Torn Roots -- an essay
Sep. 26th, 2007 10:32 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ljgeoffWalking along the Lake Superior shoreline can be an overwhelming experience. The Earth is vast beyond human imaginings. Ancient rock and towering white pine have stood for centuries along this wind-blown, stony beach. Surely these massive pines will stand sentinel along this shore for centuries to come. But something is brewing across the Earth that is now beyond human control. The climate of the Earth has tipped, and the coming ecological crisis will change this shoreline, this planet, beyond recognition.
In the 1960’s, earth scientists, biologists, geologists, climatologists and atmospheric scientists slowly began to realize that something unexpected was happening: human activity was having an effect on the Earth’s ecologies. We humans, as puny and weak and frightened as we are, have been pushing the Earth’s climate to the crest of a hill.
Now it has been tipped over the crest, and the built up inertia of climate change will gather horrifying speed.
It is hard for humans to contemplate time on a planetary scale. Walking a forest trail along the shoreline of Lake Superior, the path is treacherous with roots. They weave across the forest floor like sea serpents, dipping down into the world below. Here above, in the ether, we live in a mad spin, but below, life moves slow. Great bones of the earth, shelves of ancient rock, creak and groan. Rock cracks and spins away, bubbling and heaving to the surface.
Do buried boulders sing to one another like whale-song as they make their geologic way through earthen depths?
I cannot sit as quiet as a stone, not even as still as a root. We, whose lives flicker like a mayfly’s, talk of being rooted, of roots going deep, of the roots of the world. But, no, roots weave and slither through the earth, skimming along the surface, gone in a blink of an eye. As we are.
In 1965, British scientist Dr. James Lovelock developed the Gaia Theory: the Earth as a complex, self-regulating entity involving the biosphere, atmosphere, oceans, and the soil; an entity which seeks an optimal physical and chemical environment for life on this planet. In 2006, Lovelock wrote: “Our planet has kept itself healthy and fit for life, just like an animal does, for most of the more than three billion years of its existence. It was ill luck that we started polluting at a time when the sun is too hot for comfort.”
The Earth has had its ups and downs, ice and desert, shallow seas and raging volcanoes. Walking along a forest trail, stepping over roots and stone, I tread ground that has felt the touch of hominid feet for only the last ten or twenty thousand years; mine is a quiet corner of this Earth. Our roots are shallow here. Walking along the shoreline, it is not so hard to envision that the basin that now holds Lake Superior once held a salty sea, or that it was once the home of a massive glacier. Vastness suits Superior.
A recent NOAA study predicted that Lake Superior will shrink to the point where it will no longer be continuous with the other Great Lakes should the regional temperature rise more than thirteen degrees Celsius, a temperature increase that is well within the long-range forecasts. Smaller lakes will dry up altogether. The cedar swamps will disappear, and these red pine and white pine whose roots I trip up on will head north. Instead, there will be stands of oak, dogwood and sycamore.
But even the oak and sycamore will disappear. Lovelock, who in past years was a soft spoken optimist, has become the voice of doom: “…before this century is over billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable.”
Our planet has seen periods of inferno-like heat, when the forests dried up into wind-blown desert. Drs. Jack Williams, Steve Jackson and John Kutzbach, geologists and climatologists, write that by 2050, the earth will be experiencing ecologies that have never been seen by man. Our once lush equator will be a sun blasted desert, and scientists are predicting a 50%to 90% die-off of species in that ecological niche, a die-off that will occur within the scope of one human generation.
This Earth that we see, this nature, with its water, sky, trees and fecund soil is just the thinnest of skins stretched over ancient molten rock. The dinosaurs, dipping their muzzles in swampy muck, had a much, much longer tenancy than we. Does the Earth remember the dinosaurs? Does it mourn their passing? Dinosaur bones are lovingly mineralized, born into a new life as rock, remade into stone.
Do the dinosaurs rumble and roar to their brother stones; do they sing in their stony rebirth?
Dr. Charles L. Joseph, of Rutgers University, foresees an eventual rise in Earth mean temperature of about ten degrees Celsius above present day levels. He writes: “Regardless, it will eventually become common to have summertime high temperatures of 130 to 140 F in places such as southern Arizona, along with temperatures never dipping below 90 F (even at night) for half of the year. Few agricultural crops as well as livestock can survive such extremes. Moreover, other regions will frequently experience strong storms and flooding. The overall losses as well as the year-to-year uncertainties in agricultural productivity will likely lead to riots, wars, and breakdowns in social order since worldwide production margins are thin and panic often ensues during perceived shortages.”
The likelihood that the earth will change its face so dramatically in one life time is too much for humans to grasp. We depend on the permanence of stone, of roots that hold the land in its place. How shall we react to such sudden, horrible, irreversible change? Even now, as you read this, as your eyes pass over these words, surely your heart is denying the possibility of such a future. My heart, too, cries out against it.
This would be the time and place to offer solutions, to offer a way out of our hellish future. The reality, though, is that the coming climate crisis will sweep upon us with the speed of an avalanche. If humans were to completely disappear off the face of the Earth tomorrow, still the climate change would come. In fifteen years, agricultural areas will shift. What will happen when farmlands shift across mountains and seas, across a country’s boarders? Denial will turn to blame and ignorance will turn into confused horror. By the end of this century, billions will die of famine and war. The most intelligent and ruthless will marshal the remaining resources.
But humans are an amazing species. Some of us will try, heartbreakingly, to lessen the fall. I think that those stories will be the great, mythic tales of the next century. New roots, blood-soaked and tear-soaked, will grow into a world-tree that is beyond what we want to imagine.
Sitting on the Lake Superior beach, my back against a wind torn jack pine, I rub my hand along the roots that burrow into the sand and split the old, old stone. When my son was three years old, a great storm passed over this area. We walked this very beach, stepping over and around the trees that had been blown down. “Trees…” my little son murmured. He looked up at me, his eye wide in amazement. “Trees fall down! Trees fall down!”
My son will be fifty-nine years old in 2050. We have made plans, he and I. He knows that roots are ephemeral, that the childhoods of his grandchildren will be very, very different from the childhood that he is experiencing. My heart goes out to him, for all that my mind shies away from the knowledge of the world that my great-grandchildren will inherit.
My three-times great-grandmother was of the Cree Nation. She didn’t walk these trails, but lived far to the north, in the forests of Quebec, Canada. I plan to walk the trail my Cree ancestress walked. I will plant my roots, as shallow and short-lived as all roots are, in the far north. If I live until 2050, I will be the same age that James Lovelock is right now. If my son lives, if his children live, I will have to look them in the eye and explain all of this.
I will talk to them of the impermanence of roots, of how trees fall down, and of how some things are just too big to see, too complex to comprehend. I will tell them that we don’t own the earth, but that the earth is an extension of our own skin and our own lungs, that the earth’s bones are ground to make our bread.
Time moves slowly below the roots. This frenzied habitation of human-kind has been less than a blink to this earth, like a grain of sand compared to all the mass of this planet. I do not worry about the earth. The earth will carry on as it always has. Whether humans will be part of the earth’s future is what I question, what I hope for.
For, although we are truly rooted here, roots barely skim the surface. They flash like lightning and are gone.
Croley, T. E., II. “Modified Great Lakes hydrology modeling system for considering simple
extreme climates.” NOAA Technical Memorandum GLERL-137. NOAA, Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory, Ann Arbor, MI, 27 pp. (2006).
Joseph, Charles L. Faith, Reason, and Knowledge: The Looming Future in America, 2007 Book excerpt accessed on-line 26 September 2007 http://www.physics.rutgers.edu/~cjoseph/globalwarming.pdf
Lovelock, James “James Lovelock: The Earth is about to catch a morbid fever that may last as long as 100,000 years” The Independent 16 January 2006. Accessed online 20 Sept 2007 http://comment.independent.co.uk/commentators/article338830.ece
Lovelock, James and Ticknell, Crispin The Revenge of Gaia: Earth’s climate Crisis and the Fate of Humanity. New York: Basic Books, 2006
Williams, J. W., Jackson, S. T., Kutzbach, J. E. “Projected distributions of novel and
disappearing climates by 2100 AD”. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
104: 5738-5742 (2007)
In the 1960’s, earth scientists, biologists, geologists, climatologists and atmospheric scientists slowly began to realize that something unexpected was happening: human activity was having an effect on the Earth’s ecologies. We humans, as puny and weak and frightened as we are, have been pushing the Earth’s climate to the crest of a hill.
Now it has been tipped over the crest, and the built up inertia of climate change will gather horrifying speed.
It is hard for humans to contemplate time on a planetary scale. Walking a forest trail along the shoreline of Lake Superior, the path is treacherous with roots. They weave across the forest floor like sea serpents, dipping down into the world below. Here above, in the ether, we live in a mad spin, but below, life moves slow. Great bones of the earth, shelves of ancient rock, creak and groan. Rock cracks and spins away, bubbling and heaving to the surface.
Do buried boulders sing to one another like whale-song as they make their geologic way through earthen depths?
I cannot sit as quiet as a stone, not even as still as a root. We, whose lives flicker like a mayfly’s, talk of being rooted, of roots going deep, of the roots of the world. But, no, roots weave and slither through the earth, skimming along the surface, gone in a blink of an eye. As we are.
In 1965, British scientist Dr. James Lovelock developed the Gaia Theory: the Earth as a complex, self-regulating entity involving the biosphere, atmosphere, oceans, and the soil; an entity which seeks an optimal physical and chemical environment for life on this planet. In 2006, Lovelock wrote: “Our planet has kept itself healthy and fit for life, just like an animal does, for most of the more than three billion years of its existence. It was ill luck that we started polluting at a time when the sun is too hot for comfort.”
The Earth has had its ups and downs, ice and desert, shallow seas and raging volcanoes. Walking along a forest trail, stepping over roots and stone, I tread ground that has felt the touch of hominid feet for only the last ten or twenty thousand years; mine is a quiet corner of this Earth. Our roots are shallow here. Walking along the shoreline, it is not so hard to envision that the basin that now holds Lake Superior once held a salty sea, or that it was once the home of a massive glacier. Vastness suits Superior.
A recent NOAA study predicted that Lake Superior will shrink to the point where it will no longer be continuous with the other Great Lakes should the regional temperature rise more than thirteen degrees Celsius, a temperature increase that is well within the long-range forecasts. Smaller lakes will dry up altogether. The cedar swamps will disappear, and these red pine and white pine whose roots I trip up on will head north. Instead, there will be stands of oak, dogwood and sycamore.
But even the oak and sycamore will disappear. Lovelock, who in past years was a soft spoken optimist, has become the voice of doom: “…before this century is over billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable.”
Our planet has seen periods of inferno-like heat, when the forests dried up into wind-blown desert. Drs. Jack Williams, Steve Jackson and John Kutzbach, geologists and climatologists, write that by 2050, the earth will be experiencing ecologies that have never been seen by man. Our once lush equator will be a sun blasted desert, and scientists are predicting a 50%to 90% die-off of species in that ecological niche, a die-off that will occur within the scope of one human generation.
This Earth that we see, this nature, with its water, sky, trees and fecund soil is just the thinnest of skins stretched over ancient molten rock. The dinosaurs, dipping their muzzles in swampy muck, had a much, much longer tenancy than we. Does the Earth remember the dinosaurs? Does it mourn their passing? Dinosaur bones are lovingly mineralized, born into a new life as rock, remade into stone.
Do the dinosaurs rumble and roar to their brother stones; do they sing in their stony rebirth?
Dr. Charles L. Joseph, of Rutgers University, foresees an eventual rise in Earth mean temperature of about ten degrees Celsius above present day levels. He writes: “Regardless, it will eventually become common to have summertime high temperatures of 130 to 140 F in places such as southern Arizona, along with temperatures never dipping below 90 F (even at night) for half of the year. Few agricultural crops as well as livestock can survive such extremes. Moreover, other regions will frequently experience strong storms and flooding. The overall losses as well as the year-to-year uncertainties in agricultural productivity will likely lead to riots, wars, and breakdowns in social order since worldwide production margins are thin and panic often ensues during perceived shortages.”
The likelihood that the earth will change its face so dramatically in one life time is too much for humans to grasp. We depend on the permanence of stone, of roots that hold the land in its place. How shall we react to such sudden, horrible, irreversible change? Even now, as you read this, as your eyes pass over these words, surely your heart is denying the possibility of such a future. My heart, too, cries out against it.
This would be the time and place to offer solutions, to offer a way out of our hellish future. The reality, though, is that the coming climate crisis will sweep upon us with the speed of an avalanche. If humans were to completely disappear off the face of the Earth tomorrow, still the climate change would come. In fifteen years, agricultural areas will shift. What will happen when farmlands shift across mountains and seas, across a country’s boarders? Denial will turn to blame and ignorance will turn into confused horror. By the end of this century, billions will die of famine and war. The most intelligent and ruthless will marshal the remaining resources.
But humans are an amazing species. Some of us will try, heartbreakingly, to lessen the fall. I think that those stories will be the great, mythic tales of the next century. New roots, blood-soaked and tear-soaked, will grow into a world-tree that is beyond what we want to imagine.
Sitting on the Lake Superior beach, my back against a wind torn jack pine, I rub my hand along the roots that burrow into the sand and split the old, old stone. When my son was three years old, a great storm passed over this area. We walked this very beach, stepping over and around the trees that had been blown down. “Trees…” my little son murmured. He looked up at me, his eye wide in amazement. “Trees fall down! Trees fall down!”
My son will be fifty-nine years old in 2050. We have made plans, he and I. He knows that roots are ephemeral, that the childhoods of his grandchildren will be very, very different from the childhood that he is experiencing. My heart goes out to him, for all that my mind shies away from the knowledge of the world that my great-grandchildren will inherit.
My three-times great-grandmother was of the Cree Nation. She didn’t walk these trails, but lived far to the north, in the forests of Quebec, Canada. I plan to walk the trail my Cree ancestress walked. I will plant my roots, as shallow and short-lived as all roots are, in the far north. If I live until 2050, I will be the same age that James Lovelock is right now. If my son lives, if his children live, I will have to look them in the eye and explain all of this.
I will talk to them of the impermanence of roots, of how trees fall down, and of how some things are just too big to see, too complex to comprehend. I will tell them that we don’t own the earth, but that the earth is an extension of our own skin and our own lungs, that the earth’s bones are ground to make our bread.
Time moves slowly below the roots. This frenzied habitation of human-kind has been less than a blink to this earth, like a grain of sand compared to all the mass of this planet. I do not worry about the earth. The earth will carry on as it always has. Whether humans will be part of the earth’s future is what I question, what I hope for.
For, although we are truly rooted here, roots barely skim the surface. They flash like lightning and are gone.
Croley, T. E., II. “Modified Great Lakes hydrology modeling system for considering simple
extreme climates.” NOAA Technical Memorandum GLERL-137. NOAA, Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory, Ann Arbor, MI, 27 pp. (2006).
Joseph, Charles L. Faith, Reason, and Knowledge: The Looming Future in America, 2007 Book excerpt accessed on-line 26 September 2007 http://www.physics.rutgers.edu/~cjoseph/globalwarming.pdf
Lovelock, James “James Lovelock: The Earth is about to catch a morbid fever that may last as long as 100,000 years” The Independent 16 January 2006. Accessed online 20 Sept 2007 http://comment.independent.co.uk/commentators/article338830.ece
Lovelock, James and Ticknell, Crispin The Revenge of Gaia: Earth’s climate Crisis and the Fate of Humanity. New York: Basic Books, 2006
Williams, J. W., Jackson, S. T., Kutzbach, J. E. “Projected distributions of novel and
disappearing climates by 2100 AD”. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
104: 5738-5742 (2007)
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2007-09-26 04:37 pm (UTC)I need to walk the shores of Lake Superior again before I die...
(no subject)
Date: 2007-09-26 10:32 pm (UTC)(Full repost, comments disabled, with a link back to this post.)
(no subject)
Date: 2007-09-26 10:46 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-09-26 11:00 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-09-26 11:53 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-09-27 12:10 am (UTC)Thankyou for writing about this so beautifully, better than I ever could (I'm a meteorologist-in-training). Every person who is convinced of the reality is a bonus, though I don't know if we still have a chance to change...
superb!
Date: 2007-09-27 01:09 am (UTC)Sadly, we can slow the boat, but we cannot (as far as I can tell) stop or reverse the trends in one or three life-times. Leaders will deal with the devastation that we cause(d).
Sigh
(no subject)
Date: 2007-09-29 04:07 pm (UTC)I think the essay would be more powerful if you transitioned a little more between one and the other. use the poetic stuff to build toward the scientific, or use the scientific to build toward the poetic. Looking at it paragrap-by paragraph, I'd think you don't want to go between one and the other any more than twice in the whole essay.