Tuesday
I seem to be writing about one catastrophe after another these days. Last Tuesday it was Mariupol, followed by the likely repeal of Roe v Wade, which was followed by another post on Russian atrocities, before the week ended with news that America had just registered one million Covid deaths. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are certainly making their rounds, and to make sure they don’t miss anything, I turn today’s post over to climate change, as seen by Mary Oliver.
The four horsemen, as I’m sure you know, are War, Famine, Pestilence and Death. So I’ve covered War, Death and Pestilence, and I could note that Famine is riding hard in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan and could come to other parts of the world with the interruption of the Ukrainian wheat harvest. In their collaborative novel Good Omens, fantasists Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett feature the four horsemen, only they have replaced Pestilence with Pollution on the grounds that that latter poses more of a threat, especially with advances in modern medicine. While the grave threat that carbon emissions are posing to the future of the planet makes the swap understandable, it’s worth noting that the novel was written before the Covid pandemic.
Oliver gets the tone just right in her poem “On Traveling to Beautiful Places.” As is customary with her, she looks out at nature and captures a sense of wonder.
Then she throws in a kicker.
On Traveling to Beautiful Places
By Mary Oliver
Every day I’m still looking for God
and I’m still finding him everywhere,
in the dust, in the flowerbeds.
Certainly in the oceans,
In the islands that lay in the distance
Continents of ice, countries of sand
Each with its own set of creatures
And God, by whatever name.
How perfect to be aboard a ship with
Maybe a hundred years still in my pocket.
But it’s late, for all of us,
And in truth the only ship there is
Is the ship we are all on
Burning the world as we go.