Saying It Again While Singing Some Peggy Lee

I was out early one morning last week to get the garden irrigated.  The dew was heavy, and it weighed on the asparagus so it bent and glistened under a silver veil.  In the distance a screech owl called.  The grass, cut the day before, clung to my bare feet.  The humidity rested at 92 percent.  The first rays of sun carried an assurance it would be a hot one, well in the 90’s, with stifling air to drive home the discomfort.

There will be more of these days, not necessarily this year, but in general.  It comes with a warming planet.  The reality is now broadly recognized and accepted. If we stopped emitting all fossilized carbon today we would still face advanced warming for decades.  Coastal cities will be vacated.  Heat stress, droughts, floods, food shortages, mass migrations, pestilences, pandemics, now underway will only ramp up in frequency and magnitude. The trigger’s been pulled, the ramifications unleashed, and yet there seems a strong inclination to let everything that brought us to this point continue, to dust off the old vinyl and listen to Peggy Lee sing “Is That All There Is” while planning our trip to Greece.

Recently we awoke to see a deer floating in the pond.  We pulled it ashore and found it to be a young lactating doe with no obvious wounds, looking good and healthy aside from being dead.  Dying in the water at this time of year points to hemorrhagic disease, since infected animals seek out wetlands for relief from fever.  Animals may or may not exhibit physical symptoms such as swelling around the neck, lumps on the roof of the mouth, discolored tongue, etc.. We filed a report with the DNR.  The cause of death will never be known for certain and a jubilant gathering of vultures in our north field aren't asking questions.

Hemorrhagic disease is spread by biting midges whose range is extending north and east with a warming climate.  Shifts in the ranges of birds, plants, and insects are being widely documented with climate change.  The state of Vermont’s rich history of maple syrup production is in its last generation of sugar maples so the industry will soon be lost to Canada. Hatches of insects, their timing critical to nesting birds, are occurring earlier, shrinking breeding windows and threatening brood survival.  

One of the best examples of how seemingly minor climatic changes can have dramatic consequences is found with the red knot, robin-sized shorebirds that migrate up to 9300 miles each way from their Arctic breeding grounds to the southern coasts of Chili and Argentina. On their route north they stop along our east coast to rest and refuel, seeking primarily the eggs of horseshoe crabs.  As oceans have warmed, crabs are laying eggs earlier and finish before red knots arrive.  At the same time arctic temperatures are rising so spring insect are hatching earlier, depriving birds the larvae essential to their developing broods.  Red knot numbers have dropped precipitously and surviving birds are physically smaller due to the effects of malnutrition. Their migratory movements are spurred by day length, not temperatures.  Their future looks bleak.

Carbon emissions have slowed a bit worldwide with the pandemic but it’s just a lull.  The concept of man-caused warming might be mainstream but consequential action is minimal. The stage is set for climate conditions never experienced by Homo sapiens as we enter a new era with no assurances.  There are big distractions: the virus, the economy, unemployment, injustice, corruption, while the biggest threat of all looms before us, its ultimate impact growing steadily with business as usual.  

A family of little green herons dart around the pond daily, screeching.  No man ever heard a screaming pterodactyl but surely herons learned from them.  Today the weather has moderated significantly.  We got a much needed soaking rain.  The pond temperature dropped to the low 70’s and Lee and I, being the weenies we are, donned wetsuits for the daily swim.  It’s August.  The field crops are looking good, the garden even better, the pantry’s nearly full and the tomatoes are just coming on.  Butterflies are showing up on the zinnias, monarch caterpillars on the milkweed.  Songbirds are everywhere. 

It’s so easy to fall into complacency, to think: Is that all there is to climate change? Is that all there is?  If that's all there is, my friends, then let's keep dancing.  Let's break out the booze and have a ball.  If that’s all there is.