Tuesday
Bad news about the climate is coming at us thick and fast, including reports that melting Greenland icebergs will cause seal levels to rise a foot and would so so even if we capped carbon emissions tomorrow. I focus today, however, on lakes and rivers drying up because of an H.P. Lovecraft story about that happening.
In case you haven’t heard, China’s largest lake has gone dry as temperatures in the country hit record highs. Meanwhile, in the United States, the Colorado River has been reaching dangerously low levels, threatening both agricultural and energy production. Meanwhile, in an ironic twist that is characteristic of climate’s change’s extreme weather events, over 1000 people in Pakistan have been killed by horrific flooding, while flash floods have been creating havoc in southern California’s mountains and deserts.
But back to Lovecraft and global warming. In “Till A’ the Seas” (1935), a story he co-wrote with R. H. Barlow, the earth is getting hotter, although in this case it’s not humanity’s fault. Rather, at a date a few thousand years in the future, the earth has started to fall into the sun. It’s a gradual process, which means that everyone doesn’t die at once. They just die over a period of time, and we watch the last man on earth, desperately seeking water, fall into a dry well and die.
Disconcertingly, the story captures some of the weather-caused behaviors that we are seeing today. It may well be that climate change caused the war in Syria, as farmers whose lands were devastated by drought flocked into the cities. Some of Central America’s northward migration, especially from Guatemala, has also been caused by drought. The story, which was written during the Dust Bowl years, socks us with the stark picture from the get-go.
Upon an eroded cliff-top rested the man, gazing far across the valley. Lying thus, he could see a great distance, but in all the sere expanse there was no visible motion. Nothing stirred the dusty plain, the disintegrated sand of long-dry river-beds, where once coursed the gushing streams of Earth’s youth. There was little greenery in this ultimate world, this final stage of mankind’s prolonged presence upon the planet. For unnumbered aeons the drought and sandstorms had ravaged all the lands. The trees and bushes had given way to small, twisted shrubs that persisted long through their sturdiness; but these, in turn, perished before the onslaught of coarse grasses and stringy, tough vegetation of strange evolution.
If humans have flourished as a species, it’s we are so adaptable, finding ways to survive both in the very hot and in the very cold. Lovecraft and Barlow point out that adaptability can go take us so far, however:
The ever-present heat, as Earth drew nearer to the sun, withered and killed with pitiless rays. It had not come at once; long eons had gone before any could feel the change. And all through those first ages man’s adaptable form had followed the slow mutation and modeled itself to fit the more and more torrid air. Then the day had come when men could bear their hot cities but ill, and a gradual recession began, slow yet deliberate. Those towns and settlements closest to the equator had been first, of course, but later there were others. Man, softened and exhausted, could cope no longer with the ruthlessly mounting heat. It seared him as he was, and evolution was too slow to mold new resistances in him.
In the story, as in our present time, some people stay put and some people emigrate. In those who stay, we see both the confidence of humans in their adaptive capacities and their tendency to deny what the experts are telling them (which we can recognize only too well):
Yet not at first were the great cities of the equator left to the spider and the scorpion. In the early years there were many who stayed on, devising curious shields and armours against the heat and the deadly dryness. These fearless souls, screening certain buildings against the encroaching sun, made miniature worlds of refuge wherein no protective armor was needed. They contrived marvelously ingenious things, so that for a while men persisted in the rusting towers, hoping thereby to cling to old lands till the searing should be over. For many would not believe what the astronomers said, and looked for a coming of the mild olden world again. But one day the men of Dath, from the new city of Niyara, made signals to Yuanario, their immemorially ancient capital, and gained no answer from the few who remained therein. And when explorers reached that millennial city of bridge-linked towers they found only silence. There was not even the horror of corruption, for the scavenger lizards had been swift.
Those who flee fare scarcely better:
Steady, universal, and inexorable was the great eviction of man from the realms he had always known. No land within the widening stricken belt was spared; no people left unrouted. It was an epic, a titan tragedy whose plot was unrevealed to the actors—this wholesale desertion of the cities of men. It took not years or even centuries, but millennia of ruthless change. And still it kept on—sullen, inevitable, savagely devastating.
Yet just as the slowness of climate change—at least in human terms—allows people to rationalize away climate disasters, so those in the Lovecraft/Barlow story deny what is happening:
[W]ater was scarce, and found only in deep caverns. There was little enough, even of this; and men died of thirst wandering in far places. Yet so slow were these deadly changes, that each new generation of man was loath to believe what it heard from its parents. None would admit that the heat had been less or the water more plentiful in the old days, or take warning that days of bitterer burning and drought were to come.
At the end of the story, we watch the death of earth’s last inhabitant.
Lovecraft/Barlow take their title from a Robert Burns poem, “My Love Is Like a Red, Red Rose.”
As fair art thou, my bonnie lass,
So deep in luve am I;
And I will luve thee still, my dear,
Till a’ the seas gang dry;
Till a’ the seas gang dry, my dear,
And the rocks melt wi’ the sun;
I will luve thee still, my dear,
While the sands o’ life shall run.
We see no love in the short story, however, which means that its title is darkly ironic. When everyone is dying, no one is making love.
“Till A’ the Seas” provides one consolation, however: this future is thousands of years off. I’m currently reading Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, however, that places that dry future in the year 2024. But that will be the subject of a future post.