This is a post I'm moved to do for newborn Audrey and 3 year old Carsten, for 1-1/2 year old Eleanor and 4 year old Oliver, and for 1 year old Ethan. My heart is so full of love for our grandchildren and for our children. And my heart is also full of concern for their futures. And this is why I did not want to miss purchasing his latest book or hearing Bill McKibben speak. He is among my great heroes after having devoted 30 years on the front lines of researching and bringing us the information that is so vital to know about human caused climate change — and the urgency of the need for us to change, radically change. What a fierce warrior for the children and the planet! And my heart is filled with love and gratitude for his relentless efforts on behalf of us all.
There is just something about the people I am drawn to — those who have remained in the world for so very long with their eyes, minds, hearts, and souls open. Their courage blows me away and fills me with inspiration. If they can look and not turn away for years, then I can, too. Courage and a profound caring for life is contagious! And I believe that this is our true nature, to recognize and experience our interrelatedness with all of life. And with this remembrance, we open to the deep love and caring that has always been there, but just obstructed. We can all work to bring down the barriers we have built against love.
And so, finally, I have been listening and reading and researching for several years now. And I understand that we are at the final hour. I am aware that we are living in a time of great peril and great need for engagement in working together towards the changes that will make a habitable planet possible. May we all listen. And ACT NOW. For the children, all the children, may we individually and together take every step possible to end the madness of betraying the very futures of our children and all of Earth's inhabitants. Please. And, truly, another name for human solidarity is Love. — Molly
 |
| With Bill McKibben, May 3rd, 2019 |
I take two ideas from the turtle nest.
The first is that we really do live on an unbearably beautiful planet. We don't think of it often as a planet — we live our daily lives on flat and often prosaic ground, and when we're in the air, the flight attendant usually makes us lower the window shade so as not to interfere with the movie. But even with seven billion of us, the planet remains an astonishing collection not just of cities and suburbs, but of mountains and ice and forests and ocean. I've been to the highest year round human habitation, the Rongbuk Monastery in Tibet, and stared up from its rocky ground at Everest overhead, its summit so high that it sticks into the jet stream and unrolls a long pennant of white cloud. I've wandered the Antarctic Peninsula, watching glaciers calve icebergs with a thunderous roar. I've climbed on the endless lava fields of Iceland and watched the magma pour into the Pacific Ocean from Kilauea, in Hawaii, birthing new land before my eyes. I've seen the steam puffing from the top of Mount Rainier and wondered if I'd managed to climb it the day it would erupt. And I've lain on my stomach in my backyard, watching beetles wander by, watching dew hang on stalks of grass. I've seen penguins, I've watched whales, I've played with my dog.
We live on a planet — we live on a planet. And it's infinitely more glorious than the others we head for at such risk and expense. The single most inhospitable cubic meter of the Earth's surface — some waste of Saharan sand, some rocky Himalayan outcrop — is a thousand times more hospitable than the most appealing corner of Mars or Jupiter. If you wanted for some reason to turn that Saharan desert green, you could do it with some water. You can breathe to the top of the highest peak. Everywhere there is life.
And — this is for me the second lesson — the most curious of all those lives are the human ones, because we can destroy, but also because we can decide not to destroy. The turtle does what she does, and magnificently. She can't not do it, though, any more than the beaver can decide to take a break from building dams or the bee from making honey. But if the bird's special gift if slight, ours is the possibility of restraint. We're the only creature who can decide not to do something we're capable of doing. That's our superpower, even if we exercise it too rarely.
So, yes, we can wreck the Earth as we've known it, killing vast numbers of ourselves and wiping out entire swaths of other life — in fact, as we've seen, we're doing that right now. But we can also not do that. We could instead put a solar panel on the top of every last one of those roofs that I described at the opening of this book, and if we do, then we will have started in a different direction. We can engineer our children, at least a little now and doubtless more in the future — or we can decide not to. We can build our replacements in the form of ever-smarter robots, and we can try to keep ourselves alive as digitally preserved consciousnesses — or we can accept with grace that each of us has a moment and a place.
I do not know that we will make these choices. I rather suspect we won't — we are faltering now, and the human game has indeed begun to play itself out. That's what the relentless rise in temperature tells us, and the fact that we increasingly spend our days staring glumly at the rectangle in our palm. But we could make those choices. We have the tools (nonviolence chief among them) to allow us to stand up to the powerful and the reckless, and we have the fundamental idea of human solidarity that we could take as our guide.
We are messy creatures, often selfish, prone to short-sightedness, susceptible to greed. In a Trumpian moment with racism and nationalism resurgent, you could argue that our disappearance would be no great loss. And yet, most of us, most of the time, are pretty wonderful: funny, kind. Another name for human solidarity is love, and when I think about our world in its present form, that is what overwhelms me. The human love that works to feed the hungry and clothe the naked, the love that comes together in defense of sea turtles and sea ice and of all else around us that is good. The love that lets each of us see we're not the most important thing on earth, and makes us okay with that. The love that welcomes us, imperfect, into the world and surrounds us when we die.
Even