Climate Dos and Don'ts | Poetry of Mankh |Axisoflogic.com

“... two perceptions of time: cosmic time and industrial (computerized or synchronized) time, which is really the control over productivity and the limiting of free time. Because industrial time signifies the domestication of time and the worker, we could probably say that, through it, time became a technology of numbers. On the other hand, 'cosmic time' is slow, antiessential, and an obstacle to the purposes of synchronized speed, accumulation, and management.”

- Guillermo Delgado-P.[1]

Perhaps how we think about climate issues can help create the conditions for some of the positive changes that so many are wishing and working for.

I'm no scientist but the genericizing of the issue, which includes fixating on CO2 and especially fossil fuel emissions (while of course a key issue), limits the wider perspective.

Making some distinguishing categories (by no means the only ones), will help to better recognize that there are a variety of situations demanding a variety of answers.

Climate Change: for those whose lives are basically unaffected; areas where changes are simply noticed, for example, the Northeast having a cool and wet early Spring. There may be subtle and significant changes affecting insects, a certain crop, and such like, yet the basic human lifestyle is un-hindered.

Climate Crisis or Chaos: for those being severely affected, for example, because of melting ice, the ancient traditions and culture of the Inuit Peoples; not only the physical water and landscape but the effect on psychological and spiritual ways which are connected with the habitat.

Climate Catastrophe: for those whose lives have been drastically and traumatically altered or lost, for example, Mozambique was recently hit twice by a cyclone, causing loss of lives and major flooding; also, climate refugees.

Dos and Don'ts
There are umpteen articles and ideas about what to do about climate whatever you call it. This little essay aims to frame the question into two questions: What to do and What not to do? The answers are up to readers to consider for themselves, depending on their situations and capabilities.

Sometimes we get so caught up trying to do something that we forget the power of not doing something. Having once read of a Jewish tradition of not over-harvesting, yet unable to find the reference, I asked a rabbi-friend who noted the following verse in Leviticus:

“When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap your field right up to its edge, neither shall you gather the gleanings after your harvest. And you shall not strip your vineyard bare, neither shall you gather the fallen grapes of your vineyard. You shall leave them for the poor and for the sojourner...”[2]

At the other end of the spectrum, corporate-agriculture aka Big-Ag (more like Big-Gag and that's no joke) and property-consciousness seek to maximize control of and profit out of every square-inch. As President Bolsonaro of Brazil infamously said during his election campaign:

“'Not one centimeter of land will be demarcated for indigenous reserves or quilombolas (descendants of those people who freed themselves from slavery).' Even more harshly, Bolsonaro said, 'Let’s make Brazil for the majorities. Minorities have to bow to the majorities. Minorities will fit in or just disappear.' This is the language of genocide. He gives Brazil’s indigenous people—about a million people out of 210 million—an impossible choice: either abandon your independence and culture (protected by Article 231 of Brazil’s 1988 Constitution) or die.”[3]

But this divisive greed is not old-school. In his essay “Land, Territory, Entropy,” Guillermo Delgado-P. (Andean) states:

“Physiocrats in the eighteenth century were interested in the value of productive land as agricultural products reached higher demand. But for peasants... If surplus was available, then it was shared, stored, or bartered.”[4]

I remember reading somewhere about Indigenous Peoples farming in South America, where a section of a field is left un-seeded but the best reference I could find is a general one:

“A fallow field is land that a farmer plows but does not cultivate for one or more seasons to allow the field to become more fertile again. The practice of leaving fields fallow dates back to ancient times when farmers realized that using soil over and over again depleted its nutrients. A three-field rotation system was used in medieval times in which one field was always fallow.”[5]

And more for the Don'ts: the Taoist 'Way of Life' – perhaps best summed up in the sound-bite West as 'go with the flow of Nature' – also espouses Wu Wei, sometimes translated as “Non-Doing” yet more accurately in the modern vernacular, 'not doing stupid stuff,' and more specifically, not lording over others rather controlling one's egoic urges, for it is the fearful ego that panics and then masks its insecurity with greed, war, control freaking, and other behaviors exhibited on the grand scale by gargantuan corporations, empires, and other unsavory entities.

Elements, my dear, Watson
Along with the various categories of climate change/crisis/chaos/catastrophe are other categories of Elements. Numerous studies and the daily news allow anyone to be cognizant of the fact that some areas are dealing with floods, some droughts, tornadoes, and Fires, along with combinations, plus man-made disasters such as oil so-called spills affecting Earth and Water, and of recent news, a rash of various chemical factory explosions affecting Air.

To crack this tough-nutshell climate conundrum requires both strong and focused actions as well as wise and self-controlled non-actions. Knowing which situation requires what, requires some significant life and thinking-pattern changes.

Whether you go out there and get 'em, or don't, each choice is part of the overall way of the work of living from a place of generosity rather than fretting about getting one's share of the delusory and devastatingly detrimental overdose of pie known as capitalist greed.

While some of the climate issues are time-sensitive, demanding immediate action and planning of action, what's also needed is overall balance with the unknown treasures that the consciousness and experience of cosmic time can unravel.

How our experiences of Cosmic Time With Unlimited Space wrestle Industrial Time With Limited Space is one of the biggest matches going.

NOTES
1. “Land, Territory, Entropy” by Guillermo Delgado-P., from the book “Grabbing Back: Essays against the Global Land Grab” edited by Alexander Reid Ross, AK Press, 2014, pp.128-29.
2. Leviticus 19, Verse 9
https://biblehub.com/esv/leviticus/19.htm
3. “Bolsonaro of Brazil: Slayer of the Amazon”
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2018/10/30/bolsonaro-brazil-slayer-amazon
4. Ibid, Delgado-P., p.128.
5. “What Is a Fallow Field?"

Mankh (Walter E. Harris III) is an essayist and resident poet at Axis of Logic. In addition to his work as a writer and small press publisher, he travels a holistic mystic pathway staying in touch with Turtle Island. See his new book of nonfiction with a poetic touch, “photo albums of the heart-mind”.

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