It is hard to keep
hold of an emergency feeling when the urgency is sliced and diced by the news
cycle. We know that the past twenty years have been crucial. We know that once,
in the old days at the end of the Cold War, we – we meaning the developed
economies of the world – actually acted to prevent the ozone hole from eating
us up. And we know since, we have done squat as we watch through our windows,
on our nature specials, on our vacations, the world as we know it undergo what
fire historian Stephen Pyne calls “the spectacle of unremitting loss.”
As the atmosphere
emergency drifts South and West, the focus turns to the usual trivia. Well,
naturally. Still, a good time to read Pyne’s essay in Aeon.
An excerpt:
“I see the world through
a pyric prism. In the reforging of Earth, I see fires, especially those burning
fossil fuels, as a cause. I see fires, mutating into megafires, as a
consequence – and fires everywhere as a catalyst. The Anthropocene is, for me,
a Pyrocene, as humanity’s fire practices create the fire-informed equivalent of
an ice age. But fire, and even the charred landscapes it can leave in its wake,
is more than an issue of human health, busted ecosystems, creaky institutions
or bad behaviour. This is also a matter of aesthetics.
This thought came to
me during a field trip to the Jemez Mountains in northern New Mexico in 2014.
Three years earlier, the Las Conchas fire, part of a wave train of
conflagrations, had blasted across the Pajarito Plateau and into the Los Alamos
National Laboratory. When its plume collapsed, the fire sent hot air across
forested mesas and through gorges, like the pyroclastic flow from a volcano.
The flames culled woods, dappled the forest with blowouts and, in some sites
burned down to bare rock, not even blackened stumps remained. Craig Allen, a
fire researcher with the US Geological Survey, was our docent, and as we
scanned the still-scorched countryside, he described not so much the scene
before us as the scene that the fire had taken from him – a vision of the land
restored to its precontact state.”
The contact – a term
which has displaced the old Eurocentric term, “discovery”, but which has still
not found its poetic bearings. The warmer climate has been thought of in terms
of mounting ocean levels, and it is that. But so far are we from the trees that
have sustained us, that we don’t see the fires mounting up, just for us.
"Lord Krishna
said: The universe (or human body) may be compared to an eternal tree that has
its origin (or root) in the Supreme Being and its branches below in the cosmos.
The Vedic hymns are the leaves of this tree. One who understands this tree is a
knower of the Vedas. (15.01)
The branches of this
eternal tree are spread all over the cosmos. The tree is nourished by the
energy of material Nature; sense pleasures are its sprouts; and its roots of
ego and desires stretch below in the human world causing Karmic bondage."
Werner Sombart, an early twentieth century historian of
capitalism – a man of the right, I should say – saw how the trees were
necessary for the ships that formed the logistical core of imperialism and
trade up until the late nineteenth century. Da steht ein Baum – well, Rilke’s
Orpheus was smarter than he knew. Marx’s economic enlightenment came about when
he discovered changes in the laws on gleaning wood in the land around Koeln.
The Russian novelists depict feckless landholders whose wealth is measured by
the forests that they sell to entrepreneurs. Set the Dead souls to one side, it
was the trees from Russia that went into the great liberal era in Europe.
Another excerpt from
Pyne's essay:
"Yet I wondered
what my grandchildren might see if they were present. I recalled a comment by
Bertrand Russell who said that what most people mean when they speak of
returning to nature is really a desire to return to the world they knew as a
child (or, I would add, the world they knew when they came of age). What
existed then seems natural. Whatever comes next – new species, new habits, new
machines – seems intrusive, disturbing and alien.
That childhood world –
what we might call our ‘reference landscape’ – is the marker by which we
measure the present and coming world. It’s how we judge the new world as
welcoming or hostile, lovely or marred. A reference landscape might be
personal, but it might also be shared by a society or nation. When the world
itself is being overturned, personal grief can become intergenerational."
Our reference
landscapes are coming apart. Russell, a product of the nineteenth century
industrialized Britain that produced, among other things, the first diagnosis
of allergy, had a reference landscape that was already radically different from
that of his eighteenth century ancestors.
I think of Shelley's reference landscape and how the seeds, in the
coming storms, will be all burned to a crisp:
O wild West Wind, thou
breath of Autumn's being,
Thou, from whose
unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven, like
ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,
Yellow, and black, and
pale, and hectic red,
Pestilence-stricken
multitudes: O thou,
Who chariotest to
their dark wintry bed
The winged seeds,
where they lie cold and low,
Each like a corpse
within its grave, until
Thine azure sister of
the Spring shall blow
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