Читать книгу Dinosaur Dreaming - Gail Collins-Ranadive - Страница 7

In a recurring nightmare, I am standing in a linked-arm chain of climate-conscious citizens. We are lined up along the cliff-edge of extinction, facing off against the perpetrators of the greatest crime against humanity: the polluters and profiteers who have known for decades that their products would warm the planet, change the climate, and harm life on earth by overloading our atmosphere with CO2 emissions.

Now they’ve completely hijacked our government that’s supposed to be of, for, and by we the people and are poised to exploit every last ounce of fossilized sunlight for political power and private profit.

The only thing standing in their way is us…anyone and everyone who knows we are at a crossroads unlike any other in human history.

In my nightmare, I fear I’ll be a weak link in the line of resistance, a place where the climate deniers and liars break through, with those they have duped following as mindless as lemmings headed straight for the cliff. As the juggernaut of existential death presses towards us, I worry that my grief over what’s being lost will swallow me whole. I hang on to dear life despite throbbing arms. Surely this is just a bad dream!

Wait! Is that a snowball being lobbed in our direction, that ultimate mockery aimed at the scientific reality of anthropogenic climate disruption? Now we’re being pelted with snowballs, each of them representing the latest assault on our attempts to deal with the climate crisis: the international climate agreement, the national clean power plan, the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines, state and local renewable energy portfolios, the mileage standards for cars that would reduce emissions.

As the list grows to include offshore and arctic drilling, and leasing public land for fossil fuel exploration and exploitation, snowballs smack us and break apart at our feet, hissing like snakes. A growing pile of slush is turning into mud that is so slick and slippery we’re losing our footing as the fossil fools surge forward. I struggle to keep my balance. Or wake up.

This can’t really be happening! Somewhere in my nightmare my mind knows it is simply processing the latest findings that warn we have barely the rest on my lifetime to turn this planetary crisis around.

Submerging into the nightmare again, I catch the glimpse of a rainbow. As if the Sun has our backs, a prism of color streaks across the dark cloud above the heads of those who’d destroy our world. They cannot see it.

The rainbow carries me into my waking life, until, on my morning walk, an actual rainbow graces the misty sky and awakens my imagination. Rainbows have long symbolized hope for humankind, from the Greek goddess Iris carrying messages along its bridge between heaven and earth to the Hebrew god promising Noah to never destroy the earth again.

This time it’s we humans who are destroying the world. With tipping points and feedback loops looming, we’re at a place of no return to the “just right” climate that brought us forth and sustains us. And I’ve grown so weary and become so demoralized over this that my inner and outer worlds have become heavy, a hopeless grey. I’m ready to give in and give up.

Then all at once my grey spirit shape-shifts into a dove that whistles by. Is it in my dream or in my day? It doesn’t matter. In the dove I see a dinosaur that learned how to fly, and this remnant of the last mass extinction begs to be a metaphor to help prevent the next one.

Options for responding include flight, fight, and freeze, plus the uniquely human ones of figure out and fix it. A lifelong student of nature and human nature, I choose to believe that our species can and will wake up and take action. Never mind that the perpetrators would have us accept that it’s too late to do anything that would disrupt their profits.

We created this crisis and we can solve it. My arms stiffen in defiance of all odds. Don’t dare tell me we won’t rise to this challenge! Fear turns into fury and awakens a fierceness that frightens me.

Focusing on the rainbow as it refracts seven facets of the problem, I see the solutions that are embedded within each. We don’t have to go the way of the dinosaurs, and the human experiment need not end in the blink of this cosmic moment!