Late-K Lunacy

by Ted Bernard

  If Earth does grow inhospitable toward human presence, it is primarily because we have lost our sense of courtesy toward the Earth and its inhabitants, our sense of gratitude, our willingness to recognize the sacred character of habitat, our capacity for the awesome, for the numinous quality of every earthly reality.35

  On the other hand, an opening of human consciousness toward respectful, grateful, wondrous, and sacred interactions with the natural world could pave the way toward a transition toward a truly sustainable future, and not only for humans.

  To understand how this might happen, let’s begin with the assumption that we have failed to make this transition, have failed to understand how serious has been our transgression of multiple thresholds at many scales across the planet. This failure of understanding and imagination has then forced an interlocking and cascading series of regime shifts. Triggered by climate change we will have brought down upon ourselves a broadscale deep collapse. Denuded and impacted landscapes, like those mined by mountaintop removal or obliterated by tar sands development or streams and lakes toxified by heavy metals: their recovery could take ten millennia or longer. The same could be said of desertified landscapes, like those of the American southwest and interior Mexico, the Sahel in Africa, and parts of central Asia. Ocean ecosystems could also be long in recovery from thermal pollution and acidification. But biodiverse regions that were never heavily industrialized, such as parts of Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America and even sparsely settled bits of North America could recoup their natural function and diversity in much less time. In three or four human generations, the basis for the survival of small communities ought to be possible. Native components — from microorganisms and soil minerals to forests and their wild inhabitants — will be the building blocks for recovery.

  These landscapes of hope set the scene for α, alpha, for pioneers to populate vacant niches and for new species to evolve. As explained in Chapter Three, alpha is a wild and unstable stage where invention, re-assortment of components, and trial and error are the rule. New configurations generate new dynamics that over time either persist or are abandoned. Ultimately, if the progression is viable, previously suppressed forms of life and totally new ones begin to establish new order, develop new regulatory systems, and create a fresh identity that may be something quite wonderful and original. Humans struggling to survive and understand the potentials and limitations of alpha would be advised to stand back and learn. Farming during this dynamic stage will be a challenging enterprise. Hunting, fishing, and wildcrafting would offer alternative pathways. If humans could simply survive a few generations, they might have earned the right to engage the evolutionary processes leading toward longer term renewal.

  As the shift from α to r takes place, some of the accumulated resources will inevitably leak from the system. Hopefully, these will not be critical resources for surviving humans. At the same time, new components that have thrived and a few legacy components from past cycles will begin to sequester resources and organize the way forward. Ultimately, r species will gain primacy and set up the structure and function that will persist over the long run. While the dramatically explosive and abundant potential of α will not carry into r, there will be sufficient wealth to evolve toward a new more stable state. If humans make it to this point, the world will offer much promise.

  The adaptive cycle in nature, like evolution itself, tells and retells the timeless story of “nature evolving”. Nature evolving is about “abrupt and transforming change”.36 As a narrative, it begs us to understand and embrace the uncertainty of surprises and the necessity for responses more imaginative and enduring than our present crisis management default. In the absence of this understanding, if we continue to base our decisions on the myth of a nature as a predictable equilibrious entity, our febrile attempts to manage natural and human disturbances will grind the adaptive cycle toward a regressive halt. The fate of any particular ecosystem and of our civilization itself now depends more than ever on a well-functioning environment. It requires a nimble society whose institutions are flexible in response to disturbance and a revision of humanity’s very perceptions of how our planet works. “Nature evolving” and “humanity evolving” are bound together in this story. They are not separate. The sooner we comprehend this, the better our chances of being part of the loop of hope. Otherwise, our ignorance will condemn the families and neighborhoods, communities, cities, farmlands and forests to the fate of the fictional Brights Grove, described at this book’s onset.

  Rachel Carson wrote with foresight and awareness two generations ago that if we fail to take account of the way nature works, “its living populations and all their pressures and counter pressures, their surges and recessions,” in other words, the adaptive cycle, we shall never reach an “accommodation” between ourselves and the world we depend upon. She understood that arrogance could be our undoing. “The control of nature,” she wrote, “is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, when it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man.”37 It is our “alarming misfortune”, she concluded, that so primitive a set of misconceptions has driven our decisions about how to live on this sacred planet and, I would add, has backfired so tragically. May we somehow put aside such misconceptions and draw ourselves back from the Late-K lunacy that has taken us to the edge of the cliff. I beseech this of us even as I realize that a plunge toward omega might in the long run be the inevitable and more instructive outcome.

  2

  We, the people, decided to conduct a census. Em was reticent about the count, thinking, as people in Senegal did in her childhood, that assigning a number to a particular human amounted to a death curse. Rational arguments did not square with this cultural knowledge.

  “How are we to know what we seek if we are unclear about our need?” Nick asked.

  “Oui, mais, we are so few. We cannot lose one more person,” she said.

  “That’s the point, ma chérie,” he replied, his arm wrapped 'round her.

  Our settlement, Gilligan Island (the irony and pertinence of the name lost on all but the three seniors), included five mixed-race couples, two gay/bisexual couples, an elderly Caucasian couple, and two single parents, both white. Adults ranged in age from 20 to 79. Seven young people from 6 to 18 contributed to intergenerational activities as well as perpetual anxiety about the future. Although indecorous, the adults were forced to admit that the rubrics of the census boiled down to this: non-procreators (18), potential procreators (2), nubiles (3), children (4). Faced with these data, we rejected arranged marriages. It was wrong, we decided, to force our young adults to pair up, for they had been raised as siblings. It would constitute consanguinamory . It would lead to friction among the people. It would narrow the gene pool. The stark reality was that without the recruitment of new procreating members, quite apart from external events, demographically Gilligan Island was on its way to oblivion.

  Huddled along Gilligan Road on the Shawnee River banks at the western outskirts of what was once Argolis, the settlement consisted of a string of restored houses and cabins and the nearby forests, fields, and pastures. At lane’s end, an astonishingly large building loomed over everything. It was a restored four-story wood-framed mill built in 1821 at river’s edge adjacent to a dam constructed in that era and restored in 1934. Freshly limed and gleaming brilliant in the mid-June sun, Holmes Mill was the people’s most treasured accomplishment and a daily reminder of their deepest sadness. It was their schoolhouse, library, meetinghouse, tavern and storehouse, their grain mill and abattoir, and their source of erratic power for lighting. The latter thanks to a cranky micro-hydroelectric unit, reclaimed and restored by Weston Churchill, which, in any event, had limited capacity and could not generate power through the low water summer months.

  Holmes Mill had been the labor of love of Jeremy Holmes, the African American Peace Corps volunteer and former GUO graduate student who, after his undergraduate years at Dartmout
h, had spent six years building housing for the poor in Gaborone, the capital of Botswana. After Jeremy lost his partner, Maybelle, to the Guangdong flu, he wondered aimlessly on long treks into the forests and along the Shawnee Valley, his eyes ever on the ground, a months-long fugue causing the people to fret. We could not cheer him. A carpenter by inclination and upbringing, Jeremy awoke one morning and strolled desultorily toward the decaying building. He spent that day in solitude. He studied the structure from all angles, wandered through its musty interior, knocked his hammer against columns and beams, imagined how the people might make use of the sturdy classic. He began to envision a new purpose. Restoring the mill became the source of his resurrection, his life’s work. After sketching blueprints on Kraft paper he found in the mill’s office and writing a work plan, he organized parties to pilfer and haul materials from every corner of Argolis, including the GUO campus — roofing, siding, insulation, windows, doors, construction timber, furnishings, bricks, pipes, re-bars. He and Boss Hays and others (including skimpy me now with estimable biceps and forearms) crisscrossed the ghost town dozens of times. Boss’ stout wagon, drawn by his big Percherons, Henrique and Benoit, hauled the loot back home.

  Over a span of years, Jeremy continued to inspire us to help him resuscitate the historic mill. In August of the eighth year, just months from completion, while replacing roof tiles, Jeremy lost his footing. He slid down the roof and fell 40 feet to a stone weir below. Hearing his scream, Lara Hedlund, his partner, ran from their home to the edge of the river. In unspeakable horror, she looked upon a scene she could never expunge. Jeremy’s broken body lifeless on the wall. Having lost Adrienne to an untamed beast named Morse, and her second and third partners in blood-smeared finitude, Lara went out of her mind. When she proved incapable of caring for David, their two-year-old son, fourteen-year-old Macy, the mystical child of yore, rushed into the vacuum. She became David’s caregiver, tutor, and dearest friend, even as his rearing became a project of the people. Lara meanwhile dwelled in a woeful world of anguish, rarely reaching ‘hereness’, gaunt and slump-shouldered, mumbling and pacing the lane in frayed and faded calico and moth-eaten sweaters, a person few in her cohort (if any had survived) in suburban Minneapolis (if it still existed) would ever have recognized. She was thirty-seven when she lost Jeremy.

  By our own reckoning, Gilligan Island’s survivors had done more than survive omega and two decades of alpha. Above all, out of sheer necessity, we had committed ourselves first to the greater good of our community while tending, as time would allow, to our own needs. Brick by brick, garden by garden, chicken by chicken, project by project, we had built and sustained an isolated community while confronting no small measure of suffering. Beyond the loss of Jeremy, other tragedies encompassed a beloved mother’s death in childbirth; a half-dozen infant deaths; the pandemic and its two dozen fatalities in less than a year; a child drowning; crop raids and losses to corn blight and wheat rust; a thousand-year flood followed by a hundred-year drought; a catastrophic house fire killing Burt Zielinski, a community pillar; and ever-aggravating health and medical challenges, including Lara Hedlund’s chronic depression. On the other hand, at play with such post-collapse agonies were moments of inexpressible love and light: births of healthy children; stories of their rearing and schooling, the kids’ language — a quirky blend of English, French, Spanish and Gilligan patois — their bumps and bruises, their gifts and gaffs; birthdays and seasonal celebrations drawing on Native American, Senegalese, Ecuadorian, Vietnamese, Latvian, and Mexican traditions; games and swimming in the river; dancing, theatre, and music; and always, tales of the Appalachian fields, forests, and waters reviving to their pre-industrial immanence and of the miraculous recovery of the four-leggeds and winged and finned sisters and brothers. Here was living proof of the “remember” part of panarchy which draws upon the accumulated genetic “wisdom” and ecological maturity of eons of evolution, yielding for us, if we don’t fuck up all over again, the profound potential of sustainability.

  Life, two-plus decades after the Great Collapse, no longer a tooth and nail battle for survival, still presented exhausting challenges. Though he tried, Stefan, our facilitator, school teacher, and sage, found it difficult to square up developments on the ground with the airy components in Nickleby’s book. Every month or so, he promised himself the analysis. Drained by the responsibilities of personal survival and the people’s needs, his life (and ours) a perpetual training ground for obstacle courses yet to come, the analysis never happened. Where were we on this loop of hope? Might our rebirth be as vibrant and promising as that of our surroundings? Have we built enough diversity, variability, modularity? Are we nimble? Is our social capital sufficient? What of our children? Have we reared them with the toughness and humility required? In his mid-fifties, feeling but not looking his years, the setting sun of an early summer evening bathing the valley in steamy golden haze, he sighed, weary of those questions, craving reassurance. Kate? Rumi? Anyone?

  It was not as if we, the adults of Gilligan Island, arrived with even a few of the old-time skills required of these times, stripped as we were of what was once called modernity. Stefan and Nick recalled a tune Nick had brought to class, written in the early part of the century by Canadian Corb Lund: “Can you gut the fish? Can you read the sky? Can you track the deer? Can you dig the well? Can you break the horse? Can you light the fire?”xix

  “This pretty much sets out our challenges,” Nick mused.

  Where exactly were the yeomen farmers, the animal husbandmen and women, the brickmakers, coopers, tinkers, glassmakers, cartwrights, tanners, and ax makers? Whence the candlemakers, soapmakers, stonemasons, salt workers, woolworkers, weavers, and potters? We all knew the answer: nowhere to be found, at least at the onset, among the random collection of adults who now comprised one professor (also a fair fisherman); an ageing marijuana and chili pepper grower, along with his two Percherons, five Morgans, three oxen, and certain trade skills (though, who needed an electrician or mechanic these days?); his partner, a grieving woman, once a novice monkeywrencher, hardened by time, her children dead; a boundlessly cheerful young caregiver, her heart the size of Canada, her homeland; a doctor with less than three years of medical education, little knowledge of native medicinals, and no anesthesia; a third year student trained in computer-aided engineering; a Mexican immigrant cook with a herd of goats and sheep; a trail bike guide with dozens of bicycles, all without tires; an ornithologist who had lost her way; a computer hacker with no computer; an actor and dancer; several other former students with varying bookish interests, and me, a Jill-of-all-trades with a history of espionage.

  We adults had long ceased trying to explain to the children what a household in the earlier part of the century had taken for granted. Rummaging through abandoned houses for useful items, we found it futile to explicate the functions of every derelict, rusty, moldy, or cracked gadget dug out of the dust: flip phones and smart phones (one pulled from the pocket of a skeleton identified as philosopher Freddie Neysmith), baby monitors, motion-activated thingies, recharging stations, espresso machines, food processors, blenders, sandwich makers, air fresheners, humidifiers, dehumidifiers, printers, shredders, modems, routers, DVRs, tablets, gameboys, laptops, MP3s, flat screens, and countless others, let alone their extensions — apps, wifi, social media, emails, texts, streaming video, cloud computing, surveillance, GPS, and on and on. Say, on the hottest, most humid day of summer, while splitting firewood or pulling weeds between rows and rows of beans and sweating like a sumo wrestler, I, Hannah, might nostalgically recall adjusting a thermostat to cool a room or a whole house. Whereupon, someone else would say, “nostalgia of that sort is nothing but amnesia turned on its head” and kids’ eyes would glaze over. They might ask, “What’s a thermostat?” or just say nothing, realizing the old people had lapsed again to their fantasyland, a land they cared little about. Back here, in the land they called home, they’d beg, “Can we go swimming now?”

  When it ca
me to taking things for granted in this era, what we believed to be true and what we strived to teach the children was this: the clean water flowing from the community tap (the pump connected to a seesaw assembled by Boss), the next meal on the table (and the next and next), birdsong in spring, bullfrog croaks and cougar roars on star-studded summer nights, the warmth of hearthside in mid-winter and firewood from nearby forests creating that warmth, the gifts of insects and birds who pollinated our crops and flowers, bees who made honey, the heft of workhorses and oxen, the flesh and milk of goats, the wool of sheep, the eggs of chickens and ducks, the fat of Canada geese and river fish, the lives of every person, indeed the very breath that sustained our lives — all these and more, that in other times might have been ignored or taken for granted, were sacred blessings in a world rebuilding itself.

  ~

  A kgotla was called. Kgotla, a tradition brought by Jeremy and Maybelle from Botswana, is a council whose job was to achieve consensus on a matter of importance to the people. All were invited. Each would have an equal and valued say. It was about the census. Its implications now clear, a grave issue challenged us: How shall we recruit young people from other communities, if they exist, to enhance our gene pool and enable generations yet born?

  Stefan arrived first. In the freshness of early morning he set up under ‘the kgotla tree’, a grand sugar maple at the edge of the Holmes Mill courtyard. At the other end of the courtyard, Flocker’s Pan, high above on a sandstone pedestal, watched quietly. These proceedings required his counsel, focused as they were on fertility and the future. Pan had been heisted from the sunken garden near Brownlow Library almost twenty years ago. It took six strong people and a pulley system rigged by Boss and pulled by Henrique to provide Pan a new home. Not one citizen of Gilligan Island believed his iconic presence inappropriate.