Monday
Now we know how we will experience the end of the world: while we’re being battered to death by extreme weather events, including the hottest summer on record and accelerating arctic melt, we won’t even notice because we’ll be so distracted by Donald Trump’s attempts to destroy NATO, the EU, the rule of law, constitutional democracy, the free press, free and fair elections, clean air and water, endangered species, national parks, and truth itself. We should all be on red alert about climate change and instead we’re distracted by political chaos.
I’ve previously blogged on Leslie Marmon Silko’s apocalyptic poem in her novel Ceremony (1977), but it so directly captures the Trump administration’s environmental approach that it’s worth sharing again. It’s about a witches convention in which the attendees vie for the designation of most evil witch. The winner tells a story that horrifies the other witches.
It’s an account of white settlement of the Americas, starting with the introduction of gunpowder and infectious diseases and concluding with the invention of the atomic bomb (with uranium mined from sacred Indian sites). Silko wrote the poem before we recognized the dangers of climate change, but it gets at Trump’s wholesale attack on the environment. Here’s from the witch’s story:
Caves across the ocean
in caves of dark hills
white skin people
like the belly of a fish
covered with hair.
Then they grow away from the earth
then they grow away from the sun
then they grow away from the plants and animals.
They see no life
When they look
they see only objects.
The world is a dead thing for them
the trees and rivers are not alive
the mountains and stones are not alive
The deer and bear are ojects
They see no life
They fear
They fear the world.
They destroy what they fear.
They fear themselves.
The wind will blow them across the ocean
thousands of them in giant boats
swarming like larva
out of a crushed ant hill.
They will carry objects
which can shoot death
faster than the eye can see.
They will kill the things they fear
all the animals
the peole will starve.
They will poison the water
they will spin the water away
and there will be drought
the people will starve.
They will fear what they find
They will fear the people
They kill what they fear.
Entire villages will be wiped out
They will slaughter whole tribes.
Corpses for us
Blood for us
Killing killing killing killing.
and those they do not kill
will die anyway
at the destruction they see
at the loss
at the loss of the children
the loss will destroy the rest.
Stolen rivers and mountains
the stolen land will eat their hearts
and jerk their mouths from the Mother.
The people will starve.
The rest of the witches at the coven can’t believe that someone would be so destructive:
So the other witches said
“Okay you win; you take the prize,
but what you said just now–
it isn’t so funny
It doesn’t sound so good.
We are doing okay without it
we can get along without that kind of thing.
Take it back
Call that story back.”
And now for the really bad news:
But the witch just shook its head
at the others in their stinking animal skins, fur and feathers.
It’s already turned loose.
It’s already coming
It can’t be called back.
If white society made some progress in the 20th century, consciousness-raising authors like Silko can take some of the credit. For a while, protecting the environment even appeared to be a bipartisan affair. With Trump’s unapologetic plundering of the earth, however, we are watching the witchery once again unleashed full force.
The overriding question for our times is whether the story can be called back.
Further thought: Silko brilliantly shows us that fear drives environmental depredation. The animus against the wilderness is more primal than the desire to make money, even though that desire is there. Humans seek to dominate when they fear that nature will swallow them up.
I suspect that, deep down, many Trump supporters know that climate change is real. They are frightened so they voted for a man who claimed he could kick nature’s ass.