Get Lost (In the Woods)

     Get lost.  Beat it.  Take a hike.  It wasn't too long ago when such terms were positive in meaning instead of a prelude to a door being slammed in your face (or behind you).  The early fall that arrived in my area (snow is due tomorrow) came suddenly, catching many people and trees off guard.  In the hills and mountains, perhaps their higher location still keeping them more in tune with the wild, the colors changed quickly on the leaves and their falling to the ground was rapid,*  In many ways, it was nature's light show...or warning.

    The Washington Post had a piece on the fires in Greece, a story that was headlined: The fires in Greece are shocking.  But shock doesn't always lead to change.  The story elaborated with this: For years when it comes to climate change, and millennia when it comes to other crises, humans have fallen back on what seems an essential, ineluctable truth: When people finally get scared enough, they will change. There is an immense amount of hope embedded in that idea, hope that truth and reality will prevail over resistance and dogma...All of that is a mix of fallacy and wishful thinking. And those clichés about warnings wash up just as they always do, against the old, imperturbable fortress of complacency, denial and greed.  The Smithsonian wrote that the fires in Siberia are now larger than the fires in the U.S., Canada, Greece, and Turkey combined.

    Speaking of complacency and greed, the recent issue of Scientific American had an article that began with this: Imagine going to the market, leaving with three full bags of groceries and coming home.  Before you step through your door, you stop and throw one of the bags into a trash bin, which later is hauled away to a landfill.  What a waste.  Collectively, that is exactly what we are doing today.  Globally, 30 to 40 percent of food intended for human consumption is not eaten...If population growth and economic development continue at their current pace, the world will have to produce 53 million more metric tons of food annually by 2050.  That increase would require converting 442 million hectares of forests and grassland -- far greater than the size of India.  It's figures were sobering.  40% of fish wasted; 29% of cereals and grains wasted; 53% of roots and tubers wasted; 22% of all other meat wasted.

     That article turned out to be an elaboration of another loss, that of indigenous people and knowledge of biodiversity, well-intentioned conservation movements that "...forces those least responsible for climate change, biodiversity loss and other environmental crises to pay the highest price for averting them."  The home ranges of indigenous peoples currently shelter 80 percent of Earth's remaining biodiversity and sequester almost 300 trillion tons of carbon.  Precisely because of this abundance, these areas are likely to be some of the first places targeted for "protection."  If that happens, the very people who defend nature from the voracious appetites of the Global North, often at the cost of their lives, would be penalized for their efforts.  Up to 300 million forest dwellers and others could be forced out of their territories by one estimate.  It's already happening said National Geographic, as the world's 2nd largest rainforest (after the Amazon, which may already be reaching a tipping point) has now been opened to logging.

     Said Hakai editor Mercedes Minck: With Canada’s first National Day for Truth and Reconciliation this week, it is hard to feel anything but heavy sadness for all of the Indigenous people whose lives were stolen and destroyed in residential schools...Despite the sadness and trauma this has left behind, it’s important we reflect on Indigenous people who survived and are trying to keep the culture alive—the people like my granny who stayed true to her roots until the end.  I feel lucky to have the opportunity to carry on the traditions passed down and the more I listen and learn I no longer feel the agony of not having paid attention.  Coming up is Indigenous Peoples Day said Smithsonian, although my state and many others still refuse to recognize such Native Americans as actually "discovering" this part of north America, instead clinging to the name more imbedded from our schooling, Columbus Day.  

     One additional note, this from an essay by Malcolm Gaskill in The London Review of Books: A few weeks ago,​ a man appeared in my front garden as I was trimming the hedge.  Slight in stature, in his early twenties with short dark hair, he was wearing a huge hold-all as though it were a rucksack.  His unsmiling face radiated intensity as he began his spiel: name, from the North, recent discharge from the army, trying to get back on his feet.  He even gave his service number, as if old habits die hard, or to prove bona fides.  I guessed he was selling cleaning products; young men had been before and we’d bought their expensive dusters.  Today I told him thanks but no thanks -– and as the words left my mouth a change came about: I regretted refusing to help him (yet felt committed) and his eyes burned back.  ‘But your neighbours bought something,’ he protested, pointing over the hedge, shifting from foot to foot.  I faced him down, and he swept off to the next house, muttering.  I went inside, not wanting to overhear him be refused again or, worse, be treated with the kindness I’d denied him...I’m struck by the timeless nature of this unease, and the similarities between what historians of witchcraft call the ‘charity refused’ scenario and my encounter with the young man from the North, with his fierce eyes and his demand to be heard.  In a sense, the impossibility of a viable curse in modern times only underscores that what really mattered about those doorstep confrontations in pre-modern communities –and what endures for us– were the attendant feelings: hope, yearning, intolerance, fear, denial, frustration, indignation, fury, alienation, remorse.

    Get lost!  You can almost hear it; and no matter how much my own self feels a bit of guilt at driving past the homeless person with the sign (there's work out there, I tell myself; this could all be a con, I tell myself; I already do so much with helping others, I tell myself), there is that nagging thought of why is this still a "problem?"  The Economist had its own take on the possible reasons for such a shortage of help, including one study by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco that found that wages tend to go up after a pandemic, leading the magazine to say: In some cases, this is through a macabre mechanism: the disease culls workers, leaving survivors in a better bargaining position.  Yikes, macabre is right, or is it only because Halloween is just around the corner?

     But let's face it, such talk of climate change affecting seas and forests and peoples are now as common as people being shot, or being homeless, or out of work, or facing pollution...or so it seems.  We've seem to have heard --or hear-- it so often that we've become numb in a sense.  Here's how Patricia Lockwood put it in her review of Marian Engels novel, Bear: Much of women’s work is what allows life to continue.  The rest is like...Windexing the veneer of civilisation every morning to keep it shiny, or cooking Beef Wellington every night for a pig king who would be just as happy eating apple cores.  Equitable division of household labour has always had to contend with the fact that no husband on this earth was ever raised by Mary Passmore, hears her voice in his mind when he enters the grocery store or hunkers down to wax the baseboards...Engel’s contemporary Elizabeth Hardwick has something to say about this form of continuation in a story called ‘Cross-Town’: And out of the index cards and the coughing tapes your biography will be preserved and in this, having caught the public eye, you will be trapped in the universal, the toneless data.  No matter.  Many consolations.  You will share this internment, the fatality of being interesting to someone, with generals, scientists, flamboyant artists, and other criminals.  In a way you haven’t fared worse than Michelangelo.

     Later in her review she noted yet another utterance from Engel: Soon we’ll all be so old that they’ll have to be nice to us.  Really?  If you're still reading this then bully for you because there's hope out there, even for the oceans wrote Smithsonian.  Even Titouan Bernicot who skipped a lucrative business career to create Coral Gardeners, a group "fighting to protect the world's reefs against the effects of global warming, one piece of coral at a time."  As he told The Red Bulletin: I used to be a very optimistic person, then I had a phase where I was very pessimistic, and today I think that I have --that we all have-- to give as much positive energy as possible.  We each have our own way to make an impact, then we're connecting, trying to combine our actions and skills for the same cause.  It's only together that we can create hope.  We seem to be losing so much --species, peoples, languages, patience-- and yet for me, I look forward to the return of the positive side of "take a hike" and "get lost."  The colors of fall beckon all of us like Oz, a golden wall that leads us somewhere beyond...the weather may be cooling substantially, but our outlooks should be brightening up.  It's a time of excitement, a time of exploration, a time of hope...a time to get lost.

*As mentioned in earlier posts, the leaves' colors which are so striking in fall are always there; they are exposed when the dominant green and photosynthesizing chlorophyll is cut off as the trees began to send water and nutrient production down to their roots in preparation for the freeze that will come with winter.  Drought can also affect the timing of trees in speeding the conserving of their nutrients by dropping their leaves earlier than usual...in my lower elevation, an early arrival of snow can sometimes catch trees before they fully dropped their leaves,  placing too much weight on their limbs and causing them to break.