"To love and bear; to hope till Hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates."
Shelley
The often lovely, blooming months from June through August 2021 were in other major respects the summer from hell—that is, the summer from the future.
An intense heat dome clamped down on a huge chunk of the normally cool Pacific Northwest, from Oregon to British Columbia and edging into Alaska. Portland broke its all time heat record three times in a week, topping out at 116F—hotter than the hottest day ever measured in Houston or Atlanta. Roads collapsed, trolley rails melted. Other places in Oregon and Canada were hotter than the hottest known day in Las Vegas, in the Mohave Desert. A British Columbia town had the hottest temperature ever recorded in Canada—as hot as Death Valley.
In Alaska, glaciers were breaking apart so fast and violently that they were creating ice quakes as powerful as small earthquakes. Across the region, hundreds of people died from the heat. The heat did not end on the shore: an untold quantity of sea life perished.
Some estimated that it was a once in several centuries phenomenon: heat that hadn’t been seen since perhaps before Europeans knew the place existed. Another estimate put it at about 5,000 years—half the history of human civilization. Speaking of this event’s obvious relationship to the larger crisis, climate scientist Peter Kalmus observed, “I feel like the heat dome event in the Pacific Northwest moved up my sense of where we are by about a decade or even more.”
Also this summer a heat wave in the Middle East included temperatures in five countries that were higher than those in the Pacific Northwest event. There was historic heat in Moscow and Australia. A heat wave across the Mediterranean included the highest daily temperature ever recorded in Europe. It was reported in July that one day’s worth of melting Greenland ice could cover the state of Florida in two inches of water. On Greenland’s highest peak that only ever saw snow, it rained.
Globally, on land and sea, July 2021 was the hottest month ever recorded in 142 years of measurement, and significantly hotter than the 20th century average.
Ecologist Simon Lewis was among those to warn that literally unlivable temperatures that have at times already been measured in Pakistan, the Persian Gulf and even, momentarily, in Chicago, will occur over larger areas and in new locations, and last longer, in coming decades.
The 2021 summer heat led to titanic fires in California and 11 other western states, as well as in Siberia, Greece and Italy. Many of these fires are so huge and hot that they create their own fiery tornadoes, their own thunder and lightning, as they burn through forests and fields, farms and towns, for months. Some are burning still, not so far away, as I write this in October.
The summer heat also deepened ongoing droughts around the world. In Colorado, the largest reservoir in the US declared the most severe water shortage in its 90 year existence. In California, some rivers dried before they reached the sea, and major species of salmon face extinction.
Historically heavy rains and floods shocked Germany and Belguim, China and India, as well as London and several cities in the U.S. in July. At the end of August, on the anniversary of the devastating hurricane Katrina hitting New Orleans, the even stronger hurricane Ida became only the third category 4 in history to make landfall in Louisiana: one in 1856, and one last year. Even after weakening it carried heavy rains on an unusual inland path, causing flash flooding in places like Pittsburgh before flooding New York City subways and killing families in their basement apartments. FEMA’s director noted that recent hurricanes have formed faster, become larger and more destructive.
This hurricane—not likely to be the last of the season—further demonstrated the deadpan truth that began a report in the New York Times in July by Somini Sengupta: “The extreme weather disasters across Europe and North America have driven home two essential facts of science and history: The world as a whole is neither prepared to slow down climate change, nor live with it.”
The summer brought additional news of forests being slaughtered in the Amazon and Indonesia at record or near-record rates, of a crash in the global population of insects (up to 75%) upon which bigger animals and fish depend, of growing dead zones in the oceans, and of scientists worried that the North Atlantic ocean current and the Gulf Stream have slowed down—the doomsday scenario of The Day After Tomorrow.
In the midst of this, portions of the sixth assessment report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change were leaked and then issued—perhaps the last such report, one scientist observed, that might make any difference, because if the world doesn’t act on this one, there may not be time to prevent the worst in the farther future.
For as this summer shows, the future is already happening. Agence France-Presse summarized the report’s findings: “Climate change will fundamentally reshape life on Earth in the coming decades, even if humans can tame planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions...Species extinction, more widespread disease, unlivable heat, ecosystem collapse, cities menaced by rising seas—these and other devastating climate impacts are accelerating and bound to become painfully obvious before a child born today turns 30.”
“The choices societies make now will determine whether our species thrives or simply survives as the 21 century unfolds. But dangerous thresholds are closer than once thought, and dire consequences stemming from decades of unbridled carbon pollution are unavoidable in the short term.”
According to the IPCC report, “we need transformational change operating on processes and behaviors at all levels.” To put it another way, 14,000 scientists from 151 countries signed off on a study that predicted “untold suffering” for humanity if it does not successfully address the climate emergency.
But at least in the United States, thanks to ego-driven partisan politics, and the heavy influence of gigantic fossil fuel corporations, prospects for any substantial immediate action seemed dim. Meanwhile, the public response remains largely divided between benumbed desperation and angry, self-righteous denial. The denial is not surprising, as the damage becomes obvious. It’s very hard to admit that this society has contributed mightily to ongoing self-destruction that could make the atom bomb look like less than a firecracker.
The future, almost by definition, is always uncertain. But the dominant context of human life in the next decades is becoming painfully obvious. And what happens in those decades looks like it will determine whether human civilization has more of a future.
So where are the grounds for hope? From a philosophical or conceptual point of view, hope presupposes a situation that has something wrong with it. Otherwise there would be no need to hope for a better future.
“...the kind of hope I often think about (especially in situations that are particularly hopeless, such as prison),” he wrote in Disturbing the Peace, “ I understand above all as a state of mind, not a state of the world. Either we have hope within us or we don’t; it is a dimension of the soul, and it’s not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation. Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons.”
There are those (such as the British author John Gray) who see this current self-destruction as inevitable, because of the imperatives of the “selfish gene” driving evolution. But the orientation represented by Havel may be at least partly based on a rejection of this rigid and mechanistic view.
“What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives,” Zinn continues. “If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.”
“ And if we do act, in however small a way, we don't have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory."
For Zinn and for others, to hope is to act. Hope as an emotion is insufficient. It may even be unnecessary. What makes hope is action. Hope is enacted. Hope for the future is not primarily how you feel or don’t feel: hope is what you do.
Those of us winding up our lives may continue to contribute to that future. There’s a lot of bullshit out there characterizing and mostly maligning the Baby Boom generation, and these projections and over-generalizations verge on slander. The activist element of the huge boomer generation was always a minority, but those that remain may still direct their resources to the future. Activists Bill McKibben and Akaya Windwood recently published a piece in the Los Angeles Times calling upon progressive boomers to once again step up, perhaps through the organization they co-founded called Third Act. “But older people too can be catalysts for deep change...If enough of the 70 million of us who passed the six-decade mark join it, then we’ve got a chance. We’ve done it before.”
A recent article in the Guardian is headlined: “No point in anything else’: Gen Z members flock to climate careers.” “ Survey after survey shows young people are not just incorporating new climate-conscious behaviors into their day-to-day lives—they’re in it for the long haul. College administrators say surging numbers of students are pursuing environmental-related degrees and careers that were once considered irresponsible, romantic flights of fancy compared to more ‘stable’ paths like business, medicine, or law.”
But environmental careers are just part of enacting hope. There are choices within choices: within medicine, public health and treatments for climate-related ills; within law, environmental law is very important, as global impetus grows for giving legal standing to the environment and the future itself.
Though business is more likely to be a self-deceptive choice, Kim Stanley Robinson has argued for the necessity of changing the global financial structure in order to address the immense scope and variety of the climate emergency.
There are choices within the sciences, where research remains a source of hope. The arts need to free themselves from consumerism and apply themselves to reality on all levels. And effectively expressing what needs to be done really, really needs to be done.
This commitment to hope in action begins basically with a rejection, stated or not, of predominant values: making and spending money as the object and activity and priority of life. There is no financial stability in a world that is cooking itself.
Without becoming unrealistically one-sided, it may mean rejecting the very idea of career, replacing it with vocation—the commitment to use personal talents to be of use, to contribute.
“Be kind, be useful, be fearless,” he told them. I think I would change “fearless” to “brave.” But otherwise, I can’t think of a better formula for hope for the future. We can live with the future in mind, but we live only our own lifetime. We can only decide how to live.
That's also why it's important to note that President Obama started out his advice with "Be kind." Hope's reality in the world is what we do, but also what we are. How we live is partly action--what do we choose, among the choices we have? But it is also how we are, to ourselves and others.
A few years ago I was talking about the prospects for the future in the context of the climate emergency with some high-powered tech industry people in their 20s and 30s. One of them saw it as a race--can the climate future be addressed effectively before it is too late to make enough of a difference? It is a race--and the truth of the near future is that it will remain a race for decades while no one knows whether it is being won or lost. There is too much of a time lag between cause and effect. So for the foreseeable future, the reality is the race, and the race is the reality.
For whatever the future holds, at least for the next several decades, people are going to live in it. That future will be their present. In some respects, maybe many respects, life may be harder. But it could also be more exciting, more enlivening.
I've been promising to end this series, which I will do with the next post, plus an appendix/bibliography.
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