The Unnoticed Everywhere of Every Day
Seen but unseen: the climatic changes and corruption that surround all of us, all the time
A river within a river. Blue foam-flecked water and, sliding gliding curlicuing across the surface, streams of color: red and green, translucent, prismatic, hypnotic. An oil slick. You know what it looks like, you’ve seen it before.
Flat anvil desert; sledgehammer heat. Miles of emptiness, meager hardwon vegetation scattered like faded memories, a few creatures seeking or shunning sun, and an empty soda-can. Ants crawling across, into, all around, seeking the last moisture, the last sweetness. You know what that looks like too, you’ve seen it before.
Attaining a high vista: climbing a green hill, or ascending to the topmost floor of a skyscraper. Looking out over hills and valleys, or over a stretching city. But seeing only so far and no farther, the hills rolling into white haze, the city obscured, a brown line threading the horizon end-to-end. It’s familiar. You know it. You’ve seen it before.
The smokestacks in that part of town you don’t like to go to. The ridgeline of fire creating ominous, spectacular sunrises, sunsets. The school of dead fish pushed up against a pier, bobbing with a grey tide. The river they tell you you shouldn’t swim in this summer. That little cough that comes from nowhere and lingers for weeks, making your head buzz when you rise after a night of hacking sleep. Your child, pulling out the inhaler for the third time just over breakfast.
You know all these things. They’re familiar, you’ve seen them, you’ve smelled them, you’ve felt the heat, you’ve sat in the dark after the third once-in-a-lifetime storm knocked out power for two days.
The ubiquity of corruption. The so-common-it’s-unseen sight of a million instances of pollution, in every corner of your life. If you were to keep a list for just one day of everything that you ordinarily skip past and overlook, you might find yourself weeping by lunchtime.
For as long as the human animal has been able to wield tools, we have polluted the world around us. For as long as we’ve known how to make things, we have been unable to determine what to do with the castings of our labor. Because, as the blanching coral reefs can tell us, dumping our problem where we can no longer see it does not make it go away. Unseen is not unfelt. How many times can you pour bacon grease down the kitchen sink before your disposal clogs?
The climate has changed, is changing, will change more. We’re responsible for some portion of that change, the evidence is everywhere, you’ve seen it all before, and arguing over how big our portion of the change is, or how much it matters, is tantamount to shouting requests at the mad fiddler Nero while Rome burns around you.
Action is required. Correct action. Because inaction, the head in the sand, the blind eye turned, is itself action of the wrong sort. Inaction allows the burning, the oil slick, the dead fish, the brown horizon, the hacking cough and the inhaler. Inaction, in this time of peril, is akin to going home on a hot day and turning on the heater. Let it not cross your mind.
Because we are familiar with, we have seen, we know and we cherish the other sights and experiences, too. The uncorrupted fish-running river, the desert of stark untouched beauty, the views from high vantages that leave one the right kind of breathless. Uncharred ridgelines, a neighborhood of trees not factories, fish nuzzling a mossy river stone. We know these, we long for these, all of us every one. We should deny none of these to our descendants; we should deny none of these to ourselves.
Next: What is correct action?
