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