I didn’t realize how emotional the subject had become for me until two years ago, when I was covering a demonstration by young activists advocating for the Green New Deal. I have a recurring vision of one giant storm consuming the entire Atlantic Ocean and whipping up a single monstrous wave, like the one on the watery planet Anne Hathaway and Matthew McConaughey narrowly escape in the film “Interstellar.” I can’t encounter any novel weather patterns or curious wildlife antics without thinking the shift toward doom has begun. I have trouble getting through climate stories anymore each one reads like a case of senseless, bloody murder. While we haven’t reached the climatic tipping point beyond which planetary doom is sealed - yet - it feels as though we are arriving at a psychological tipping point. (Her recent poetry collection, “ Cast Away,” is dedicated to the proposition that a person might not be able to save the world, but at least she could pick up trash.) I welcome that approach and try to practice it myself, but I’m losing faith that it’s enough. I’ve certainly heard Nye’s stance before: that countless individual acts can collectively change the gloomy trends. As humans, she says, we have to ask ourselves, “ ‘What is within my reach? What could I help change myself?’ Because just to stew in a corner and worry about all this catastrophe overtaking us will not really help us in the big picture.” Now caught in a weather-induced civic collapse - arguably connected to climate change (because Arctic warming has disrupted the jet stream, allowing freakishly cold storms to push south) - could she still find hope? And if so, where?
Among many subjects in her numerous books, she writes about nature and the environment, and I wondered how a poet, someone who thinks deeply about the planet, handles the steady stream of apocalyptic news.
OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM ESSAY BY PUERTO RICAN AUTHOR HOW TO
I’d called Nye in a quest to learn how to be hopeful in the face of despair over the fate of Earth. “I think I’m going to throw them a box of cereal soon because they’re so hungry.” “Now I’m out of all the bird food, and I’ve fed them everything from my refrigerator that they would possibly like to see,” she continued. Outside Nye’s house in San Antonio, the palm trees were glazed with ice. A melted Greenland alone would mean a 20-foot rise in the seas. In recent months we learned that warming is weakening the sensitive circulation system of the Atlantic Ocean to a point not experienced in more than 1,000 years hundreds of butterfly species in the American West are in steep decline and Greenland’s ice sheet - already melting at the fastest rate in 12,000 years - is more susceptible to small temperature changes than was previously understood. Some 200 people were killed in February in a landslide and flood from a collapsing piece of glacier in the Himalayas. Nearly 3 billion animals were incinerated or displaced in the Australian bush fires of 20. Living things facing what they’re not used to facing: It’s an increasingly common experience on planet Earth, as the climate changes and the weather gets more extreme. But also what we’re talking about is the natural infrastructure of our world, and how are we going to help maintain it?” … keep talking about the ‘grid,’ the infrastructure of the state. “This is not what they’re used to facing.
“These birds do not know what is happening here,” Nye told me over the phone. They crowded onto a patio table until there was no room left, huddling body-to-body for warmth, and they stayed until almost dark, devouring the seed she gave them.
All week she watched the others exhibiting behaviors she had never seen. The doomed one crashed into her office window and died on the frozen ground below. The week Texas froze over, in mid-February, poet Naomi Shihab Nye couldn’t save one of the marvelous gray mourning doves that flock in her yard near the San Antonio River - but she was determined to save the others.
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