Yesterday we were at rehearsal room running thru songs, it is one of our favorite things to do in the world. It's the essential good-work that feeds the soul. Storms blew thru while we were singing and playing. And then alarms and sirens went off.
It was bit strange, surreal and eerie. The sky was dark and light. There was calm, and wild storminess looming over our heads. We packed up our gear and a scooted home. We dodged rain-drops and listened to the loud, screaming, whining sirens promising rough weather.
Safe back at home we heard on the radio that a "flock of tornados" were passing thru. Yikes. That's a new one. We also caught a bit of an interview with Jeff Goodell, the author of the moment:
"The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet.""It's all happening." That comes from one our favorite movies, "Almost Famous," but it is a sentence that can be applied to our new planet-reality.
Think of Gaia as a patient, sick, in bed, a whirling mess of a being with all her vital signs on the fritz. I think of that haunting phrase I once heard in a hospital: A cascade of failure. Too much carbon in the air, too much poison from burning fossil fuels, polar ice melting, oceans boiling.
Everything in the extreme: heat, cold, rain, flooding, drought; every last thing pushed to the brink of fuck-up.
This little humble canary asks silly questions like:
What happens when the plants and trees burn up and go extinct?
What happens when the oceans die?
What happens when large swaths of planet earth are totally uninhabitable?
Where do the the human beings go?
How will they be fed, clothed and housed?
Why did our species conspire to murder Gaia?
What were we thinking?
Yikes.
I hate to be a canary in a coal-mine, or the bearer of bad news, but the truth of our human-made, climate catastrophe is pretty damn undeniable. A supremely stupid question: How is it possible that we did absolutely nothing to avoid this calamity? Fuck...
"The Heat Will Kill You First is about the extreme ways in which our planet is already changing. It is about why spring is coming a few weeks earlier and fall is coming a few weeks later and the impact that will have on everything from our food supply to disease outbreaks. It is about what will happen to our lives and our communities when typical summer days in Chicago or Boston go from 90° F to 110°F. A heatwave, Goodell explains, is a predatory event— one that culls out the most vulnerable people. But that is changing. As heatwaves become more intense and more common, they will become more democratic."