Winds Blowing Us Back Home

The earth isn't in a state of crisis. We are.

To tell a suffering person that there is “opportunity in crisis” is — at best — unkind, no matter how true it is. As with other truths we often kindly withhold from others, there’s little to be gained — and much to be lost — from a poorly-timed utterance of objective reality.

I cite the etymology of words so often in my writing because I don’t think the older meanings ever go away, even if we have forgotten them. They still echo in our current usage, even as modern communication media tries to strip them bare of their history, roots, and texture. We use words to describe our reality, to bring in — and sometimes also to wall out — meaning. Sometimes, something slips in with it; sometimes, the answers to our questions stare back at us in the words we used to form them.

Some part of us still remembers what a word also meant.

Consider “crisis,” which comes to us from Greek. It originally meant “judgment” and “decision,” and derived from a verb that meant “to sieve,” as when you need to sort out what must be kept and what must be discarded. Quite often, it was used in writing to discuss illness and disease: a crisis was the moment when it was possible to judge clearly whether a sick person would either become better or would die.

These older meanings of crisis are rarely what is meant by the word anymore: we often now think of a crisis as just a time of trouble, a temporary storm passing over our life, or as an awful event we “just need to get through.” If we can only survive the moment, everything after will be okay again, life can continue, and normal will return.

Briefly scanning the headlines this week, I read a litany of crises. More than 100 dead in Maui from wildfires, with a projected cost of 1.3 billion dollars to rebuild homes, businesses, and resorts reduced to ash. More than a thousand separate wildfires are currently burning across Canada, displacing scores of thousands from remote towns, not even a month after Nova Scotia saw its heaviest flooding rain in 50 years (and hardly two months since distant forest fire smoke turned the skies of New York City a thick orange). While metropolitan Los Angeles may have dodged most of the effects of the first tropical storm in 84 years, towns in more arid inland areas saw catastrophic flash flooding. And, as I write this, much of central and southern United States, France, Greece, and Italy are setting records for highest temperatures ever recorded, while fires continue in Greece and the Alps continue to melt.

These are just a small sampling of the crises we regularly hear about, and of course we’ll hear more. Everything is changing around us, the climate is not as we knew it, the land behaves strangely. Something is wrong.

Unfortunately, neither of the ways in which we think of crisis are quite helpful for this. Thinking of these events as moments to “just get through” obviously is unwise, no matter how much a few still assure us that a normality is awaiting just past the floods and droughts. But also, looking at the earth as a sick patient getting worse isn’t helpful either, because we humans are neither its doctors nor its judges.

It isn’t the earth that is dying, as it cannot die. It’s carrying on quite well, actually, doing precisely the things the earth does in response to human pressures. It’s responding perfectly fine to our destruction, in the way a healthy body responds to an infection.

The earth isn’t in a state of crisis.

We are.

To think of climate change and environmental destruction this way may seem initially wrong, even arrogant. When humans destroy so much habitat for a species that it goes extinct, how could we possibly say that it’s humans — and not nature — in crisis? But this is to forget what crisis actually means. It’s not a crisis for a species or a forest to die; it’s a catastrophe. It’s a simple matter of cause and effect: we cause it, and we witness the effects.

The same can be said about the cascading changes in climate patterns and systems. The recurring heat dome/polar vortex pattern we now see almost yearly in North America isn’t a crisis for systems of air and ocean currents, because neither of those things can actually be in crisis. They don’t die, they change.

We, on the other hand, do die. We die from heat and famine, from extreme cold and from flooding. We die from fire and smoke, we die from disease and thirst. We die from the things that happen when forests burn, when we cannot cool down in extreme heat or cannot get warm in extreme cold. We die from hunger when our crops fail in droughts or flood, we die from thirst and disease when our sources of water dry up or are polluted.

There’s a drought in Panama as I write this, slowing cargo vessel traffic through the Panama canal to a mere trickle. I learned of it from a panicked social media post citing this as proof of the “climate crisis.” But “the climate” didn’t gouge a 50 mile trench in the earth to connect one ocean to another — humans did. The climate doesn’t send 14,000 ships through the canal each year so that Americans on the east coast can buy more cheaply-made industrial and agricultural products from Asia — humans do.

It’s hardly a crisis for the air, the water, or even the forests displaced and animal habitat destroyed to create the canal. It’s our crisis.

Again, to tell a suffering person that there is “opportunity in crisis” is unkind, but only because we have forgotten the meaning not only of crisis, but also of opportunity. We think now of opportunity as the potential for some new venture, a chance to profit or to gain advantage in a situation, a door opening through which we might find great reward. But as with crisis, we’ve strayed far from its original meaning.

“Opportunity” is from Latin, and was used first as part of a description of favorable wind conditions. These winds, though, were not those which sent sailors far off to distant lands to increase trade and wealth, but rather those which brought them to safety. Opportunity was the wind ob portum veniens, the breezes coming towards the harbor, blowing us back home.

The longer the litanies of crises grow, the more favorable the winds become to return us to home. Not the idealized homes of the urban condo dwellers thumbscrolling digital catalogues of trade spoils from distant lands, nor the cramped apartments of workers crowded with cheap plastic and screens displaying simulacra of lives lived elsewhere. The home towards which these winds blow is not the “normal” we delude ourselves into believing will return after each crisis passes, nor the utopian fantasies that we can have everything we want without any of the effects our rapacious desire causes.

The home towards which these winds come is a home we may not yet recognise, since it has been so long since we’ve been there. Much has changed since we left it: fewer forests, fewer insects, fewer animals, fewer wilds. A thick dust of forgetting has fallen over every room, obscuring what we once cherished as dear and celebrated as beautiful. Too long at sea seeking wealth and wonder, we may not even remember how to live the kinds of lives one lives at home.

Fortunately, it is mostly only a matter of remembering, and it’s most often all joy. What is it like to grow a bit of one’s food at home, rather than shop for it in garishly-lit warehouses? What does one do without a screen to tell you what to think? How does one meet other humans without algorithmic filters telling you who “likes” you? How do we provide for ourselves without capitalist networks of distribution, employment, and management?

It is mostly only a matter of remembering, but it will also be a matter of learning anew, and this will not always be joy. We will need to learn anew how to survive without being told how to survive, without anyone managing our desires, telling us what we need, and re-assuring us that it’s all under control. We’ll need to wean ourselves off the opiates of lies, false visions of a future where the earth does what we want it to, rather than what it does. We’ll need to learn what addicts in recovery learn, that our sense of control was always only an illusion of control.

The earth is not in crisis — we are. Still set adrift, struggling against strong winds blowing us back home, still certain we can reach distant lands to plunder. Storms rise up, winds scorching and freezing, while the proud captains of our ships still swear and promise of a way through, an end of the crisis, a utopian arrival.

Walter Benjamin wrote that perhaps revolutions are the pulling of an emergency brake on the locomotive of history. It is clear now to me that they are also the mutiny of sailors reading the weather, smelling the air, and ready to follow the winds ob portum veniens, blowing us back home.

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