"You owe me something for the sugar," she shouted.
"I don't owe anybody anything," said Buck, baring his empty gums. He quickly turned away. As he started to run, he gripped the duffle with two hands so the dead bird wouldn't fall out.
"You owe me meat, Buck Hobbs," yelled Ingrid, surprised by the force of her own voice.
But Buck kept trotting away, faster and faster. He was still strong for a man in his seventh decade. He walked resolutely towards the Vilar's old farm. Ingrid didn't chase him. She turned and took an overgrown path that wound around and ended up in the front of the Vilar's land. She walked slowly, almost in circles, until she could creep onto the property and hide herself behind the rusted carcass of the abandoned Chevrolet in the Vilar's driveway. One of the doors of the old car was open and hanging by a single hinge, like a giant loose tooth.
She crouched down. From there, she could see Buck kneel on the ground next to the old potato house, build a fire, and open the duffle bag. Buck didn't just have one bird. He had several. A seagull, a plover, and a vulture. Ingrid watched her old lover as he plucked each bird, skewered it on a stick, heads, guts and all. The smell of the roasting meat traveled slowly in the heavy, moist air. Ingrid's stomach knotted.
She watched Buck as he ate greedily, sucking on the bones of the ribcage, smacking his lips loud and often, and wiping grease from his chin with the back of his hand. She thought she saw him take an eyeball, now crunchy and blackened, and pop it onto his tongue like a peanut.
She reached down and cupped her hands around a large, smooth rock. Her heart was pounding. Her stomach continued to rumble.
She looked around and found another rock. And another. And yet another. These were the stones that the ancestors of the Vilar family must have once pulled out of their fields centuries ago. Back when farmers could grow things on the island because the rains came after the snow, and the bees were abundant, and the sun shone, and summer was long and warm, but not too warm.
She looked at the rocks. So pretty, she thought. So round. Flecked with color. Mottled. They could have been apples. It had been twenty years at least since she had seen an apple. A plain red apple. Her brain was woozy and slow. She wasn't reasoning or plotting. She was merely reacting to some message from the pit of her belly.
She piled the rocks up in a tidy pyramid. She remembered a time when she and Buck had piled up snowballs like that. Row upon row, like cannon balls in a fort. Then they had thrown them at each other, laughing as the small white spheres burst, cool and flaky, against each other's back. It had been New Year's Eve, decades ago. She had been wearing the coat with the cornflower blue buttons.
She felt weak. She could barely throw the first stone even two yards. But she picked up another one and took aim. The second landed a bit further away. Then she wound up her arm with all her might and pulled it back. She snapped her arm like a catapult, the way she had seen sailors throw.
The third stone hit just in front of Buck's feet. He jumped back and cursed. The fourth stone hit his knee. The fifth hit his chest. He started to run away, still holding onto the roasted bird. But the sixth stone got him squarely in the middle of his back and dented his spinal column with a thud. He fell to the ground. The meat flew out of his outstretched hand. The dead bird was airborne for a minute and then landed.
Ingrid kept throwing the pretty rocks. She watched a stone bounce off Buck's head. He groaned and then grew completely silent. The warm wind blew the frayed cuffs of his old denim shorts. His Red Sox hat lay in the dust nearby.
Ingrid approached Buck's body and stepped over it, as if it were a fallen log. She still had a stone in her hand, but she let it drop slowly to the ground as she hurried towards the roasting birds.
The seagull and the plover were blackened. She flipped them off the fire with a stick and devoured them, one after the other, ripping the flesh, sucking the bones like a straw.
Only later did she begin to cry. For herself. For Buck. For the island. For a world without the sweet comfort of a cup of Joe.
The Apology, Paul Collins
"We do not know very much of the future
Except that from generation to generation
The same things happen again and again."
-Murder in the Cathedral. T.S. Eliot.
January 21, 2017
"The Apology" — Delivered at Delicate Arch, Arches National Park, United States
I speak today for the United States and begin to honor my pledge and commitment to you, fellow citizens, our global community, and future generations, to reconcile the environmental injustices that our nation has inflicted on the peoples and cultures of the Earth. The time has now come for our nation to turn a new page in its history by righting the wrongs of the past and moving forward with confidence to the future. The time has come to say sorry.
I speak today against the background of a natural wonder—Delicate Arch. The great American nature writer who has influenced me enormously, Edward Abbey, described this fantastic object of nature as having the curious ability to remind us—like rock and sunlight and wind and wilderness—that out there is a different world, older and greater and deeper than ours. For a few moments we discover that nothing can be taken for granted, for if this ring of stone is marvelous, all which shaped it is marvelous, and our journey here on Earth is the most strange and daring of all adventures.
We are a proud nation. A courageous nation.
But we must be honest with ourselves. In our attempts at environmental leadership, we have, at times, failed to embrace the possibility of new solutions to enduring problems and have taken paths that are wholly and predictably unsustainable. Old approaches have failed. Our future must be based on mutual respect, mutual resolve, and mutual responsibility. The often damaging and dangerous notions, fantasies, and myths of American exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny that continue to influence American political ideology must be confined to history. They belong to the ages. A State cannot be exceptional when faced with the destructive effects of global warming. I am both an American and a globalist. A denial of exceptionalism does not deny the heart and soul of this nation. We are all different, and we must not forget that we are created equal.
Some former holders of this privileged office of President have made a positive and lasting contribution to protect this Earth. Former President John F. Kennedy, a true visionary, declared that more than any other people on Earth, we bear burdens and accept risks unprecedented in their size and their duration, not for ourselves alone but for all those who wish to be free.
Richard Nixon ushered in the decade of the environment and established our Environmental Protection Agency, and Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton built on the public lands legacy started by Theodore Roosevelt. It was Roosevelt who recognized that the environment had a direct connection to democratic ideals and that the conservation of natural resources was a duty we owe to our children and our children's children. For Roosevelt, conservation was a great moral issue, for it involves the patriotic duty of ensuring the safety and continuance of our nation.
But others of this office pushed pro-growth, anti-regulatory, anti-environmental agendas, politicizing the scientific debate by ignoring scientific evidence, distorting facts, and leading to the censorship of scientists and reports—doing so at the peril of our nation and the world, leading to morality-based politics. Science and religion are not rivals. They are complementary. Our choice is not one, as some alarmed commentators and politicians appear to believe, of science or the humanities. We must learn to create unbreakable bonds between the disciplines of science and humanities. We cannot procrastinate. The world of the future is in our making. We have a moral responsibility to be intelligent about these things. But moral advances must keep up with scientific advances.
It is a mistake to insist that moral and religious convictions play no part in politics and law. The solution to many social problems, including environmental injustice, requires moral transformation. Addressing the problems we face requires changes in
the hearts and a change in minds. We need to embrace a more faith-friendly form of public reason. One that transforms and sustains our relationships with other nations and our relationship with the Earth.
We owe the world an apology for the historic environmental injustices we have inflicted upon peoples and cultures. The sense of belonging to a community and showing an allegiance to it carries with it a moral obligation to make amends for our nation's past wrongs. That is patriotism. And with that sense of belonging comes responsibility. It is not really possible to take pride in our nation and its past if we're not willing to acknowledge any responsibility for carrying its story into the present, and discharging the moral burdens that come with it.
The words of the remarkable Eleanor Roosevelt ring as true now as they did when they were first published in 1962: Today we must create the world of the future. Tomorrow is now. Just as our early nation struggled to embrace democracy, we must now embrace a new declaration against fear, timidity, complacency, and national arrogance.
Some have asked, why apologize?
As a nation, we are empathetic to our neighbors but should feel shamed and guilty for some aspects of our way of life. Through apologizing, we can seek to restore and maintain our own dignity and self-esteem.
We are wanting to be forgiven. For this, we must repent, we must apologize. Forgiveness without repentance is cheap grace.
Our fragile planet demands that we renew and focus our energies on the resolution of conflicts, and that we do so in a way that does not simply submerge the resentments that inevitably accompany such conflicts but acknowledges and responds to them. I hope that apologizing can help in that effort.
But in apologizing, we must recognize that this is more than merely an acknowledgment of our offences, with an expression of remorse. It is an ongoing commitment by our nation to change our behavior. It is a process that requires of all parties attitudes of honesty, generosity, humility, commitment, and courage.
It was early morning August 30; violent shaking aroused Colorado's population from their beds. The fifty-second tremor moved furniture, shattered glass, and toppled buildings. After a pause in the shaking, it then renewed with greater strength. Panic and chaos ensued. Streets filled with injured and stunned residents, and cries rang out from injured and trapped victims. Fifty five people perished. This disaster resulted from the injection of fracking waste water into deep underground voids. Before this, our fracking industry was seen as the new bonanza for America, reducing its reliance on overseas oil. Fracking was a process that was deemed safe, licensed, and regulated by our agencies who were trusted to protect us. An industry that had flourished at an urgent pace, with the backing of influential lobbyists and largely in response to addressing high unemployment that had resulted from the financial crisis a few years earlier. Colorado State, we are sorry.
The link between genetically modified organisms and dementia, Alzheimer's disease, has been proven beyond all doubt. We, as a nation, were the key players in this branch of science. We convinced nations across the globe that this emerging science would help solve the world's food shortage problems and that any concerns over public health or environmental pollution grounds were groundless. We fought legal cases and supported industry to develop and market these new products of salvation.
John Richards had consumed GMO products for decades. I met John in my first weeks as Governor of New York. A previously healthy and lively man, he now sits slouched over in a wheelchair, silent in gaze and sound. In the years I have had the honor to know John, we talked at length about his fear of being absorbed into his diseased mind. The fear of slipping away, free-falling into the unknown. The loss of free will. I witnessed the tears, anger, and frustration of John, his wife, and his caregivers as they all failed to understand what was really going on in John's mind. There is no cure yet for this disease. It's a path of early death that we, as a nation, led John and thousands of others along. As the President of the United States, I am sorry.
The roots of environmental racism are deep and have been difficult to eliminate. Many of our nation's environmental laws, policies, and practices have differentially affected or disadvantaged individuals, groups, and communities based on race or color. Our government, legal, economic, political, and military institutions have reinforced environmental racism, and it continues to influence local land use, enforcement of environmental regulations, the siting of industrial facilities, and the locations where people of color live, work, and play. America's Deep South has become a sacrifice zone, a sump for the rest of the nation's toxic waste, and is tarnished with the legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, and white resistance to equal justice. Native Americans have had to contend with some of the worst pollution of our nation, and the places where they live are prime targets for landfills, incinerators, garbage dumps, and risky mining operations.
These stories cry out to be heard; they cry out for an apology. Instead, from our nation, there has not been enough action. As politicians, we were too easily persuaded by the flawed logic of economists who thought that putting a price on our natural resources could justify the sacrifice of nature in one place through seeking to replicate it in another. Responsible environmental stewardship is not a series of banking transactions ruled by the balance sheet.
Our precious natural resources will no longer be treated as a tradable commodity.
These victims of environmental racism are not simply an interesting sociological phenomenon. They are not intellectual curiosities. They are human beings, human beings who have been damaged deeply by decisions of governments. But, as of today, the time for denial, the time for delay, has at last come to an end. Decency, human decency, universal human decency, demands that our nation now step forward to right a historical wrong. That is what I am doing today. We are sorry.
For many American businesses, the concept of corporate social responsibility has lost all credibility, at home and abroad. Companies can no longer seek to greenwash their failures when we see the damage their operations cause. This nation demands greater accountability from those responsible. And we will see to that.
Over the last few decades, our nation has experienced unprecedented extreme weather conditions—droughts, floods, hurricanes. Many of our fellow citizens have lost their livelihoods, and businesses have been ruined. Thousands have had to move away from their communities, families, and loved ones. This has placed an enormous strain on our economy. Decades of underinvestment in our nation's flood protection infrastructure and a failure to properly protect our natural resources, such as water for agricultural use, has led us to this worrying state.
But look a little closer and the strain on those trying to cope with this change in fortune is clear. On my Presidential campaign trail, I spoke with farmers who were having to sell their family farms that generations before them had run. Financially, it was crippling for them. But, although often forgotten, the mental health strain on our nation's farmers and their families is tremendous. The sense of helplessness following months of preparing the land for crops that then die from a lack of available water, or lie rotting in flooded fields, is too much to bear. The incidents of suicide and depression in our farming community, and those who suffer the loss of their loved ones, homes, and businesses to extreme floods and hurricanes, are truly horrific. I know that, in offering this apology on behalf of our nation, there is nothing I can say today to take away the pain you have suffered personally. Whatever words I speak today, I cannot undo that. Words alone are not that powerful; grief is a very personal thing.
Amura Ropati was born on the Pacific Island of Tikvah, the only child of Prosper Ropati and Elizabeth Ropati. Amura's father's childhood was suddenly and irreversibly shattered by the unleashing of unprecedented horror by a trusted friend of his Marshal Islands home. The detonation of the Shrimp hydrogen bomb by our nation in 1954 changed everything for Prosper and his community. Of those who didn't die from the immediate after effects of radiation, many wanted to die. Left permanently damaged,
physically and psychologically, many thousands of residents were hastily moved to camp slums of the Pacific. Innocents exiled into an alien environment, fed on a degrading diet of white rice, doughnuts and pancakes, knowing that their future was going to be limited to an existence as a State beneficiary. Amura's father was the sole survivor of his family. Found on a desolate track, sheltered in the arms of his dying mother, blinded in his left eye, this tiny baby was adopted by two kindly American scientists who had been monitoring the bomb tests on the island. Terrified and appalled by what their countrymen had done, and were capable of doing, Burt and Madeline fled the Marshall Islands with baby Prosper to the welcoming shore of Tikvah and brought up Prosper to be the wonderful, humane man he became.
At that time, despite their colonial history and the arrival of missionaries, traders, and administrators, many Tikvah islanders were still holding on to their own beliefs and traditions. But things changed radically during Amura's childhood. The island's natural resources were being exploited by our nation through new methods. Then came the arrival of U.S. logging machines, the clearance of native forests where she used to play with her friends, and the creation of huge swathes of commercial agriculture growing plants for the countries that had planted them on Tikvah. Hallowed landscapes lost their sacredness, and local people became insensitive to the destruction, accepting it as a sign of progress.
Climate change will affect the physical territory of States like Tikvah in a number of ways. Tikvah, in common with some other coastal States, has suffered permanent loss of land through shoreline erosion caused by extreme weather events and sea level rise. Climate change-induced territorial degradation, coupled with climate changed-induced migration, now threatens the very existence of Tikvah.
In the history of the United Nations, there have been almost no incidents of total extinction, either voluntary or involuntary, of a State. The most pressing issue for States facing extinction due to climate change is the very existence of the State altogether. The total loss of territory is the prospect facing Tikvah and small island nations. Should climate change result in total population displacement from a small island, either because of rising sea levels or extreme weather events making habitation unsustainable, that nation will be forced to abandon that territory entirely.
Winds of Change: Short Stories about Our Climate Page 10