Global Warming
and Radical Hope:
Afterword
November, 2020.
We have so much to learn
Chief Vincent Mann says we need humility.
I’m slowly processing his meanings.
It’s more than human modesty.
It is a stance, a way of being necessary to learn, to pay attention, to attune…
All life is of the land, waters, and air…
“Do not pick the first nor the last.”
When droplet falls into slime
When the soil clinging to the mushroom
When the breeze whiffs fetid—it is us.
Can this be understood as alive, together, not feared. All this intimacy is…
…Indigenous local knowing.
How can we tell the stories of the hyperobject?
We need millions of dreamers, dancers, artists, and poets—a civilian cultural corps
Who, with humility, dare to venture outside the infinite beyond, and inside the bottomless depths, to rediscover and reconnect to the millennial traditions (that’s been tossed out like yesterdays newspaper) and to a grounded furturity in a peoples’ science. More of the “new,” more Western-style, commercial more-modernity is not the answer.
To decenter the smug assumptions of Big Universalisms
- To decolonize the hierarchic categories and classifications
- To unsort the tested, ranked, and mangled
- To open up knowing, relinking that pill you swallow to their medicinal roots
To embrace what mere humans can yet fathom.
What are the yet insufficient English-language words of spatial temporality we strive to fashion?—“hyperobjects” and “ki” and “kin” are just suggestive. George Carlin’s classic schtick on “Stuff” (“A house is just a place to keep your stuff while you go out and get more stuff.”) hacks at the insane logic of shopping as happiness. Mikhail Bakhtin’s discussion of the power of compressed time/space or “chronotopes” does help explain the extractivist power of Big Gas fracking and selling more fossil fuels. Poet Meena Alexander’s formulation of “palimpsests,” also Kara Walker’s “Sugar Sphinx” at the Old Domino Sugar factory in NYC, the Indigenous demonstrations at Standing Rock, we can go on and on…
These creative, improvisational, organized actions get at the immensity of this extractivist political culture in ways that become increasingly understandable.
What are the deeper insights buried in the planets endangered languages? A nuance of time and place squashed by the 24/7 day work week.
How have our human sensate performers learned from the far greater than human complexity and nuance of manitou, of dao, of asili, of gaia?
How can ecosystems be further simplified in terms we can grasp?
Well, we can’t within our limited human forms.
We can’t without being in touch with all that is living
Helping us see what personhood can’t
Smelling the musty humus. We can’t
Sensing the lobsters leaving their habitats, walking northwards. We can’t.
Viral cells large enough for all to witness. We can’t.
El Niños echolocated enough to sense. We can’t.
Technology can help us understand the grander complexities of manitou. But we are not nature’s creative masters.
We know, we know, we can’t thrive without
Watersheds, arboreal forests, mother trees, mycelia networks, bugs, bees, blue moons, wetlands…
Can we act
Before the glacier melts more?
Before the scorched twig ignites?
Before the saltwater corrodes all shiny machines?
Radical hope?
So much is lost.
So much is still known.
We can support revival.
The knowledge
In finding
The seed
Placed in
The enriched soil
At the right time
In the here/now.
