This is a hot, sultry September. I think about the hurricanes overwatering the eastern states, and the big Southwest rivers fading away with millions of people gathered at their sides like piglets at the sow’s teats. I think about the possibility that Trump could be president again in 2025 and put our democracy to bed once and for all. I think about the babies in my niece’s wombs and the hot September. I wonder what they will experience long after I am a forgotten ancestor, ashes scattered over the Jemez Mountains.
I asked a man from Pennsylvania recently about the politics in his state (a swing state). He looked at me and said he tries not to think about it, tries to just live his life now without all that noise. I appreciated his point. We live in a time when most people know our national affairs are a little off the rails. I am tempted to keep track of the news all the time and do what I can to help with myriad problems. Sometimes I think keeping track of which birds are at the feeders and how the clouds are behaving may matter more.
Then I look out at the cosmos from my deck out in the pines near my house. I can just see the spray of the Milky Way and the gleam of the moon floating like a Navajo pendant over the Southwest desert. A group of good friends gather around a fire and laugh about whatever twisted comment someone manages to make. Their kids are struggling despite their best efforts. We all know that time is running out on climate change and the parents worry most about that. The moon hides in the pine boughs while I add a little cynicism to try to create an atmosphere of normalcy while the world spins wrongly. I add some sticks from the forest to the fire and smell the ancient smell of wood smoke.
Recently I visited the Abiquiu country of northern New Mexico just to get some perspective. Here a chunk of 250-million-year-old sea floor sediments dry out in the New Mexico summer while the Jemez volcano looms threateningly to the west. Even the youngest rocks up here are too old to accurately imagine their age. You can devise various ways to grasp long timeframes, geologic history, and none of it works. I suppose professional geologists have their relativistic time scales in their minds. They can “put it all together” so-to-speak, while the rest of us look at the desert in either total or relative ignorance. We can call it pretty. They call it transitory.
The youngest rocks are the volcanic ash, at 1 million years ago. (The only time most people think about a million is when they wish their bank account were bigger.) The volcano unloaded its belly fully of ash on the calm sedimentary landscape a million years ago. It mostly covered 10-million-year-old sediments but partly it covered 200-million-year-old sediments.
When you struggle to understand these geologic times, the news of the day seems utterly trivial. Humans will leave a tremendous amount of plastic in the geologic world, but otherwise will be forgotten quickly after our collective death, after we spin our last poem and yell about our last political rally. And the echo of our voices will no longer ring. Our computers will be so much debris and our books will form some future carbon deposit.
One thing that older people understand that youth may not grasp yet… at some point in the aging process you get a health problem from which you won’t recover. And you’ll find this out and all those years of thinking about your death in future terms will be over and reality will demand your reconciliation full time.
The earth is at such a moment. We can fantasize that just because the banks and the gas stations are still open, all is well for another day or year or lifetime. But the doctor who visits humanity as it sits on the examination table knows the terminal nature of the ailment. The earth is sick, but we are sicker.
In the case of the earth, we, humanity, are the ailment. We are the mold that grows, the cancer that spreads, the fluid that fills the lungs with no ability to purge. And we mourn for ourselves because humanity is so interesting. To us it is everything. We are the eyes of the world. But the world is barely concerned with us. Plants and animals struggle to survive. Geologic change covers everything with dust.
Mass extinctions have happened before. Scientists can tell you about them (65 million years ago). We are building one of our own right now, one with our fingerprints all over it. And it is like a funeral pyre that we build and then climb inside before we light the fire. There may not be anyone left to see the coals cooling. At some point humans will push the whole system way too far. That point is probably soon.
Parents don’t like this line of thinking. They have invested everything in their kids, but kids are a deeply instinctive affair. And perhaps a few more generations will have time for beers on the beach and science in the natural world. A few more may experience the joy of love and the love of joy. I won’t pretend to know how the patient fares except to know that things are not rosy just because the banks are still open.
The sun is setting over the southwest desert and I know the woods are calling me and the dog for out nightly slog up the Precambrian gravels and rocky places to the big views over the wilderness. I’ll sit up there somewhere and toast my beer to the big expanse and wish my unborn nephews all the best.
Tom Ribe
