I’d like to take some time here to explore the stories we tell ourselves. I like to think about these as “meta-stories” that cut through the surface of our literature and historical writing like the arc of a conical cross-section. It is on the plane of this cross-section that we can find some of the underlying motivations behind allegorical depictions or constant re-interpretation of historical data. I won’t try to list these motivations, either in full or part, because this is really the constant task of historical research and the reason we keep producing art. Instead, I’ll begin with a story of my own and the train of thoughts it lead me on.
A couple of weeks ago I found myself stuck in early morning traffic heading towards the city. In keeping with the general theme of many mornings this winter my primary sensations were tired and cold. I was one of the mindless automata in the highway traffic–settled quite snugly into my seat, enjoying the music on the radio and tapping my foot to the contrasting rhythmic counterpoint of the brake lights in front of me. After some minutes I was dislodged from this soporific choreography by a sudden cloud of fog that enveloped my vision. The fog, of course, was the combined exhaust of the cars in front of and beside me. It had apparently built up on the ground in between and underneath the cars, but as we all moved forward as a fluid whole, the fog was released from its captivity. By its sheer volume this fog would have caught my attention in any case, but what really brought me ought of my revery was the delicacy of the chilled carbon monoxide as it rose and surrounded the car.
I followed these billows up and around as they rose in sync with the continued rhythmic braking as the herd rounded a curve and with a view onto the downtown skyline, where the same dance I saw around me was being played out on a grand scale.
After several days of snow and clouds, the skyscrapers seemed to be stretching their legs and lifting themselves up into the freshly cleared firmament. They were set against a great bank of clouds still suspended over Lake Michigan and the sun was making a belated orange-hued ascent. In response to these long awaited rays of warmth and color the buildings were sending up their own plumes of steam and exhaust to mingle with the lake’s fog bank. –– I’ll stop there for fear of going too far down the path of anthropomorphizing these blocks of steel and concrete and their water vapor and smoke.
Regardless of the source and content of this experience what I came away with was the elegance of it. It was, in fact, startlingly elegant. In retrospect, however, it ought not to have been. The morning was exceptionally cold in a city that needs to heat millions of people and fuel extensive networks of machinery, which produces copious amounts of hot vapor that condenses and floats away slowly in the frigid air.
When I first reflected on this experience I put it into the context of having recently returned from Japan and the continued reverse culture shock I had been experiencing. All of the familiar things that hadn’t existed to Japan, like extreme cold and snow, now seemed to greet me with fresh vitality. A short time later, however, I finished a book (Black Hills, Dan Simmons) that ended with an attractive depiction of time in the not-too-distant future when large swaths of North America have been returned to a pre-European-settlement state.
The idea of a return to a state before human over-population is a theme that I’ve been encountering with some frequency lately. Some of these visions have been in fairly old books as I work through science fiction worlds of the distant future. Some, however, are cropping up more frequently in popular culture with television shows and basic cable movies exploring what would happen after some kind of collapse in western society. The common element that I’ve latched onto in these fictional worlds–whether it is a world where electricity has vanished, a world overrun with zombies or some other disease, or one where our environmental mismanagement has forced us to retreat to some other world–is that we often imagine a world in which we can scale back our abuse of nature and that things will revert to normal.
Would this really happen? Over hundreds or thousands of years, of course, the world might return to a state that we might recognize as untouched by human hands. But would it happen simply by our elimination as a species or by a drastic reduction in our industry? I doubt it. Many signs point to the damage we have done as being irreversible at least in the short term: even if we could cut carbon emissions and other pollutions to pre-industrial levels tomorrow, we have clearly entered a period of ever hotter summers and ever colder winters. And yet we seem to be telling ourselves that things will get better “if we can just change our ways…”
Which brings me back to my smog-fog-exhaust filled morning. Even when I consider the implications of that scene in terms of carbon emissions, I still see the natural processes at work that created the version of that pollution that I saw. As I reflect on it that scene brings to mind others from my childhood when I would be in the Sierra Nevada in early spring or late fall and would watch the sun rise over a cold and foggy lake. What was always amazing to me in these moments was the way that the fog would increase with the rising of the sun. Although a great deal of moisture from the warm daytime air had condensed in the night it always appeared to me that the warming sun would make this blanket on the water increase in size. Then small wisps of fog would rise above into the air above and only when the sun was quite high would the fog finally “burn off”. It was elegant and I would have been perfectly happy simply to sit down on the bridge at one end of the lake watching that moment play over and over.
I want the scene from this winter in Chicago to be another version of that from my childhood, even though I know it isn’t. I want to see nature going on about its business even in the midst of our tremendously artificial existence, which in many ways it does.
Although we haven’t yet broken the laws of physics, we have done severe damage to world around us. Day by day, however, the world still goes on much as it has for eons and humans go on much as we have for eons. In fact, we have been stewards of nature since well before we were recording our history and while at some points and in some places we have been good stewards, in the long run we have gotten it wrong (or so it would seem at this point). So barring some sort of catastrophe that wipes out our technology, we really have no choice but to continue our stewardship and try to get it right.
I’ll save the comments about what the role of government ought to be in all of this (large) and the big changes we need to make (getting rid of exurban living and gigantic single car commutes would be a good start) for another day. For now I’ll just try to use as much natural light as possible, leave the thermostat low, and put on another sweater.
