is a kind of leaping from one verbal ice floe of
concern to another, amidst a melt of distrac-
tion. Can you feel these ice floes rock and
tip and tremble? Can you feel them shrink?
How often was my progress—your prog-
ress—between them interrupted by Snapchat,
Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, text, TV and
email? Are we losing our ability to maintain
a steady line of concentration? Do we have
the necessary balance to keep to the stepping
stones of sense?
It’s easy to lose your footing when the
sea ice of communication has become so
treacherous. Wisdom—a rare enough com-
modity at any time in history—now has its
islands surrounded by a rising tide that’s
littered with an alluring wash of trivia.
Intelligent utterance about serious subjects
is swamped and mocked by the twittering
of fools. Perhaps media ecologist Neil Post-
man was right and we’re amusing ourselves
to death. Certainly his picture of the decline
of public life into the vacuous dynamics of
show business has a horrible plausibility.
Postman’s analysis of American politics was
worrying enough when it appeared nearly
thirty-five years ago. Read today it seems
unnervingly prescient in its prediction of a
spiraling descent into tawdriness.
It’s hardly original to suggest that a
change in our inner weather is an essen-
tial precursor for dealing responsibly with
the climate change that’s now altering our
world, perhaps forever. Of course even the
most indoor sensibility can be informed
about the threats that face us. Many of those
who occupy rooms whose dominant view is
that supplied by the media may nonetheless
be committed to implementing the curative
strategies that need to be brought into play.
But perhaps if more of us spent more time
outside, directly engaged with nature, it
would add the iron of firsthand experience
to what may otherwise be lukewarm convic-
tion based on something that’s too abstract
to engage us. Our tragedy as a species may
be that by the time the impact of climate
change reaches into even the most compla-
cent indoor bastion of the psyche, it may be
too late to do anything about it.B
IN The Ethics of Climate Change, James Gar-
vey warns that “the end of a book on climate
change can be a dangerous place.” He notes
how authors have what he calls “a worrying
tendency to veer off into grandeur about
five pages from the end.” Given the nature of
the subject, it’s perhaps understandable that
people succumb “to an uncontrollable urge
to engage in some soothsaying,” such that
they end up making grandiose pronounce-
ments about the course of human history,
our destiny as a species, the parlous impact
we’re having on the biosphere. Even at the
end of a short essay like this, I can feel the
urge to shift into apocalyptic gear, empurple
my prose, and write about imminent plane-
tary disaster and the urgent need for change
at an individual, national, and international
level. While some sort of drum roll and
dramatic climax might be forgivable in a
sequential argument that was moving step
by strategic step toward some dénouement,
it would be out of place in the more mean-
dering approach I’ve favored.
I’ll content myself with a final leap onto
another ice floe of wisdom. From there,
if you’re so minded, you can jump back
to the beginning, rejoining Lucy Honey-
church and Cecil Vyse on their ill-starred
walk together. This leap is onto something
said by Henry David Thoreau, whose close
experience of nature created a sense of how
to live that we can still learn much from.According to Thoreau: “Moral reform is the
effort to throw off sleep.” Of course he didn’t
mean actual slumber, but rather the sleep of
inattention, profligate consumerism, indif-
ference to others, distraction, sheer inertia,
and just not caring. The knowledge we are
privileged to have access to carries with it a
huge awakening potential—as do the vari-
ous media through which it’s communicat-
ed. But too often things we should be able to
rely on to inform and enlighten us—to wake
us up—instead act like soporifics.
Laureli Ivanoff concludes her essay thus:My son, not yet crawling, may never
harvest an ugruk for his family. His
experience is already one of loss. But
I remember our values. Our ways of
being. Though the earth changes,
it is still giving. Providing. Nurtur-
ing. Inuqtaq [her son] will still learn
respect for what gives life. I hope the
rest of the world quickly adapts and
also respects the earth—as we have
for millenniums and will continue
to do.Respecting what gives life is not a lesson to
be learned indoors. Will we waken from our
slumbers in time to venture out and tend
our arrow-injured world with the neces-
sary mix of knowledge, determination, and
compassion?St. Andrews, ScotlandEditorial note: The online version of this essay
contains notes documenting the author’s
sources.Chris Arthur (www.
chrisarthur.org) is the
author of several essay
collections, most recently
Hummingbirds Between
the Pages (2018). His awards include the
Akegarasu Haya International Essay Prize,
a Theodore Christian Hoepfner Award, the
Gandhi Foundation’s Aitchtey Memorial Essay
Prize, and the Sewanee Review’s Monroe K.
Spears Essay Prize.COVER FEATURE CLIMATE CHANGE | ESSAY
Our tragedy as a
species may be that by
the time the impact of
climate change reaches
into even the most
complacent indoor
bastion of the psyche,
it may be too late to do
anything about it.64 W LT SUMMER 2019