Not Styx, not Acheron, not Cocytus,
but the Rio Grande:
which circle of Hell lies this side
of our southern border?
The little girl and her father
didn't make it across,
but their failure carried us
to the other side.
Wednesday, 26 June 2019
Lifeline
Think in terms of lifelines.
Don't think in terms of deadlines.
The deadline isn't 2050 or 2030
or even right now.
The deadline was 5 years ago.
We missed the deadline.
We don't need a deadline anymore.
We're dead already.
We need a lifeline.
Think in terms of lifelines.
Lungs
The Aegean.
The Rio Grande.
Water in a child's lungs,
like two tear shaped sacks.
I would cry,
but my eyes are as dry
as deserts fled by refugees
when the climate trespasses
upon their crops,
in this age of dust bowl and deluge.
We weep with our lungs now
and grieve for our own extinction
with the bodies of dead children.
(Prompted by the distressing scene of the father and daughter drowned in the Rio Grande)
The Rio Grande.
Water in a child's lungs,
like two tear shaped sacks.
I would cry,
but my eyes are as dry
as deserts fled by refugees
when the climate trespasses
upon their crops,
in this age of dust bowl and deluge.
We weep with our lungs now
and grieve for our own extinction
with the bodies of dead children.
(Prompted by the distressing scene of the father and daughter drowned in the Rio Grande)
Monday, 17 June 2019
The alliteration of opposites
The child was born with one leg.
That neither means we aren't bipedal,
nor that she is not one of us.
It simply means she has one leg.
A slight limp lingers in the adult's gait.
Prosthetics are improving all the time,
and she has learned of grief and growth,
of the ethereal and the eldritch,
and taken it in her stride, and glimpsed
stars glimpsing back at her
through the fingers
of her outstretched hand,
and knows all simplicity is deceptive
and though we may never square the circle
that does not mean we should not try.
That neither means we aren't bipedal,
nor that she is not one of us.
It simply means she has one leg.
A slight limp lingers in the adult's gait.
Prosthetics are improving all the time,
and she has learned of grief and growth,
of the ethereal and the eldritch,
and taken it in her stride, and glimpsed
stars glimpsing back at her
through the fingers
of her outstretched hand,
and knows all simplicity is deceptive
and though we may never square the circle
that does not mean we should not try.
Friday, 14 June 2019
The ancestors
Our entire material culture, to the extent that it is distinctly human, originates in ancestor worship and the artefacts generated by its observance. Other animals make tools. Only humans erect monuments to the dead in which they place those tools beyond use.
This is the root cause of the destruction we are inflicting on the planet. Our entire material culture, and the attitude its development cultivates in us, alienates us from nature because it is a response to demands made by death, not by life. This is why our civilisation is sterilising the planet, cutting down forests to replace them with monocultures to feed inhabitants of concrete and steel, curating crops with pesticides that wipe out insects, enforcing our will on each other with war. This is why we cannot encourage and resign ourselves to the rich diversity of worlds beyond our control.
The tallest skyscraper is a temple to the memory of those whose legacies we celebrate with our material culture. Every plaque preserving the memory of a bequest tells us every monument we raise is a headstone.
Everything we own is inherited from the grave one way or another, but nature provides us with our inheritance through processes of life, while culture does so through processes of death. This is because culture started when we first usurped nature to preserve the memory of the dead, rather than to allow that memory to fade along with their bodies as they decayed and were returned to the processes of life. We quell the riot of life that nature would allow to erupt from the graves of our ancestors by keeping them pristine in commemoration of those they contain.
The first cities were built as expressions of the temple economies that arose as we elaborated our rituals of remembrance. Bread was first baked to feed festivals of the dead ten millennia ago. All power is wielded on the authority of ancestors. In ancient times a king's first concern, on ascending his throne, was the disposition of his tomb. Men became gods. We scorned the anonymity of the sparrow and witheld our fame from the maggot. We imagined ourselves as angels governing the cosmos.
All wealth is in a process of decay because it originates in the grave. The value of assets we identify as expressions of the fictional wealth with which we confer privilege on members of our societies is eroded by obsolescence or by factoring in their environmental consequences into to their cost. So our technologies have been propelled forwards by innovations developed to allow the transformation of wealth from one asset to another in a constant struggle to preserve their value.
Humans do not dominate the planet because they are apex predators. They are not. They dominate it because they are highly social, a trait developed in response to changes in habitat over hundreds of millennia. This sociability has resulted in the development of attachments so strong they persist after the death of the individuals involved. We grieve. We mourn. And as the generations pass, and the personalities of those we mourn recede through those generations' successive iterations of collective memory, the ones we mourn merge into a disindividuated group I have termed our ancestors. This process started at the edge of the first ever grave, where someone first refused to accept the death of their friend, and insisted that the continuation of their personality had some material expression. Human history is a journey from that graveside to now.
But now we stand at the brink. The consequences of our material culture are environmentally unsustainable. The demands of life must eventually take priority over those of death. We stand at a precipice as daunting as the edge of the first ever grave. If that was the threshold that first awakened our humanity forty thousand generation ago, we require an awakening today of a similar magnitude to address its consequences.
We have a choice to make today as awesome and terrible as the choice we made then. Shall we allow our pretensions of divinity to outweigh our children's future? Can we disobey our ancestors if this is the only way our children will survive, even if this means abandoning or re-evaluating every cherished notion we take for granted? Or shall we step off the precipice to join our ancestors in the grave at last?
This is the root cause of the destruction we are inflicting on the planet. Our entire material culture, and the attitude its development cultivates in us, alienates us from nature because it is a response to demands made by death, not by life. This is why our civilisation is sterilising the planet, cutting down forests to replace them with monocultures to feed inhabitants of concrete and steel, curating crops with pesticides that wipe out insects, enforcing our will on each other with war. This is why we cannot encourage and resign ourselves to the rich diversity of worlds beyond our control.
The tallest skyscraper is a temple to the memory of those whose legacies we celebrate with our material culture. Every plaque preserving the memory of a bequest tells us every monument we raise is a headstone.
Everything we own is inherited from the grave one way or another, but nature provides us with our inheritance through processes of life, while culture does so through processes of death. This is because culture started when we first usurped nature to preserve the memory of the dead, rather than to allow that memory to fade along with their bodies as they decayed and were returned to the processes of life. We quell the riot of life that nature would allow to erupt from the graves of our ancestors by keeping them pristine in commemoration of those they contain.
The first cities were built as expressions of the temple economies that arose as we elaborated our rituals of remembrance. Bread was first baked to feed festivals of the dead ten millennia ago. All power is wielded on the authority of ancestors. In ancient times a king's first concern, on ascending his throne, was the disposition of his tomb. Men became gods. We scorned the anonymity of the sparrow and witheld our fame from the maggot. We imagined ourselves as angels governing the cosmos.
All wealth is in a process of decay because it originates in the grave. The value of assets we identify as expressions of the fictional wealth with which we confer privilege on members of our societies is eroded by obsolescence or by factoring in their environmental consequences into to their cost. So our technologies have been propelled forwards by innovations developed to allow the transformation of wealth from one asset to another in a constant struggle to preserve their value.
Humans do not dominate the planet because they are apex predators. They are not. They dominate it because they are highly social, a trait developed in response to changes in habitat over hundreds of millennia. This sociability has resulted in the development of attachments so strong they persist after the death of the individuals involved. We grieve. We mourn. And as the generations pass, and the personalities of those we mourn recede through those generations' successive iterations of collective memory, the ones we mourn merge into a disindividuated group I have termed our ancestors. This process started at the edge of the first ever grave, where someone first refused to accept the death of their friend, and insisted that the continuation of their personality had some material expression. Human history is a journey from that graveside to now.
But now we stand at the brink. The consequences of our material culture are environmentally unsustainable. The demands of life must eventually take priority over those of death. We stand at a precipice as daunting as the edge of the first ever grave. If that was the threshold that first awakened our humanity forty thousand generation ago, we require an awakening today of a similar magnitude to address its consequences.
We have a choice to make today as awesome and terrible as the choice we made then. Shall we allow our pretensions of divinity to outweigh our children's future? Can we disobey our ancestors if this is the only way our children will survive, even if this means abandoning or re-evaluating every cherished notion we take for granted? Or shall we step off the precipice to join our ancestors in the grave at last?
Monday, 10 June 2019
A curler to remember
“In life, as in art,
the beautiful moves in curves”:
a change of pace,
a change of direction;
she sends the defender the wrong way;
she sees the chance and takes it,
putting such a spin on the ball
with the side of her foot
the air itself takes part
and curls it into the corner
of the net, in life, as in art.
(I was delighted and honoured that this was selected as poem 14 in the SWNT Poets' Society collection to mark the participation of the Scottish Women's National Team in the World Cup)
the beautiful moves in curves”:
a change of pace,
a change of direction;
she sends the defender the wrong way;
she sees the chance and takes it,
putting such a spin on the ball
with the side of her foot
the air itself takes part
and curls it into the corner
of the net, in life, as in art.
(I was delighted and honoured that this was selected as poem 14 in the SWNT Poets' Society collection to mark the participation of the Scottish Women's National Team in the World Cup)
Sunday, 9 June 2019
Astronaut
Far from home,
so light you lie
almost weightless,
a feather on your bed.
The count down:
weeks, days, hours.
A button is pressed:
your bed is adjusted,
and your back is raised,
so you can see the stars
through the hospice window
before your final journey.
so light you lie
almost weightless,
a feather on your bed.
The count down:
weeks, days, hours.
A button is pressed:
your bed is adjusted,
and your back is raised,
so you can see the stars
through the hospice window
before your final journey.
Wednesday, 5 June 2019
Caesium 137
I remember when I first met you:
1988, Glasgow, an undergraduate lab class,
radioactive mud taken from the drains
in the aftermath of Chernobyl two years before.
We were suitably cautioned,
and we handled you with care
lest you infiltrate ribs, settle in marrow,
to eject gene-shredding electrons
and announce your presence with leukemia
and leave a signature of barium in bones
lying undisturbed for centuries
in a premature grave,
but you entered my life before that:
in the rain that fell that day in April 1986,
and in the grass that fed the sheep
and cooked them from the inside just enough
to take them by the million from the hills
in case they ended up on our tables,
but even before that you were there,
a minute residue of Hiroshima, a trace, a stratum,
dividing all of human history into two eras:
the Pre-caesium-137 Age and the Post,
your absence in old bottles of claret
a proof of vintage, as bought and paid for,
because we'd have to go back aeons,
long before grapes grew
in the chalky soils of St Emilion,
before the beguiling balance of risk and reward
teased life into the diversity we see around us
that erupted in the Cambrian Explosion,
before single cells first embraced as gametes,
to find you in the detritus and rubble
from which the Earth was formed, dwindling away
after the concatenation of half lives
that had elapsed since you were first born
in the collision of neutron stars
that we unravel today to heat our homes,
and destroy the armies of our enemies,
and confer on you a second birth
that buries us in your resurrection.
1988, Glasgow, an undergraduate lab class,
radioactive mud taken from the drains
in the aftermath of Chernobyl two years before.
We were suitably cautioned,
and we handled you with care
lest you infiltrate ribs, settle in marrow,
to eject gene-shredding electrons
and announce your presence with leukemia
and leave a signature of barium in bones
lying undisturbed for centuries
in a premature grave,
but you entered my life before that:
in the rain that fell that day in April 1986,
and in the grass that fed the sheep
and cooked them from the inside just enough
to take them by the million from the hills
in case they ended up on our tables,
but even before that you were there,
a minute residue of Hiroshima, a trace, a stratum,
dividing all of human history into two eras:
the Pre-caesium-137 Age and the Post,
your absence in old bottles of claret
a proof of vintage, as bought and paid for,
because we'd have to go back aeons,
long before grapes grew
in the chalky soils of St Emilion,
before the beguiling balance of risk and reward
teased life into the diversity we see around us
that erupted in the Cambrian Explosion,
before single cells first embraced as gametes,
to find you in the detritus and rubble
from which the Earth was formed, dwindling away
after the concatenation of half lives
that had elapsed since you were first born
in the collision of neutron stars
that we unravel today to heat our homes,
and destroy the armies of our enemies,
and confer on you a second birth
that buries us in your resurrection.
The Climate Emergency is our Chernobyl
I watched the last episode of the HBO and Sky Atlantic television drama miniseries Chernobyl last night. This is utterly brilliant television, and should be considered mandatory viewing.
I feel it is also urgent in its contemporary relevance. Consider the parallel, comparable zeitgeister of nuclear disaster and climate emergency. In both cases we see the consequences of systemic failings and decades of lies leading to both crises: the denial of Soviet fallibility on one hand; and climate change denial on the other. In each case a series of lies accumulate a debt to the truth: in the words of Valery Legasov, as depicted in the dramatisation, "every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later that debt is repaid".
The parallels continue: both were preventable, but the research was suppressed in the 1970s, on the one hand by the KGB, on the other by ExxonMobil; in both cases this suppression was achieved through control of public discourse and the media, on the one hand by the Soviet state, on the other by public relations firms and think tanks acting on behalf of undeclared sponsors; in both cases the short term gains of entrenched vested interests were given priority over the long term interests of the rest of us to the point of illegality; in both cases massive global environmental catastrophe was the consequence. And as methanocalypse has begun to unfold over the last five years, the imminence of the threat in both cases is not immediately appreciated, but requires immediate urgent action.
The differences are few. In the case of global warming typically only the characterers of dissenters have been assassinated by the apparatus deployed against them to preserve an unsustainable status quo. The crisis at Chernobyl came to a head rapidly over a matter of minutes after the reactor was stalled under secretive circumstances, whereas the climate crisis has been developing in plain sight for all to see for decades.
Typically, sustainable energy accumulation timescales are similar to those that characterise the use of that energy, as in the case with renewables. Carbon emissions are due to our rapid and recklessly extravagant exploitation of an energy resource accumulated over geological timescales. Nuclear power relies on energy locked into heavy nuclei formed in the collision of neutron stars billions of years ago.
Other key differences should be noted. The half-life of the caesium 137 released by Chernobyl is about 30 years. In the 30 years between 1986, when the Chernobyl incident occurred, and 2016, the radiative forcing attributable to anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions has not halved, but gone up from 1.184 to 1.985 W/m2, an almost two-fold increase. Whereas the reactor at Chernobyl has been sealed within a metal and concrete sarcophagus to keep it safe for a hundred years by the largest single civil engineering operation in history at a cost of £2 billion, and the plume spreading radioactive contamination across Europe has abated, the furnaces consuming our fossil fuels remain open and are still spewing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere at twice the rate natural processes can absorb it, leading to the increase in radiative forcing mentioned above.
So there are key distinctions. Note that I am not drawing any conclusions about the role of nuclear power in the decarbonisation of our economies, I am merely comparing the circumstances of two specific disasters that have befallen us. The similarities are sufficient for us to declare that the climate emergency is our Chernobyl. In both cases urgent action become imperative once the crisis is revealed. And in the former, as in the latter case, system change is the "debt to truth" that now falls due.
I feel it is also urgent in its contemporary relevance. Consider the parallel, comparable zeitgeister of nuclear disaster and climate emergency. In both cases we see the consequences of systemic failings and decades of lies leading to both crises: the denial of Soviet fallibility on one hand; and climate change denial on the other. In each case a series of lies accumulate a debt to the truth: in the words of Valery Legasov, as depicted in the dramatisation, "every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later that debt is repaid".
The parallels continue: both were preventable, but the research was suppressed in the 1970s, on the one hand by the KGB, on the other by ExxonMobil; in both cases this suppression was achieved through control of public discourse and the media, on the one hand by the Soviet state, on the other by public relations firms and think tanks acting on behalf of undeclared sponsors; in both cases the short term gains of entrenched vested interests were given priority over the long term interests of the rest of us to the point of illegality; in both cases massive global environmental catastrophe was the consequence. And as methanocalypse has begun to unfold over the last five years, the imminence of the threat in both cases is not immediately appreciated, but requires immediate urgent action.
The differences are few. In the case of global warming typically only the characterers of dissenters have been assassinated by the apparatus deployed against them to preserve an unsustainable status quo. The crisis at Chernobyl came to a head rapidly over a matter of minutes after the reactor was stalled under secretive circumstances, whereas the climate crisis has been developing in plain sight for all to see for decades.
Typically, sustainable energy accumulation timescales are similar to those that characterise the use of that energy, as in the case with renewables. Carbon emissions are due to our rapid and recklessly extravagant exploitation of an energy resource accumulated over geological timescales. Nuclear power relies on energy locked into heavy nuclei formed in the collision of neutron stars billions of years ago.
Other key differences should be noted. The half-life of the caesium 137 released by Chernobyl is about 30 years. In the 30 years between 1986, when the Chernobyl incident occurred, and 2016, the radiative forcing attributable to anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions has not halved, but gone up from 1.184 to 1.985 W/m2, an almost two-fold increase. Whereas the reactor at Chernobyl has been sealed within a metal and concrete sarcophagus to keep it safe for a hundred years by the largest single civil engineering operation in history at a cost of £2 billion, and the plume spreading radioactive contamination across Europe has abated, the furnaces consuming our fossil fuels remain open and are still spewing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere at twice the rate natural processes can absorb it, leading to the increase in radiative forcing mentioned above.
So there are key distinctions. Note that I am not drawing any conclusions about the role of nuclear power in the decarbonisation of our economies, I am merely comparing the circumstances of two specific disasters that have befallen us. The similarities are sufficient for us to declare that the climate emergency is our Chernobyl. In both cases urgent action become imperative once the crisis is revealed. And in the former, as in the latter case, system change is the "debt to truth" that now falls due.
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