Nothing to be afraid of: an introduction
About a dozen years ago, I became friends with a couple who lived in central Washington’s Methow Valley — a wide open landscape nestled against the Northeast Cascades, a place of mountains and forests and rivers and high desert grasslands. I visited them, and fell in love with the Valley; I chose my first and only intense trail run because it was there, I hiked there, I visited as often as I could…and I looked at real estate listings, imagining the joys and hardships of living in such a wild, open place. In the city I had built a tiny house and small outbuildings, and I had chickens and a dog; I had a strong urge to build my own house, and maybe have more animals too.
My understanding of the likely speed of climate change meant that I always felt a queasiness at this yearning; I knew that the Valley — always a place of weather extremes, with both scorching summers and bitter winter cold — would probably be hard hit, and I worried that it didn’t have a future that could support as many people as already lived there. The practical shape this concern took was that I feared the wells were going to dry up: that I’d put all my time and money into building a house in a community that would run dry.
Since then, the Valley has been hard hit, and some people are quietly wondering how long they can live here. After needing to evacuate two years in a row for wildfires, my retiree friends decided it was too harsh a place to age, and they left about 5 years ago, though they’d loved their community more than any place they’d ever lived. For many people so far, though, it isn’t the immediate danger of fire to life and property that’s the central issue (nor is it water, yet) — it’s smoke.
In late summer and fall, residents of this magically beautiful and relatively pristine area now suffer through weeks or even months of some of the worst air quality in the world. Many moved here at least in part for the bountiful outdoor activities (world-class hiking, fishing, and cross-country skiing), but now, for weeks on end in some of the used-to-be prettiest times of the year, it’s unbearably hot, the skies are a heavy yellow, and they can’t open their windows, let alone exert themselves outside. Because the region typically had cool nights even in summer, and because many of the longtime residents struggle financially, few people have air conditioning. But as in many places hit by new climate hardships, more of them have responded with resolve — and community-building — than by moving.
In our collective climate imagination, we often fear dramatic dangers: the monster hurricane, the hellish heatwave, the immense fire. But what frays and perhaps eventually devastates communities — especially those with limited resources to adapt — may just as often be things like the sunny-day flooding already experienced in parts of Miami (which makes houses in some neighborhoods unsellable), the lengthening of “smoke season” throughout the West (a potent health threat even when the fires are far away), and, across the country, the seemingly modest increased temperatures that allow more generations of tree-killing beetles (making wildfire a greater danger) and Lyme disease-carrying ticks (making summer walks a threat to long-term health).
At first, a few weeks of smoke might seem okay, especially when weighed against the Valley’s abundant charms, and against the knowledge that other regions suffer their own climate impacts. Everywhere, even for those who have the resources to move elsewhere, the calculus of where might be most livable is nearly impossible: drought, smoke, disease, hurricanes, flooding, sea level rise. How do we measure these things — coming at us in unknowable waves, sometimes quiet for a few years at a time, then roaring in — against our homes, work, and communities, as well as the love we have for the ecology that we’ve chosen or grown up with?
Every winter for the last few years, I’ve come to the Valley for its sun and snow and the 120+ miles of cross-country ski trails through woods and meadows. I’m staying at a friend’s yurt for a couple of weeks in Mazama as I write this now, in mid-November. It started snowing as soon as I got here, and after a few days there was almost 2’ on the ground — a good six weeks earlier than usual. It’s not normal, but it’s abnormal in the right way. After a Seattle fall of heat and smoke, it feels like a benediction.
But after the last few years of increasingly obvious climate impacts, my pleasure in this place has shifted — no longer a yearning to root, and to know who I would be and how my life would develop if I stayed: winter rituals of skiing and cooking, skies full of stars, animals and writing and guests who stay for a week at a time. That might have been a treasured phase of my life, might even have been the rest of my life, if I’d started imagining it just five or ten years before I did.
Instead, I have a simple if deep appreciation of getting to be here at all, like I’m a visitor to an extraordinary and resilient friend who’s very sick. This is both a clear-eyed feeling and a humble one. At a minimum, this place is struggling ecologically, with a disease for which we understand the etiology, but have begun the healing process (ending fossil fuels, primarily) years late, and far too slowly. At worst, it’s dying — changing so fast that any attachment to what is, always involves cards that have been shuffled to the back of the deck while we weren’t looking. Coming realities are just behind others, just out of reach, and possibly about to trump the hand the community is holding.
It’s not just the Methow, of course. This may, of necessity, be a shift that we make in coming years regarding many if not most places; for the next few decades at least, I suspect the number of places that are nearly impossible to live in will be relatively small, and the great bulk of the rest will be varying levels of (unusually) difficult, which may have almost as much to do with how the community has come together as how often the stressors come and how bad they are. There will be precious few places that are mostly untouched by the new (and ever-worsening) atmospheric regime.
Even more dishearteningly, it’s not just place that will be increasingly precarious; that precarity will have ripple effects to other things that we’re accustomed to anchoring our lives in, like friends and work. Since I received the gift of a week at a Zen retreat last spring, I’ve been mulling over the Five Remembrances, and it seems to me that the fourth has never been more true for more people: “all that is dear to me and everyone I love are of the nature to change. There is no way to escape being separated from them.” This is…not a thought that most of us want to dwell on.
But we should, because if we don’t enlarge the shape and tenor of the things that help us feel connected and purposeful, everything we face will be both harder and worse — harder because we resist it, worse because in our resistance we are likely to hurt others.
Regarding a sense of home, to state the obvious, this separation is one thing when it’s a place we love but haven’t made the locus of our daily lives. It’s another thing altogether when it’s a place we’ve lived for decades, or our whole lives — perhaps even where generation upon generation of our ancestors have lived.
It brings up a host of questions for me: Can we see ourselves as natives and citizens of a struggling, precarious Earth, and not of our birth or chosen places? Can we see others as having an equal right to be in the place where we are? Because in places that have more climate stability — the places where people will be able to remain in their existing communities — we’ll need to, or we’ll become monsters.
When both those who are historically indigenous to that place and those who have lived there all their lives do make room for those who have migrated in, how can the former peoples and their relationship to the place be honored, while the latter are deeply welcomed and integrated into the life of the place?
Can we make a society where our fealty is to one another, and to a future that recognizes the reality and strength of our interdependence?
This cloud of questions is intimately connected to the ultimate question of our time: how quickly and completely can we minimize the damage to Earth’s ecosystems, so that there will be less forced migration to begin with, and more stable places?
***
In the silence of the early snowfall, I seem to feel the landscape’s yearning for deeper slumber — as if it wants feet upon feet of snow, even at this lower elevation, for months on end. And perhaps it does, if a regional ecology can be said to have desires (its denizens have desires, so why not?), because it is snow rather than rain that is the natural abundance here, staving off drought and keeping the wildness resilient. If extraordinarily copious snow kept out more humans, myself included, then so much the better.
Is this projection, this sense of the landscape’s desires? Is it only I who would like to think of this place experiencing a deep hibernation? What does this yearning even represent for me — do I picture a mini ice age, or simply a long winter? A series of them, perhaps. I don’t know how much it would help in wildfire prevention, given the searing dry heat of the summers, but the mountain snows are our water bank — because of them, the rivers run full in spring, refreshing the bioregion and providing enough for animals and farms and power too. I run my car on these winter snows. We all need them.
The countless other creatures here get to want what they want. But I worry that in me, this is a deceptively gentle apocalyptic fantasy, a secret hope that by making a place more difficult for humans (though likely for many animals as well), it can rebound. I know better than to truly wish for such things — as always, it would be those least to blame who would suffer most, while those most responsible for twisting the knob on heat and drought would simply move somewhere that’s still relatively easy, somewhere where one could turn away from the news and pretend that the planet’s climate and ecosystems are not rapidly fraying. The desire for a post-human Earth that’s openly claimed by some (and felt by many, at least in rare moments) isn’t merely self-loathing and self-defeating, it’s immoral and presumptuous in the extreme: to understand that all humans are complicated and that many are weak, bullying, and/or selfish is not the same as knowing that all are irredeemable, and there are many people and cultures that have learned to live symbiotically in their ecologies. Why should they suffer for the mistakes of others?
***
I’ve noticed lately that the letup from the mild climate impacts I’ve experienced resonates not just as relief, but as joy. It was joy I felt when Seattle skies were suddenly cleared of smoke by the wind — even though I knew, guiltily, that the smoke was merely pushed elsewhere, into other lungs. And it’s joy I feel in the early snow here in Mazama, just a few weeks after the central Washington skies cleared too: unwilled, days-long, and enchanted joy, like I’m falling in love with these places all over again.
I’m troubled by this; I know how others are suffering — this fall, in Pakistan and China in particular, but also in Florida and other places. Many people lost their homes, and their lives may never have the same level of security again, especially if that security was modest to begin with. Their climate travails are far, far worse than anything I’ve experienced; we in the Pacific Northwest had the truly frightening “heat dome” in June 2021, but it was only a few days; Jacobabad, Pakistan, had nearly two months of daily highs hovering around and over 115° this year. Given the darkness of suffering around the world, it feels unseemly to rejoice in delightful, old-fashioned, and natural-seeming weather — and also delusional, because the letup is temporary; it’s not a sign that anything is actually trending in the direction that the world so desperately needs.
But the sudden letup of even modest suffering can remind us to be grateful for the beauties of the world that we still have, and thus perhaps to protect them.
Snow in particular makes me a child again; it feels like a promise of play and magic and dark and rest all at once. This is no doubt amplified by the fact that I no longer live somewhere where snow persists long enough to get dreary and dirty and highly inconvenient; in my young adult years around Boston, I think it felt magical only very occasionally (mostly, I worried about enraging my Somerville neighbors if I inadvertently parked in “their” cleared spaces). But when it’s not deadly, and when our lives can accommodate it without real discomfort, then inconvenience can be a beautiful thing, forcing us to change our rhythms, adapt to our limitations, and see the world differently: literally, at least — a landscape of city, meadow, or mountain suddenly covered in a foot of new snow is a landscape transformed. Walking or skiing slowly through a deep snowfall at night, with all the darkness suddenly bright and still and silent, is one of the surest ways I know to be reminded of the primitive magic in the night.
It may be that now, at 56, I’m finally learning secrets of…not detachment, exactly; I’ve always been and continue to be ridiculously attached to everyone and everything I love. I feel like there are tendrils that connect me to the people, the animals, the places, and the experiences that I treasure — and often, these attachments are represented by ritual: a morning run in the same woods, a dinner or a walk with a friend every week, regular hikes with another. It has a physicality to it, a place in my life. This is so true that, ridiculous as this may be, when I go to places closely associated with people I love, who are gone from those places, I don’t really comprehend that absence at a deep level; I still absolutely feel them there, so it feels to me like they’re somehow just around the corner, or on a plane that I can’t access. This is living people, for the most part, so being metaphysical about it seems a bit odd; I could simply call them.
But despite my stubborn attachments, I’m learning how to appreciate things in the moment, without imagining their persistence into the future. Climate change has made so much so unreliable: I do not believe that even the lives of privileged folks like me will ever again in my lifetime (or over many lifetimes) be predictable beyond a few years if we’re lucky, a few months if we’re not. You cannot count on staying in a place. You cannot count on the place staying recognizable, if you do. You cannot count on life or health or wealth or work — or much of anything, really, to remain the same. Friends and family may need to move to places other than the ones that you move to; their health and lives, like yours, will be increasingly at risk from pandemics and other climate stressors. There’s simply no way around it — the coming decades and possibly centuries*, even for those who are privileged and/or in the global north, are going to be hard. For those who are not privileged and/or in the global north, they will be very, very hard.
For many people this was always true, of course — and for all of us it was true to some degree. I’m the youngest in a family of seven children, and I always vaguely imagined that the sixth and I would have metaphorical rocking chairs next to one another on a porch somewhere in our 80’s, eating chocolate chip cookies and playing Scrabble. We’d all been blessed with excellent health and pretty good habits, and started with a large measure of cultural and socioeconomic privilege to boot. Erica died in June, at 61, after 5 years with frontotemporal dementia, a disease I would not wish on my worst enemy. So yes, of course, nothing has ever been guaranteed. I know that.
But the pool of what cannot be counted on now has enlarged vastly for everyone. I imagine it represented by all the water that’s no longer in the dried-up reservoirs in the American West. All those images of bathtub rings in Glen Canyon? That water’s all gone into the pool of what cannot be counted on.
Henry James wrote: “Summer afternoon — summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.”
This is…not true anymore for those in the Methow Valley. As a dear friend has said, it used to be the time they looked forward to all year, and now it’s a source of dread. Will the home you built with your own hands burn down? Will your community be devastated? Will the smoke drive everyone inside for months, so that community itself begins to be something of an abstraction?
How will we all manage this changeability? Can we learn to appreciate our joys without wanting to hang onto them? I have begun to appreciate the Methow’s joys without yearning (too much) to live here…but my fantasy of a long, deep winter may represent another kind of continuation urge — the seasons are supposed to be highly predictable; they defined the knowability of change, its comforting regularity. That sense of continuation is likely one of the foundational urges, for humans or for any being.
If rooting in place gets harder and harder, and if relationships and work will also be more precarious, what can we root in?
Increasingly, it seems to me that what we need to root in is a shared vision of the future we desire, because communities of purpose can sustain us even when communities of place falter, and they can strengthen us for the multi-lifetime journey of getting there. Our labors may well not manifest a clear and beautiful regeneration in nature or human society during our lifetimes, but if I can see, even as a glimmer, that we might get there in a few more lifetimes, then I can understand that anything I do now is precious. Collectively, we have to power to ensure that this regeneration is a living possibility, and I can think of no better legacy than that.
Again I find the Five Remembrances clarifying. The fifth is the only one that offers something other than loss; it offers a path forward that integrates loss but focuses on our impacts: “I inherit the results of my actions of body, speech, and mind. My actions are my continuation.”
For the sake of our own psychological and spiritual wellbeing, and for the sake of the world, our actions must work towards the kind of continuation we hope for.
What we do leaves its imprints in the living world, good and bad; we leave some ecosystems, communities, and individuals hurting, and some heartened. Those impacts won’t end when our hearts stop beating. A friend of my sister’s gave me a book by a dying minister that puts it this way: the only thing that cannot be taken from us by death is the love we have given away. This also means: the work, the money, the time and attention we’ve given to the world and our fellow humans. All of that is love — and in the deepest sense, it’s all that we have.
There will be many answers to the question of how we live in the coming years. Communities of place will have a central role, as the people in them either pull together to face their shared hardships, or fail to do so — and welcome others in, or fail to do so. And also: for many people, it’s precisely the local communities that will fall apart, as the places themselves do the same. And also: many more of us may be on the move than are currently thinking we will be. And also: it’s not only places that will be precarious — all else will be, too, including the health of even those in the more stable places; our pandemic response has proven deeply problematic, and then there’s the increased toll of housing shortages, wildfire smoke, heat, drought, and more.
How can we move into the coming darkness with vision and courage? When we’re forced to remake aspects of our cities, nations, and lives, how can we make sure to move forward humanely rather than getting stuck in how we’ve always thought and what we’ve always done? How do we find comfort and even joy more often than fear? Fear evolved to keep us safe — we needed to seek shelter when we heard a roar, or jump when we saw a big snake. But when its cause is as diffuse as the whole world becoming more chaotic, it doesn’t keep us safe — nothing does. Fear will only keep us from navigating the changes in the ways that we would hope to.
In a way, the sense of safety is also a threatened ecology — a web of intricately connected forces suffering from the same instability that other ecologies are suffering from. When we are there, we should appreciate it both as an ephemeral gift to be cherished, and a living web that it’s our job to help preserve for everyone.
We will get sick and die, as we always have. It will likely happen more unexpectedly and sooner for many of us in the coming decades, but while we are alive, we have the chance to remake the world — not into some kind of utopia, but into a place where we’ve finally (again) elevated the role of care for one another and the ecologies into which we were born, recognizing that such care is the only way we ourselves can be whole. Because we are not separate: not from each other, and not from the natural world around us. This is the dirty little secret that Western culture has told us we must not admit into our awareness (for if we do, we will understand that we are no better than all the rest, and we do not rise to the top…wherever that is). This stance has cost us our health, our relationship with the world, our humanity. We can abandon it.
We are a part of an intricate, complex, and unfathomably beautiful interconnected world that we’ve hardly begun to understand.
What we may lack in familiar comforts as we move forward into a changed and changing world, we can gain in humanity, and gain in understanding.
A great deal will be difficult, sometimes incomprehensibly so. But if we appreciate the connections and life that we have while also focusing deeply on what cannot be taken from us — the love embedded in our actions towards one another, our ecologies, and a shared future — then there’s nothing to be afraid of.
___________
*Clearly, it will be centuries or millennia before the natural world comes back into balance; I do believe it’s possible, though, that we will find a better way of interacting with each other and our changed world long before it regains that balance — and thus, the period of grave difficulty might not be so very long.
A note on the title: while working on this, I wasn’t sure if it was a single essay, or a way of beginning to articulate thoughts that would lead to several essays. After a couple of weeks, it seemed to me that it will function as the introduction to a series of essays. This is a bit odd — usually one would write the introduction last! — but so be it; if I collect the essays into a book I’ll no doubt edit this substantially, but for now, I think it serves as some useful navigation for me in what I hope to encourage people to be thinking about. I hope it’s useful for you too.
