Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage. These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that. As a reminder, though no one really knows how many there were supposed to be, the three names we have are Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. These roughly translate as “unceasing,” “grudging,” and “vengeful destruction.”

Climate change is real. Climate change is a scientific fact. And I can’t believe I even have to say that.  The Fourth National Climate Assessment was released last week, on Black Friday, deliberately, so as few people as possible would see it. However, many major news sources did cover it, simply because the bottom line was so grim: we have at most twelve years to turn around. Failing that – the planet will be fine, but human life and much other life will disappear.

For us in the United States, that translates to, we will not turn around, we will keep pushing forward, for two years, at the end of which time we will have, at most ten years to turn around (and maybe only eight, since we will have two more years to overcome.) In case anyone missed it, Donald J. Trump issued a brief statement on this report. He said he does not believe it.

The same day, another related report was also published: the Second State of the Carbon Cycle Report (SOCCR2). To summarize briefly, for hundreds of thousands of years that we know of, carbon in our atmosphere was in balance. It isn’t any more (earth’s levels of carbon dioxide are now the highest they have been in about fifteen million years.) Every year, over 2 megatons (one megaton is roughly 2.2 billion pounds) of carbon in North America alone is emitted into our atmosphere. Oceans, as well as forests and other vegetation, suck up about half of that. The other half remains in the atmosphere. The oceans, incidentally, when they suck up this much carbon,  become more acidic.

Scientists refer to oceans and vegetation as “carbon sinks.” What happens in your house if the tap is running twice as fast as the sink drains? Yup, mine too. (But don’t try a demonstration. We can’t afford to waste water.) In this case the tap is humans burning fossil fuels. And 80% to 85% of carbon emissions from this activity are produced by the United States.

Katherine Hayhoe, an earth scientist, is one of the authors of the Fourth National Climate Assessment has a YouTube channel called “Global Weirding,” which features short videos on various aspects of climate change. Here’s one on, among other things, some of the crap that scientists get, as compared to the truth. She’s easy to listen to (and there is CC) and easy to understand.

As she points out, signs of climate change are all around us – starting with trees and flowers blooming earlier than they used to – and about 26,499 other things (no, she doesn’t list them all in seven and a half minutes.) One of them is the way wildfires are now happening in California. I grew up there, and, yes, there were fires, but nothing like what we have been seeing the last few years, and this year especially.

Louise Dunlap is a teacher and a writer. She has taught at MIT and at Tufts university. Recently she attended a retreat where she and others brainstormed about ways to deal with our “burning world” – meaning climate change but also mass shootings, burning hatreds, personal pain, government militancy. To get there, although she was about 150 miles south of Paradise, the epicenter of the Camp Fire, she had to drive through its smoke.

She writes:

These fires say it all. As I write, the one in Paradise, alone, has destroyed twice as many homes as last year’s fires and moved even faster across the land. It has killed 88 people, with hundreds still missing, many more homeless, and millions exposed to the sick air….

These dry-season fires bear close relationship to what the land evolved with—many native plants here can’t reproduce without a good burn. I’m glad to say some of them on our hill are thriving anew after last year’s fire. But modern fires burn differently, thanks to interlocking factors of our own making.

What no one else that I have read is talking about is how deeply our rape of the land, in California and elsewhere, is tied to colonization – our colonization – that white Californians in their first year as a state legislated against practices of indigenous peoples – practices which had for thousands of years protected the land from catastrophic fires. And those practices had nothing to do with raking, incidentally.

The people who evolved with this land had learned to work with gentle, controlled burning at milder seasons of the year, supported by ceremony and traditional knowledge. Their burning killed pathogens, fertilized the soil, stimulated biodiversity and healthy creeks, and cleared tinder buildup—leaving a park-like ecosystem that our European ancestors found lovely and rushed to exploit. 

Ms. Dunlap goes into mote detail about what we could do, individually and as groups, and as a nation, to make things better. But this sentence struck me – and at least two editors – as being the bottom line – the one thing that truly might save us, if we can only have the wisdom and the will to see it and do it:

I want us to go humbly to the very people our culture tried to exterminate to listen to what they can teach us.

That will require us to renounce arrogance and all that goes with it. Renunciation is always painful, and this is one that may be more painful than most. But it may be our only hope, and is likely our best hope.

Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone, if you can bring this about – there truly are no words to describe what a transformation there would be. May it come to pass. May it be.

The Furies and I will be back.

Cross posted to Care2 HERE.