I just wonder . . . if your house burned down in one of the mega-fires out west if you would change your mind about the climate crisis? Let’s say you staunchly believed it was a hoax perpetrated by the left wing media as an excuse for the government taking over our lives but then you lost your house and all your stuff and infact the whole town you lived in burned up.
I wonder, if someone who ended up in the hospital, on a ventilator, clinging to life, if they would change their mind about the pandemic and that it might have been a good idea to get a vaccine after all?
I suspect the answer to both would be ‘yes’ but of course then it’s too late to do anything about it. This is also known as the ‘you don’t know what you have until the shit hits the fan’ principle. Wisdom comes from experience not lectures.
While that’s true, it’s also true that human beings have the capacity for long range planning, strategizing and working together. This is how we conquered the planet back when there were wild wolves everywhere. And wild other things. Everything was wild and it was everywhere. Also called nature.
We’ve subdued nature (or atleast so we think). We have farms with thousands of acres where the the grain is planted and harvested with machines - truckloads of grain not a basket full like back in the day. Train cars full of grain. Off to the processing plant to make cornflakes and off to the supermarket to sit on the shelf until you grab it (a form of harvesting) and take it home. It’s a production line and we do it all without being chased by wolves.
We thought we were in control and then suddenly . . . it seems to be out of control.
We knew this was coming though, somewhere deep in the human psyche we knew. And now that it’s here we’re shocked and amazed.
As of this writing (August 13, 2021), the world is burning. Forest fires from northern California to Greece to Algeria to Siberia. Greece has 154 fires burning across their nation including in the suburbs of Athens. A 2500 year old olive tree on the island of Evia was destroyed by fire setting up lamentations all across the island. It was a well known landmark.
Fires across northern California, southern Oregon, southeast Montana, Idaho, Washington state, Alaska, Wyoming, Utah, Nebraska, Colorado, Nevada, Arizona, South Dakota and New Mexico have consumed 3.9 million acres.
The wild fires in Siberia are larger than all the fires raging around the rest of the world combined.
Entire towns have been destroyed.
And, of course, all these forest fires are releasing the carbon that was locked up in the trees, exacerbating climate change. Oh great.
But we knew this was coming. And now it’s here. What the hell are we going to do?
These fires will eventually die out, leaving ashes and charcoal where there were once verdant forests full of life, but what about the wildfires of our minds? The wildfires that thrive on controversy, divisiveness and opinionated opinions? They burn unabated, infact we feed them - the tinder of biased news stories, the rhetoric of populist politicians and worst of all the drumbeat of grievance and racism and entitlement. All nice words for what it really is - hatred.
I’m thinking of my siblings who can’t have a conversation without getting political and then if their politics are other than mine, it becomes argumentative and then offensive and then it shuts down. We don’t want someone throwing water on our wildfire.
Technology won’t save us. That just makes it easier to start a fire with someone else. Which brings us back to the ‘you don’t know what you have until the shit hits the fan’ principle. That also brings us back to the long range planning, strategizing and working together - in other words language skills, high level cognitive abilities. What happened to us? We’re not monkeys. We’re homo Sapiens, the best and the brightest species on the planet. Right?
We’re the story tellers and the myth creators. This is what has allowed us to thrive and make nations where there were only tribes before. Truth. You can’t have a nation without shared beliefs that are spread through our story telling. Also called ‘culture’, the sum of our movies, books, personal narratives, what have you. So here’s a story, for the humans, in this time of our greatest need.
Once upon a time there was a boy, who was very curious and a little foolish. What we call aspirational these days. He was entrusted by his mother, a single parent, to take the family cow to market and there get a good price for it so that the family could prosper and have enough to eat for the coming winter.
The boy’s name was Jack and he took on the project with alacrity, proud of his responsibility. He led the cow to the town market and there met a wily merchant who greeted him.
“Hello, boy. A fine looking cow you have there. Are you looking for a fine price for your fine cow?”
To which Jack replied, “Oh yes, sir. I want to get the best price possible.”
Said the merchant, “You’re a very lucky boy. Today I happen to have 6 magic beans in my possession for which I can trade you three of them for your cow.”
“Magic beans?” responded Jack.
“Oh yes. These beans are magic and no telling what will happen when you plant them.”
Replied the boy, “I can’t believe my good fortune.” Then he thought, wait I’m supposed to bargain, not accept the first price. That’s what my mother told me.
“Alright,” said Jack, “I’ll sell you this cow for the magic beans. But I want . . .” and there he paused and thought hard. “I want four beans, for this is a fine cow.”
“Four beans you want for one cow? But then you’ll have four magic plants and I’ll only have one cow. It’s too much. I can’t agree to it.”
“Four beans or nothing.” responded Jack resolutely.
The merchant demurred, stroked his beard, took off his hat, scratched his head, looked around. “Look I’ll tell you what. I’ll give you four beans for that cow but you have to throw in the rope and the bell as well.”
“Deal!” said Jack, feeling quite happy with himself.
All the way home he held the magic beans in his hand, inside his pocket and thought about what a fortunate boy he was. When he got home he rushed into the kitchen and in a loud voice excitedly said, “Mom, look. I got four magic beans for the cow. He wanted to only give me three but I got four. Look.”
His mother looked at him in amazement and then in disgust. “You what? You sold our cow for beans?”
“But these are magic beans.” replied Jack.
“What the hell.” said his mother. “Jack, you’ve ruined us.” She grabbed the beans and threw them out the window. “Now we have no cow. We have no milk. And we’ll starve before the winter’s over. Go do your chores!” she said. “There’ll be no supper tonight.”
Jack was shattered. He straggled out of the small one room hut where he lived with his mother and little sister, out into the small yard with their small garden and sat down on a stump. Breathing deeply, he thought about life and what a fool he’d been and what’s going to happen now.
The next morning when Jack got up, he looked out the window and to his surprise and amazement, there was a bean stalk growing up into the air, so high that he could not see the top of it. In fact, there were four bean stalks, intertwined and rising as high as the clouds. Jack, being foolish and eager, or as we like to call it nowadays, aspirational, began climbing the beanstalk branch by branch, up and up.
“Gee whiz.” said Jack as he looked down at the ground far below him. “This is a tall bean stalk.” He climbed right through the clouds and came upon the land of the giants. There he disembarked and started looking around. There was a castle in the distance, surrounded by a moat. There were battlements and stone towers all around it and a giant wall.
Jack approached the castle, fascinated, compelled by his eager foolishness to check it out. When he found that the castle was built for giants and that he could slip in by swimming across the moat and skinnying through a crack in the gate, he did so and found himself inside a wide courtyard.
This story has been kicked around for ages. Probably thousands of years if you go all the way back to the roots of it. Maybe it wasn’t a castle, maybe it wasn’t a magic bean stalk, maybe it wasn’t giants, maybe it was something else that the foolish and eager lad came upon and in his naivete got away with something audacious. Perhaps it was the lair of a bear and he found food there. Perhaps it was a thick dark forest and he discovered fruit there.
In any case, in this story, this Jack, finds himself exploring stealthily the rooms and habitations of the castle. And that’s when he happens upon the treasure. A golden harp and a goose that lays golden eggs. And as any young aspirational adolescent would do, he grabbed them and ran like hell. He dropped the draw bridge and crossed. At the same time he did he heard a voice, rumbling like thunder. “Fe fi fo fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman.” The giant had awoken from his nap and was on the case.
Jack ran like hell, oh I already said that. Jack ran like bloody hell, as fast as he could with the golden harp and the goose that laid golden eggs. The giant ran faster. Jack’s head start disappeared. As the giant was about to grab him he leaped onto the bean stalk and nimbly clambered down.
The giant followed him but was more clumsy. Jack reached the bottom. He took the axe and chopped down the bean stalk. The giant fell to his death.
He went to show his mother what he had won and his mother cried out with joy. “That’s the golden harp that was stolen from our family years ago. And that’s our goose that lays the golden eggs. Oh Jack! Oh Jack! Oh Jack!”
And that’s pretty much the end of the story. Of course that’s ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’, a fairy tale. No fairies in it but unbelievable nonetheless. Unless you want to believe that possibilities are unlimited for aspirational young lads like Jack. And us. An aspirational but thoroughly adolescent species.
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as the world burns