Nature Telling Us Time's Running Out

The land is shrouded inn a ash-laden haze: a winter evening filled with gloom and foreboding. Scene from an English countryside, perhaps, where “The Hounds of the Baskervilles” is about to unfold.

Only it is not. This is San Jose in Northern California. The clock says it’s 9 in the morning, but the sun lies hidden behind wildfire smoke so thick that stepping outside poses serious breathing problems. Earlier, in the predawn sky where Venus used to glow brightly, I saw a pale tangerine planet barely able to hold its own.

Wildfires are on a tear in Western United States. Idyllic, pastoral towns are aflame and burnt out. People and trees are being uprooted at a scale never seen before. The ravaged, desolate landscape tells tales of nature’s sound and fury signifying everything.

In California, hundreds of freakish lightnings, utterly unanticipated by meteorologists - so much for our hubris of predicting and controlling the weather, far less the climate - started the terrifying fires, carried relentlessly forward, backward and sideways by hot winds that devoured everything in its way. We suffered long periods of blackouts but that was nothing compared to those who lost everything - homes, possessions. No accurate counting of lives lost is yet possible, but it will be tragic when the final tally is in, each death diminishing us all.

This, on top of the killer pandemic that has so far claimed more than 200,000 American lives. Misfortunes, as the saying goes, never comes singly.

The worst nightmare, of course, is the malevolent president who denies climate change, who calls those who made the ultimate sacrifice for America “losers” and “suckers.” Americans must surely know by now the existential threat this president poses to America and its values, to its standing in the world. We hope  this grievous wrong will be righted in the November 3^rd election this year.

For now, though, we must turn our attention to nature. It is telling us that time is fast running out. Burning fossil fuels to sustain our "quality of life" is unsustainable. Droughts, wildfires, hurricanes, famines, even civil wars are only another climate catastrophe away.

Yet we also know that given half a chance, nature will spring back. But for that to happen, we need a quantum leap in our thinking about consumption, development, and all the quotidian things we do that needs to be suffused with an awareness of their impact on the environment. Impractical? The alternate is fiery death.

In the air opaque with wildfire smoke and without birdsong, I risk a walk along the wooded trail that works its magic every time I am on it. Giant eucalyptus and pine trees stand like ghosts just a few feet away from me, hardly visible.

And then I see it and I stand rooted to the earth. A bluebird is resting on a pine cone, calm and poised. An ineffable sense of hope surges in me. Give me a chance, a small, tiny chance, nature seems to be saying, and I will make the air breathable, the water potable, and the birds transcendent again.