Sorry to Have to Tell You This, But….

Sorry to have to tell you this, but nothing is going to get better just because 2021 is over (or, in my time zone, will be in a few hours).

Yes, I know it’s been a rough year. The pandemic continues with not one but two horrible new variants. Floods, fires, droughts, hurricanes, and tornadoes have all been unusually intense and occurring in weird seasons (December tornado outbreak, anyone?). And some excellent people have left us of late–the famous ones include Desmond Tutu, E.O. Wilson, and, just today, Betty White. So, the cartoons and the Facebook memes about 2021 being somehow cursed or something, a year well over, are understandable.

But the thing is, we’ve been making the same jokes for years, now.

From https://xkcd.com/1779/, by Randall Monroe.

And every year seems to get worse.

None of this is a coincidence. I mean, maybe it COULD be a coincidence–random events are almost never evenly distributed, so a clump of randomly bad events is totally possible. You’d have to do some sort of statistical calculation to determine how much bad stuff can be truly coincidental, and I don’t know if anyone’s done it yet for 2021. But the thing is, there’s an underlying mechanism that explains all this.

It’s called entropy.

Even if you don’t know much about physics, you might have heard of entropy–it’s the principle that although energy can’t be created or destroyed (First Law of Thermodynamics), it also can’t be recycled. Energy dissipates and, once it does, it can’t be recovered. So, the universe is very gradually winding down, becoming cooler and simpler. Eventually, there won’t be enough energy left for life or stars or anything. It’s a depressing image, and I for one dearly hope that after the universe ends with a soundless whimper, some other universe bangs into being and life goes on.

But you might also be familiar with the fact that lots of familiar phenomena appear to disobey this supposed universal principle of decay. Babies, for example, get bigger and more complex. So, what gives? Turns out that there are two kinds of systems, simple and complex. “Complex system” is a technical term and a fascinating subject, but the important thing for our discussion is that living systems are complex, and that, being complex, we can fight entropy and win.

We do it by taking in energy from the larger systems we’re nested within (by eating, for example).

As long as we take in more energy than we lose, we grow, becoming more complex and more stable in the process. Think of a child, becoming stronger, smarter, and better at self-care. At maturity, gains and losses equal. In illness or age, we lose more energy than we gain, and in the process become simpler and more erratic–that’s called the entropic phase. Death is the loss of the ability to take energy in, the loss of identity as a complex system, the final surrender to entropy.

And the thing is, we’ve taken so much energy out of the biosphere–through burning fossil fuels–that the biosphere itself is now in an entropic phase. At the very least, it’s gravely ill. And so we see all the symptoms typical of this phase–the loss of biodiversity, the loss of climate stability, the strange, extreme weather….

I’m not convinced our other ills are not also related.

I mean, Betty White was personally in her entropic phase anyway, humans generally are at 99 years old, but the other things, I’m suspicious about them. COVID, certainly, has a climate connection. Our various political woes may well have economic drivers, and the economy is deeply linked to the integrity of the biosphere–that’s where wealth comes from. It’s the only place wealth comes from. The whole world is starting to wobble like a falling top.

The thing is, I’ve seen the entropic phase is many forms of late, seen, or been in communication with those who have seen, various beings dying in various ways. At its best, death can be accomplished with grace. It can be a sacred time. But even then, there is a strangeness to it, even an ugliness, a hint of horror, of pain. More commonly, there is more than a hint. The progressive loss of stability–strange physical symptoms, bizarre behavior–is frightening. We recoil in atavistic fear, knowing what we see.

I see it now all around us. So do you. That’s why you’re joking about the year being cursed.

So that’s why, though I hate to have to say it, I must; next year will not be better. It will be worse. All the years will be worse–until we do something about climate change. Until we stop maiming the planet.

And the thing is, we have the power to do just that. This is no time to get depressed, it’s time to get busy. It’s time to have hope and to act on it, to empower ourselves and each other.

If you want a Happy New Year–and to be very clear, you CAN have one–you will do this.

You can do this.

About Miracles

Photo from Unsplash

I post some version of this every year the week of Christmas. Perhaps you don’t celebrate Christmas? Many people don’t–it isn’t my primary winter holiday, either, though I join the celebrations of family and friends. But chances are Christmas is on your mind these days, whether you celebrate it personally or not.

There are the TV adds, the holiday specials, the new holiday movies, the incessant Christmas carols in public spaces, though I’ve been even more socially isolated than normal this year, so I’ve encountered relatively little of it. I haven’t even heard “Little Drummer Boy” once. Now, I know that some people harbor a special hatred of that over-played song, but I kind of like it.

Actually, I really like it. That song has been known to make me cry whenever I really pay attention to the lyrics. Here they are, minus the rum-pa-pum-pums and traditional lyrical line-breaks:

“Come,” they told me; “a new-born King to see. Our finest gifts we bring to lay before the King, so, to honor Him when we come.”
“Little baby, I am a poor boy too. I have no gift to bring that’s fit to give a King. Shall I play for you on my drum?”
Mary nodded. The ox and lamb kept time. I played my drum for Him. I played my best for Him.
Then He smiled at me, me and my drum.

I mean, seriously, picture this. There’s this little boy who has this fantastic experience–mysterious grown-ups appear from some exotic place and tell him of this amazing baby–this King whose birth was announced by angels and by a new, very bright star, the subject of prophesies about the redemption of the whole world. The drummer boy probably doesn’t understand most of it, but he understands this is a Big Deal, and when the grown-ups urge him to come with them to worship and honor the newborn King, he eagerly agrees.

Except what can he give? He has no money, no expensive gifts. He’s poor and he’s just a child–compared to all these Wise Men and other important people, what can he do? He doesn’t know how to do anything except play his drum, and maybe he can’t even do that very well. Poor little drummer boys just don’t get to go visit kings. It isn’t done.

But then the child gets to see the baby, and he sees this King is actually a poor little boy just like him. They aren’t that different. And the baby is looking up at him, expectant. The drummer boy just has to give something. So he does the one thing he can do, knowing it can’t possibly be enough. He plays his drum and he plays it just as well as he can.

And it makes the baby smile.

We’re all like that, in one way or another. Most of us probably feel inadequate most of the time–I certainly do–and, frankly, in the face of global warming, we are each inadequate, at least by any reasonable definition. We don’t have enough money; we don’t have the right skills; we lack the cooperation of friends and family; or we have other, competing responsibilities; or grave problems of our own to cope with. These are entirely valid excuses, real stumbling blocks, and arrayed against us is the full power and might of some extremely rich people who do not want us to get off fossil fuel at all, ever. We’re running out of time.

And yet, sometimes the universe isn’t reasonable. Sometimes one person can change the world. Sometimes one’s best turns out to be good enough after all.

May it be so for you. Merry Christmas.

Good Morning

Here is a slightly-edited Solstice post from a few years ago. It’s as applicable as ever.

The winter solstice is a holiday for various groups of people, but it may be unfamiliar to others. The short explanation is that the winter solstice is the shortest day of the year. The summer solstice is the longest. Note that the winter solstice only falls in December in the northern hemisphere–in the southern hemisphere, December is late spring/early summer, and the month of their summer solstice. The days when day and night are equal are the equinoxes.  When I use the word “solstice” as the name of a holiday, I capitalize it, but not otherwise.

The reason that many different religions have holidays in December is that they either honor the winter solstice or incorporate cultural practices from earlier religions that did. Light and hope are common themes across cultures for this time of year. The usual explanation is that primitive peoples developed these traditions because they worried that the days would just keep getting shorter and then the world would be dark and cold forever. They lit fires and sang songs and so forth in order to magically strengthen the sun or to celebrate it’s “miraculous” return.

That doesn’t make sense.

While humans may once have worried about the sun in that way, they must have figured out otherwise a very long time ago. For one thing, if a people honestly didn’t know the sun was coming back, how would they know what time of year to hold their festival? Or if they believed only magic brought the sun back, why delay magical operations until the time of the solstice? Why not begin as soon as the days started to shrink?

No, they knew. Even thousands of years ago, the predictable transition from shrinking days to growing days was used as a metaphor for things that felt similar but couldn’t be predicted, such as injury, illness, famine, or the evils humans can do to each other–or sometimes triumph over.

That insight was impressed on me one night when I went backpacking alone over the solstice and found the weather much colder than I prepared for. I had planned to celebrate the holiday in solitude in the woods, a rather romantic idea that fell apart when all my water froze and I had to retreat to my sleeping bag shortly after the sun went down so I wouldn’t freeze, too. My bag was plenty warm enough, but since I didn’t know how cold the night would get, I didn’t know that. And if my bag wasn’t warm enough, I knew there wouldn’t be anything I could do about it.

That Solstice, I knew the sun would come up the next morning, but I wasn’t sure I’d see it.

And none of us really knows. My friend, Elisabeth, didn’t see the sun come up this Yule morning–she died a month and a half ago, as you may recall, since I’ve posted about her. Lots of people didn’t see the sun come up this day. Day length varies. Life involves both sickness and health, both beginnings and ends, and for the most part we don’t know when or if one might turn into the other. The return of the sun carries hope for the good news we can’t predict.

What does all this have to do with climate?

I don’t know if this human endeavor is going to work out. Frankly, I think we may simply have dropped the ball as a species, and if hope still exists it is only hope–it’s a long time before we’ll get good news, if we ever do. The night of anthropogenic climate change grows long.

Religion–and the less traditional spiritual traditions–have always been, at bottom, about answering a single question; given what we know about how the world works, what do our lives mean? All the holidays of all the cultures in the world are neither more nor less than reminders of many generations’ answers to those questions.

In the face of climate change, do we need a new holiday? Or simply a new face to our old holidays, like Solstice?

What does it mean that the world we are a part of is being killed and too many people don’t care? What does that mean about our lives? How do we survive the long night?

Post, Interrupted

OK, I had a post on a different topic all planned out for yesterday, but two things happened that got in the way.

1. I had one of those days when I just can’t get my act in gear and nothing gets done.
2. The weather of the world went screwy again.

I mean, there was just a tornado over two hundred miles long, I can’t not write about it. And then the latest atmospheric river bringing heavy rains, dramatic snow, landslides, and fierce winds to the west. It’s not a good week for focusing on the abstract.

Look, I don’t have much time to write today, as I’m all piled up from yesterday and even the day before. Too much on my plate. But I have to say this is just one of those weeks when the bizarreness of our changing climate is more obvious than it usually is, and I need to acknowledge that.

Just to acknowledge, though, it’s difficult to be sure how climate change may be impacting tornadoes because tornadoes are difficult to study. It seems likely that they will get more frequent and worse, but it’s hard to say whether they have yet done so. The area where they frequently occur has been shifting east, meaning that more tornadoes are occurring in heavily-populated areas. That shift could be consistent with climate change, but it’s difficult to learn much about phenomena as small and as brief as tornadoes are.

As for atmospheric rivers, I have written about them before. They are essentially very large, very intense rain (or snow) storms, and while their relationship with climate change isn’t clear, their behavior does seem to be shifting. But the real issue here is not just the storm itself but the condition of the land where it hits. The landslides occur where wildfires have killed the vegetation that would otherwise keep the land from sliding. Wildfire is very much a climate-change issue, as are the intense droughts that have some people more or less welcoming these destructive storms.

Any way you slice it, climate change is making things worse and will continue to do so until we stop making climate change worse.

A Hanukkah Post

Photo by Gaelle Marcel on Unsplash

I realized last week that I’ve never made a Hanukkah post for this blog. I have mixed feelings about amending that. On the one hand, I don’t want Jewish readers to feel ignored. On the other hand, there’s a long tradition among gentiles of only paying attention to Jewish culture in December when we belatedly remember that not everybody celebrates Christmas, and I really don’t want to be like that. And Hanukkah is over for this year now, anyway.

But I’ve had a rough day and remembering the times I’ve been allowed to join Hanukkah celebrations makes me smile a little. The light is pretty, OK?

So here goes. A short list of links to “climate change and Hanukkah” articles online:

• Higher-than-normal temperatures threatened (but did not cancel) a tradition of ice-Menorahs in Siberia.
• A suggestion that Hanukkah be considered a celebration of renewable energy and fuel efficiency.
• A rabbi urges people to spend each day of Hanukkah on a different pro-environmental activity.
• A suggestion of pro-environmental meditations and practical suggestions for Hanukkah.
• A short essay using the story of the Hanukkah miracle as a source for ideas on how to reduce resource use.
• An article on the ways climate change damages olive trees and olive oil production.

Holiday Plans

Photo by Chad Madden on Unsplash

So, most—not all—of you are either getting ready for Christmas or getting ready to get ready for Christmas. In the past, I’ve waited until deeper in the holiday season to post about the carbon footprint of Christmas (and holidays celebrated in similar ways), but I’m thinking that posting earlier might be more practical. You might have time to make some changes this way.

The Carbon Cost of a Holiday

Some years ago, I found an article entitled “The Carbon Cost of Christmas.” That article is almost fifteen years ago, now, and it was based on calculations made for the UK. I doubt that the numbers for the United States this year are exactly the same, but I suspect the picture is still broadly similar. Christmas is still a very carbon-intensive season for most people, and it doesn’t have to be.

The article estimated that Christmas was responsible for 5.5% of the UK’s entire annual carbon cost. That is, while much of that carbon was released outside of the holiday itself, it was all expended for the holiday. Five-point-five might not seem like a big number, but 5.5% of the year is 20 days, so Christmas basically adds almost an extra month of emissions to the year. Personally, I suspect that America’s numbers are worse, but I can’t be sure.

But what really caught my eye as useful was the following breakdown of average carbon emissions in kilograms of carbon-dioxide equivalent per individual:

Christmas shopping = 310

Decorative lights = 218

Car travel= 96

Holiday food = 26

The numbers might no longer be exactly accurate, but the overall pattern is probably about the same. And that suggests some low-hanging fruit.

Picking Low-Hanging Fruit

The first thing to do is to eliminate emissions that don’t actually make human life better. For example, those lights—I don’t know how many hours per night those lights are on in the UK, but American holiday lights seem to be on all night in many cases. Who’s looking at holiday lights late at night? How much joy does that carbon buy? None.

Similarly, a lot of that Christmas shopping results in unwanted gifts. The Carbon Cost of Christmas reported that Brits spent an annual total of £4 billion on unwanted Christmas gifts, which they estimated had a carbon cost of 80 kg carbon-dioxide equivalent per person. That means almost a third of the Christmas shopping cost goes for gifts no one wants to receive. I’m not sure what the equivalent American carbon cost is, but our financial cost of unwanted gifts is a whopping $15.2 billion (about $46 per person), so clearly we have wiggle-room, too.

There are other ways to “green” the holidays, but surely turning out lights nobody is looking at and not buying gifts the recipients don’t want is a good place to start.

Oh, Christmas Tree

A few years back, I wrote an article on whether live Christmas trees or fake ones are better. I used information gleaned from articles written by two  other authors, whose work you might want to check out.

The short answer was that live, cut trees have a substantially smaller carbon footprint than artificial trees, and in some circumstances live, cut trees can even be carbon-negative. Christmas trees are typically grown on farms, so they are not a driver of deforestation, and a Christmas-tree farm is almost always environmentally better than what the land would be used for if the farm failed. In contrast, artificial trees are made of metal and plastic, facilities to disentangle these materials for recycling do not exist, and while the same tree can be re-used year after year, verses a real tree that must be replaced every year, most artificial trees are replaced before the savings can add up to much.

Of course, using a second-hand artificial tree that would otherwise be trashed is a different story, plus there are other options. You could decorate a house-plant, for example.

Thinking Strategically

Not all holiday planning is equal. You might already be as green as you can possibly get, especially is you don’t have a lot of money to work with. Average figures don’t necessarily reflect your situation. And it’s worth remembering that most emissions are not related to lifestyle issues but instead reflect corporate practices and government policy. The important thing is to demand changes to those policies and practices, particularly by voting for climate-sane candidates.

But if you can “green” your holidays, do it. There are lots of tips available online. I add just three:

1. Do the research to find out where your environmental impact really is. There is no sense stressing about a few ounces of carbon over here when something you’re doing over there is releasing tons of the stuff.

2. Don’t fall into thinking of “green” and “not-green” in simple, binary terms. For example, you might hear that meat is bad, packaging is bad, plastic is bad, etc., while vegetables are good, organic food is good, locally-made products are good, and so forth—and then end up paralyzed with doubt over some product that appears to be “good” and “bad” at the same time. Do your research, consider the context, remember nuance, and remember that this isn’t the part that’s going to save the planet. Voting will.

3. Don’t assume that fewer emissions mean less joy. Your holiday might be a bit different if you reduce its carbon footprint, but different isn’t always bad. You can change the things that don’t matter and keep the ones that do.