Code Red and Me: Rethinking Everything

A Scarlet Omen and FCAN

I quit.

It’s too hard living in this unprecedented, frightening, broken moment in history without you, readers. I’ve decided to resume my Sunday morning posts. I miss talking to you in my head, then casting that chatter into a story and sending it to you. I miss feeling you close by, engaged, listening. Always now, since I learned about the interconnectivity of trees and how they watch out for each other, I want to imagine you, the birch and the hemlock of my forest, out there, just beyond the window, recognizing the currents of shock and dis-ease in the firmament, sending out little chemical beats of understanding and care.

When was it that I wrote the last Covid Diary piece? It’s hard to remember. Time is foggy. I feel as if I’ve dropped through a gap in time into a dystopian landscape, inhabited by masked men and informed by plots about the end of truth, of democracy, of civilization. Oh!  Wait that’s not fiction, that’s what’s happening!

Back in March when I bid you all farewell, I had so much hope. We had, miraculously, an effective covid vaccine: we could go out into the world unmasked. Yea!  I won’t miss the Music Theater at Bowdoin this summer!

And we had a great President! Biden had swung even further towards issues I believed in: strong support for a green energy economy, for reduction in fossil fuel use, for a social safety net. He would tax the corporate thieves who pay far less (or nothing at all) in taxes for the gigantic profit they make (and hide) than I do listening (gratefully) to people who are more depressed and anxious than I’ve seen in my fifty years of practice. 

I felt then like a kid whose parents are finally paying attention to all the dangers: the heat, the droughts, the lies the neighbors are telling. My shoulders relaxed and my eyes sparkled, and I felt like dancing! True, the reports of how many believed The Big Lie were still scary.  But I was sure that as time went on, people would see all they had to gain in Biden’s legislation. Surely, Republicans would abandon their move away from truth and caring for the well-being of our planet and the species on it.

It can’t be.  What’s occurred in this country, in the world in the last eight months is so unrecognizable, so disheartening, I don’t quite know how to live a fully sentient life in the face of it. During the summer I grew increasingly listless. I sat on the porch and stared out at the lawn, the crows, the overladen apple trees.

I staked the dahlias when the blooms grew so heavy their big heads drooped and split from the stalks. I remembered a term I’d learned years ago in some class on psychoanalytic theory: annihilation anxiety. I rolled the sound of that around inside my head. I was slightly dissociated, slightly depressed, slightly lost. Most people were going on with their lives as if things were normal. The purple heads of the big dahlias kept falling to the ground.

Then an omen arrived at dawn one morning on a walk on a narrow road at the tip of the peninsula just below Jonesport where we spend the summer. There, the sun rises over Eastern Bay, a place where the lobster boats moor and chug out to open ocean early, before sunrise. I could hear the deep thrum of the boats over the water.  It was dark at first, with the sun just beginning to brighten the sky. No one was about.

Suddenly, at the lip of the horizon, the shoulder of the sun rose above the pines at the other side of the bay. It wasn’t yellow, it wasn’t orange, it was instead a frightening scarlet.  I’d never seen the sun that color.  I stood still, transfixed, as the scarlet orb grew and overtook the early morning sky. This is a warning sign from the gods, I thought.  An omen. 

A few days later, I learned that there was so much smoke in the sky here in the east from the fires out west that the smoke had turned the sun into an ominous signal.  An alert to action.  But what kind?

On August 9, The United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres announced that the new report from the IPCC was a code red for humanity.  “The alarm bells are deafening, and the evidence is irrefutable: greenhouse‑gas emissions from fossil-fuel burning and deforestation are choking our planet and putting billions of people at immediate risk.  Global heating is affecting every region on Earth, with many of the changes becoming irreversible.”

Code Red. Red sunrises. The omens were all around me.

Sitting out on the deck overlooking the harbor, drinking tea with two longtime friends from Freeport who were visiting, I shared my fears about what we are doing to the earth.  They felt the same way and, like me, they too felt unclear about what they could do.  One of them thought there must be some research somewhere that indicated the one thing that would make the most difference. 

By the end of the conversation, we had a plan. We would organize a Town Forum on Climate Action.  We would do some research. We would bring together the people in town who have devoted their lives to the topic of global warming. We would ask them for help, support them and support each other. We would get going. 

To avoid despair, convert fear into action. It’s my profession’s formula for this kind of moment. That and talk about it.

Since August I am off the porch, going fast: reading; doing research; assembling a team of local activists, some of whom I’ve known for thirty years or more; meeting new people from all over the state. Our group has a name: Freeport Climate Action Now, FCAN. And a logo! And soon a website and an email address. There are ten of us planning this, old and young, eager for companionship in this journey—most of us with our hair on fire.

I am learning a lot in this getting-going-in-the-face-of-great-danger mode.  I have a lot to write about this process, about what it means to live a sentient life at this moment when the scientists have warned that we have ten years, and only ten, to bring carbon dioxide emission levels down far enough to avoid mass extinctions, mass migrations, food shortages: an uninhabitable earth. 

“Why,” Greta Thunberg was asked, “isn’t everybody acting as if this is the emergency it is?”

“Because,” she said, “no one else is acting as if we are in an emergency. Humans are social animals, and we look to each other and copy each other’s behavior, and since everyone else around us is just acting as everything is normal, as if nothing is wrong, of course we will also act as if nothing is wrong.”

 In the family I grew up in, I was known as the one who drove everyone nuts because.. “You always want to talk about things.” “Stop,” they told me “you’re a pain.”  Now, it seems very simple to me: unless we talk about the climate emergency, we will not make it as a species on this earth.

So, I am going to spend the next whatever amount of time talking not about the threat itself but about what happens to my mind and spirt as I try to stay emotionally and intellectually present in the face of so much devastating information. Will action really help my denial and despair? What will those actions look like? What are the moral actions of everyday life? What kind of action will others want to take? How scared are they? What do they care about?

Will I get crashingly depressed? Will I throw it all to fate and get angry at the gods? Resort to magical thinking? A carbon vacuum cleaner in the sky! There are so many defense mechanisms ready to pull me away from consciousness. I can see them like a pack of dogs lying just on the edge of the carpet. I will report on the dogs.

And I will look out the window at the birch and the hemlocks and feel you there, reader.

But maybe you will say, “Stop talking about this, you really are a pain!” It’s a risk. I’m betting that enough of you feel much the same as I, and, reading this, you too will feel accompanied.

Happy Halloween Everyone!! Oh the irony of starting this up on this day!!