bank statement.

REQUIEM

The crucified planet Earth,
Should it find a voice
and a sense of irony,
might now well say
of our abuse of it,
“Forgive them, Father,
They know not what they do.”

The irony would be
That we know what
we are doing.

When the last living thing
has died on account of us,
how poetical it would be
if Earth could say,
in a voice floating up
perhaps
from the floor
of the Grand Canyon,
“It is done.”
People did not like it here.

Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

***

There are, out there, some phenomenal writers who have boldly chosen to tackle the delicate topic which is the interaction of man and his natural environment. Emerson was one, Rachel Carson was another. Bill McKibben is still hammering away. It’s a broad and noble subject, so full of importance.

Kurt Vonnegut– the zany twentieth century satirist best known for his habit of chain smoking unfiltered Pall Malls and his humorously indifferent narrative of the vaporization of 135,000 people during the bombing of Dresden– fails to crack into most “greatest environmental writers of all time” rankings, but I think next time he shouldn’t be overlooked. I just finished up A Man Without a Country, and what a ride it was: a collection of bitterly cynical essays openly critical of the Bush administration and humankind’s general apathy toward our blatant addiction to fossil fuels. His requiem at the end is notably morbid, and how true! We’re well aware of what’s happening to our planet and we just couldn’t care less.

The World Bank just released its commissioned report entitled, “Turn down the heat– why a 4°C warmer world must be avoided.” The title sums it up, really. Our planet is expected to warm 4°C by 2100, the population will triple, the oceans will rise and become more acidic, agricultural yields will plummet, and developing nations will be the first to feel the real pinch. Oh– and they note that these current predictions are far more dramatic than have been previously forecasted. So it goes.

This news is nothing new, and in fact, it’s a message which has been pounded into our skulls so frequently over the last 35 years that we’re less agitated by such bulletins than we are by the news of a CIA director’s flagrant infidelity. This is sad but understandable. It’s hard to visualize what an overcrowded and overheated planet might look like in 88 years, and it’s even more difficult to muster the courage to do a darn thing about it. But handing our kids a rotting planet is a painful prospect. What a day it’ll be when I have to encourage my grandkids to take up basketball in the winter instead of teaching them to pizza pie and french fry on a snowy ski slope. My basketball skills are woeful. I will be a grandfather grossly unprepared for a world 4° warmer.

I’m certain that Kurt Vonnegut has been to the future. He’s got such insight, such clarity, and such funny jokes. But he’s also quite proficient at describing, with horrifying accuracy, man’s parasitic relationship with the natural world.

***

“When I went to grade school in Indianapolis, the James Whitcomb Riley School #43, we used to draw pictures of houses of tomorrow, boats of tomorrow, airplanes of tomorrow, and there were all these dreams for the future. Of course at that time everything had come to a stop. The factories had stopped, the Great Depression was on, and the magic word was Prosperity. Sometime Prosperity will come. We were preparing for it. We were dreaming of the sorts of houses human beings should inhabit– ideal dwellings, ideal forms of transportation.

What is radically new today is that my daughter, Lily, who has just turned twenty-one, finds herself, as do your children, as does George W. Bush, himself a kid, and Saddam Hussein and on and on, heir to shockingly recent history of human slavery, to an AIDS epidemic, and to nuclear submarines slumbering on the floors of fjords in Iceland and elsewhere, crews prepared at a moment’s notice to turn industrial quantities of men, women, and children into radioactive soot and bone meal by means of rockets and H-bomb warheads. Our children have inherited technologies whose byproducts, whether in war or peace, are rapidly destroying the whole planet as a breathable, drinkable system for supporting life of any kind.

Anyone who has studied science and talks to scientists notices that we are in terrible danger now. Human beings, past and present, have trashed the joint.

The biggest truth to face now– what is probably making me unfunny now for the remainder of my life– is that I don’t think people give a damn whether the planet goes on or not. It seems to me as if everyone is living as members of Alcoholics Anonymous do, day by day. And a few more days will be enough. I know of very few people who are dreaming of a world for their grandchildren.”

–KV,  A Man Without a Country, from “I turned eighty-two on November 11”