The Winds to Come
REVISIT: a found reflection from the post-election days of December 2016, not quite imagining the full devastation of the ill winds to come, but trying to stay hopeful, even so. And back on Earth, we just thought we knew the wind down there on Goose Creek. Oh no. NOW we know the wind—but also the sky, the sunsets, the constellations, the clouds and the far horizon.
The wind is not my friend, and, yet it is.
While I loathe its bite on bare hands and the angry howl of it overhead, I often consider the powerful metaphor it offers as I feel it and hear it and resent it in my life at the moment.
Wind is a symbol for unseen forces that move the ships of our lives; and winds have been the invisible gods of the sky–-a pantheon whose names are hung in varied halls by longitude, latitude and altitude. Every civilization has deified the wind—the anima, the spiritus, the invisible powers around us that move unseen but in their consequences and everywhere presence.
There is an order in the chaos of moving air-–predictable patterns (and their aberrations like renegade bubbles of the so-called Polar Vortex) that we can actually visualize now, realities aloft that we could only imagine and deify not so many generations ago. We know the demons and gods in the near-space above our heads.
We comprehend this planet today at a level of detail unimagined by the storytellers of simpler times–-times when we were surface watchers only. Just a generation ago, we had no eyes to see temperatures, atmospheric gases, wind velocities and the bigger “logic” of moving oceans of air overhead every hour of every day.
And so I keep coming back to a kind of grounding in pondering the state of the planet by looking down on this immensely complex web from space, moving in real time, viewed by lenses such as Windy.com (highly recommended for geo-educational Walter Mitty mind travel.Play with the sidebar controls and get your local weather forecast for the coming week in great detail.)
The illustration pictured above (updated Wednesday 18 Nov 2020) shows the low over Louisiana (yet another storm cell) and the driving northwest winds or circulation that whistle through the trees on Floyd County ridges this morning) We can understand so much of Earth’s nature only in the past few years, and with that knowledge comes responsibility.
The more we know, the more we understand. The more we understand, the better we can predict. The better we can predict, the better we can serve, informed by our knowledge and by the reverence and cautions such understanding gives us.
These are facts, truths of physics and mathematics, made real by the memory and integration of our silicon brains. This knowledge we would not possess without this new (“digital”) way of seeing the truth of our precarious place in the ecology of a burdened world.
And all the sadder that the plan is to dismantle science and divert our economy, no longer in the pursuit of what’s best for Earth and the people it houses. The plan is to act against what we have come to know as the prudent way to treat our water, our soils, our air for the health and common good of all of us.
The New Plan is business as usual, retelling the old and broken story, acting as if the goose can forever lay the golden egg of profit for some, to the detriment of many.
From now through what remains of the current epoch of civilization, we can’t say that we did not know what we should have done to sustain the livability of the planet.
We can’t plead ignorance of the fact that our collective actions and inactions have made the entire planet unstable, collapsing or collapsed, for those vital global-scale functions we have taken so for granted–-the goods and services once provided by the intact planet that teeming humanity requires to prosper, even to survive.
I am thankful to have lived in a time when we have grown so quickly in our coming to understand the workings and wonders of this place so that we nurture a true reverence and awe for this unlikely rock in space. I celebrate it, even as I mourn, and an ill wind blows.
Beautifully written Fred, but very saddening to me.
Beautifully written. Thank you! Yes I too "am thankful to have lived in a time when we have grown so quickly in our coming to understand the workings and wonders of this place so that we nurture a true reverence and awe for this unlikely rock in space. I celebrate it, even as I mourn, and an ill wind blows."