Caitlín R. Kiernan (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
greygirlbeast) wrote2010-07-02 12:20 pm
greygirlbeast) wrote2010-07-02 12:20 pm
Entry tags:
"Did we even try to stem the tide?"
One cannot genuinely hate a season, but autumn instills in me a deep uneasiness. Yesterday and today, it feels like autumn here in Providence. That carnivorous blue sky, low humidity, temperatures in the seventies Fahrenheit. I'm glad for the break from the heat, but not glad that means a splash of autumn in July.
Dreamsickness this morning for the first time in a couple of months. I have a pill to stop that now, but something nasty wriggled in under the pharmacological wire.
Every bit of yesterday was spent editing "The Maltese Unicorn." No, that's not quite true. Only the hours spent working. And I didn't finish the editing. It sprawls over into today, and maybe also into tomorrow. Did I write anything new yesterday? Yes, but I don't think there was any net gain. I would write a paragraph, which would take half an hour or an hour, and then I would erase it.
Please do have a look at the current eBay auctions. Thanks very much.
When the editing was done for the day yesterday, I watched an episode of American Experience about the Dust Bowl (Spooky had gone to the market). I found a curious parallel. During the 1930s, during a time of great economic hardship, the nation is suffering a man-made ecological disaster, an agrocalamity. Short-sighted farming techniques in the Southern Plains led to conditions in which a layer of topsoil that had taken a thousand years to form was blown away in a few minutes. Anyway, now, in a time of economic hardship, the nation has suffered a man-made ecological disaster, an petrocalamity. Short-sighted use of fossil fuels, combined with greed and carelessness, is threatening a gulf ecosystem that has taken many tens of millions of years to evolve. In the episode of American Experience, a number of people who had been children during the Dust Bowl were interviewed. There are two I would like to quote:
Melt White, Dalhart, Texas: "It looked like the greatest thing would never end. So they abused the land. They abused it somethin’ terrible. They raped it. They got everything out they could. And we don’t think. We don’t think. Except for ourselves and it comes down to greed. We’re selfish and we want what we want and we don’t even think of what the end results might be."
J.R. Davison, Texhoma, Oklahoma: "I think that most of those people thought this is just what we might say 'hog heaven’. It’ll always be this way. So they kept breaking this country out and they plowed up a lot of country that should never have been plowed up. They got the whole country plowed up nearly and, ah, that’s about the time it turned off terribly dry."
Change a few words here and there, and this could be an interview in, say, 2075, of people who were children during this year, recalling the spring and summer the seafloor of the Gulf of Mexico bled crude oil and methane.
And now I have to edit.
Dreamsickness this morning for the first time in a couple of months. I have a pill to stop that now, but something nasty wriggled in under the pharmacological wire.
Every bit of yesterday was spent editing "The Maltese Unicorn." No, that's not quite true. Only the hours spent working. And I didn't finish the editing. It sprawls over into today, and maybe also into tomorrow. Did I write anything new yesterday? Yes, but I don't think there was any net gain. I would write a paragraph, which would take half an hour or an hour, and then I would erase it.
Please do have a look at the current eBay auctions. Thanks very much.
When the editing was done for the day yesterday, I watched an episode of American Experience about the Dust Bowl (Spooky had gone to the market). I found a curious parallel. During the 1930s, during a time of great economic hardship, the nation is suffering a man-made ecological disaster, an agrocalamity. Short-sighted farming techniques in the Southern Plains led to conditions in which a layer of topsoil that had taken a thousand years to form was blown away in a few minutes. Anyway, now, in a time of economic hardship, the nation has suffered a man-made ecological disaster, an petrocalamity. Short-sighted use of fossil fuels, combined with greed and carelessness, is threatening a gulf ecosystem that has taken many tens of millions of years to evolve. In the episode of American Experience, a number of people who had been children during the Dust Bowl were interviewed. There are two I would like to quote:
Melt White, Dalhart, Texas: "It looked like the greatest thing would never end. So they abused the land. They abused it somethin’ terrible. They raped it. They got everything out they could. And we don’t think. We don’t think. Except for ourselves and it comes down to greed. We’re selfish and we want what we want and we don’t even think of what the end results might be."
J.R. Davison, Texhoma, Oklahoma: "I think that most of those people thought this is just what we might say 'hog heaven’. It’ll always be this way. So they kept breaking this country out and they plowed up a lot of country that should never have been plowed up. They got the whole country plowed up nearly and, ah, that’s about the time it turned off terribly dry."
Change a few words here and there, and this could be an interview in, say, 2075, of people who were children during this year, recalling the spring and summer the seafloor of the Gulf of Mexico bled crude oil and methane.
And now I have to edit.
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And then when I bring the history and its data up into the conversation, the ignorance and denial tends to drown everyone. It's discouraging, but how can I not keep saying it just because people don't want to be reminded that it's true?
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'it's hubris to think that humans could possibly change something as big as the global environment.'
It's kind of funny that the only time humans downplay (instead of inflating) their importance is when they're being blamed for something.
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Somebody, please rescue us from "us".
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We're our only hope, and it's a hope a fine and frail as a single strand of DNA.
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This was my favorite SD to date, and people who haven't subscribed yet - DO!!
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It is a disaster story. The BP thing happened just after I finished it, and the parallels are strong, and tragic. What have we done?
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But "irrevocable" isn't quite exactly the same as "irrecoverable". Yes, the Dust Bowl was horrible for the land and for the people, but it led to improvement in agricultural practices that reduce the likelihood of another Dust Bowl and to (eventual) improvement in living conditions for those who moved to the cities instead of scratching out a living on marginal farmland (which also, admittedly, helped open the area to huge factory farms instead of family ones).
But overall, to me the Dust Bowl is an example of resilience of land and people, and how people can learn, if only, unfortunately, one step at a time and I wish they'd do it before disasters instead of after.
Maybe I'm an optimist. Maybe I'm a cynic. I think humans can wipe out certain areas of land or sea that might not be recover in our lifetimes, that might possibly never recover, and I know humans can wipe out entire species of plants or animals and that's a sad, sad thing. But I don't think we're clever/stupid enough to be able to ruin the world entirely. Change it, yes. But not completely destroy it.
And this got very long, sorry, sorry. Delete it, if too much.