to the feathers on the arrow’s flights. Are
they goose or swan or egret? If he can decide
on the type and style, it will point to the
fletcher responsible for making them, and
that in turn will help him find his assailant.
And of course the man dies.
Instead of doing the one thing that was
essential—pulling the arrow out and tend-
ing the wound—he wastes time, our most
precious nonrenewable resource, by specu-
lating about what, in the circumstances, is
of such secondary importance it’s irrelevant.
The Buddha used the story in response to a
monk whose preoccupation with abstruse
metaphysical questions was preventing him
from engaging in any practical action to
lessen suffering. But the story slips into a cli-
mate change guise with disconcerting ease.
We—as a species, as a planet—are grievous-
ly injured by the arrows of carbon emission,
yet much of our energy is taken up with the
equivalent of examining the feathers on the
flights of the arrows that afflict us.
B
IN A MOVING ESSAY in the N e w Yo r k
Times, Laureli Ivanoff writes about the
impact of climate change on the Iñupiat,
a northern indigenous people. She notes
that “last winter, there was less ice in the
Bering Sea than any winter since the start
of record-keeping in 1850.” She laments
the effects such warming is having on the
creatures the Iñupiat depend on. A tradition
of hunting bearded seals that stretches back
some 2,500 years is now threatened. Ivanoff
fears that her baby son may never partici-
pate in this central practice of their culture.
The sea is becoming too warm for the for-
mation of ice, which means the seals will go
elsewhere or simply perish. Ivanoff ’s elegiac
lament recognizes that the environment she
knew as a girl will not be the one her son
inherits. Instead, he and his contemporaries
will have to cope with[a]n ocean changing so rapidly that
the auklets, puffins and other sea-
birds are dying and washing up on
Alaska shores in alarming numbers.
He has inherited a Norton Sound
that, I fear, is becoming too warm for
ice to form and ugruk (the Iñupiat
name for bearded seal) to survive.This is, of course, just one specific instance
of the impact of rising temperatures. The
world is in the grip of the warmest weather
it’s seen since records started. Since 2015 the
annual global average surface temperature
has been 1ºC above that of pre-industrial
levels. There’s a risk that before 2023 this
increase will exceed the 1.5ºC threshold set
out in the Paris climate agreement. Unless
greenhouse gas emissions are curbed, global
average temperatures will continue to rise.
As the secretary-general of the World Mete-
orological Organization puts it:Extreme and high impact weather
affected many countries and mil-
lions of people, with devastating
repercussions for economies and
ecosystems in 2018.... Many of
the extreme weather events are con-
sistent with what we expect from a
changing climate. This is the reality
we need to face up to. Greenhouse
gas emission reduction and climate
adaptation measures should be a top
global priority.Thousands of miles away from the Ber-
ing Sea that is Laureli Ivanoff ’s immediate
experience of these “devastating repercus-
sions,” I picture the Belfast schoolchildren
who used to visit the nature reserve. They’d
be grown up now, part of the adult world—homeowners, parents, voters, employed in a
whole spectrum of professions. And unless
something along the way changed radically,
they’ll still be fundamentally ignorant about
the dynamics of the natural world. How
many of them recognize our arrow-struck
condition? How much time do they spend
indoors, closeted with computer games, TV,
and social media, compared with time spent
outside directly experiencing the natural
world on which we all depend?B
“HUMAN HISTORY has become more
and more a race between education and
catastrophe.” Although it was made almost
a century ago, H. G. Wells’s pronounce-
ment seems even more apt today. Looking
at the contemporary situation, one could
be excused for thinking that education is
lagging so far behind that it has no hope of
catching up. It may be that climate change
will win, bringing a scale of catastrophe that
will overwhelm us, perhaps pushing us—
and countless other species—to the point
of extinction. Nor is it by any means the
only competitor running in catastrophe’s
colors—nuclear accident or war, terrorism,
poverty, epidemic, starvation—there’s a for-
midable team arrayed against us.
Meanwhile, education too often seems
distracted from the essential business of
winning. Either it’s starved of funds or is
devoting time to studying the feathers on
the flights of catastrophe’s quiver of arrows.
The philosopher R. G. Collingwood once
said that “[w]e try to understand ourselves
and our world only in order that we may
learn how to live.” The connection between
learning and living has become so tenuous
in many educational establishments that it
often seems at risk of being lost.B
I’M AWARE OF the fragmentariness of this
essay. Instead of an orderly progression from
the first sentence to the last, providing incre-
mental detail to substantiate an argument
step by step, I’ve preferred to move from one
vignette to another. This modus operandi
seems appropriate to our situation. The resultCan you feel these
ice floes rock and tip
and tremble? Can
you feel them shrink?
Do we have the
necessary balance to
keep to the stepping
stones of sense?WORLDLIT.ORG 63