The End of Hope?

I’ve just finished reading Dahr Jamail’s alarming (to say the least) book, The End of Ice. And though there are dire surveys aplenty in the latter half of the book (chapters on the terrifying loss of biodiversity in the Amazon which is being clear cut rapidly, on the loss of critical sea ice in the Bering Sea, on the already-threatening sea level rise in Florida which threatens not only the Everglades but Miami Beach itself, and on what may be the greatest threat of all, the melting of the permafrost in the Arctic and thereby the release of methane—a more potent greenhouse gas than CO₂), I’d like to focus on Jamail’s last chapter. Here is where Dahr Jamail tries to conclude with some prospects for what we can do in the face of collapse on every meaningful front and the threat of warming which is so far underway that nothing we can do can forestall the warming that is already locked into the system. As Jamail puts it, “Given the fact that a rapid increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere coincided with previous mass extinctions and that we could well be facing our own extinction,” we should be asking ourselves, 

“How shall I use this precious time?” (216).

This is really the question. Jamail admits that his close scrutiny of the calamitous events happening all over the globe—something he is deeply committed to—caused him to fall into a “deep depression.” And it is no doubt this, fear of this fall into deep depression, that leads most of us to turn our eyes and our thoughts away from the catastrophe that looms. We don’t want to think of millions of people displaced from their homes, of the entire Middle East being too hot for human habitation, of our coastal cities inundated by sea level rise and lower Manhattan under water, of so much disruption to the ocean currents that London turns into a frigid zone that people accustomed to the warming Gulf Stream are unequipped to endure. We do not want to face global food shortages, of starving millions perishing as they are forcibly turned away from places where the food supply still exists for a time. So, we bury our heads in the sand, hoping that someone, some wiser political savior or saviors, or perhaps some technology will emerge to finally save us from disaster. But for people like Dahr Jamail, this simply won’t do. He is compelled to face, and he has traveled the planet in the effort to face, the warming future squarely. And to finally realize that his writing, no matter how well shaped and researched, will not fulfill his hopes that people would be roused from their slumber and take, or at least demand, action. And even beyond that, Jamail 

“came to understand that hope blocked the greater need to grieve, so that was the reason necessitating the surrendering of it” (217). 

For Jamail, the way to use his time is to continue to trek in his beloved mountains, to be revivified by the healing power of nature, but also and thereby to remain “connected to my sorrow for what is happening..” (218). For what is happening is terrible and inevitable in all its senses and he, above all, knows it:

We are already facing mass extinction. There is no removing the heat we have introduced into the oceans, nor the 40 billion tons of carbon dioxide we pump into the atmosphere every single year. There may be no changing what is happening, and far worse things are coming. How, then, shall we meet this? (218).

Jamail then quotes Stephen Jenkinson, a storyteller who works in palliative care and gave a recent lecture at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, that focused on grief:

“Grief requires us to know the time we’re in. The great enemy of grief is hope. Hope is the four-letter word for people who are (un)willing to know things for what they are. Our time requires us to be hope-free. To burn through the false choice of being hopeful and hopeless.  They are two sides of the same con job. Grief is required to proceed” (218). 

For Jamail, this involves surrendering “any attachment to any results that might stem from my work. I am hope-free” (219).  

            Does this acceptance of grief and the surrender of hope mean ignoring what is happening, ignoring the planet that is dying for us humans? Anything but. 

A willingness to live without hope allows me to accept the heartbreaking truth of our situation, however calamitous it is. Grieving for what is happening to the planet also now brings me gratitude for the smallest, most mundane things. Grief is also a way to honor what we are losing (219). 

For Jamail and, he suggests, for all of us, grief is something to fully embrace and then move through to whatever exists on the other side. This other side of grief reveals something unexpected: 

This means falling in love with the Earth in a way I never thought possible. It also means opening to the innate intelligence of the heart. I am grieving and yet I have never felt more alive. I have found that it’s possible to reach a place of acceptance and inner peace…(219).

But again, for Jamail this means not so much ignoring the terrible things we humans have done to the natural world, or giving up on whatever can be done to salvage it. Rather, it means doing whatever we can without any vain hope that calamity will be ameliorated or avoided thereby. It means doing everything possible, in communion with like-minded people, no matter the outcome.

“I am committed in my bones to being with the Earth, no matter what, to the end.”

This means, for Dahr Jamail, and by extension for all of us, becoming newly aware, again and again, of not so much our rights as top predators or God’s chosen ones, but of our obligations to the Earth that nurtures us and the beings with whom we share it. This is what many indigenous cultures have tried repeatedly to teach us. And Jamail ends his alarming, sorrowful, determined book with exactly this: “What are my obligations? From this moment on, knowing what is happening to the planet, to what do I devote my life?”

            It is a profound question, and one we would all do well to ask ourselves.

Lawrence DiStasi

Virgin Birth

This being Christmas, it occurred to me to contemplate the old Catholic doctrine I learned as a child. Not only is Jesus of Nazareth said to be the Son of God (he apparently never actually referred to himself with this term; he said “Son of Man” something else entirely, but nevermind), but also he is said to have been born to Mary, who “has not known a man.” That is, Jesus is supposed to have been conceived and born to a virgin, who was impregnated by the Holy Spirit, or God. In the gospel of Luke, this is made very clear by the dialogue between Mary and the Angel in the so-called Annunciation. In verse 31, the Angel tells Mary that she is to have a child, and she asks how this could be possible since she is still a virgin. The Angel then tells her that she will conceive “by the power of the Holy Spirit.” Then comes a reference to the Old Testament, to the verse of Isaiah 7:14, where it says “the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel.” The same is asserted in Matthew 1:18 where it is written that Jesus is born to Mary, who has become pregnant before having sex with Joseph (Italian popular culture has fun with this by referring to Joseph as cornuto, the cuckolded husband), before they even live together.  

            It should be noted that this alleged virgin birth differs from the other mystery attributed to Mary, the “immaculate conception.” I always thought the two terms referred to the same phenomenon, the conception by virgin Mary which results in the birth of Jesus.  But that is decidedly not the case. The immaculate conception refers exclusively to Mary before she was a mother, that is, to her own birth free of original sin. Her birth to her mother, St. Anne, is made to fit with Mary’s exalted position as the mother of God, when Mary is declared by Pope Pius IX to have been born, alone among humans, free of original sin:

In 1854, Pope Pius IX proclaimed the dogma of the Immaculate Conception and stated: “The most Blessed Virgin Mary was, from the first moment of her conception, by a singular grace and privilege of almighty God and by virtue of the merits of Jesus Christ, Savior of the human race, preserved immune from all stain of original sin’” (Caroline Bologna, Huffington Post, 12/21/18). 

Several things deserve comment here. To begin with, this dogma was issued very much later than the events referred to and appear nowhere in the New Testament. Second, the Pope who proclaimed this dogma was Pius IX, known to Italians as Pio Nono. He it was who reigned over Rome when the Italian revolution for independence, the Risorgimento, was gathering steam, and resulted in the assassination of his Minister of the Interior, Pellegrino Rossi. Following this, the Pope fled to Naples in fear, and this, in turn, was followed by widespread revolutions in 1848 and the establishment of the brief, but deeply significant Roman Republic of 1849, which Pio Nono bitterly opposed. In fact, he actually called for aid from the French monarch, whose army laid siege to and eventually bombarded Rome. The defeated Italian patriots excoriated Pio Nono for his perfidy, and this probably contributed to his being known as a gettatura, or one whose glance sowed misfortune (in the form of malocchio, or evil eye) wherever it fell. In sum, any dogma promulgated by a guy like this could be looked upon with more than normal scorn or suspicion. 

            But to return to the virgin birth. There has been much speculation about whether a woman could actually conceive without intercourse and/or the male sperm that is necessary for normal conception. Though there are now numerous recorded instances where some species—a python, several species of sharks, and recently, in the lab, artificially-fertilized mice—can reproduce without sex or fathers, it would be virtually impossible for a human to do so. Especially for a woman to give birth to a son. This is because in order to conceive, there have to be XX chromosomes from the female, and XY chromosomes from the male. This means that even if a woman could spontaneously conceive by herself, she could never provide the necessary Y chromosomes needed to engender a son. Those Y chromosomes could only come from a father. And though there can be the rare instance where a woman has a condition called testicular feminization, it would mean that Mary, carrying both an X and a Y chromosome, would have been a woman with ambiguous genitals that could have supplied that X chromosome. But she would have been sterile. In short, a highly unlikely pregnancy. 

            But there is one even more fatal problem with this whole business. Recall that both evangelists, Matthew and Luke, who wrote 70 years after Christ lived, wrote about his virgin birth to Mary not based on any eyewitness truth, but so that Jesus would be the fulfillment of that prophecy in Isaiah—the one where Isaiah said that “the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel.” There is a major problem with this line, however. Matthew is using the wording of the Greek translation of the Old Testament known as the Septuagint (translated some time in the third century BCE). And there is a serious mistranslation in Isaiah 7:14. The Hebrew word Isaiah used for the woman who is to conceive and give birth to Emmanuel is alma (Joel Hoffman, Salon.com, 3/13/16). Scholars know from other uses that this word does NOT mean “virgin” but simply a “young woman.” So where the Hebrew text refers to alma, a young woman, the Greek translation makes her a virgin, parthenos. And from this simple mistranslation stems a whole tradition that became dogma and has come down to us today: the Blessed Virgin Mary, who became the mother of Jesus, did not have to succumb to that degrading act of sexual intercourse with Joseph to conceive Jesus. She was kept free from that stain because God himself impregnated her. Though since Jesus had a brother James, one has to infer that she eventually did have intercourse with poor, patient Joseph. But I suppose that is another matter.

            Of course, the mass of people love miracles, and the virgin birth is one of the humdingers in Christianity. The Roman church was only too happy to supply it, and elevate it to the level of dogma. Perhaps it even has relevance to our own time as well. For isn’t a similar syndrome operating with Donald Trump? Don’t his most rabid followers actually believe in miracles—that this most boorish and vulgar and lawless of con men, this self-described pussy grabber, is in fact god’s instrument to bring about all that Christian fundamentalists long for: the defeat of science, of all the liberal atheists who scorn them and ridicule their beliefs, and the fulfillment, perhaps, of the end of days? The resemblances seem too suggestive to dismiss. 

In any case, Christmas has now passed, and with it another season of paying tribute, however preposterous it might be, to the virgin birth. And it does make for some nice music. 

Lawrence DiStasi

The End of Ice (and Coral Reefs etc.)

Dahr Jamail is perhaps the world’s premier reporter on climate change (he uses the more vivid and accurate term, Anthropogenic Climate Disruption, ACD), and his latest book, The End of Ice, may be his most dire. I haven’t yet finished reading it, but the chapter on coral reefs, “Farewell Coral,” is so alarming that I felt compelled to write about it now. 

            Let me begin with the ice story, though. Jamail is a long-time mountain climber and he has spent a good deal of time climbing and enjoying Alaska’s mountains and glaciers. He notes that Alaska has 100,000 glaciers that cover “approximately 79,000 square kilometers,” the largest glaciation area outside of Greenland and the Antarctic. Interviewing Louis Sass, a USGS glaciologist in Alaska, he quotes Sass as saying that “On average, we’re probably losing 50 glaciers each year now” (28). Does this incredible loss of ice matter? It does for two reasons. First, mountain ecosystems are sensitive indicators of climate disruption, so their melting should be taken as a warning that the heating of the planet is truly dangerous and getting moreso every year.  Second, these mountain systems “provide up to 85 percent of all the water humans need…Globally, glaciers contain 69 percent of all the fresh water on the planet” (45). So on a planet where humans in the U.S, China and India are rapidly depleting the underground aquifers that we need for farming and drinking, to be losing simultaneously the immense water supply that comes from mountains and glaciers is alarming indeed. And warming, and the consequent glacial melting, is only increasing, with each of the last four years being hotter than the last. Humans are in trouble, water-wise. 

            Then comes the coral reef story, a story about what is happening to the oceans. Aside from the pollution that we’ve dumped into the oceans—literally “the lungs and food source of our existence” (95)—the warming from excess CO² in the atmosphere is also being dumped primarily into the oceans. Here is how Jamail makes this vivid: 

If you took all of the heat humans generated between the years 1955 and 2010 and placed it in the atmosphere instead of the oceans, global temperatures would have risen by a staggering 97° F (94).

In other words, by absorbing this massive amount of the heat from the warming we humans have created, the oceans have saved us from thermal disaster so far. And what is our response? to treat them like a garbage dump. But that’s not all. All this warming of the oceans is having a catastrophic effect on coral reefs. Briefly, warming waters cause what oceanographers call ‘bleaching.’ That’s where corals turn ghostly white because they expel the symbiotic algae that live in their tissues; they also cease being able to reproduce. This bleaching has been accelerating in recent years. Jamail has figures for this and they’re sobering to say the least. He writes:

Sixteen percent of global corals perished during the first ever global bleaching event which happened in 1998. According to the Associated Press, the largest bleaching event ever recorded occurred in 2015 to 2016 “amid an extended El Nino that warmed Pacific waters near the equator.” Twenty-two percent of the Great Barrier Reef was killed and 73 percent of coral surveyed in the Maldives…suffered bleaching, with other areas in the central Pacific experiencing a 90 percent loss of their coral reefs (77).

These are big numbers. But, one might say, so what. Do corals really matter? They do indeed, and not just so scuba divers can admire the colorful fish that hang out there. Though coral reefs only cover around 2 percent of the ocean bottom, they provide a home for a full one-fourth (1/4) of all marine species, says Jamail. And he again gives us statistics:

A report by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN shows that coral reefs are responsible for producing fish that contribute significantly to what is 17 percent of all globally consumed animal protein. That rises to more than 70 percent in island and coastal communities like Micronesia (79).

So if those reefs go, as in the Caribbean up to 80 percent of reefs have gone, disappeared, much of the fish that humans rely on for food goes with them. 

            The largest coral reef assemblage lies off the coast of Australia. It’s known as the Great Barrier Reef, and Jamail recounts his conversations with some of the oceanographers monitoring what’s happening there. Dr. Dean Miller, director of science and research for Great Barrier Reef Legacy is quoted as follows:

“Corals need many years to adjust to the warmer ocean waters, and we don’t have that kind of time anymore. The warming we are seeing now is happening far too fast for evolution…So what we’re seeing now is death. That’s what bleaching is” (92, emphasis mine).

This comes close to saying that one of the oldest ecosystems on the planet, some as old as 20 million years, are nearing extinction. In fact, Miller does say that “we might see ecosystem collapse as we know it. We’ll lose the reef fish from the bleaching, then all the fish that depend on them, then all the way up the food chain to the biggest fish. Everything is affected” (92).

            Nor are the coral reefs alone in their plight. Jamail cites another 2015 study showing that plankton, “the basis of the entire oceanic food chain” is threatened by acidification—itself also caused by uptake of excess CO² from the atmosphere. If the plankton die out, that will constitute a very BIG problem, according to the report’s authors “given that phytoplankton photosynthesis produces half the total oxygen supply for the planet” (94). Yes, you read that right. Not only are plankton the base of the entire marine food chain, but they supply half the oxygen we humans need to breathe and survive. 

            So we are in serious trouble due to the CO²-caused warming of the planet, and specifically of the oceans where most of the warming is occurring. The problem is, most humans are oblivious to what’s happening. As Dr. Miller puts it, “oceans are more vulnerable to apathy because they are easy to ignore since they are an unseen world” (95). But we all depend ultimately on the oceans and those rapidly-bleaching reefs. Again, Dr. Miller puts it baldly: “Right now, the largest ecosystem on Earth is undergoing its death throes and no one is there to watch it” (96). Except, of course, for Dahr Jamail, whose book is clanging the alarm bells in the night. The question is, will anyone pay attention, and more than that, finally take action that is meaningful? The governments attending the COP25 climate summit that just ended did not. Like the Australian government, which had a plan to save the Great Barrier Reef but which it has now declared to be “no longer achievable,” the governments of the world, led by the United States, are burying their collective heads in the sand and still striving hardest to amp up their fossil-fuel-driven economies. And with them, climate disruption. 

Will they ever learn, and will it be in time? We all better hope so.

Lawrence DiStasi