God gave Noah the rainbow sign
No more water, the fire next time
Apologies to James Baldwin for appropriating his title. Apologies to the person who came up with the hopeful hymn, “Mary Don’t You Weep.” Apologies for not being hopeful.
Apologies, in advance, for pointing out that sins of the fathers get inflicted upon their children and beyond. God will punish all of humanity unto the seventh generation, just for starters.
Apologies for bringing up the seventh generation, and the unfair arithmetic that goes with it. If a generation lasts 25 years, and young people today are the seventh generation, God is making them pay for sins committed around 1850. Slavery would be one of those. The genocide of Native Americans would be another. But these are only symptoms of an older and nastier sin.
I think those of us born in 1950 are the seventh generation. The sin that has attracted God’s attention is the Industrial Revolution.
God, for me, strongly resembles the laws of physics. You don’t need to be a Jeremiah to know that if you try to break the laws of physics—say, by setting up an inhuman economic system dependent on infinite growth on a finite planet—God will shrug and let things play out the only way they can. Pain is involved. It’s nothing personal. Just physics.
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I realize that sin is a loaded word, with intimations of hellfire and demons with pitchforks and, if you read Dante’s Inferno, diabolically clever punishments for all of Dante’s enemies. Sin presumes a watchful God who, like any author, keeps track of transgressions, maintains a value system that distinguishes right from wrong, and enforces a system of justice that ensures that nobody and nobody’s descendants can get away with anything.
Our everyday secular discourse allows wiggle room where sin is concerned. Psychotherapy has eased the pain of millions of guilt-tormented people, but it has also made good and evil contingent on context, and context can be expanded to infinity. Good and evil are no longer absolutes, and they often switch places any time the Big Picture gets bigger.
Murderers can be seen as genetically disadvantaged. Sadistic dictators can be understood to be working out childhood trauma by seizing control wherever control can be seized. Destroying innocent people can be understood, and sometimes even forgiven, as displaced revenge on people long dead.
In the normal course of events, bad things can happen to good, physics-fearing people, which suggests that God isn’t all-powerful or all-caring and therefore can be ignored.
Worship can evolve from obeying the rules to a meditation on the mystery of existence, which allows for sin to be a mystery, too. Mystery means that on Judgment Day, you can plead ignorance, which is a way of saying that whatever happens really isn’t your fault.
The trouble is, God is an absolute. Good and evil are absolutes. Sin is an absolute. Punishment is an absolute, except for that bit about foisting it off on the kids. Forgiveness is not anywhere in the picture.
Something bad happens. If it’s not your fault, why is God so pissed off at you?
Apologies for bringing God into the discussion.
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I have been hiking in the head of Sawtooth Valley, in the 40,000-acre Ross Fork Fire, hunting morel mushrooms. The fire started in the middle of last summer, stayed small for a month or so, and then, when the terrain had dried to tinder, shot down Beaver Creek to the valley floor. In a matter of hours, it reached the ghost town of Old Sawtooth City, Alturas Lake, and the Smiley Creek resort and subdivision. Two houses burned. Only an extreme effort by a thousand or so firefighters and supporting helicopters and water-scooping tankers saved the entire community from burning.
In places the fire was so hot that it sterilized the soil, which has made morel-hunting spotty. Black mud flowed down the mountainsides, and even though we’re fifteen miles from the fire, we’re getting bigger and bigger thunderstorms now the afternoons are getting warm. A cloudburst in any of the canyons in the fire area will make the Salmon River behind our house run black for days.
The thousands of acres destroyed by the Ross Fork Fire are predicted to recover, but I have my doubts. Idaho is in the long-term process of becoming a desert. Old fires in our neighborhood haven’t shown much new growth, even after a couple of decades. Pine seedlings require a damp summer when they’re starting out, but our summer weather has, like the weather in the rest of the world, been a series of deluges and droughts. Augusts and Septembers have been hot and windy. Fire season, most years, has expanded into June and October. Rocky yellow grasslands are replacing thick stands of lodgepole.
Even the morels have suffered, despite an abundance of new burned areas. The ground will often dry out on top before the soil around the mycelium—the wispy, attenuated body of the mushroom—even thaws out. Mushrooms won’t grow in dry dust, which is why you hunt in places where dead pine needles have coated the ground and kept moisture in the soil. But you can walk for miles in dry ashes and never see a single mushroom.
Fireweed does well in the burns. Large grazing animals—elk, deer, and antelope—range through black stumps and twisted bare trunks, looking for the fluorescent green of new grass. Woodpeckers hunt for grubs crawling beneath toasted bark. Now and then you can find evidence that a ground squirrel, in underground hibernation during a late fire, survived the winter and is feeding on a buried cache of pinecones, getting ready to move to a still-green neighborhood.
Other than that, the badly burned areas have far less life than they had before the fire. Those old Smokey Bear posters that showed all the newly homeless animals fleeing before an escaped campfire weren’t lying.
Still, we are happy to salvage what morels we can from the ashes. It’s good to go for a walk in the woods, even if the woods are black and dead. It’s healthy exercise, now that the smoke is gone. If you climb to the top of a ridge, you can see the naked land spread out below you, wrinkled and creased and exposed, looking like it did just after the glaciers melted. This is the face of the ancient earth, there all along, under the makeup.
Now and then you find old iron, evidence that in most places in the valley, people logged, mined, camped, hunted, and hid out long before you came along. They’re gone now, even if their artifacts remain.
Over my years of hunting morels, I’ve found cast iron stovetops in the ashes, the half-buried remains of ancient cars, shepherd’s crooks, the heads of axes and Pulaskis, melted purple glass, harness hardware, and the occasional ungulate skeleton. Last week Julie found the remains of two old refrigerators, their white enamel blackened, their metal twisted, their insulation melted into the air.
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Yesterday I found the bones of a cow elk. She had likely been shot, but had been able to run off and hide before she died.
Her skull was firmly attached to her spinal column, so I sawed it off with the serrated knife I use to harvest mushrooms. When I got it home I began to remove her two front teeth, working around the bits of black flesh still clinging to the bone.
Julie, wrinkling her nose at the smell, asked me what I was doing.
“These are ivory,” I said, holding a tooth out to her. “Leftovers from a time when elk had tusks. They make beautiful earrings.”
“Not for me,” she said. “And wash that knife.”
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I have been keeping track of the world’s weather headlines, and between the typhoons, floods, droughts, and record high temperatures, I think that this summer might be when humanity finally realizes it’s completely fouled its nest.
A new El Nino is beginning, and the ocean heat that it will give up to the atmosphere will set new high-temperature records all across the planet. It’s already begun, from Antarctica to south Asia to northern Canada. The new highs are sometimes two or three degrees higher than the old highs, and the old highs were killing people.
Continental glaciers are melting and will soon disappear, depriving millions of fresh water. A warmer atmosphere holds more water, so flash floods are becoming the norm. The southern Sierras got a record amount of water this year, and Tulare Lake in California has reclaimed a bunch of lakebed that had been turned into farmers’ fields.
Miami has begun to experience weeks above high tide. People have drowned after rainstorms in Turkey, Iran and Kyrgyzstan, and Haiti.
Fire season has already begun in Canada, as any resident of New York or Philadelphia knows. Uruguay and Argentina are in a winter drought. Heat waves are under way in Costa Rica, Mexico, China, Siberia, British Columbia, Nunavut, Spain, India, and South Africa. Sea ice is at an extreme seasonal minimum in Antarctica.
Drought is expected to cut Australia’s wheat harvest by a third. For five days of the last two weeks, the world has had record high sea surface temperatures, record high air temperatures, and record low sea-ice volume. All at once.
These things are happening now. They are not somewhere in a postponed future.
Of course, you can cherry-pick bad news and make things look worse than they are, but I’ve left a lot of climate emergencies off this list. If anything, things are worse than they appear.
If there’s such a thing as a climate-denial tipping point, I think we’ve reached it. After this summer, some people will still insist that the earth is a good place for humans to live. But they will be people with air conditioning, alcohol, border walls, a decided lack of empathy, and industrial-strength denial when they look at the evening news.
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If God is the laws of physics, his habit of trapping infrared radiation in planetary atmospheres is going to look like poetic retribution for the next few thousand years. It will take that long for God’s natural processes to clear the earth’s atmosphere of the most important artifact we will have left behind, greenhouse gasses.
It’s going to be pure hell.
How humanity will fare in those years is anyone’s guess, but chances are that our descendants unto the seventh, seventy-seventh, and hundred-and-seventy-seventh generation will curse our names for worshipping Mammon rather than thermodynamics, Moloch rather than atmospheric chemistry, Beelzebub rather the carbon spirits sequestered in trees.
It's not all divine wrath, at least for the moment. We have thunderstorms that cool the air, and a mostly green valley where a big winter snowpack still decorates the surrounding mountains. We also have morel crepes, morel stroganoff, sauteed morels, morels on toast, morel quiche, and omelets that are more morels than eggs.
We hope that this situation will last for a while, at least until the heat and the drought arrive, and we look out our windows to see that the fire next time has become the fire this time, and it’s time for us to go.