in the unseasonable City, a dream of wasps
—
In Egypt this week, world leaders assemble on the coast of the Red Sea for the COP27 climate talks. In opening remarks, UN Secretary-General António Guterres told the world that “We are on a highway to climate hell.” True—absolutely—but trite. Diplomatic rhetoric, designed to sound measured, is ill-suited to urgency. This sounds like advertisement, corporate initiatives. Guterres: “We need all hands on deck for faster, bolder #ClimateAction.”
No surprise that activists and onlookers are uneasy about these bureaucratic spectacles. Naomi Klein called the talks “Sisi’s sunny Green Reality Show,” in reference to Egypt’s authoritarian president. Hypocrisies, tangential or glaring, abound. Alaa Abd El Fattah remains on hunger strike in jail. The lead sponsor of the talks is the global leader of plastic pollution. The PR firm for the summit counts Big Oil among its clients. They are the hypocrisies one must weigh against possible solutions to the larger hypocrisy: that nations like the US, disproportionate carbon emitters, go disproportionately unpunished, claiming all the while to be in this together with the rest of the world.
In his speech, Al Gore said, “We have a credibility problem, all of us.” Not all of us. The tiny country of Tuvalu bears no responsibility for global warming, and it is sinking into the ocean. In September, Prime Minister Kausea Natano noted that “This is the first time in history that the collective action of many nations will have made several sovereign countries uninhabitable.”
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It is November in the US, and I am wearing a t-shirt on the roof in the unseasonable Sunday sun. My body thrums, surprised and delighted, unconcerned that soon it will come to feel the horror of such gorgeous days. Looking toward the horizon, past the brick battlements of buildings and their spaceward shields of satellite dishes, I can see the Statue of Liberty. Standing small like a trinket. Refuge and false promises of refuge.
I am sitting on an island but you cannot see any water from here. Were it not for the gulls, large and white amid pigeons, you’d hardly know there was water near at all. The City obscures everything that is not the City.
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“We’ve never seen so much water in our lives,” said Abdul Qayoom, standing in the rubble of his family home, ruined by the historic floods in Pakistan this summer. Staggering heatwaves led to more rainfall, which combined with accelerated glacial melt to swamp over a third of the country.
By the time such a reckoning comes for Long Island or Manhattan, a second Sandy or worse, the rest of the world will have long suffered. These islands will continue to build themselves up while other islands disappear. Everywhere the sound of jackhammers, new construction to block yesterday’s vantage, to brick up the views of the sea.
Qayoom: “Here we say that you either own a house or a grave.”
These islands are full of tenants like me, who own neither. In a different sense, perhaps, we own both.
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On Saturday, also eerily warm, I walk a small bag of food scraps to the compost drop-off point. The few pounds of compost I take to the Park each week does so little to offset the rest of my consumption that it is basically a spiritual practice. A way to feel less blighted. Less blighting.
Though putting waste in the correct pile is not, in fact, spiritual. It is the ordinary good of the civic. Like voting, you do it while knowing of its smallness. Small helps accrete across a City, throughout a place. Gaining meaning as they mount. Will they ever amount to enough.
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The goal of limiting warming to 1.5ºC above pre-industrial levels now seems unlikely. Much of this year’s IPCC report stressed the calamitous difference between a world that warms 1.5º and one that warms further: “All losses, both in terms of lives and in economic terms, will be more limited in a 1.5°C than in a 3°C warmer world.” Per the report:
Ecosystems already reaching or surpassing hard adaptation limits include some warm water coral reefs, some coastal wetlands, some rainforests, and some polar and mountain ecosystems (high confidence). Above 1.5°C global warming level, some ecosystem-based adaptation measures will lose their effectiveness in providing benefits to people as these ecosystems will reach hard adaptation limits (high confidence).
Hard adaptation limits. Humans, whose adaptiveness runs down through us like a rachis, cannot conceive of such a thing. The shuddering forests, the blank reefs, we still cannot conceive of limits.
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The PR firm managing COP27 is none other than Hill+Knowlton Strategies, which has represented Chevron, ExxonMobil, Saudi Aramco, and Shell.
Shell, which posted a record second-quarter profit of $11.5 billion this summer, has a page about COP27 on their website, in which they claim to “explore lower-carbon ways to produce the cement, steel and chemicals that help build the modern world.”
With profits like these, there will be no voluntary end to production. No stalling of extraction. The lie will be that innovation can hug the hard adaptation limit like an asymptote, or that no such limit exists. But the “lower-carbon ways” are often unproven or half-measures, like supposed carbon-capture technology, which would put no end to burning fuel. Why would it? The corporation’s mandate is perpetual existence. It does not think of endings at all.
In 2018, Hill+Knowlton ran an ad for Shell, highlighting the use of coffee waste to power several buses in London. Entirely unscalable, entirely beside the point. Diversions and sleights. As if one could turn coffee to cement.
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Earlier this year, in Assam, in Northeastern India, archaeologists discovered large stone urns. Ancient and spheric, they look like the fossilized eggs of enormous insects, tumors protruding from the undergrowth. Researchers are not sure what they were used for, or who built them. “The longer we take to find them,” noted archaeologist Nicholas Skopal, “the greater chance that they will be destroyed, as more crops are planted in these areas and the forests are cut down.” Local oral tradition suggests they were made by the Siemi, a lost people, who placed their dead in these jars along with treasures for the afterlife.
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I dreamed the other night of a large parasitic wasp, black and deep orange, hatching from a butterfly’s chrysalis and floating around me in a forest.
The wasps lay their eggs in living caterpillars, and their young hatch and hollow out their hosts. You await a butterfly but a wasp emerges, miracle-stealer.
I wrote on a sticky note when I woke the next morning: “dream of parasitic wasp. orange & black. odd stone moss tunnel up to other path.”
My dreams grow alarmed, looking for ways out. Up to other path. Where. How to take it.
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On Saturday, I keep walking, across the Brooklyn Bridge, pushing my way through the swarm of people who climb onto beams to bask and smile. It is hard not to resent them, pushing against their numbers. Behind me the skyscrapers flare with light, a city of sun-stelae. These pilgrims with their phone cameras, bent on capture. I cut through them my narrow pathway home.
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The Prime Minister of Barbados speaks at a lectern, before flags of Egypt and the UN. “I do believe that we have a moral and just cause. And it is up to us to work together to ensure that this effort, and this journey, will define us.”
Taoiseach Micheál Martin tells the audience that “Temperatures in Ireland have been so mild this autumn that trees are producing new growth before they have even dropped their leaves.”
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I used to worry that marking all this down added to the doom. Winding fear into some small poetics of paralysis. I don’t think that anymore.
The civic purpose is to cast one’s small stone, to add to the pile. And further: to organize, to demand. And even further still.
The purpose of the writing is something else. Attempts at reordering, perhaps futile. A different kind of record. But all writing is toward something. Sleepless, I busy myself here.
—
At each day’s end I go into my small room in the City to dream. Of black and orange. Paths and pupae of stone. Something unspeakable sprouting wings.
How I’d like instead to dream of ascending a hill. The unobstructed sight of the sea. That breeze. How I’d like to dream of something that does not speak doom in the dying world we wake to. Which we do wake to. Which we must.
ben tapeworm