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My brilliant and awesome friend, John Young, who lives on the west coast, recently published a piercing blog about the “smokeocalypse in coastal British Columbia”…Here’s a direct link to his blog if you want to read more of his writing ….https://livingdharma.wordpress.com/author/livingdharma/
“I think it was two or three years ago that the phrase “hard, harder, hardest” came to me. I’d been spending a lot of time with people going through things that were almost unbearable for them and for those who loved them. I remember saying to a friend, a while ago, that when I see great suffering my tendency is to run straight toward it.
I’m becoming a little more discerning about when, where, what and why I will run into suffering – for a variety of reasons, both my own well being and the ultimate efficacy of running into another person’s suffering story.
On top of or adjacent to or part and parcel of all that – the personal and the practice and the compassion and the spiritual of being with suffering, – a lot of my professional life has been about being asked to walk into very messy situations and maybe find some way to make them better. I’ve been willing to do that (?!) and I’ve been/was reasonably good at it.
Which is all to say that I have some experience with hard things. And one of the things that I have definitely noticed is that most of us choose to ignore the flashing amber warning signals in our hearts and minds and bodies and in the various concentric circles around them. Our bodies are so clear (our planet is so clear). They send us messages all the time, literally. I used to ignore them all the time, literally. And I paid a steep price – in terms of anxiety, darkness, panic attacks etc. And then I started paying attention and everything changed, which I have written a lot about elsewhere.
Anyway.
We’re in the midst of a smokeocalypse here in coastal British Columbia.
It happens every summer now. It never used to happen. Yes, the high dry parts of this region – east of the mountains – have always seen fire in summer. But it’s been very rare for the coast to burn. Or for the interior fires to be so enormous and uncontrollable that the smoke covers vast Europe-sized areas. And the authorities advise us to stay indoors, presumably because they can’t advise us to stop breathing the particulate-laden air that is inescapable. And that’s got me thinking about hard, harder and hardest again.
The whole planet, every part of it, is setting record temperatures (again) and drought is destroying farm land and we are on our way from seven billion humans to nine billion humans on a planet that does well with about one-and-a-half billion humans and the polar ice caps are melting and sea levels are rising and you know the litany.
I’m a lay *expert” on climate change. I’m no scientist. But I would guess that we are at harder, in terms of our journey into and through runaway climate change. Hard was back in the late 1980s, when the science first became crystal clear and when there was a chance to avoid the disaster that is now unfolding in all eleven directions. T
The New York Times recently devoted its entire Sunday magazine section to how we might have stopped climate change, but didn’t (here it is in case you missed it). And, shortly after the Times published that long, sorrowful but remarkably political agnostic and tone deaf tome – Naomi Klein wrote this piece in The Intercept. The Times piece blamed human nature. Naomi Klein blamed capitalism. I think they’re both right.
So, here we are at harder. Runaway climate change is now pretty much baked in to the system. I suppose that if there was a sudden species-wide leap of consciousness that even pervaded the minds of political decision makers, then we might have a chance to miss the most searing impacts of runaway climate change. Buy that would require an immediate end to all fossil fuel development plus an immediate and massive investment in renewable energy plus an immediate species-wide *yes” to ending the insane belief in endless conventional economic growth plus an immediate redistribution of conventional wealth plus an immediate reformulation of our understanding of what wealth is, and isn’t. And that would be so great. But gosh. Donald Trump is president and much closer to home my former colleague is the Premier of a province that is adding fuel to the fire, as this recent piece of research underscores.
Anyway (?!).
I think we’re at harder.
Hardest is the stuff of dystopian fantasy and it’s hard to believe that it is really happening. I hope it doesn’t. It’s such a beautiful planet. We can be so lovely, the humans. We can do so much better.
What am I doing about or in response to all this? A fair question. And I’ll write more about that soon, both from a political and personal perspective.
The photo to the left is from the beach in front of our house. I took it one afternoon at 5:00. The sun will set at 8:39 tonight. But the sky is darkening, isn’t it? The photo is not edited and that is how it really looks. Normally, there is a blue green sea in the foreground and a summer sun hanging in a blue sky and an enormous mountain range leaping out of the Salish Sea, also in the foreground. But not in this photo. It’s all smoke and portent. Tea leaves and lizard innards. Bones tossed and dice played and short electoral cycles and trillions of dollars in fossil fuel money. Looks like this.
Moments before I took the photo, I had a close encounter with a very laid back doe/deer. She was browsing green browse as the smoke closed around us. And moments after that, I met a little cat as I walked out onto the beach to take a few photos. A little black cat with two white socks for back legs and white whiskers and the very, very sweetest demeanour. We loved one another up with total honesty and offering our very best. And then I took pictures and thought some more and came home to write a bit.”
John Young from the west coast of BC…for more from John, go to .https://livingdharma.wordpress.com/author/livingdharma/
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