The Idea of Home Read Free

the planet begins to heal’. If only.
    Of all the disappointments of the past three years, highest on my personal list is Barack Obama’s silence — his failure to use his gift of eloquence to explain our predicament and the necessity for urgent action. Instead, Obama approved Shell’s drilling in the Arctic, even as the toxins from BP’s blown-out well swirled in the Gulf of Mexico. He failed to enforce more stringent clean air standards and weakened protections for endangered species. He has yet to act definitively against a tar sands pipeline that will run from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico and which has been described as the fuse on a carbon bomb. The US president cited the condition of the economy as the reason for these terrible decisions. But if ‘it’s the economy, stupid’, then how stupid is it to ignore a looming crisis that threatens the shape and, ultimately, the survival, of every economic activity we have. If we don’t stop burning down our only home to provide a few hours more light to party by, there will not be an economy as we know it. Wall Street will be underseveral metres of water and we will be at war with each other for the scant fruits of our heat-blasted, storm-lashed harvests.
    When I was very young, I read John Wyndham’s post-apocalypse novel, The Chrysalids . In it, one of the characters keens for her devastated planet:
    What did they do here? What can they have done to create such a frightful place? … There was the power of gods in the hands of children, we know: but were they mad children, all of them quite mad?
    In my own mind, I create a character like Wyndham’s, in the aftermath of the climate wars, eking out a mean existence in a harsh landscape, and trying to explain to her kids the mass insanity that led them there. ‘And you know, they flushed their toilets with drinking water . They made durable things, like plastic plates and cups, and they would use them only once and then throw them away . They thought it was normal for one person to drive around in a huge thing called anSUV. They used air conditioning , when it wasn’t even really that hot outside …’ I imagine her kids rolling their eyes and thinking to themselves, ‘Mum. Always exaggerates. Nobody could ever have been that crazy.’
    But how do you convince people, here and now, that these common behaviours are indeed crazy? Machiavelli observed that:
    â€¦ there is nothing more difficult nor more doubtful of success nor more dangerous to conduct than to make oneself a leader in introducing a new order of things. For the man who introduces it has for enemies all who do well out of the old order and has lukewarm supporters in all who will do well out of the new order … who do not put their trust in changes if they do not see them in actual practice.
    Or, as Yeats put it more succinctly: The best lack all conviction, the worst are full of passionate intensity.
    This sums up the current political predicament, most especially in the United States. There is nonationally effective Green movement there. There is no energy policy. Barely even a breath of serious discussion. Climate change is an issue in the national political conversation only among Fox News bloviaters who use climate scientists as piñatas.
    In the United States, without leadership, the potential for any kind of concerted national action is bleak. So in the land of rugged individuals, it falls to individuals to act. In a funny little life irony, having fought against a hydro scheme on the Franklin, I have just completed an engineering study on how to use Benjamin Church’s 1665 dam for mini-hydro on the Tiasquam. We are designing a fish ladder at the dam, so that the herring can return after their long absence. We’re revegetating some wetlands with native shrubs for wildlife habitat, and planting fruit trees. Because we live in a rural place we can buy our meat and vegetables from