As I am writing this, my state is on fire. Massive wildfires are sweeping across the eastern half of Washington, always the drier side, but in this year of unprecedented drought and heat, even moreso. I cannot fathom what it is like to be there, to witness these enormous storms of flame racing over the landscape, to be a firefighter trying to do anything to make a difference in the face of this literal inferno.
Even here on the "wet" west side, which is of course dangerously dry this year too (and there are fires on this side, though not nearly as large), we are impacted by these enormous fires. The prevailing winds sweep most of the smoke eastward, but our sunrises and sunsets are lurid red and the horizon is heavy with haze from westward-leaking smoke. As my boat heads out each morning, the skies are grim with smoke the further north we go. I haven't seen Mt. Baker in a week at least.
Last week, on a day off, I went to a local zoo with my daughters and some extended family. We decided to watch a stage show at the zoo, which was clearly a very sophisticated presentation with a customized stage, great special effects, really entertaining animals and a good overall message emphasizing that it is good to go outside, suggesting geocaching as a fun thing to do while you're there, and that getting involved with Citizen Science efforts was a worthwhile thing, too. But. The show began with a little vignette in which Our Hero was trying to figure out why frogs weren't eating all the mosquitoes this year. After a brief search, Our Hero discovered that the frogs in the pond were "covered with trash" so they couldn't catch the mosquitoes. And that is where my faith in humanity faltered a bit, and the dedicated environmental educator in me wanted to weep.
Now, I can't say of a certainty that the massive wildfires in Washington (and other parts of the west) right now are a result of Global Climate Change, but it's a pretty good bet that the drought that is exacerbating them is part of it. It is certainly possible that a massive drought all up and down the west coast of North America, that has been going on for years in some areas, is just a coincidence, a part of the normal cycle that is bigger and deeper than we understand with our limited data (weather and climate have, after all, been doing their thing far longer than we have been keeping track of it, and when one considers that it takes 20,900 years for all the possibilities of astronomical influence on the tides to play out, it is worth considering that we really don't know that much about the overall cycles of climate with the limited records we have available to us). But I kind of doubt it.
I confess that I have kept my head in the sand about issues of Global Climate Change, figuring selfishly that I would not live to see the worst of it. I wanted to save myself from the profound grief of watching the ecosystem that I love with every cell in my body dying a slow, painful death. Turns out it might be a faster death than anyone anticipated, as the very salmon in our rivers are dying from water that is too warm, which of course will have dire consequences for the SRKW. The impacts of climate change are happening swiftly and mercilessly, and I am left with only my faith to believe in any possibility that those species I count among my non-human family and friends will adapt as swiftly as they need to in order to carry on.
In the face of this, frogs covered with trash seems to me to be the most trite, useless example of an environmental problem that could possibly be given. Especially since frogs are creatures that actually move, so generally speaking even frogs living in a garbage-laden environment will be getting out from under the garbage. When I coordinated a kids' environmental club some 20 years ago, the "cost" of membership was declaring something that the new member would do to help keep Puget Sound clean. The overwhelming majority of kids said "pick up trash." Even then I felt a little despair, reading these responses, because it is such a superficial, cosmetic issue.
Trash is unsightly. Trash can injure wildlife, and does so, although this is not so common or critical a threat for most species as one might imagine (if ten salmon are swimming in a river too warm to have enough dissolved oxygen to sustain them, and one gets caught in a 6-pack ring, they will still all die). Trash is really easy to pick up and put in the garbage or recycling. We can feel like we have control over trash, so it is an easy target and low-hanging fruit for an introduction to environmental responsibility and activism. And when you are speaking to a general audience, you need to consider the lowest common denominator, and start with that low-hanging fruit.
What makes me want to weep over this example is that we are, very literally, facing the end of the world as we know it. I am not so doom-and-gloom to imagine that the human race is going extinct or anything like that, but massive change is happening and will continue to happen, that will almost certainly have an enormous impact on some very basic things about our lives--like where our food and water come from, and what plants and animals will remain to share the world with us. Unless every single one of us, starting today, goes out and starts planting hundreds of trees (and realistically, most of those seedlings would die here right now for lack of water, unless we were also allocating water resources our region may not possess to keep them well watered), climate change is going to keep careening headlong toward whatever the new normal will be. As someone who loves the ecosystem I grew up in and finds ambient temperatures over 75F to be miserably uncomfortable, I am not really excited about what that new normal will be.
And faced with these rapidly occurring uncomfortable changes, I question whether or not we can ethically limit ourselves to discussion of "safe" environmental activism with general audiences. Sure, keeping it simple like that is comfortable and doesn't cause anyone anxiety or concern. But we MUST be made uncomfortable, anxious and concerned in order to get to the point of changing our behaviors if we want to continue to live on a planet that has things like comfortable temperatures, green forests, coffee, chocolate, seafood, and the ability to continue making irresponsible choices about having too many children in the name of religion. Failure to recognize that and act on it, and we'll all be eating soylent green and applying to government agencies for the privilege to breed in a world where you wouldn't want to be a kid anyway.
Generally, I subscribe to the "no catastrophes before 4th grade" rule in environmental education. Why raise your kids to be sad and anxious about issues they have so very little influence over? It has, rightly I think, been suggested that children raised from the cradle with awareness of larger environmental issues will disengage out of a need for emotional safety and therefore not become the problem solvers of the future that we need. As a child of the Cold War, I understand; many of my peers believed very seriously they would never see adulthood and made choices in their adolescence that had some pretty serious impacts for their adult lives. Global Climate Change and the dire predictions of what might happen could certainly create the same kind of fatalistic zeitgeist among my daughters' generations. But in the recent conversations about race issues in the U.S., I heard someone mention that white children are often sheltered from the idea of racism while children of color must be raised with knowledge of racist realities for their own self preservation. White privilege begins at home, because who wants to teach their kids how awful people can be to each other? Every parent wants their children to grow with hope and a positive outlook on life, and what better way to destroy that than by holding forth the evidence of how untrue it is? Yet some parents have no choice but to present their young children with this information for the sake of their survival.
I submit that, in the same way white parents must start teaching their young children about racism (beyond the scope of this post, but for now I'll just say that until social justice is achieved, environmental recovery will be impossible, and if it makes you angry or upset to consider that possibility I beseech you to examine the source of those feelings), we must also start teaching all of our children about the ecological realities we are living in, because our children's survival depends on it. We can no longer soft-pedal reality, of race or environment, and expect any positive long-term outcome in either realm.
This post is a lot darker than what I like to put out into the aether, but I've been feeling it strongly. If you've read through this far, thank you for sticking with me. I recommend you go outside now and find a little patch of space to share with some nonhuman beings for a while. We humans are very resilient creatures, and we can survive through a lot. I still believe it is possible for us to reverse (to some degree) and restore things in a way that most of us (human and nonhuman) can survive, even thrive, and carry on. But in order for that to happen, all of us need to allow ourselves to be educated to an uncomfortable level, and change our behaviors as we see fit to do so, unless we want to wait for forces beyond our control to force those changes. It's already happening...my city has voluntary water restrictions in place, but may have to impose mandatory ones if enough people don't respond to the voluntary request. A small example in a huge bigger picture. Take the initiative, and take action. If you have to start with picking up trash, because it is quick and available and actionable, go ahead. But promise me you'll make that the first step to doing much more.
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