It’s the first week of 2022, and much of what I’ve been reading in social media land is a ‘year in review’ from 2021 -in pictures, movies seen, museums visited, meals eaten, or books read. There are lots of family pictures from my friends who have kids. I’ve enjoyed many household improvement before and after shots; I love The Old House and seeing my friends do it all is fascinating and inspiring. But what struck me is how many of my friends are regularly reading, and how much is getting read! Lists after lists of books and interesting media are being shared, and I assume downloaded for later consumption.
As I’ve scanned through these lists, I’ve realized that I recognize few of the authors, and sometimes, not even the publishing house. I’m a reader, and so this was a little surprising to me. I hadn’t realized I hadn’t been reading because I HAVE been reading nonstop, just not books. Which is way weird for me. Before the last few years, I’ve typically read several books a week. But other kinds of text have taken over my reading.
Reports. Policies. News articles. And more reports. Even reports about reports. That’s pretty much it these days.
I feel inundated with data and opinion, spin and dire prediction. You may recall the hullabaloo caused by the 2018 United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, which stated clearly and without reservation that we only had about a dozen years to reverse our disastrous trajectory towards climate disaster. This report was so startling and comprehensive because it had been primary generated by inputting real world data into multiple climate predictive models. Virtually any way you sliced it with real numbers, we were in trouble and it was happening faster than anyone had thought.
I do have books from that report. Beautiful books with gorgeous pictures of what is in danger and frightening charts of doom. Recently, I’ve been reading new reports, mostly online. The next IPCC assessment is due in 2022, and the Physical Sciences working group submitted its full report in August, 2021.
The 2022 Assessment will be made up of three working group reports. We have the physical. Next month, the Impact working group will submit information about the most vulnerable places and people in regards to the coming changes. Working group 3, focusing on Mitigation and Intervention, will be released later in the Spring.
The Physical Working Group report focuses on five scenarios, from little to no action taken to the most actions and change that could be taken. Even in the “we get it together right now and mobilize” scheme, we experience upheaval, change, and death. The “do nothing" scheme is the stuff of films, only it isn’t fiction.
The report is deeply alarming, and is an in-depth dive into expansions of physical degradation and crisis triggered by climate change. Essentially, it says that the strange and destructive weather and elemental disasters we’ve recently experienced will become normative. The events will become more violent, frequent, and be larger in scope than previous phenomenon. This is the group that deals with the physical and elemental -the earth and how it moves, air and how it behaves, fire and water.
Many people were so alarmed by the 2018 IPCC report that new climate movements sprang up around the world. And this is a good thing. In other countries, and at several corporate levels, movement towards the climate goals made in Paris in 2015 finally started in earnest when this data, driven by the addition of real world numbers, made much of it all more real.
But very little changed here in the United States from a policy standpoint and nothing in process or priorities. I suppose it all still seems so distant, something that can be deferred. Reports and data aren’t useful here in the US for turning public opinion or changing policy. We primarily respond to experiences, to testimony, to vision.
But the future in store for us is clear if we do nothing, and won’t be easy regardless.
We’ve seen a little bit of this future in the last month. Tornadoes ripped through Kentucky before Christmas, and last week, a wind-whipped wildfire raged through Front Range communities, destroying over 600 homes in Colorado. I hope we all know this -it isn’t that climate change brings new and bizarre things. It’s that the effects of climate change amplify and enlarge the effects of already existing weather patterns. Wildfire is always a danger here in the mountain West, but the devastation was greatly increased by dry grasslands and unusually high winds.
All of this is predictable, which means it can be mitigated. But nothing can change without radical shifts in how we operate our public and common life. Our political systems are broken, and do not serve our needs now, the needs of Creation, or the needs of generations yet to come.
American culture in the United States has lost its hold on the Commons. I believe the rise of the greed-is-good movement of the 1980s washed away much of what we collectively valued, not like a flood but more like a seeping leak.
The quality of our shared life was a valued concept, and people do still hold as important a ‘neighborhood feel’ or a ‘sense of community’ -certainly planners and developers have attempted to capture community as a commodity.
When disaster strikes, we can still rally that Spirit well, and authentically. We can muster care, concern, and action for “the other” when their homes are lost to a raging wind-whipped fire or devastating tornadoes. That gives me a good deal of hope.
And yet, we have abdicated any agency outside of these emergencies to craft what we need to thrive. We have ceded public concern for private goals and gains, and lumped it all under some sort of search for personal freedom, as if that were ever a defined thing.
Without a vision of shared life, without something generative to move towards, we turn inwards. Our units of concern become smaller and smaller. A city, a neighborhood. A single church group, a social club. A gaggle of high school friends, college alums. Like-minded companions online. Your biological family.
We cease to consider larger context, and this is dangerous when the collective is living life together. Perhaps it would be possible to wholly isolate into one of these insular identities, but all of these separations are essentially false.
A pnenomenon like a fast and raging wildfire only emphasizes these points. Working class communities and multi-million dollar planned developments were all consumed in equal measure last week on the Front Range of Colorado. Property value wasn’t a concern for the flames.
Re-investment in the commons, in our shared moral, social, physical lives is key in creating the world we need to thrive. This is a deeper call than the realization that rising tides lift us all, or that we’re all in the same storm, or that we need each other. This is the ground on which we will build, seek refuge, form community, heal and grow. We have all we need, and we are called to build something new.