Why Must We More Creatively Imagine Our Climate Futures

in the year of the covet 19 pandemic

students in my courses at the university

of florida would have seen this image

in the background during our zoom

sessions

it’s a painting by the dutch post

impressionist painter vincent van gaal

called tree roots it’s one of a series

of van hawk paintings in this genre

known as subwa that’s french for

forest floor or undergrowth this one is

unique in at least two respects

we believe it was the last painting van

hawk don

he was painting it on the morning or the

afternoon of july

27 1890. later that evening

overcome with his worsening depression

he shot himself with a revolver

he would die of his injuries two days

later

in 2020 art historian walter van der

veen

made a remarkable discovery tree roots

depicts

a precise place in the small french town

of oversejois

where van hulk was living during the

final months of his life

this is a composite image of the

painting

and a photograph taken of the spot about

1900

the heavily eroded embankment you see

here and the trees

they were about 150 yards away from the

hotel where van hawk was living at the

time

this tangle of color this exuberant

expression of form and space

this was and more than a century later

it still is a real place

i want to begin today with the simple

observation

that van hawk’s beautiful sorrowful

painting

is the product of a soul in deep crisis

and an extraordinary expression

of the power of the human imagination to

capture

and recreate reality

tree roots an image of a real and a more

than real place

is an example of the crossing

of observation and creation that i call

vital connectivity and today i want to

talk with you about the importance of

vital connectivity

in the age of climate crisis

the earth’s climate is changing perhaps

you’ve seen this animation by nasa

of anomalous surface temperatures since

as median temperatures rise anomalous

weather

super storms floods droughts wildfires

are becoming more common and more

destructive

polar and glacial ice are melting sea

levels are rising

we face in the coming century

a planetary ecosystem without precedent

in human memory

for millions of our human kin and

countless numbers of our non-human kin

the catastrophe has already arrived

now vital connectivity this exuberant

crossing

of creation and observation

it’s not going to slow or reverse the

effects of global warming but i do

believe

that a better understanding of its

potentials

can enrich and extend our

understanding of our place in the world

to come

because we’ve done this before this is

something we as a species

are really good at let me show an

example of what i mean

the ancestors of the aboriginal peoples

and

taurus islander straight peoples torres

strait islander peoples

of australia left africa at the

end of the um the late pleistocene epoch

about 75 000 years ago

they arrived on the australian continent

about 10 000 years later

at the end of the last glacial period

and the beginning of the holocene epoch

11 700 years ago

they were effectively cut off from other

human populations

as the vast ice packs of the northern

and the southern hemisphere began to

melt

and the continent was encircled by

rising seas

this is a map showing the extent of the

sea level rise the yellow border

is the boundary of the continent before

the rise and the darker interior

is its boundary as the rise tapered off

about 7 000 years ago

the aboriginal peoples who settled on

the perimeter of the continent

were faced by enormous challenges in the

post-glacial age

in the space of a few thousand years sea

levels rose by 400 feet

the shorelines receded by hundreds of

miles

islands offshore disappeared peninsulas

were turned into chains of islands

freshwater deltas were consumed

completely by rising salt waters

we know from the extensive

archaeological evidence that the

aboriginal peoples were forced

to move inland to higher and drier

ground

and we know that they created stories to

explain what was happening to them

anthropologist patrick nunn has called

these the oldest

true stories in the world he and his

team have identified 21 locations

on the perimeter of the continent where

very old oral narratives

clearly describe seawater inundation

some of these stories will seem very

matter of fact to us

an island offshore is described as

having been connected by a land bridge

that’s now underwater

others will seem more fantastic for

example

two brothers struggle over a magical

water bag

it bursts its content spill on the

ground and a coastal plain

is immersed or a giant kangaroo

plunges a digging stick into the soil

cuts a trench

which opens to a channel and then opens

to a great gulf in the sea

these changes were reflected also in the

art of the period

this is an image of the rainbow serpent

an important

aboriginal deity that first appeared

about 6

000 years ago in ancient rock paintings

like this one in arnhem land northern

territory

aboriginal mythology has long associated

the rainbow serpent

with the movements of water and seasonal

rains

anthropologist paul tessall has proposed

that the curious anatomy of the serpent

is based upon that of the ribbon

pipefish

haleek this taneo forest a saltwater

species commonly found

in the waters north of the australian

continent and pipefish like this one

would have been carried in by the inland

incursion

of salt water

stories of magical water bags

giant kangaroos mystical serpents

may not see much to us today

like precise observations

of environmental transformation

but none and his team have shown that

the hydrological crises described in the

aboriginal myths

correspond very closely to the

geological evidence

for how the shorelines actually receded

and tassal’s insight is that the rainbow

serpent represents the

origin story of a creature the

aboriginal peoples had never seen before

and which soon became the emblem

of a radically new ecosystem they were

now forced to live in

i want to be clear about one thing

however to compare in this way

seemingly realistic and fantastic

elements

of the aboriginal stories does not

reduce

the majesty or the expressive power of

their mythology

i think it does the reverse it advances

fact through myth-making into something

far more meaningful and more enduring

it subjects fact and myth to the

synergies

of vital connectivity

let me tell you about another example

this

is a grove of quaking aspen’s populist

tremolodos

growing now today on about 108 acres on

a hillside in south central utah

it’s called pando from the latin for

i spread and the name is very apt

pando is what’s called a clonal colony

each of the 47

000 trees in the grove is a genetically

identical clone

sprung from the roots of a single parent

pando is in fact one vastly

interconnected organism

running beneath the forest floor it

weighs

more than 6 million kilograms it’s the

most

massive living being on our planet

it’s also one of the oldest at least as

old as the last glacial maximum in north

america some

16 000 years ago which means

when the aboriginal peoples were telling

their stories of sea level rise

for the first time panda was only an

adolescent

the grove figures prominently

in richard power’s 2018 novel

the overstory one of the most celebrated

works of american

environmental fiction of the last

several decades

it’s the story of nine humans

whose lives are drawn together by their

shared passion for the welfare of trees

which powers rightfully calls the most

wondrous

products of four billion years of life

and the terrible tragic consequences of

those humans failure

to protect old-growth forests of the

pacific northwest

from clear-cutting and climate change

pando appears early in the novel when

one of the characters

passes through it the narrator remarks

on the grove’s age its size its

strange plural selfhood

and then something really marvelous

happens the kind of thing

that an english professor really likes

the narrative begins to skip between

brief episodes in the lives of the

individual human characters

and we learn that in each case other

aspens

far from pando played a role small or

large in their life and that

all of the humans are bound together

over the course of the novel

by this hidden network of trees

it’s exactly like a subway painting for

a moment we see

the extraordinary undergrowth that

sustains the entire novel

everything is of a whole and richly

immensely complex

a couple of years ago i was teaching

this novel to a class of undergrads

and i observed in passing that this

passage is an example

of how connections in the story world

can

reach out to the real world and reveal

their potential cross-pollinations

one of my students frowned a bit at that

then suddenly brightened and smiling

broadly she called out

i think what you mean is that

pando and all the other forests in the

novel

they’re not metaphors for the

connections between the people

they’re exactly how the people are

connected

if anything she added all the other

connections

are metaphors for how the grove already

connects

to everything including

us

think for a moment about van gaal

painting

or a pipefish that coils into the shape

of a deity how

observation and creation can entangle

in a moment and produce an exuberant

enduring ecosystem of thought

that’s what my student picked up on in

that moment and hers is the insight i

would like you to take away today

from these examples of a painting a

novel

and seven thousand years of storytelling

in this

our time of deep crisis

because we live in a time of

accelerating environmental decline

some cruel and terrible futures are

already foregone conclusions

we are going to need large-scale

engineering scientific and political

solutions to the wicked problems of

climate change

but we’re going to need something else

to

because our children are going to need

their own rainbow serpents

we must rediscover the fact that

everything

our species crafts every image every

story

reveals more of the wider world than the

bits

of reality it repeats

to the extent that we have forgotten in

the late age of technoscience

this consolation of the oldest true

stories we must return to its embrace

we must begin to create new images

and new stories as the world changes

so that we will remember what we have

lost and so that we may discover

what we can find again

if i had only three words of advice to

give you

about your role in the necessary

refashioning of the world

they would be this cultivate

vital connectivity

even as we labor individually and

together to find responses

to the massive problems that face us in

the century to come

listen and tell

paint and write and sing in ways that

will recreate the world

because art and storytelling

are the most resilient and the most

enduring

technologies of humanity

let’s take that fact seriously

let’s create lasting beauty in our

sorrow

let’s watch carefully for what washes on

the shoreline and declare

without apology it’s magical origins

let’s look deeply into the ancient

entangled undergrowth of the world and

find there

again our most vital relation

to it let’s bear witness to the truth

that it has always connected and that it

can continue to connect

to everything

including us thank you