What should I do when climate change ruins my best advice?
When the climate changes, we lose pieces of emotional terrain, as well as physical ones.
When my friends are facing big questions about their future, I encourage them to look at their life as a series of seasons. There may be a moment where a certain decision will make perfect sense, and then after a period of time, it may not, when you can decide to do something else. We change, and our circumstances do as well, and understanding every moment as part of ever-changing seasons helps me pay better attention to my needs and state of mind. If everything has a season, part of the job of being alive is trying to observe the signs around you, and understand what season you're in.
This is a very old idea. Pete Seeger put it to words in the 1950s, using The Book of Ecclesiastes, originally authored in 10th Century BC: to every thing there is a season, turn, turn turn, and so on. But it's a metaphor that is being steadily diminished by a world put off its axis.
The notion of seasonal turning that is essential to that ancient idea from 12 centuries ago is threatened by climate change. The first breath of cool fall air isn't quite a herald of months of layers, easing into winter; it's only a moment between warm spells and deep freezes. My winter in Texas has whipped between pipe-shattering cold and shorts and t-shirt in the evenings. I have struggled to plan out my weeks, not knowing what to expect to fall out of the skies. The ripening of spring, with its warm sunshine in cool air and wet mornings, has shrunk to a wisp of days before months of heat arrive.
I don't think this is the only metaphor, or practice that is being strained by a changing climate. When the climate changes, we aren't just losing physical terrain to sea level rise, desertification, or flooding. We are also losing an emotional terrain, one that helps us understand our lives as connected to a bigger picture.
Watching the seasons keep their rhythm provides a sense of smallness in the world. It can shake you out of mental habits, and lead you back to observing the world, rather than trying to always change it to suit you. It's a simple way of being reminded that we are living on a giant tilted sphere, circling another larger, hotter sphere. It reveals our limits.
During the first springs and summers of the COVID-19 pandemic, I would go outside daily to watch the plants in my neighborhood blooming. Marveling at the changes was a reminder that the earth endured and that time was passing, at a time that was consumed in crisis and dominated by anxiety. Against the grey uncertainty, the bright color and the daily, steady growth felt like glimpses of awe.
Amitav Ghosh's book The Great Derangement is one of the most original and interesting works I've ever read about climate change. It's a subtle work about history and storytelling, but one of its concluding notes about how religious institutions are an essential part of addressing the climate crisis has stuck with me:
"Finally, it is impossible to see any way out of this crisis without an acceptance of limits and limitations, and this in turn, is, I think, intimately related to the idea of the sacred, however once may wish to conceive of it."
In context, Ghosh is addressing the need for spiritual communities to be active participants in movements to save the planet. But I also think what he's describing here is a risk of living on a planet tilting on an edge. The awe we need to understand our limits is slightly harder to find. I've been shocked at how quickly people can adapt to our new seasons. This winter, which is the warmest ever recorded, I've had friends who have spent years in Texas act as if we've always lived through 80 degree Fahrenheit days in December.
Instead of a reminder of an ancient, celestial system, the changing of the seasons are now tenuous steps into a perilous world: blooms that may not meet their pollinators, tender shoots that may be exposed to rapid cold, leafy green that emerges and then dries out in the heat. Some part of our shared frame of reference is diminishing in each tortured summer, and with it metaphors, cultural practices, and emotions. The idea of the sacred that is contained in all these old flows of time and energy could be lost, and with it, part of our shared sense of our limits.
I wonder what will rush in to fill that emotional space. All of the alternatives seem so troubling. I find unseasonable warmth uncomfortable, even on the days when you can sit outside. Without the steadiness of the seasons, I worry about turning deeper into ourselves. A hotter planet may be a less mindful one, and a lonelier place as a result.