The most recent issue of The Sun has a picture on the cover by photographer Forest Woodward. It’s been laying on the coffee table haunting me ever since it arrived. The photograph is a head shot of Elsie, a young girl from Tuvalu, with water dripping off her hair and face, as she stands in the Funafuti lagoon. Hers is a face of innocence. But if you look at the eyes long enough, you can see the deeper question of “why?”
Tuvalu is a series of islands in the South Pacific. Seeing the Woodward photographs and reading about their situation reminded me of a video I saw of Kiribati, another island in the Pacific ocean. In that video some young people toward the end are asking those of us in the U.S. for help. They don’t want to leave their home. Both countries are on the cusp of disappearing from climate change and rising oceans. Resisting the encroachment of ocean as best they can, resilient in nature, the future of these island populations still seems inexorable. The children keep asking if they are going to have to go someplace else.
My sister sent me a box of books for my birthday. It was all non fiction. I told her I get too much of that during the day and need fiction to read so I can go to sleep at night. Nevertheless, I started reading one of them, “The Uninhabitable Earth” by David Wallace-Wells. I think I was aware of most of the threats to life on earth he mentions: heat death; hunger; drowning; wildfire; disasters no longer natural; freshwater drain; dying oceans; unbreathable air; plagues of warming (diseases stored in melting ice); economic collapse; climate conflict; and systems crisis.
The book is not particularly good news. Whenever you have a book of 241 pages, with an additional 66 pages of notes documenting sources, you know you’re dealing with a serious New York journalist. “The Uninhabitable Earth” follows on an earlier book called “The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History” by Elizabeth Colbert. Hers is an easier read as she is more of a storyteller than a fact-facing journalist. But both communicate in no uncertain terms what all of us are facing, especially and immediately, Elsie and her friends on Tuvalu.
Even the fiction has become more problematic, less fantasy more dystopian future. After seeing a number of references to it, I purchased Octavia Butler’s novel “Parable of the Sower.” Written in 1993, the story begins in 2025. It may be prescient.
Set in California, society has collapsed. Global climate change and economic crisis have rendered the social glue that holds civilized people together useless. Rain comes every two or three years and then rains for three of four days straight. Income inequality is extreme. Violence is all too pervasive and brutal. I’m only on page 77 in the book, but it appears a 15-year-old girl will be the heroine, facing the reality of their situation head on and dealing with it in a creative way.
Laura Ramnarace has a similar novel, “Sung Home.” It is set in the southwest in a near apocalyptic future. The immediate problem is a plague that has decimated large populations globally and made normal existence impossible. Once more, the story revolves around a young girl, who makes her way in a world gone mad to a vision of new possibility. The second of the trilogy has just been published.
On the same day, I read in the news about coral reefs around the U.S. We’ve lost all but 2% of them around Florida. Ocean warming and acidification, pollution, coral disease, development and overfishing are all contributors to their decline. Coral reefs help support marine life, provide shoreline protection and economic benefit. Florida’s reef is estimated to be worth $8 billion to the economy, supporting as many as 70,000 jobs.
Then there was the article on the whales. 97 beached whales and three dolphins in the Chatham Islands. Dead by the time rescuers arrived or euthanized, because they were so close to death they wouldn’t survive. Indigenous people of the island held ceremonial prayer. The article gave no explanation for the beaching, just that it happens. In September, 450 were stranded on the coast of Tasmania.
Why is it we can’t see our connections, to whales and coral reefs, to all creation? Why can’t we offer prayers for this glorious creation while whales are still alive? Why have we reached a point where we tell time by watches and never notice the sun and moon?
Scientists tell us we are beyond the point of no return on climate. What we will have to hope for are young people, in novels and real life (like the Sunrise Movement), who will not ignore the threat and will do what’s necessary to insure their future.
One can also hope their elders will look into the eyes of their children and grandchildren and be haunted to the point of action.
