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. 

Fridays For Future Climate Strike in San Jose, California

With the possible exception of removing Donald Trump from office in the 2020 US election, no challenge looms larger globally than reversing the catastrophic climate change that threatens to destroy the planet we love and call home.

Friday, September 20, 2019, was Global Climate Strike Day. The movement – Fridays for Future - was launched by 16-year-old Swedish student Greta Thurnberg in 2018. It has now spread to 150 countries, from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. Students around the world are embracing the idea of “striking” from school on specific Fridays in coming years to demand action.

On Friday, 

Greta spoke to the thousands of “strikers” in New York City. She had disembarked in Lower Manhattan on August 28 after 15 days of sailing across the Atlantic on an emission-free yacht that prominently displayed the Twitter hashtag “#FridaysForFuture.” She is scheduled to address world leaders at the United Nations Climate Action Summit on 23^rd September. 

This is what she said to New Yorkers on Friday, September 20:

“This is an emergency. Our house is on fire. We will do everything in our power to stop this crisis from getting worse … Why should we study for a future that is being taken away from us. That is being sold for profit … Everywhere I have been, the situation is more or less same. The people in power, their beautiful words are the same. The number of politicians and celebrities who want to take selfies with us are the same. The empty promises are the same. The lies are the same, and the inaction is the same. The eyes of the world will be on the world leaders at the climate summit on Monday for the U.N. Climate Summit. They have a chance to prove that they too are united behind the science, they have a chance to take leadership, to prove they actually hear us. It should not be that way. We should not be the ones who are fighting for the future, and yet here we are. We demand a safe future. Is that really too much to ask?”

I am a teacher, not a student, but I was there along with mothers, fathers and grandparents, in my hometown of San Jose, California - over a thousand of us - to participate in this protest march against greedy and clueless politicians in the pockets of fossil fuel industries who have been plundering the earth to extinction. We assembled outside the Diridon Railway station in downtown San Jose and then marched along Santa Clara Street to City Hall about a mile away, chanting, singing, and erupting in wild cheers when cars and buses passing us honked in support.
 
“Hey Hey, Ho Ho, Fossil Fuel’s Got to Go.”
“Planet Over Profit.”
“What Do We Want? Planet Justice!” “When Do We Want? Now!”
“Whose Streets? Our Streets!”
“One, Two, Three, Four! Planet’s What We’re Fighting For!”

Posters tell the story better than words. What was so remarkable was how animated everyone was. Most were students but girls outnumbered boys by almost 10:1. That the earth is in danger of extinction, along with humanity and all the flora and fauna, is a truth no one can escape, certainly not through the same damn lies we have been hearing time and again from politicians, hypocrites and leaders blind to scientific evidence.

My pictures give only a glimpse into the thousand of us who marched under a hot sun in San Jose, joining our fellow “strikers” across the globe, to demand that we reverse the threat of catastrophic climate change that is choking the life out of Mother Earth, the planet we love and the only home we know.