Late November in the northern temperate zone is always a crapshoot, and today, it came up craps. 2 or 3 C at best, a dark overcast, and on and off rain, showers, and clumpy snow that immediately melted on contact with one’s coat or the forest floor or the beach sands. Windy enough to make the damp cold bite, but not enough to stir the wet leaves and clean up the ground before the inevitable snow soon to come, it was a day that normally I would have said “I’m going to catch a cold” but this being 2021, I’m almost certainly not going to have enough human contact today to acquire a cold virus, this despite it being the day after Thanksgiving and thus, in theory, I should be shopping somewhere, boy in tow, to affirm my belief in American consumerism.
Instead, the boy is at home, reading a new stack of books from his mom, and the dog and I are out on a trail. She’s in her bright orange vest on this, the second to last day of hunting season, and I’m in an ill-chosen dark grey jacket, which will enable any erstwhile hunter who accidentally shotguns me in the back to say “hey, I couldn’t see him, and his movement made me think it was a deer.” I’ll deserve whatever I get as we walk through state wildlife reserve land.
I love this trail when it’s not hunting season. It winds through scrublands about a mile from the ocean, flat, sandy soils with occasional semi-permanent puddles where the drainage isn’t good. On this soil and in this town, the puddles mean the granite that lies beneath everything here gets close enough to the surface that it prevents the water from washing through the sand, and after awhile the leaves accumulate and forms rotting peaty mud, and then the puddle – which could be six inches deep, and could suck your leg down to your hip if you step in an unfortunate bit as I have done before – acquires a life of its own. In a month, once it’s below freezing for a few days in a row, despite weak sunlight, the puddles will freeze over and we’ll be able to walk across them with confidence, but for now, walking this path requires extended bushwhacking through the surrounding forest. A month ago, the dog would have just tramped through the water, but it’s cold now, and despite her fur and her desire to take the shortest path, even she is skirting into the woods.
It should be snowing today, but hey, global warming, and we’re probably two to three weeks late for our first decent snow of the season here in Scarborough. It’s been a good year for us here in town to assess what that means – global warming, I mean – and it seems to settle in on a few items beyond the obvious. “The obvious”, to be clear, is sea levels rising for us here on the coast. Normal monthly high tides now regularly put the Audobon Society marsh recreation centre, the place that rents out kayaks and canoes, under a foot to a foot and a half of water, and even a mid-lunar tide has the high tide water lapping onto the edge of its parking lot; when I was a kid thirty years ago, that only happened in the spring for the yearly neap tides, and my guess is the spring tides next year may require sandbags. The houses on the back side of Pine Point are probably five years away from the same yearly or monthly flooding; there are a couple up for sale and I’m sort of stunned they are trying to command seaside prices when they will be underwater within a decade or two.
That’s the obvious; we joke (badly) about it in the town’s Long Range Planning Committee – “you don’t buy houses on the beach these days, you rent them from the Atlantic” – but the non-obvious is the subtle changes through the year. The mosquitoes, for example, are now intolerable from mid June until roughly the first week of October. Maine is well-known for its mosquitoes, but on the coast, the foggy chill that used to be June kept them down until July 4th, traditionally, and the first decent cold nights, the ones where it wasn’t really below freezing but you’d get some white bits on the low grass in the fields which got shady earlier in the afternoon as the sun starts to get low, the first cold nights which would finally kill the larvae in the puddles in the forest, those nights would come around typically in mid September. So you’d only have July, August, and a little bit of September where being in the woods, or anywhere at all at dusk or dawn, required a hearty dose of barely-legal DDT bug repellent to be at all tolerable.
Not anymore: it’s an extra 30 days of warmth and summer and biting insects now. It’s not like Maine is suddenly Costa Rica, mind you; the high temperatures in the summer are still decidedly moderate. We just barely made it to the waterpark for five days this summer, not because we were so busy but because only on five days was it so hot that the boy and I both agreed it was necessary, we had to be submerged in a pool – which in Maine meant it was maybe 30C and a bit humid. The water at the beach was a smidge warmer than I remembered it, but still not comfortably warm. And while I’m glad to have had air conditioning – well, a heat pump that cools as well as warms – we really only needed it for a couple handful of days, and a handful of nights.
My friend Al observed that New England is one of those places that’s probably benefiting from global warming, a lot like most of Canada (with apologies to my friend in British Columbia, who in one year has both recorded Canada’s highest temperature ever and floods which temporarily made Vancouver the city an island due to flooding). The winters, usually barely survivable and always too long, are now mild enough that I don’t even need to hire a neighbor kid to shovel the driveway – even as a portly 47 year old I can do it myself. Also, winter clears up promptly in early April, which means the summers, usually all too brief, have an extra three or four weeks padding to them. Fall lasted a full 10 weeks this year, and spring’s meltwaters and mud and grime and raw early southwesterly winds came and went almost without notice before it was warm enough to start thinking about backyard campfires. All in all, things are better here in Maine, which may help explain the steady rise in home prices.
All of this expansion of Maine weather perfection will only continue – that is, if in the almost fifty years of my life, we’ve seen an extra two weeks of Maine accrue, and an extra foot or so of ocean level rise, it’s not hard to realise we’ll see more before we’re through. “Before we’re through” recognises that humanity will eventually stop burning carbon at its current delirious rate, which I’m actually confident we’ll do, not because of the strident activism of boomer and millenial environmentalists but because of basic supply-demand pressures on what’s left of the carbon in the ground and the obvious economic benefit of shifting from mined energy to energy from zero-cost sources like sunlight and running water and wind. But having been on our carbon binge for nigh on a century or two, and coming off a longer term sectoral cooling and in the midst of an inter-ice age warming trend, we’re not going to see temperatures level out any time soon.
I’m not a human climate change denialist, mind you; I know a lot of those types, alas, and they are painful to listen to, their strident ignorance usually accompanied by some sort of conspiracy theory linked to Black Lives Matter or Al Gore’s involvement in private equity or the pope being some kind of Argentinian communist plant. Humanity has done its best to screw up the climate and it has succeeded. But the environmentalists I know are similarly tiresome. Bill McKibbon is my bete noire but I suppose I’d throw Greta Thunberg in the mix as well, as they pound the table – McKibbon now for forty years, Thunberg painfully for the last five or six, since her parents allowed her to have a Twitter account – about how humanity needs to stop burning carbon, now, or else the world as we know it will end.
Such complaining bothers me at a fundamental level because, despite the fact that thinking about the environment would seem to require a deep consideration of system complexity, thinking that going “carbon neutral” now, or in a decade, or by 2050 implies that “we can do something and make a difference now.” Let’s be honest with ourselves: we can do nothing to make a difference now. The warming we’re seeing – whether in Maine, or in British Columbia, or in chronic drought fire conditions in southern Europe, or in permanent smog clouds in China, or the expansion of the sahel in Africa, or monsoon disruption in south Asia, whatever – is because of the coal and oil burned in the first half of the 20th century, because of the insane destruction of forest lands during the same period. Climate change today is because of what people did to the planet decades or a century or two ago, and whatever changes we make on the margin today will do nothing to stop the long, slow, molasses like trend that will continue the process whereby Pine Point will be underwater in thirty years even if we all permanently park our cars and turn off the carbon generation stations tomorrow and rely solely on solar-powered intraday Wi-Fi to power the global information economy.
This is the fallacy at the heart of the global environmental movement: that we as individual human beings can make a difference today. That’s not how complex systems work – that’s the lesson of the failure of Soviet communism, of the collapse of Gosplan, and indeed of the failure of the US space program and of the laughable parody of governance that was Donald Trump. We as individuals are not heroes in a complex interconnected world: our capacity for heroism has been steadily eroded not by the world getting bigger, but by the world getting more interconnected. When our environments were small and disconnected, each of us meant a lot; when our environments merged and became interconnected, each of us individually matter not much, and we have to be content to acknowledge our importance only as ripples of influence, not as direct actors or causal agents of change.
This is painful to humanity because all of our folkways rebel against the idea of the individual being meaningless. Chinese and south Asian cultures probably are best armed to remind us that as individuals we are essentially meaningless, even though our actions and our choices ripple in ways we will never understand and cannot predict, but even those cultures retain traditional stories and mythologies which hold up the individual actor as being somehow important: the peasant who rises up to become emperor; the poet who changes the language; the Buddha. In the context of the global climate system, though, we are truly irrelevant as individuals, and even as a generation, we have no real impact in changing the direction of what has already been laid down by the centuries of uncomprehending humanity that came before us. We might make a meaningful difference to the future, but just as all of the people who have created the climate of 2021 are already dead, so we none of us – including Greta, including my son – will be around to experience the “difference” we make from altering human carbon consumptions decisions in the next few decades.
Does this mean we should lay down arms and say screw it, “burn baby burn” as Sarah Palin once famously chanted to her ignorant followers in the 2008 election cycle? No, of course not. But it means that we should stop lying to children and adults about why it is that we should be enviromentally conscious. We should stop burning oil like it’s going out of style because it’s never a good thing to waste a limited resource, not because if we do so we’ll have better weather in ten years’ time. We should stop orienting ourselves towards a culture of endless consumption because it will never lead to any real psychological or moral satisfaction, either individually or in aggregate, not because it means we’ll save the planet.
Indeed, the planet isn’t depending on humanity to save itself. That, in fact, is the crowning conceit of the environmental movement: the notion that we, humanity, and in particular we humans alive today in 2021, are essential to the operation of life and sentience. We are not. Life in its diversity will continue whether we burn oil, whether we wear hairshirts and live in straw huts, whether we produce per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances in quantity or stop doing so, whether we allow the use of single-use plastic shopping bags or ban them, whether we vaccinate or not, whether we go vegan or double down on toe-to-tail carnivorism, whether we expand global air travel or ban it. Life does not require you or me as individuals – and, difficult or even unimaginable that it may seem, it doesn’t even require humanity. Life, and the beauty and tragedy that life implies, does not care.
Environmentalism depends on rejecting that basic fact – and I use the word “fact” with intention. Environmentalism is really a doubling down on the idea of human exceptionalism – it demands that humanity have a unique role in saving an environment which it has, consciously or unconsciously, started to damage and perhaps destroy. Indeed, it depends on privileging humanity’s ability to destroy “the environment” first, so as to grant humanity a privileged role in saving it. Both positions are false. We have, to be sure, impacted the environment; and our actions in the future will continue to impact it. In a very real way, our actions to date have had an outsized impact versus other, non-human directed long term trend changes; they may have even had an outsized impact versus non-human directed short term changes that we don’t have enough data to model or describe effectively. But we are not simple, linear, directing principals on a global scale; painful as it may be for our collective ego, we are one of an almost infinite series of interconnected agents acting in a system of collective complexity. None of us makes a meaningful difference, but all of us are essential for the system’s overall expression.
I do what I can at a local level to make Maine a better place. I serve on local town committees; I participate in public forums which debate things like a utility corridor to ship hydro power from Quebec south to New England, or to build rail-to-trail corridors for public recreation, or to develop public transit. I also drive a car, and have a job which flies me across the country (it used to be around the world, but Covid, blah blah, no more), and in those jobs I also try to do things which won’t reinforce dumb overconsumption but in which I also understand that my influence globally is limited. I pay attention to the news about environmental consequences and discussions in Glasgow but ultimately I’m more interested in how my town and region are making their local decisions, because after all, that’s the level at which development and building and consumption and waste disposal actually takes place, not at the level of the globe, or even of the continent-spanning country in which I live.
I know the environment will continue to develop along its trend lines over the next 100 years; I know that decisions we make today might ameliorate the trend in 100 years time, but the environment will still be warmer, the summers longer and the winters milder here in Scarborough, in 100 years time, and still again in another 100 years, than it would have been had Watt never powered up his steam engine to leverage coal production 250 years ago. The environment’s future for the next 100 years is locked in, and anything we, or our children, do, will not effect that in the least. We need to teach them that the reason we should burn less carbon and produce less toxic chemicals and do less mindless destructive stuff in general is not because we matter – not because we causally impact anything at all – but because we should just be thoughtful, considered beings in a world that is precious with or without our presence.
At one point today, there was a particularly large puddle in the woods. It’s actually a kind of waypoint on the trail – roughly 10 minutes into the walk, there’s a big puddle, clearly a granite depression, the water dark and tannic from endless leaf decomposition, you could probably profitably install a hood with a copper pipe to harvest the methane from it all. Sometime awhile back, long before the dog and I started walking the trail, some idiot trashed a couple of refrigerators in the mud, and being constructed of plastics and intelligently forged aluminum alloys, they remain intact, a more or less permanent part of the landscape. Only this year, with time to waste due to Covid no doubt, and with a longer summer making it more worth it to do so, someone ripped the doors off the fridges and installed them off to the side of the puddle, as bridges between dry bits of earth, given the dog and I a dry path around the water. I noticed on the mud-smudged surface a weird combination of shoe prints, raccoon prints, some bird claws, some dog paws, some leaves, some smudges.
More impactful than anything in Glasgow in the last month, more effective than anything passed in Washington in the last week, and probably more lasting than anything I’ll decide to do in the future, the environment – including its human participants – changed along the trail and became more sustainable, for humans, dogs, creatures of the forest, for the world, courtesy of some doors fabricated by Whirlpool somewhere in the rust belt. And the dog and I walked on, skirting the muddy bits, she chasing squirrels, me marvelling at the lost leaves and quiet rain falling at the end of yet another season, ready for winter, excited to be alive in a world that views me at once as essential and, as an individual, as irrelevant.
Happy Thanksgiving.