Wake up. If your eyes are sleeping then wipe them gently. You need to be awake for this. It is a matter of life and death. Kamand Kojouri
Longer than an earthquake, a pandemic shakes your life and living. P.S. Jagadeesh Kumar
There is nothing stable in the world; uproar’s your only music. John Keats
On what slender threads do life and fortune hang! Alexandre Dumas
As anywhere else, political instability provided an opportunity for local scores to be settled, for personal grievances to be aired, for heroes to be acclaimed and discarded. Charles Emmerson
Instead of a stable truth, I choose unstable possibilities. Haruki Murakami
Humans can’t be strong because of the comfort & can’t be comfortable because of instability. Sonal Takalkar
April is my favorite month of the year. The gentle rains. The longer sunlit days. The moderating temperatures. The lightening of human moods, even in the midst of a pandemic that has lasted longer than most could have predicted or imagined, at least the moods of those of us privileged by health care access and vaccinations in a world still waiting – and waiting some more – for its fair turn.
And of course the trees and flower beds bursting with color. In the north, April is the month that reminds us city dwellers of nature’s capacity – assisted in many instances by some truly remarkable urban gardeners – to regenerate itself and thereby tweaking the human race regarding the need for its own regeneration, its own need to recalibrate its relationship to the rest of the natural world, to (as UN SG Guterres says) “stop our war on nature.”
All this “Earth Week,” amidst a bevy of UN meetings alternately hopeful and maddening, I have been taking multiple, daily walks through nearby daffodil hillsides and under cherry blossoms and tulip trees. I’ve also been spending evenings binge watching (for me) the stunningly filmed BBC nature programs hosted by the indefatigable David Attenborough. I can’t get enough of either, not this week, not this month.
But all the color and the natural drama, the beautifully manicured parks and other scenes of a natural world bursting with new life also come attached to a blinking warning light, a warning that the flowers and species that make our hearts race are now under siege. The biological rhythms that keep life in balance, indeed that help keep potential pandemics in check and our agriculture functional, are increasingly out of whack. As our lands dry and our seas warm, species from bees to whales must find alternate survival settings on a planet increasingly hostile to their interests.
This “uproar” in the natural order, largely a consequence of human activity, is increasingly hostile to our own survival as well. Those of us who are trying to stay vigilant, trying to stay awake and focused on our increasingly wobbly planet, seem so often to possess in our persuasive arsenal more warnings than we have solutions. We know that deforestation ruptures food chains, destroys biodiversity and increases the likelihood of future pandemics at a moment when we have barely regained any firm footing from the current one. We know that our collective food security is regularly undermined through conditions from drought and flooding to soil erosion and the absence of pollinators. We know that levels of ocean plastics threaten to contaminate sea harvests on which many of the world’s peoples depend.
And we know that a warming planet continues to release both abundant methane into our atmosphere and vast quantities of precious fresh water into our oceans, altering both temperature and pH. In addition, a recent article by Brian Kahn chronicles the growing evidence that a combination of ice cap melting and groundwater depletion is causing a “wobble” in the very stability of our planet, a shifting (subtle for now) in the movements of the “rotational poles,” shifts in gravitational pull related largely to rapidly rising sea levels.
As the world wobbles on in response to our carbon addictive warming, so too do many of our fellow humans. As noted at the UN this week, the current pandemic has been a boon to garden-variety narcissism but also to criminality in diverse forms – trafficking in persons and weapons, violence against cultural minorities, even the consolidation and expansion of extremist movements. As the representative of the Maldives reminded this week during a UN General Assembly event on “urban crime,” cultivating a “sense of belonging” remains key to effective crime prevention. In its absence, criminal elements can establish (and have established) an increasingly malevolent, destabilizing presence, widening social divides and increasing levels of insecurity and anxiety within and across populations.
Such a “sense of belonging” has certainly been hard for us to come by during this pandemic. So many of us, even the vaccinated and otherwise privileged among us, even those of us who have not been victimized by crime or lost those we love to a creeping virus, even we are now less stable, more wobbly, than we might otherwise admit. Many of us have retreated to places that offer more comfort than growth; many of us have recalibrated relationships and passions and made the decision to shrink our circles rather than pushing them outwards; many of us have abandoned the goals and gifts that once animated our lives and provided hope for others as we “ride out this storm” that never seems to run out of destructive consequences. We have at times allowed the insecurities in our immediate spaces rob our attentiveness to the almost unimaginable insecurities of others bereft of health care, bereft of security from traffickers and other criminal elements; bereft of food security as once viable croplands turn into non-productive deserts.
And yet, despite our efforts to protect ourselves and those closest to us, it is not at all clear that we have put the threat from wobbles to rest. As the pandemic evolves and as our long social isolation and chronic uncertainty slowly begin to lift, many of us find that some aspects of our competence, our confidence, even our essential sanity, have taken a hit.
As the buds and flowers of April spring open, they communicate what should be a hopeful signal to the rest of us: If they can open to the world, so can we. If they can spread their color, sharing the best of what they have to offer to brighten our sometimes dismal, lonely spaces, we can do the same for others. If they can honor their annual biological commitments despite the wobbles of pollution, temperature and pollination, we can overcome our own struggles; indeed we can address the anxiety and even depression that will otherwise continue to impede our engagement with a human-saturated world that needs our sustainable caregiving input as much as it ever has.
Perhaps the signature event of this past week available on UN Web TV was actually not a UN event at all, but a Climate Summit convened by the US White House, bringing a range of global leaders together (virtually) to strengthen commitments to stem the steady march of a warming, species-threatened, plastics-inundated planet. Despite a stream of largely predictable statements long on concern and short on change; and despite the opening warnings of UN SG Guterres that we are now risking a “mountain of debt on a broken planet,” there were a few genuine bright spots. US VP Harris opened the Summit with surprising references to the “indigenous insight” and “nature-based solutions” that offer a tangible path forward, much of which was reinforced this week at the UN’s Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. Later on, the president of the Marshall Islands, stressed the need for his oft-vulnerable people to find “safe harbor” amidst the current tempest, noting that the safest of all would be policies and actions to keep global temperature rise at or below 1.5 degrees C. He also noted the importance, as did other leaders, of using this “rare chance” provided by pandemic recovery to “to reset our economies and societies.” Perhaps reset ourselves as well.
All of this was helpful and hopeful, but as German Chancellor Merkel intoned, we face a “herculean” task requiring a thorough revision of the ways in which we now do our business. Indeed, her statement raised questions, for me at least, about the sufficiency of our institutions, the wisdom of our policies, but even more about the resilience of our collective psychology, our ability to shed our pandemic cocoons, to find ways to stop our shaking and steady our wobbling, to do our best to overcome the anxieties and insecurities which have taken root during our long hibernation, to lay aside grievances born of social isolation and chronic instability and remain awake to a world which has been waiting anxiously for us to take up, once again, our engaged and caring roles, providing inspiration for healing that other people need and that might not exist if we don’t find the courage and capacity to share such ourselves.
As our world wobbles on, as we struggle to recover our economic and emotional health, the tasks lying before us seem to be growing in intensity not shrinking. Of all these current “herculean” matters, perhaps the most daunting relates to recovering our own strength to overcome the after-effects of a most difficult time and play our role in this “life or death” moment for our world, embracing possibilities that might appear uncertain on the surface while making space for a wider and healthier range of global constituents to enter the conversation and share their own revision strategies.
The clear, consistent messaging coming from this UN week is that “we are running out of time” to change the way we do our business, to ensure that there will be more flowers and buds in springtime, more species able to dodge extinction, more people freed from pandemic anxieties and access inequities that continue to take such a heavy toll. We are running out of time to stabilize our now-wobbly planet and we urgently need to enable and support more of us still-shaken humans to remain awake to that task.
gapwblog 