we breathe in when plants breathe out

 

I have a vague memory of cooler days and there has actually been the odd late evening just after sunset when I reached for a thing called cardigan -  the lightweight version mind you. Thankfully, with longer nights, there is a pleasant enough cooling down period and the early hours offer a short promising glimpse of maybe even autumn. But before autumn, the gods of gardening have invented pears and plums and apples and grapes, all calling for attention.

This summer has been brutal, not just due to heat and drought but also due to hard personal private loss and grief and all that it entails. I am nursing this idea that once I have recovered my ability to walk proper long distances, I will walk away from it all and towards something lighter, easier, a more hopeful way of living again.

Part of me is bursting with ideas and plans and energy and then I find myself carefully walking down a steep hillside after watching the solar equinox yesterday and I have to stop every so often to let people pass and to figure out a way to reassure my beating heart that I will never again slip on a narrow, dry, stony, uneven, downhill stretch again, at least not now. (And I did not. But back home I crawled onto the comfortable sofa and felt sorry for myself for the rest of evening.)

 

more riverbed than river

This is where I cycled yesterday with the sun burning down on my back. I have never seen it like that. And still I am hopeful. When I cycle back from the river and through the small streets of our subburb which was once a medieval village, I can count the number of roofs and/or balconies without solar panels on one hand. Every day, I get notifications about meetings, self-help groups, technical support groups, sharing skills and ideas and tools, and also concerted actions, rallies and court cases and reminding local elected people of their responsibilities. Yes, the idea that climate action is about individual responsibility is as ridiculous as suggesting everyone can equip themselves to fight in war. But around here, I feel we are many and growing. And if it's a battle, so be it.

 

. . . people who throw up their hands and give up. I will assume some of them sincerely believe that it's too late, there's nothing we can do, we have no solutions, and nobody cares. For others it might be an excuse for doing nothing – if you can pretend the drowning people will inevitably drown, you justify remaining a bystander. 

. . . if you think the entire realm of life on earth is threatened wouldn't you throw yourself into understanding the threat the way you do when you get an alarming medical diagnosis? But lots of people don't. They make uninformed we-are-doomed-it's-too-late pronouncements and remain bystanders. 

Rebecca Solnit 

 

 . . we live on a planet where the cheapest way to make power is to point a sheet of glass to the sun

. . . sunlight travels 93 million miles to reach the earth but none of those miles go through the straight of Hormuz

Bill McKibben 

 

It's as if the ancient gods of nature are playing a prank: “We’ll set the world alight, make pigeons fall dead from the sky, make ash rain down, cook people in their homes, melt the tarmac in the car parks ... and turn the oceans into a lukewarm soup. Let’s see who notices what – and when.”

Every child knows what’s happening here. It is humanity’s most tedious, most predictable and most thoroughly studied catastrophe. But its scale still seems too vast for political action, so everywhere the response is just pretending nothing is happening. 

Instead, scientists are being discredited. On certain social media platforms, their findings have long been regarded as elitist musings from an ivory tower. The handling of the Covid pandemic served as a blueprint for the far-right attack on science.

 

Nils Minkmar