HOW SHOULD WE RESPOND TO CLIMATE CHANGE? What I Tell My Students

Those scientists were so wrong back in 1980. When they climbed from the helicopters, holding handkerchiefs over their faces to filter ash from the Mount St. Helens eruption, they did not think they would live long enough to see life restored to the blast zone.

 

Every tree was burned and ruined, every ridgeline buried in ash, every stream clogged with broken limbs and landslides. If anything would grow here again, they thought, its spore and seed would have to drift in from the edges of the devastation, long dry miles across a plain of cinders and ash. The scientists could imagine that -- spiders drifting on silk threads over the rubble plain, a single samara spinning into the shade of a pumice stone. It was harder to imagine the time required for flourishing to return to the mountain -- all the dusty centuries. But here they are: on the mountain only thirty years later, these same scientists on their knees, running their hands over beds of moss below lupine in lavish purple bloom. Tracks of mice and fox etch a muddy streambank, and here, beside a ten-foot silver fir, a coyote’s twisted scat grows mushrooms. What the scientists know now, but didn’t understand then, is that when the mountain blasted ash and rock across the landscape, the devastation never touched some small places hidden in the lee of rocks and trees. Here, a bed of moss and deer-fern under a rotting log. There, under a boulder, a patch of pearly everlasting and the tunnel to a vole’s musty nest. Between stones in a buried stream, a slick of algae and clustered dragonfly eggs. “Refugia,” they call them: small places of safety where life endures. From the micro-environments of the refugia, mice and toads emerged blinking onto the blasted plain. Grasses spread, strawberries sent out runners. From a thousand, ten thousand, maybe countless small places of enduring life, meadows returned to the mountain.

I have seen this happen. I have wandered the edge of vernal pools with ecologists brought to unscientific tears by the song of meadowlarks in this place. So I am careful when I talk to my students. They have been taught, as they deserve to be, that the fossil-fueled industrial growth economy has brought the world to the edge of catastrophe. They don’t have to “believe in” climate change to accept this claim. They understand the decimation of plant and animal species, the poisons, the growing deserts and spreading famine, rising oceans and melting ice. If it’s true that we can’t destroy our habitats without destroying our lives, as Rachel Carson said, and if it’s true that we are in the process of laying waste to the planet, then our ways of living will come to an end -- some way or another, sooner or later, gradually or catastrophically -- and some new way of life will begin. What are we supposed to do? students ask me. How can we do any good, when the job is nothing less than saving the world? These are terrifying questions for an old professor, and it has taken me some months to think of what to say.

I have decided to tell them about the volcano. I tell them about the rotted stump that sheltered spider eggs, about a cupped rock that saved a fern, about all the other refugia that brought life back so quickly to the mountain. If destructive forces are building under our lives, then our work in this time and place, I tell them, is not to stop the mountain from cracking apart -- no one can do this -- but to create small refugia of the imagination to reseed the ashy plain. Refugia: places where new ideas are sheltered and encouraged to grow.

Even now, we can create small pockets of flourishing, and we can make ourselves into overhanging rock ledges to protect their life, so that the full measure of possibility can spread and reseed the world. Doesn’t matter what it is, I tell my students, or how small; if it’s generous to life, imagine it into existence. Create a bicycle cooperative, a seed-sharing community, a wildlife sanctuary on the hill below the church. Write poems for children. Sing duets to the dying. Tear out the irrigation system and plant native grass. Imagine water pumps.

Dig a community garden in the Kmart parking lot. Study corn. Teach someone to sew. Learn to cook with the full power of the sun at noon.

We don’t have to start from scratch. We can restore pockets of flourishing life-ways that have been damaged over time. Breach a dam. Plant a riverbank. Vote for schools. Introduce the neighbors to each others’ children. Celebrate the Solstice. Slow a rivercourse with a fallen log. Clean the grocery carts out of the stream.

Maybe most effective of all, we can protect refugia that already exist: they are the small pockets tucked into every corner. Protect the marshy ditch behind the mall. Work to ban poisons from the edges of the road. Save the hedges in your neighborhood. Boycott what you don’t believe in. Refuse to participate in what is wrong. There is hope in this -- an attention that notices and celebrates thriving where it occurs, a conscience that refuses to destroy it.

This is integrity, I tell my students, which is whole, which is healthy, which is holy. This is consistency of belief and action. And that is the answer to powerlessness -- to do what you think is right, knowing that your actions will be the well-spring of the new world. You’ll know you have achieved this integrity and torn loose from hypocrisy, I tell them, because the relief of it will bring you to tears.

From these sheltered pockets of moral imagining and from the protected pockets of flourishing, new ways of living will spread across the land, across the salt plains and beetle-killed forests. Here is how we will start anew -- not from the edges over centuries of invasion.

Rather, from small pockets of good work, shaped by an understanding that all life is interdependent, and driven by the one gift humans have that belongs to no other -- practical imagination, the ability to imagine that things can be different from what they are now.

“Your calling,” philosopher Frederick Buechner said, “is at the intersection of your great joy and the world’s great need.” Go to that place, I tell my students. Do that work.