Climate diaries: Real and imagined
Journaling the apocalypse with Octavia Butler
The Book:
Parable of the Sower
By Octavia E. Butler
Grand Central Publishing
First Published in 1993
The Talk:
July 16th, 20231
Yesterday at the pool the whole sky was a flat brown-white. After a couple hours, my throat felt rough, like a sore throat feels. It’s still a little rough today. My friend sent me pics of the sky in Orange City, Iowa. Today we are in the “red” for air quality – 155 AQI. This morning I drove to Scooters to get my wife her morning coffee; it was raining and there was a white haze in the neighborhood.
August 22nd
Second day of heat dome. 100F. Heat index is 110F. 102 in Wichita. 102 in Forth Worth. At least two more days of 100+ temps. We are inside with air conditioning all the time so we don’t feel it. But if you’re outside for five minutes you’re covered in sweat.
September 6th
AQI 157 today. Driving my son to school this morning it looked like fog, but it’s the Canadian wildfires again. Off and on all summer and now into September.
October 2nd
High of 95F today. It’s hot all weekend, record or near-record. It’s hot even up in Minnesota. Will cool down in the 50s by the weekend.
November 10th
50F today. Tomorrow it will be 60. Ten day forecast is: 60, 66, 65, 68, 70, 68, 64, 62, 57, 54. No precipitation. Currently running 10+ degrees above normal. Most of the leaves have dried but are still on the trees. We hardly run the furnace at all. I’ve even turned the A/C on a couple times at night because the house is so warm. Douglas County still in severe drought, as is all of Eastern Nebraska. Afternoons are nice enough for my son to play outside with no coat, sometimes no sweatshirt.
December 22nd
51F and cloud today. Sat: 54. Sunday (Christmas Eve): 54 and rainy.
January 19th, 2024
Yesterday evening we had a “snowsquall warning”—phones went off with an emergency alert. Never heard of it before. Apparently, it’s like a mini-blizzard. We had snow and wind. Some small towns had more extreme wind. It was a strange experience.
February 26th
80F this afternoon according to weather.com. Sunny, dry, windy. Red flag warning. I took our dog for a walk around the neighborhood in a t-shirt and shorts. Retired folks sitting outside on lawn chairs.
March 10th
66F today. Sunny. Fire Weather Watch. Mon forecast: 71. Tues: 71. Wed: 70. Normal is 50F.
April 26th
Tornado came through Elkhorn this afternoon. Our neighborhood was unaffected, though sirens went off while my wife was picking up our son from school. The tornado came up from Gretna, went near downtown Elkhorn, Bennington, on to Fort Calhoun. Another wave of storms came to downtown Omaha. A tornado started at Eppley Airfield and destroyed some hangars. Council Bluffs had some damage tornadoes continued across Western Iowa. Lots of people sharing photos and videos of the worst hit Elkhorn neighborhoods. A factory was hit in Waverly. All in all, a very wide storm system with a lot of tornadoes spilling off2 – and severe damage, mostly rural and near the edges of the city, as far as I can tell.
May 13th
The wildfire smoke arrived this evening. AQI 124. Took my son to soccer practice. There was a white haze over the city, sometimes brown. Smelled funny. It arrived about this time last year too.
June 24th
Excessive heat warning today. High will be 101F. Heat index up to 110-115. Also under a river flood warning. Missouri River is currently 1.9 ft below flood stage (27 ft). Predicted to crest at 34.6 feet on Wednesday. Will fall below flood stage next Monday. The flooding took out a train bridge in Sioux City last night. According to the Des Moines Register, the Rock River surged 5 feet over the previous record. Le Mars flooded. Arnold’s Park in Okoboji. Also flooding along the Platte. Iowa Gov. declared emergency for 20 counties and called it “catastrophic.” Flooding is also bad in Minnesota, also described by governor as “catastrophic.” Nebraska governor sending national guard.
July 25th
Went into the office today. The city was smoky-white haze. From my office I could see white haze across the river. Canadian and PNW fires. It’s been smoky the last few days with strange sunsets. 91F today and will be 90s and dry for next 14 days, the local weather guy says. Sunday was the warmest day ever recorded on Earth. Monday was hotter3. They say it will likely be broken again before mid-August.
Still point of the turning world
I mention the weather in my journal because it’s been strange. It’s so gobsmacking bonkers to be walking the dog in shorts in 80-degree weather in February, waving to the neighbors on their lawn. What I’m trying to write down is: This is not the way it’s been.
Heat. Wind. Smoke. Fire. Flood.
Another reason I write it down is to prove to myself I’m not going crazy. I write down the facts of my personal experience, as dispassionately as possible, so that when nobody’s talking about what’s going on, I know I’m not just seeing things. So that when I read another Wall Street Journal opinion about how actually nothing is happening, I know I’m not crazy.
Climate hypochondriacs deserve to be treated with compassion, much like anyone who suffers from mental illness. They shouldn’t, however, expect everyone else to enable their neuroses.4
And I journal to anchor my thinking in what’s really happening to me vs. what’s happening everywhere in the world.
Perhaps anchor is the best word for why I keep journaling. To make some fixed points on the map. Not to stop the movement, but to take my bearings, to measure the rate of change and my relationship to it.
Welcome to July 2024
The fact that I’ve been doing this for awhile has made reading Octavia Butler’s 1993 novel Parable of the Sower really uncanny.
The book is written as a diary of social and economic collapse as a consequence of climate change. The book begins on Saturday, July 20, 2024. Two Saturdays ago. It tells the story Lauren Olamina, a teenager in Southern California, who grows into an adult while experiencing economic and civil breakdown due to ecological collapse.
There is still a little water in the San Luis Reservoir. It’s more fresh water than I’ve ever seen in one place, but by the vast size of the reservoir, I can see that it’s only a little compared to what should be there—what used to be there.
The older people in the story are mostly paralyzed by how the world has changed. They are still waiting for things to go “back to normal,” though that hope is increasingly dim. Many of the children in the book know nothing but the world they live in. They accept it. Olamina is somewhere in between—confident the old way is not coming back but also unwilling to accept her neighborhood’s fate as it is overrun by gangs, thieves, and pyromaniacs.
Earthseed as prophetic pragmatism
The book reminded me, in subtle ways, of Butler’s other novel Kindred. In both stories the main character spends most of the book as an observer in a dangerous situation. They are watching, learning, calculating, strategizing. They are waiting to make their move, knowing one small mistake could be their ruin. They are self-confident, intelligent, and powerful—they are just waiting for the right moment to take action.
In both books literacy plays an important role. In Kindred the main character teaches slaves to read and this becomes the foundation for a new community of sorts. In Parable of the Sower, formal education has fallen away, and thus reading and writing become a kind of special ability, a special power, that fewer and fewer people know. It is Olamina’s self-education through reading books that provides the foundation for her new religion called Earthseed.
“It sounds like some kind of combination of Buddhism, existentialism, Sufism, and I don’t know what else,” he said. “Buddhism doesn’t make a god of the concept of change, but the impermanence of everything is a basic Buddhist principle.”
“I know,” I said. “I’ve done a lot of reading.”
Olamina’s Earthseed reminded me a lot of Cornel West’s “prophetic pragmatism,” in that the horizon of the future is always open. We identify our values existentially, that is, we presume our values just because and then take action. (West’s Christianity is existentialist—a pure leap of faith.)
Pragmatically speaking, ideas are tools in support of a willed vision and concrete action. Earthseed does not have a metaphysical basis, rather its invention is required in order to stimulate the necessary action for survival. Becoming a multi-planetary, spacefaring species—the ultimate goal of Earthseed—is the utopian vision required for action, as I understand the book.
The father of pragmatism, Charles Sanders Pierce, describes three foundational sentiments of pragmatism: “Interest in an indefinite community, recognition of the possibility of this interest being made supreme, and hope in the unlimited continuance of intellectual activity.” This seems to be very close to the idea of Earthseed as an expanding, never-ending community of discovery.
Earthseed as social reality building
The story also reminded me of John Searle’s book Making the Social World. In order for Earthseed to be realized, a community, however fragile, must be formed. The community makes the idea an objective social fact. As Olamina picks up new followers along her journey, they acquire new powers. As a group, they are stronger against threats. Each individual provides new talents. As they trust each other more, they are able to start shaping reality, social and otherwise.
What’s interesting—and this too reminded me of Searle—is that few if any of Olamina’s followers are “true believers.” Nobody (except for Olamina) “believes” in Earthseed by the end of the story. But clearly something is emerging that is the reality of who they are as a group. People half-joking repeat the verses of Olamina’s Books of the Living. They aren’t zealous for it, they aren’t affirming it, just… starting to take it as a thing. Olamina welcomes these small moments of light mocking because they show a little spark of a social reality coming into being.
“Oh, god, there she goes with her Earthseed shit again,” Allie said. But she smiled a little as she said it. That was good. She hadn’t smiled much lately.
Earthseed against the mass man
As a sci-fi story, Parable of the Sower is subtly shocking in its realism. The world of real 2024 is not as bad as Butler’s 2024—Californians may disagree—but I don’t think it’s that far away. (The rapidly growing Park Fire was apparently started by someone pushing a burning car into a gully. In Butler’s novel most of the fires are started by people, though the environment provides the fuel.)
Near the beginning of the story, a woman lands on Mars. About when that will likely happen in real life (probably around the mid-2030s), things could definitely be looking much like the world she depicts. Butler was maybe only off by a decade.
And yet when I finished the book, I felt like it failed me—or I failed it.
It failed me if it was trying to inspire me to be hopeful or to believe in the spirit of humanity, for example, in the way the movie Interstellar does, with its grandiose speeches about humanity and love and time and destiny. But, on second thought, I don’t think that was the point of book in the end. (More on that in a minute.)
I also feel like I failed the book insofar as it exposed me as the mass man that I am.
What needs to happen to make things right is that the whole of human civilization needs to take decisive collective action on every level possible on an order of magnitude never seen in modern history.
Nothing less will work.
There is no convincing evidence that this is happening or that this about to happen.5
Therefore, it’s essentially game over.
Push the VOTE button. Push the BUY button. Push the UPGRADE button. Hope that a miracle pops out of the system.
Community sounds nice. We need community. But society isn’t built for community. Therefore, there will be no community. OH WELL. I guess we just aren’t going to have that. Would’ve been nice.
Another way to live
There are, however, people I’ve met who live on different terms. For them, the live question is “Is there a place for me in this world or not?” It’s a question of survival. It’s community or being assaulted. It’s community or drinking yourself to death. It’s community or suicide. It’s community or living a lie for the rest of your life. It’s community or checking out. It’s community or nothingness. These people are, in a phrase, playing for stakes in a way I rarely feel.
This is what I think distinguishes Parable of the Sower from Interstellar (heck from The Road). Olamina is attempting to answer a question through action: Is there a place for me to exist in this world or not? Olamina realizes that she is psychologically different than everyone else around her, and so finding a different social reality is an imperative of her own consciousness. There are some references to humanity in Earthseed, granted, but the real core of the story, as I see it, is ultimately not about saving the world or saving humanity or even liking humanity. (Most of the humans in the book are unlikeable or downright scary, I would say.)
It is maybe not hope for everybody—maybe just hope for you. At least, that’s the first step. And the challenge in Olamina’s world is how to let your guard down while simultaneously keeping your guard up. There is no presumption that all of humanity is in on this project with you. The goal is not to fix everything or solve everything, but to actively shape the future—because if you don’t, the future will eat you alive. Even if you try your best, it may still eat you alive. But those are the stakes. Are you going to have your say in what happens to you or not? Throw your seed and keep throwing.
Thanks to my friend Christopher for recommending this book.
Related:
Climate change is my family's life now
Whatever happened to American pragmatism?
Burning down the memory palace
Journal excerpts from the past 12 months. I only removed names.
Tornadoes Are Coming in Bunches. Scientists Are Trying to Figure Out Why. (NYTimes, 5/8/24)
Climate Change Obsession Is a Real Mental Disorder (WSJ, 7/30/23)
Based on current policies and polices in development, we are estimated to consume the same amount of oil and natural gas in 2050 that we are today. And 60% of the coal we currently consume now.
The United States is producing more oil than any country in history (CNN, 12/19/23)
Warren Buffett sees a bright future for fossil fuels (Semafor, 2/28/24)
Proxy season results show support for ESG efforts continues to ebb (Financial Times, 7/5/24)
Thank you for your thoughts about the book. Both "Parable of the Sower" and "Parable of the Talents" were interesting books for me because I only really liked them on the second reading. I think it would be interesting to see your take on the sequel. They really are a pair - essentially the autobiography of the founder of a new religion (as a former religious studies student with an interest in religious origin stories, this is what grabbed me). I don't like the sequel as much (the big reason is that unlike the first one, it has multiple POVs which I think takes away the single narrative focus on the first novel) but the first novel has more power in light of the second.