wind storm,” says Andrea Battisti, an entomologist at the University of Padua and one of the leading experts on bark beetles in Italy.
But it ain’t over till it’s over. We have a responsibility to our descendants, to give them stories and songs, to bequeath them more than just a daily struggle for existence or the daily struggles against injustice.
The composer John Luther Adams lived for years in Alaska, working as an environmental activist:
The Arctic Refuge for me is still like the holy land," Adams told Sierra from his current home in New Mexico's Chihuahuan Desert. "It is the sine qua non in my imagination."
By the early 1980s, though, Adams was exhausted. He realized that he could be an activist or an artist, so he quit his job and in his remote cabin began to create intense and unconventional music "inspired by the big world outside our closed doors." He writes, "I took a leap of faith, in the belief that music and art can matter every bit as much as activism and politics."
(snip)
In 2014, Adams and his wife left Alaska for New York—citing the "accelerating reality" of climate change (the decade prior, they'd witnessed vast wildfires, mild winters, and early snowmelts). During a return visit, Adams discovered his old cabin was sinking because of melting permafrost. Still, he has only recently realized how much the climate crisis has affected his psyche and music.
Please take the time to listen to Adams’ elegiac music, which is as creative and beautiful a response to our accelerating crisis as I have ever heard.
I sing songs that are hundreds of years old, passed on through a centuries-old chain of oral tradition that is in itself one of humanity’s great cultural heritages.
When I help a young person learn an old song, I’m sending a message to folks waaaaaay down the line:
We are thinking of you. We hope you are well. We love you; we are fighting on your behalf.
Make some phone calls. Write some letters. Make some good trouble, because we’ve got more than our share of the bad kind.