03 / The Glacial Rock

Thoughts on thirty years of climate despair

For thirty years I worried myself sick about the impending end of the world.  It started in an ecology class during my senior year in college.  I already knew something about the “Greenhouse Effect,” as it was called then.  But after that course, the fruit I’d eaten from that that tree of knowledge left me naked, ashamed, and heavy with dread.  I was cast out of the garden of innocence. There are some things you wish you did not know.  And once you know them, you can never go back to the way you were before.  The message in Genesis is as true as anything science has ever revealed.

This dreadful knowledge made me think that I should not have kids.   I did not want to bring innocent beings into the impending disaster.  But also, I confess, I believed that humanity itself was the problem.  We were a cancer on the earth, as one of my teachers said.  That became the metaphor that swung my moral compass. It pointed to a dark future that could only be averted with drastic measures. The dystopian vision and its utopian solutions made me terribly judgmental, but rightly so.

I developed a moral scorn for the conspicuous and unnecessary burning of fossil fuels. This was matched by my personal shame for burning any.  This guilty zeal fueled my judgement of others - especially those who showed they did not get it by driving SUVs and and taking vacations to exotic places, oblivious to the damage they caused.  I silently fumed at the drivers of Hummers from the righteous perch of my efficient little Nissan.   Had more money, I would have bought a Prius. I hated the sound, the smell – the very idea of inventions like Jet Skis that brought smiles to the faces of people who were destroying the planet while skimming across the water, laughing.   I did not talk about this all the time, but these thoughts were always in me, simmering with dread for the coming apocalypse.

But this dread was no match for the goodness of a woman I met on a boat, with whom I fell in love, to whom I became devoted, and with whom I sailed away in holy matrimony.  Maybe we would have kids, but probably not, I thought.  The cancer, you know.

Then my wife became pregnant almost immediately after we got married.  The timing was terrible for our plans, but the biological logic of it was perfect, and perfectly undeniable.  So I prepared myself to be a dad.  I was not ready.  But I do remember an insight that felt like a revelation, for it came at me like an order: “You are going to be a father now.  Your child deserves to have a dad who is not a doomsayer.”

So I put on a posture of strength and tried to to become a loving and hopeful father, even though I silently believed I had sinned against Nature by bringing resource-dependent child into this dying world.

The child was my first son.  Then five years later another son was born.  And then another boy three years after him.   After three sons, I got the operation that would prevent any new babies coming into the world through the love of this family. It was only right. My wife and I had been irresponsible with our fecundity.

But over time, an ironic truth wore my judgements down in the soft places. These boys felt like a blessing, not like ecological cancers.  And still, silently, alone, I worried about what I had done, bringing in more people to exacerbate the climate crisis. 

I mitigated my guilt with practical action. Politically, I voted correctly, of course.  I became chairman of our town’s energy committee.  I got involved in feasibility studies for municipal wind power projects. I debated the NIMBYs who did not want to see wind turbines on one of the coastal mountains that overlooks our town.  I drove the most efficient cars I could afford. We switched to “biofuels” to heat our house in the winter.  I pestered and encouraged my senators to fight for climate justice. I marched in New York City at the biggest climate march ever in the history of the world. It was there that I stood next to Bill KcKibben and felt like I had been blessed by a prophet. 

They said we had ten years to act.  They said we had five years to act.  I amplified the message. I preached that we had no time to waste.  The dreadful calls to action came like waves from an unseen storm offshore.

Meanwhile, through all the dreadful warnings, life went on and my boys grow older. Urgent meetings of the world’s designated experts were convened in Brazil, Japan, and Denmark, and Paris.  They made promises of grand intentions with great numbers and projections. Hockey stick graphs and parts per million and carbon credits became real things to me. 350 parts per million was a holy number.

Then someone I knew to be a boorish narcissist became President of the United States. He said it was all a hoax.  His stupid words made me so sick I was dizzy. It was like being kicked in the gut - and the throat.  I had no words.

But time went by, or time did what time does, whatever that is.   I don’t know what the right metaphor is to describe what I believe is true anymore.

I still have no words to describe it well.  But I can say that something happened to the idea that we are “the cancer.”  What was true thirty years ago is still true, and perhaps worse.  I have not changed my mind about all the numbers and graphs and parts per million.  I don’t doubt “the science.” I believe in the carbon cycle, the chemistry of combustion, of what the ancient air bubbles in the ice samples show. I have breathed the smoke from the wildfires in California.  And I feel the rising temperature of the ocean in Maine.   I see the thermometers and what they say.  It’s all true.  I still believe it.  All of it. 

But here is the thing I’m wrestling with on a dark winter night in Maine.  Later in Genesis, the trickster Jacob knows he is doomed for consequences he has brought into being for his actions, and probably his whole family too. On the night before impending disaster, he goes out alone in the dark, where he is attacked by a fierce opponent who fights him all night long.  Was it an angel?  Was it is his conscience? Was it shame? Was it “God?'“ The story does not say exactly. But it does say that when dawn came they were still wrestling. Jacob said he would not let go without being blessed. And he was.

This changed him forever and it made all the difference. The blessing left him with a limp for the rest of his life. But he walked away with a new name that revealed a new story. Jacob became Israel, the father of a whole nation and a whole future. The new story was a better story, one that he could not have believed when he was living in dread and darkness.

What I’m trying to convey does not need to be a religious epiphany. I’m just trying to say that the awareness of the blessing changed everything for Jacob and how he and his family, for generations, carried on. The world did not end that night. Nor did it end on the morning after.

I feel blessed tonight. My boys are almost grown.  Two have come home from college, near the age I was when the great dread came into me from going to school.  Tonight, we just had a simple but lovely dinner of chicken and rice and broccoli in our warm little house.  All of that food was made possible by the work of people I will never know, and delivered by ships and trucks that are part of “the problem” of carbon combustion and climate injustice. But it was a really good dinner. And it was really very good to be together and be grateful for the truth of our life together.  Yes, we – this family, this world - have problems to figure out, serious problems.  But here is the secret I’m afraid to say but I know is true as anything I have ever known: These boys are not a curse on the planet.  Nor am I.  Nor is my wife and nor are you.  Nor are your children, or their children.  Our existence here is not a cancer.  That is not the right metaphor.  It’s not only not right.  It’s wrong.  And it’s not just morally wrong.  It’s wrong – as in it’s essentially incorrect.  I don’t know what the right metaphor is, but it’s definitely not THAT. 

They say that – depending on how you define “us” as homo sapiens - we have been in the world for about 100,000 years in our current morphological condition.  Civilization as we generally understand it may be 8,000 years old – or perhaps 40,000 years old. The industrial revolution was not even 400 years ago. Since then things have changed so quickly. We are currently in a time when forces - physical, cultural, political, spiritual - make it feel like there is no ground under our feet.  I can do the math, and read the science, and ponder the history, but I don’t understand what it all means.  I also don’t know when the first fresh broccoli and honey mustard chicken was eaten for dinner on a cold winter night in Maine.  But whenever it was, it was probably good - just like it was tonight.   And when something is good, it is worth being grateful for it, as we were, and as I am.

As I write this tonight,  I am also thinking about my favorite rock.  It’s six miles from my desk, over the water on the south end of an island in Penobscot Bay on the coast of Maine. The rock is almost the size of my garage.  It’s big and white and out of place, perched precariously on a low cliff on the edge of the ocean.  Geologists call it a “glacial erratic.”  It was left there from a sea of ice that covered this part of the world for thousands of years.  12,000 years ago, there was a mile of frozen water and rocks over the place where our little warm house is now.  10,000 years ago, when Cape Cod was left behind, the retreat of that same glacier left the rock where it right rests right now.  Whenever I get out on the water to see it, I think that “behold” would be a better word for what I am doing. I’ve never touched it.  I’ve only looked at it from a distance across the water.  It moves me every time, in it’s stillness.

I used to play a game with my boys when they were young. I’d point to a random thing and ask, like a mean teacher pointing out something out of place that they were clearly not responsible for, “Hey, did you put that there?’ It might be a tree, a rock, a cigarette butt. It was always a preposterous question and it made the game funny for us. They’d turn it around on me as well. Sometimes we’d say no. Sometimes we’d say yes. “Yeah, I put that there,” pointing to a giant rock from 10,000 years ago.

When I behold that rock that was put there by forces I can barely appreciate, I wonder what people were doing on the earth then when the glacier left it there.  Certainly, they were around – our own ancestors, the very people who lived long enough to have the children that led to our coming into the world - they were here somewhere, making a life one day at a time with their families.   And that rock was left there by forces beyond any human control.  That’s not meant as a nihilistic statement.  It’s simply a recognition of something that seems beautiful and true.  Please don’t read too much into this, for my thoughts are not complete, not any more than my life is.  They may not be “right.”  Even these musings may not be acceptable in today’s climate when half of us are always wrong about anything the other half of us disputes. I’m not trying to take sides on anything right now, but this one thing:  When I feel foisted into confusion, I tend to trust in the truth of beauty and wonder, and things that have endured through generations.  

Maybe that’s why I like that rock.  Beholding it even in my mind feels like a blessing tonight. My children feel like a blessing tonight. My life feels like a blessing tonight.

It’s possible that these feelings are just as random as the placement of a glacial erratic on the edge of an island 10,000 years ago. That’s one way of looking at it. It’s perfectly reasonable except for the fact that it’s so completely inadequate. Maybe that’s why Jacob insisted on being blessed after his long night of wrestling in the dark.  The story he believed showed him a future in which he and all whom he loved were doomed. The blessing changed everything and he limped into the morning without dread. The dread has left me too. I don’t know where it went.  But I feel closer to the truth now that it’s gone.