Category Archives: Climate Change

The Matters of Location

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My farm notes often seem to start with the wind, writing as I frequently do just before sunrise. In the dark it is what I hear that informs. Last Saturday morning, the sun would not appear above the eastern ridge for another hour and a half, and out by the barn the gates creaked with each gust. The wind caught the oaks, shaking their dry brown leaves before releasing them to hit the house, then it curled under my drafty windowsill, cooling my hands and coffee.

When I let the dogs out at sunrise, the temperature was an unseasonably mild 69. In an East Tennessee mid-December that can only mean one thing: change. By the time I poured my first cup of coffee and Buster the rat terrier had nailed his first small varmint out in the muscadines, the change had started whipping full force through the valley. I didn’t need the weather service to tell me strong storms would hit us, possibly as soon as late morning, before piling up and spilling over the mountains to our east. Sure enough, an early morning peek at the news confirmed devastation far to our west and northwest, with a death toll predicted and only expected to rise.

As the morning progressed, concerned text messages began rolling in to check on our welfare. We did the same with friends who had family in the hardest-hit area of western Kentucky. A friend just 35 minutes to our southeast lost a portion of her barn roof in the path of the storms, but when the first and most intense line had passed, our immediate area emerged unscathed.

Now, not that damage couldn’t and hasn’t occurred before from severe weather in this broad valley. We have had our share of violent storms, floods, occasional heavy snows, even tornadoes (though not in our smaller valley), and, most damaging to our farm, the long-running extreme drought of 2016. But this area of the upper Tennessee river valley, extending from Knoxville down to around Athens, is not noted for extreme weather. This land — an area of 30 to 50 miles across that is tucked between the Cumberland escarpment to the west and the Appalachian Mountains to the east — typically escapes the worst of the weather inflicted on the plateau and Middle Tennessee, as well as the tornado alley that starts near Chattanooga and cuts southeast across Alabama.

Location, for us, matters, at least for now. While the impacts of severe weather are here to see, those of climate change are really a matter of percentages. A 10 percent increase in the number of microbursts, and the town of Waverly is removed from the map. A 5 percent increase in the frequency of F-4 tornadoes, and a candle factory in Mayfield, Kentucky, is blown out. A catastrophic drought lasts 13 months instead of seven.

We could build in more resiliency to our infrastructure. But increasingly too often, we are spending our spare energies and resources just rebuilding. With a 5 percent more here and a 12 percent more there, a budget is soon depleted. The scope of preparing for every wall of water rushing down every narrow valley, the bulldozing of towns by 250 mph tornadic winds, the leveling of cities by a Cat 5 hurricane, the occasional loss of crops on a continental scale — all is too daunting for a civilization that already appears exhausted fighting useless culture wars.

And as we are now learning, while the impacts of severe weather are great, the changing percentages of its frequency are what really tell the tale. That’s a particularly alarming thought when you’ve always taken comfort in thinking your location keeps you safe.

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Reading this weekend: A Time of Gifts (P. L. Fermor). About a young man’s walk across Europe in the early 1930’s.

Absent Landscapes

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I grew up on a dirt road at the end of which was an old-growth wood of many hundreds of acres. It bordered what is called Contraband Bayou. I have written before of this wood and Jean Lafitte, the pirate rumored to have buried his loot among the cypresses. I hunted those woods, fished those waters, was a boy along those banks, in that place. Today, like all the area surrounding, it is concrete pavement illuminated by halogen lights, a Walmart, a Super Target, a casino or two, budget and luxury hotels, homes built on every conceivable patch and lot. It is an absent landscape.

For those of you still advocating for eternal growth and progress, I pose these questions: What is your secret to finding beauty in what we have achieved? Does your heart flutter at more shopping opportunities and a new strip mall? Are the woods and bayous and rivers an obstacle to your betterment? Do you see productive agricultural land along the highway as an opportunity for a solar farm of concrete and silicon and metal? When you see a pastured hill or a majestic stand of hardwoods, do you calculate only the fill dirt or the timber that can be sold from it. Is your heart unmoved by the leveled and the dead? If so, then I will tell you that you are the enemy.

Last year, when the world came to a stop — when the skies were empty of travel, when the wheels of commerce slowed, when seagoing vessels with the latest fashions from sweatshops rusted at their piers for lack of workers — tell me that you didn’t catch the smallest flicker of hope for a better and more sane world. If not, then you are the enemy.

In that year, when you had your hands in the dirt for the first time in your life, when the first tomato was ripe and sliced in your salad, when the sweet corn you grew was roasting on the grill, when the chicken you raised had been butchered and fried for Sunday dinner, tell me that in your secret treasure chest of desires you longed instead to be in Myrtle Beach or Pigeon Forge playing putt-putt or standing in line at the all-you-can-eat buffet with tens of thousands of your kin. Tell me that and I’ll tell you that you are the enemy.

For the news writer who penned these words: “Right now, the mega site is just an empty landscape. While there’s still a long way to go before business is up and running, it’s a springboard for growth at Red Stag and in Sweetwater” — do you sincerely believe that the pristine 400-acre property next to the interstate is really improved by becoming an Amazon-like distribution center? If so, I’ll say once more, You are the enemy. You would sacrifice 300-year-old oaks and countless wildlife for 10 to 20 years of economic activity.

Tell me that you find an absent landscape of pavement and metal buildings beautiful. Then give me your address; someone wants to know.

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R.I.P. Diane Di Prima

“I Know Where I’m Going”

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I’m ending the 2020 year with a repost from December 2015. It touches on several issues dear to my heart. I’ll leave it to you to suss out what those might be. Everyone have a Happy New Year! I do appreciate each of you who stop by with me each week. And a special thanks to those who comment. While a comment is not expected, it does encourage.

Cheers!

Alas, we are down to only turnips in the garden for the next 3 months.

As our betters jet back from Paris, with bellies full of artisanal French food and exciting business contacts that allow them to both profit and “save” the world, our thoughts on the farm have been on Delores. She of the wandering tribe of swine that seldom saw a fence without seeing an opportunity. She who after a gallant effort to artificially inseminate and an arranged marriage of four weeks to a neighbor’s boar is still not pregnant.

We are now faced with a classic small farm dilemma: do we keep her for another try at motherhood or convert her to sausage? Back in August, during her matrimonial date with Old Red, Delores was what is euphemistically described as “pleasingly plump.” She has now been on an owner-imposed diet and slimmed down to what we hope is a good breeding weight. (Yes, hogs, as well as other livestock, can be too fat to conceive.)

There are so many small farm models to follow in this world. And we do not offer ours up to any but ourselves: a three-way contest between profits, sufficiency, and fulfillment. Last week’s post on taking time out from the first two to sit in the woods and do nothing but meditate and smoke a cigar spurred one online reader to call me a slacker.

The conclusion I drew was that, in his mind, the monetary profits of the farm stood superior to sufficiency and fulfillment. An imbalance, if applied mindlessly, that has contributed greatly to this world of rapidly diminishing resources and a climate rollercoaster. Which reminded me of a another recent commenter who seemed to take issue with the notion that achieving sufficiency was anything other than a weigh-station toward profitability or a path down the road to abject poverty.

So, as we watched the old classic set in the Scottish Hebrides, “I Know Where I’m Going,” last night, I chuckled when one of the characters took umbrage at being told that the villagers were poor because they had no money. What poverty of imagination, she said, that would imagine us as poor because we lack money.

Hers was an outlook actively at odds with the modern mindset, the one that devalues the wealth derived from family, community, and being a part of the earth, the one that feeds on the acquisitive and that can, if not moderated, create a life out of balance.

It is this mindset, I think, that led to conditions that energized our betters — a convening of corporations, governments, and nonprofit agencies — to spend a week dining in Paris. Now, with their bellies bloated and their backs sore from congratulatory pats, I have the sneaking suspicion that all of their grubbing around for money will result in a climate plan for more of the same.

We, meanwhile, spent our weekend on the farm. We dined on produce from our gardens and meat we raised. We worked hard, relaxed, and gave a favored sow another chance.

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Reading this weekend: Endurance: Shackleton’s incredible voyage (A. Lansing).

 

Fatigue

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If there is a better word for our 2020 zeitgeist, well, I am too tired to think of it. As we creep toward December 31, fatigue has spread across the land. Like a plague miasma in a Gothic novel, it leaves each of us fevered and unwilling to face the hard work of our daily lives, much less the world at large. We do not have enough weak and trembling fingers to point at all of the demons in the mist, even to identify the one who is reflected back to us in the mirror.

Our day-to-day existence seems depressed by the larger circumstances of this crisis year. Friends facing health concerns wait crucial months for treatments. Family evacuate the comfort of their homes from impending hurricanes or wildfires, and still look forward to a long and difficult recovery. Elderly relatives don’t get visited for fear of contamination or because vague distant bureaucrats have issued unclear, sometimes unfounded parameters (Is it better at an advanced age to die cloistered and alone or from a disease contracted while sitting with and holding the hand of a family member?). These frequent short circuits to everyday living — overlayed by the impending elections, imploding civic life, economic uncertainties, and shortages of the small necessities of average life — fatigue our waking moments.

This year even more than usual, the farm has been a refuge. I have had more time for projects, gardens, interactions with my partner, and all the things that have made this life, frankly, pretty special. Even so, at times it seems as if the blue sky is the eye of the storm. I get out and get the work done, I sit on the porch and enjoy the birdsong, but only before the next wave of bad news hits and leaves debris in its wake.

Such as it is for our race and always has been: brief blue skies before war, pestilence, and hunger sweep back across the land. Yet, we moderns have by and large lived our lives sheltered from the worst. And it has made us soft. We complain about the hangnail, not imagining that a cancer awaits us all. Our fatigue arises from our failure to recognize that history is not only a cycle but also a hurricane. A moment of seeming separation from history does not provide immunity from its winds. Ours is the delusion of the moviegoer, that the dynamics outside have been suspended while we sit in a cushy chair, entertained, in the darkness.

I am not afraid. But it is disconcerting to speculate that the blue sky we have lived under for most of our lives will be going away. History has proven it so.

Farming, for me, has been the practical vaccine for what ails. My optimism is tempered by the expected catastrophe. Out of that mix comes whatever happens. Better to stand, no matter how fatigued, and meet it with resolve, even if it destroys what we have loved.

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Reading this weekend: Local Culture: a journal of the Front Porch Republic (The Christopher Lasch issue).

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BTW: Brutus, fellow blogger, at The Spiral Staircase, paid us a farm visit. That in turn inspired his next post, broadly about dogs and always about more than the main topic. https://brutus.wordpress.com/2020/10/15/a-dogs-life/

Landfall (again)

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A picture of a crawfish boil seemed appropriate

Tonight, my hometown of Lake Charles, Louisiana prepares for the landfall of Laura. I have more than a dozen family members in the path. Fortunately all have evacuated. But it is uncertain what they will return to face. Keep them in your thoughts and prayers. The nervous waiting until landfall and what the sun will show tomorrow reminded me of this piece I wrote after Hurricane Harvey (2017). Be well and I’ll return with something new on Sunday.

Growing up on the Gulf Coast, where life was measured by the big storms, your given name could serve as a handy marker of your age. Post-1957, Audrey disappeared from the lists of incoming elementary pupils almost entirely. After ’69, no one named their child Camille.

In the hallway of our home in Lake Charles, Louisiana, hung a map. On it we plotted the latitude and longitude of each new disturbance as it sprang to life off the African coast or in Mexico’s Gulf of Campeche. My older brother, always a bit of a weather nut, actively tracked the storms. He would often plot an apocalyptic path to our door, then erase the hoped-for trajectory with a “there is always next year” shrug when the storm petered out or went off to blight someone else’s life. It’s not that he ever wished harm on anyone. There’s just something seductive about the destructive power of a hurricane. It’s like watching a Powerball lottery grow, except that the payoff is something that no one really wishes to win.

This past week it was my extended family in Beaumont and Houston who won that lottery, and recipients of the winning tickets will still be dealing with the aftermath in years to come. Harvey is just one in a long list of tropical storms and hurricanes that have recently resulted in 500-to-1,000-year floods in the South: Houston (2010, 2015), Baton Rouge (2016), Columbia, South Carolina (2015), the Carolinas (2016). Sadly, epic floods account for only a handful of the extreme events now occurring with increasing frequency across the globe, and it looks as if this nasty-weather lottery will only keep building to a stronger payout with each daily contribution made to the fund of planetary climate change.

As the waves of Harvey hit the Texas shoreline, likewise a predictable wave of finger-pointing washed ashore. Seems that a certain segment of the population confused the larger community of devastated coastal residents with the lesser community that had voted for Donald Trump, and proceeded to say that they had gotten what they deserved —blaming the whole of Gomorrah on just its naughty residents.

This holier-than-thou attitude rankles me. Because, let’s face it, whether we fall into the camp of climate-change deniers, with their heads buried firmly in the sand, or climate-change acknowledgers, staring in awe as the storm approaches, virtually none of us is doing anything significant to change the planet’s trajectory of catastrophe or to prepare for its impact.

Both camps, by and large, are still active participants in the consumer-industrial machine. Unless we have gone Amish or medieval, we depend on the people of the Gulf Coast for our cushy life. Our great collective illusion of progress is that we can continue to enjoy our current lifestyle simply by making the correct purchasing choices or pulling a lever in the voting booth, that we can use magic or tweak our way out of this mess. We can’t. That life is no longer sustainable.

According to that map hanging in the world’s hallway, the potentially cataclysmic future — for earth and, consequently, for humanity — has now passed the Leeward Islands and is picking up speed and strength. No wiping the grease board when a fantasy destructive track changes its course.

We all have bought into this lottery, and we all are at risk of winning it. So, if there is to be finger-pointing, let’s do it facing the mirror. And in the meantime, fill your bathtub with water, stock your larder, and prepare for landfall.