Time to rise

LISTEN. That's my 5 a.m. mantra, but it's also the message of a powerful poem by Marshall Islands poet and climate activist Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner. 

She, fellow poet Aka Niviana, some ice scientists, and Bill McKibben traveled to Greenland to research and plead for its melting ice shelf and our warming planet. McKibben shares the message at the end of our first day's reading in Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?

...we ask

we demand that the world see beyond

SUV’s, ac’s, their pre-packaged convenience

their oil-slicked dreams, beyond the belief

that tomorrow will never happen, that this

is merely an inconvenient truth.

Let me bring my home to yours.

Let’s watch as Miami, New York,

Shanghai, Amsterdam, London,

Rio de Janeiro, and Osaka

try to breathe underwater.

You think you have decades

before your homes fall beneath tides?

We have years.

We have months

before you sacrifice us again

before you watch from your tv and computer screens

waiting

to see if we will still be breathing

while you do nothing.

My sister,

From one island to another

I give to you these rocks

as a reminder

that our lives matter more than their power

that life in all forms demands

the same respect we all give to money

that these issues affect each and everyone of us

None of us is immune

And that each and everyone of us has to decide

if we

will

rise

===

Coming on the heels of my recent revival of interest in the mere game of baseball, this so much more self-evidently-existential talk of threats to the continuation of the game of life on Earth is sobering. 

I don't want to be too quick, though, to move on from that old game of my childhood and perpetual grasping at youth. It's been my teacher as much as a diversion and a recreation. My favorite player back in the day was Bob Gibson. He died this weekend, age 84. His autobiography From Ghetto to Glory opened my sheltered eyes at about age 10, and sent me to find Malcolm X's. 

But as existential threats go, empty ballparks don't compare to melting ice caps and land masses, rising seas, climate refugees, droughts and floods and all the rest.

McKibben is a baseball fan, as he'll reveal later. But the point he's making about the bigger game of life is that its complexity and beauty are a marvel of cooperative human endeavor and evidence of human capacity. We are entitled to take some pride, as a species, in life's intricate dance and what we're not wrong to call its progress from humble early innings. 

Darwin said it well, "from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved." Each generation is entrusted to keep it going, keep it human, and pass it on to our children at least no more at risk than we received it. And Falter's subtitle clearly signals distressed concern that we're dropping the ball.

McKibben acknowledges the recent trend, in books at least, to send a different message. Steven Pinker's Better Angels and Enlightenment Now argue against gloom and doom, asserting contrarily that "none of us are as happy as we ought to be..." 

By many uncontested measures, things are better than they've ever been. They're way better than they were decades and centuries past. Fear of violent death, for most of us most of the time, is negligible. Access to quality health care, even in the U.S. (where it remains shockingly uneven and unstable, compared to the rest of the "developed" world), is higher than its ever been. Life expectancy far surpasses our forebears' of just a few decades ago. And so on.

But we're on a trajectory for "catastrophic biodiversity loss," global poverty and malnutrition and child labor (!) are up. Climate change is palpable and suddenly urgent, with unsettling implications for the mass displacement on our side of this century of people as heat and ocean rise. We truly are challenged to rise, to reclaim our shrinking habitats or at least slow their rate of disappearance. 

And yet I do think Pinker's specific claim, that we should be happier than we are, is correct. Things could be worse for us, and were, for many of our antecedents. The pressing question, though, is what we're prepared to do to transmit a happy (or at least not miserable) planet to posterity. We can be happy that things aren't worse for us, but when we contemplate how things may be for our children and grandchildren et al, it's hard not to feel a creeping despair. 

McKibben says he lives in "engagement, not despair," and given his personal level of activism over the years he has every right to say so. He's done so much to bring active attention to this issue, and as Hope Jahren told us, doing something is the best antidote to dejection. Now, the ball's in our hands. Will we rise to this unprecedented occasion? Nothing less the the fierce focus of a Gibson will do.