I give all the money I can spare to nonprofits fighting for the earth on a far larger scale.īut I also remind myself sternly to attend to what is not dying, to focus as much on the exquisite beauties of this earth as on its staggering losses. I vote for environmentally aware political candidates. I do what I can to lower my carbon footprint, to encourage biodiversity in my own small yard. And these days a person sitting on his porch in Kentucky can smell the smoke from wildfires in Oregon. This isn’t the lovely kind of summer that has us lingering on the porch and watching the lightning bugs, if only because insects are among the most deeply imperiled lives in the Anthropocene. Human behavior has plunged the earth into an everlasting summer. There’s a difference between weather and climate, of course, but increasingly the connection between them - and between them and us - becomes clearer.
In one important sense, summer has gone nowhere: During a single week at the end of July, the National Weather Service issued five heat advisories for Nashville, with heat indexes over 100 degrees in this fertile place traditionally known as the Garden of Tennessee. We wonder: What has become of the languorous summer we longed for back in the sadness of winter? Where did the endless, grass-fragrant days go? The children trudge back to school under a blistering sun. The dog days of August crisp the spring-green underbrush to crackling tinder. How brief is the season of “splendour in the grass,” as the poet William Wordsworth put it, and surely summer is the time that brings such lessons closest home. Life is a single wink from a single lightning bug. Life is the glint of light on rushing water, a flash of lightning. Now my father is gone, and my mother too, and I know that life is not at all a long process. “There’s still time.”īut that was long ago, when I was still young enough myself to believe those words of comfort.
“Life’s a long process,” I would say, echoing my own father’s reassurances.
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