Diary Notes: August 25, 2020

A few early mornings ago in the middle of the night. White, lightning storms raged loudly against the midnight blue sky and clouds raced in and through them, as I had never witnessed before. These lines of thick, bursting, noisy light straddle across the skies like gigantic gods and goddesses striding across the sky, walking back and forth, saying, See Me. Do you see me now? Stop what you are doing. Do you understand? Was that a gigantic metereological wake-up call? A bugle warning?

(See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wpxSKrd77Y)

***

Civilizations live and die. They come and go. We all know that. We all have seen the photos and films of the age-old civilizations with a strange, unreflective fascination, as if we, in our current modern, industrial civilizational moment, are exempt from their fate. There may be a shadow of a doubt, however, behind our smooth faces. Are we the next one to go?

We can sometimes see the view from the foothills of the small town I live in in northern California. It is shrouded in a thick, fog-like smoke. Brown. Yellow. Red. Grey. Layers of a vaguely unnatural pink glow, not unlike that of a hazy sunset dominate our skies throughout the day. We can smell the fires burning, out of control. Just the other day, we all heard the words———10% contained, 100,000 people evacuated and many more under potential evacuation orders.

It is only August, and the fires started earlier this year than the usual run-of-the-mill October Santa Ana’s winds, which are a special kind of terror in California and the rest of the west. We have seen close friends lose their homes in a flash in that month alone.

Maxine Hong Kingston,the author who brought so many gifts of stories, including the revolutionary books, The Woman Warrior: A Memoir of Childhood Among Ghosts, and many others, lost her home in the October 199 fire in the Oakland Hills  When she went back to look to see if she could recover anything, she found the beautiful clay pot made by the mother of our Peublo woman friend, Rina Swentzell, who had gifted it to her a few weeks earlier when we were all together in Santa Clara Pueblo near Santa Fe, New Mexico. Though it did not survive completely intact, the pot had been fired once already, so it was used to surviving the fire of a kiln. So it did survive this fire, too. Even then the skin of the pot’s surface is mottled and rough as if it had been thrown around by the Oakland fire hither and thither.

Breath. Lungs fill up with soot. Now I have to consciously breathe in case the body, tight with longing for ease of breath, gives up the necessary will, while asleep.

It was around four thousand years ago­­——two thousand years before Pompeii——that another great civilization, the Indus Valley Civilization, in present-day Pakistan and India, lasting from around 2900 BCE to around 1800 BCE, maybe one as amazing as ours in its own way, went under.  The archeologists surmise it was due to a climatic shift caused by a river moving its boundaries. The whole city was built on a raised platform, to keep away the annual floods of the Indus River which it was built near.

One city we call Mohenjo-Daro, another one we call Harappa. They are both located now in modern Pakistan. They were discovered early on, in 1822, and then again in 1911, and then again in 1922 when the railroads were being built by the British. That was when they realized what they had actually discovered, a lost civilization.

It was perhaps the first planned city in the world, streets laid carefully at right angles. When I visited there, some three decades ago, the streets seemed easily livable; I could easily imagine people walking on them, even strolling by getting vegetables in the markets nearby, enacting their daily life. It was hard to imagine that that was nearly five thousand years ago. There were mostly homes with several rooms and a tiled bathroom served by convenient sewer drains that went out to the street and had covered by mud tiles for convenient cleaning.

There was the Great Bath, which reminded me of my more familiar kulams, the large water reservoirs, which were also for bathing, dotting the Tamil village landscape where I was born in southern India more than a thousand miles away. Every Tamil village had several kulams, one for each street, one for the temples, one for the animals, one for humans. They were collectively managed, patronaged by the rich landlords because they bathed in them, too, before the indoor water supply became built in individual homes, mostly by the rich. Once the rich abandoned the kulams, their existence became numbered. The poor cannot manage the commons on their own most of the time. Collective management requires the rich to be patrons, at the least.

These collectively managed water reservoirs, whether we are speaking of four thousand years ago in the Indus Valley Civilization in present-day Pakistan and India, which is more than two thousand years before Pompeii, if we can imagine that, speak of a kind of deep societal cooperation that focuses a kind of shared commons of water and bathing needs.

***

Ten years: the climate scientists said last year. Now it is nine years to go until it is nearly impossible, though it may be now already, they just don’t really know the widest possible impact. It is as if they are reading signs in a smoky mirror of a telescope looking into the future, unlike the past when we look up at our sky and look at stars or at least how they may have looked at millions of light years ago.  Now we need a telescope to just look one decade, two decades, three decades into the future.

Unless we are willing to face the idea of our collective death squarely every day face on, and act accordingly every minute of our lives, including a deep rest from our furiously busy, unmanageable lives, with too much going on all the time, with no time left for reflection or long-term thoughtfulness, we seem doomed to our fate and destiny.

We must raise the collective awareness of the problem at hand; we must bring together leading experts to suggest solutions, such as the brilliant team at Drawdown has already done (See drawdown.com) and figure out at all the levels of society­­­­—the household, the street, the neighborhood, the village, the town and city, the larger geographical region, perhaps a watershed, a bioregion, a state, a country, a hemisphere, a planet. All the scales we can imagine that we are living in, that we are deeply embedded within, we need to figure out how to reduce drastically the carbon/nitrogen/coal/oil output at each level of geographic significance.

We need to switch the purpose of every kind of institution we have, governments at every scale, educational institutions at every scale, companies at every scale, to figuring this all out, to fund these efforts. We encourage every person who is living beyond their necessities to fund these efforts, wherever they are and wherever they are not, from what they can see around them to what they cannot see around them, to make sure every person is fed, clothed, housed, and has access to a carbon-neutral lifestyle.  We do it. We just do it. Without a lot of fanfare, but with a lot of grief, with a lot of fear, with a lot of prayer, with a lot of communal solidarity.

We are surrounded by a circle of fire. It is closing in. We really have no choice. We can see the problem. The problem is us. It is the way we live. We must help each other change the way we live.

Begin by reading the new book, The Green New Deal: Why We Must, How We Can by Varshini Prakash and Guido Girgenti of the Sunrise Movement. I am going to walk to the local bookstore and get it tomorrow.  So, should you.

The rich, the middle-class, and the poor—we all have a lot of responsibility in our shared futures, but I would argue, especially the rich ones, as they have taken more than their fair share for a long while, and now they need to see more clearly their own kinship with those that are not rich, that we are really in this together. We must get beyond the lines that divide us from each other and see each other as worthwhile to work closely together with, from here onwards.

The election is not far away. Let us gather together and work as hard as we possibly can to see a future where we can see future generations continue to live on this beautiful, wild planet that is speaking back to us, only if we can stop to hear it.