"I am doing the best I can"

  In the past week Oberlin has been lucky to be visited by Gary Paul Nabhan and Bill McKibben, two amazing thinkers and activists dedicated in their own ways to confronting the realities of climate change. 

  I feel so lucky to have met such a kind, thoughtful, energetic man as Gary Nabhan.  As both someone involved in sustainable agriculture and writing, he and my partner Kazim Ali (a poet) and I sat around and could seamlessly shift from fruit tree grafting and soil development to Agha Shahid Ali.  He is for me truly a model of what an agri/cultural worker can be.  Gary's work as a pollination biologist, ethnobotanist, and writer centers on preserving local foodways around the country and the world, particularly in the Southwest.  He spoke at several events, describing how 16,000 regionally-specific American apple varieties in the nineteenth century have now been reduced to only 11 varieties available in supermarkets today and how climate change is creating not just shifts that will cause crops to shift geographically but sudden and dramatic weather events that could extinguish species altogether and disrupt the cultural food pathways connected to them.  His latest book is Chasing Chiles:  Hot Spots Along the Pepper Trail. You can learn more about his work and writing at his website and at Renewing America's Food Traditions (RAFT), a program he helped start that promotes local foods and food cultures.  Ohioans: check out the Buckeye Chicken, bred right here in Ohio, and consider raising some of your own to keep one of our own local food breeds alive.

  A week later Bill McKibben gave a stunningly bleak picture of what awaits us in this brave new world created by climate change that was at once rousing, activating, and hopeful.  In his book Eaarth:  Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, McKibben argues that climate change is not coming but is already here, that the rhetoric of having to make societal changes for our grandchildren's sakes is woefully inadequate and misses the timeliness of what is happening right now.  In fact, he writes, we are now living on a planet that is fundamentally different from the one on which human culture first developed.  Hence the uncanny new name for this planet:  Eaarth.  This means not only having to make fundamental shifts in global energy use, but also facing up to having to rethink how we can survive and thrive on this new planet -- that there needs to be a new human culture for this new world.

  At his lecture, he spoke of events in two parts of the world in 2010, after he had finished writing this new book:  19 countries broke high temperature records; a string of 100+ degree days in Moscow where 100 degrees had never been recorded;  major decreases in grain production in Russia; 129 degree days in Pakistan;  25% of Pakistan underwater during flooding.  He made an interesting case for the need for both global and local action on climate change.  While local action is fundamental, it will be useless if global changes aren't made because effects will always be global.  As he said (and I can attest to from my experience of an incredibly hot summer last year in Oberlin), "It doesn't matter how good a farmer you are, you're not going to be growing food" if extreme weather makes it impossible.  His 350.org global activism movement is dedicated to creating the change necessary to bring atmospheric carbon levels down to 350 parts per million (ppm), the maximum level that James Hansen, a leading climatologist, believes human civilization can survive in.  Where are we now?  391 ppm. 

  Where will we be by 2100, even if all the government pledges made at the 2009 Copenhagen Climate Change conference are kept? 

725 ppm.

  At the end of sesshins, weeklong intensive Zen meditation retreats, participants are exhorted to practice diligently "as if extinguishing a fire on our heads...  Like fish living in a little water, what sort of peace and tranquility can there be?"  These two startling images, one of searing pain and immediacy and the other one brimming with pathos and the doom of the inevitable, have always been striking to me.  But now I have to admit that I feel them more keenly.  Last summer a long string of 95+ degree days and no rain made farming difficult and yields less than abundant.  It seems chillingly appropriate that Gary Nabhan's and Bill McKibben's visits should be bracketed by unusually harsh and destructive weather this Spring.  We had a hail storm descend out of nowhere on Oberlin just a few hours before Gary arrived, with pea-size hail turning the streets white and clattering on the roofs.  They also battered the cool-crop seedlings I had been hardening off outside.

The hailstorm only lasted about 3 minutes but it came down heavy.

Just a few hours later, there is barely any evidence of the storm, except for battered radish and pea seedlings.

  Bill McKibben's lecture was greeted by torrential rains, only yet another in a series of downpours this Spring that have been filled eerily with lightning given the time of year.  Earlier this year my backyard (about 3/4 acre) was flooded worse than I have seen before: 

I thought this would be a once-a-season event, but by the time Bill McKibben was done speaking about the increasing incidence of disruptive weather, this is what my back yard looked like:

And this is how deep it was:

Fava beans, radishes, and peas are not underwater vegetables, unless they've been flooded.

  All the work I've put into building beds and sowing seeds "on time" means nothing if weather systems change.  On Eaarth maybe the time for planting radishes and peas and fava beans is different than the planet I grew up on.  Maybe these cool weather crops no longer have a place in a landscape where extreme spring weather doesn't offer the appropriate window of mild weather before the summer heat arrives.  This is frightening.  What sort of peace or tranquility can there be? 

  While my goal this year is to grow lots of vegetables in our yard and model a kind of micro-farm space within the suburban space of my small town, I luckily have the resources to feed myself from the supermarket.  But what of the farmers in Pakistan, where 25% of the whole country was flooded?  As I write this another strong storm is passing through and threatening more rain just as the lake in my backyard is slowly receding into the saturated ground.  What happens if another storm comes?  And another?  McKibben pointed out the harsh injustice of climate change:  that those who have contributed least to its causes will suffer most from its effects.  And so I cast my thoughts to my Pakistani and Bangladeshi farmer brothers and sisters.  And knowing the distress I feel from my relatively comfortable vantage point, I have to wonder what the future holds for all of us.

  I recently watched the documentary, Dirt! and was heartened to hear the story recounted below by Wangari Maathai, who won the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize for her work planting 20 million trees throughout Africa. 



For me the little hummingbird's spirit is like the Zen power of joriki, translated as "self-power."  She accomplishes what she does because of her will and self-reliance.  Maathai's hummingbird is a lot like the Buddha's parrot.  There is a series of Buddhist stories called the Jataka tales about the many previous lives of the Buddha in which his virtues of compassion and wisdom are revealed.  One of them is about a parrot whose spirit of endurance is like the hummingbird's.  Which bird is the Buddha in this story:  the parrot or the eagle?

Is this a story about tariki, "other power," an approach of petition to a higher power (here in the form of the golden eagle)?  The being who would later become the Buddha, "the awakening one," was the little soot-covered parrot, not the resplendent god-like eagle.  The added dimension that I see in the parrot's story compared to the hummingbird's is that one's self-reliant energy gets things accomplished precisely because this "self" isn't contained in just one tiny body but ripples out through small actions that beget other actions. 

  What can I do about climate change and the very real new world we are all living in together right now?  "I am doing the best I can."  Thank you for doing the best you can too.