When the internal organs of the human body overheat the heart begins to race. The great red river of blood is sped through the arteries, out the veins to the capillaries to the lower surfaces of skin from where, if the temperatures are favorable, the blood will return cooler, bringing the body core down from the danger zone. Perhaps perspiration, breezes, cooler temperatures will restore the age-old equilibrium: 98.6 degrees, plus or minus a few. Perhaps. Unlike the apocryphal frog in the slowly heating water the body feels the danger. It responds to the rising heat. The pulse races faster. As it races it weakens. As mine did at the end of a five hour trek down the South Kaibab trail of the Grand Canyon.
Even on May 15th the early morning sun on the eastern exposed trail heated the stone ovens, brought the hot wind pulling my woven straw trail hat against the chin strap and evaporating the water from my skin faster than I was taking it in. Even the walking sticks began to clatter uselessly on the rocky, mule gouged trail. I had been in trouble from an hour into the walk. At two thirds of the way down I had considered using the last emergency phone for a thousand dollar ride out. Funny thing about the heart. It pushed me on.
I had made it to within one hundred yards of the boat beach on the Colorado River, 4,780 feet below where I had started. There, within shouting distance, I hollered “I Need Help!,” managed the last three switch-backs and collapsed in the relative cool of the pedestrian tunnel that abuts the Kaibab Bridge leading to famed Phantom Ranch. The river water, which I had been conjuring for the last hour or so –two minutes away for a man with legs– was at 52 degrees. The shadowy figures of strangers gathering around me in the tunnel knew how cold it was. They had been on the river for a week, soaking in the tumultuous glory of the bitter cold rapids. One of the boats had flipped on day one and two swimmers pulled from the 48 degree green river.
“Get water!” the man kneeling by my head called to others. “Buckets!” He eased his arm and chest under me and started dripping water into my mouth. Someone laid a sopping, cool cloth on my forehead, removed my hat and poured water over the sweat soaked skull.
“Unbutton his trousers and pour water – slowly–, over his groin area. Unlace his boots and pour some on his feet.”
The five hours of down hill battle was receding in my brain. The body does odd things in extremis. At least I was off my feet and out of the sun. People, stranger-friends, were around me. The man’s fingers were resting again on the pounding artery in the throat. “What do you think?” he asked another. “Is his heart slowing down?” Sodium rich peach nectar replaced the drip of water over my lips. “How you doing?” a voice asked. “Any nausea?”
For about 45 minutes I lay there, finally beginning to wiggle my feet and respond to the queries. “O.K. No. Yes.” When the call went out for more water for my “privates” and I responded, “Not any more,” they judged irony to be the proof of a mind regaining its bearings. “You ready to stand?” my caretaker asked. “Slowly,” he said. “Now just stand still for a couple of minutes. How do you feel? Any dizziness? Nausea?” Finally we began to walk, three of us, four or five paces at a time, first to the suspension bridge and the bracing down river breeze. We stood for a while, gripping the rail. Then to mid-span. The wind swayed the bridge and the bridge swayed our feet. How did I feel? He put his fingers on my carotid artery again. “Good. Let’s go.” Docility is the only response the body has after such a heating. We walked the last decades of yards to the waiting boats and a lunch table set out in the shade of a tamarisk tree where they sat me down and brought me small pieces of cucumber and chicken breast.
“Don’t stop drinking water. Bring him salt — no tequila yet!”
The body begins to recover, and with it the mind. For over three hours, switch-back after switch-back, all I had thought was: “There is no one to help you but yourself. Move on. Move on.” I thought of all the refugees struggling on their roads, in freezing winters or burning suns, with guns, machetes and butchery and told myself, “This is nothing. Move the back foot forward. Rest. Move the back foot forward. Rest.” And that was all. I understood the stories of people who had laid themselves down in deserts or in snow, exhausted –just for a rest, to sleep, insulated from reason.
Now I could think of the names of the friends around me, and of the white water coming up: Horn, Granite and Hermit were all ahead, within hours. The frigid water would be my talisman. I thought I might go shirtless.
This small though personal drama is nothing of course, compared to the heat shock of earth. I am only one of 6 billion. My passing would be more or less noticed by some, intensely felt by a few. The passing of the earth as we know it will be taken more seriously –at least 6 billion times more; at least several thousands of billions more for all of the creatures in all of their lives, in the mutual, unfathomably complex, unknowable support roles each of the other – the butterfly and thistle, the great blue heron and the humpback chub, the ring necked seal and the polar bear, the krill and the phytoplankton, not to mention the hundred of species of bacteria passing through the guts, invisibly, in the great life-systems of earth.
When the circulatory systems of earth are overheated the remedy is not quite as easy as buckets of river water poured over a healthy hiker. In the case of the earth the circulatory system itself –the air and water— is being altered in ways that will alter everything; some things in ways we can know, or imagine; some in ways inconceivable.
As it happens the book I brought for my canyon reading was The Weather Makers by Tim Flannery. On another river trip many years ago, without such personal drama, I had read Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel, for the first time. Two weeks of river, rest and reading is a good time to absorb what a writer has put into a book. So it was with The Weather Makers.
For decades the heat trapped by the troposphere — our breathable space– has been increasing, little by little – after 8,000 years of being perfect: agriculture perfect at 57 degrees F. –average body temperature. CO2 in the troposphere gave us a livable world; without it there is no mediation between temperatures of day and night. For thousands of millions of years on earth there was not enough CO2 to sustain life beyond algae and primitive plants. Fossil-less stone is all around us in the Grand Canyon: millennia when nothing big enough to leave a mark, lived. Now, for about 600 millions of years — and with great interruptions, CO2 has held a relative balance – trapping enough heat reflected from earth and sea to allow life, releasing enough heat back into space to allow it: a fine greenhouse adjusting itself to big creature growth and finally to crop growing temperatures. Now this is changing. The self adjustment sensors are out of kilter. Heat is rising – as in an automobile with windows closed on a mild sunny day, its population of dog and child at first oblivious, then in discomfort, then sliding away to die.
As the heat of the air rises its water absorptive capacity rises. Over warm oceans much more water is absorbed, then dumped in ever larger storms, in narrower areas of land: saturation breeds next to drought. The jet stream shifts, the ocean currents cool, or warm. The great hydraulics we have known for centuries are changing, marked and measured but not yet fully understood – the first sketched lines of the street artist; we don’t know what the final figure will be; nor does she. Chance will play its game with necessity until those who remain will finally see.
*
The banks of the Colorado – seldom its original eponymous, muddy, “colorado” (red), now – are home to Tamarisk from Asia, once someone’s idea of a fine ornamental. Sometimes they cling to beach and cliffside in sparse settlements; other times the shores are thickly lined. The rafters hate the stuff though we seek its shade from time to time, during lunch stops, or early afternoon lay-overs. Its intrusion changes habitat for gnat, bird and fish. Its roots suck up water deeper than native plants and leave them heat struck and dying; sucking up the water leaves the soil more saline and compacted than before their arrival.
The banks themselves have been diminishing for years. What we will remember of course are the massive vertical walls of sandstone, basalt and schist, in colors unimaginable – millions of years in the making. But the banks we depend on are the white sand beaches – washed down from the stones, washed up from the river over millennia. Since the Glenn Canyon dam’s installation in 1963 the Colorado has not run wild enough to carry and drop much mud and sand. For all it’s white water joys there isn’t enough throughput to carry it, not enough seasonal rising and falling of the river to lift it and drop it and leave it behind. The beaches that remain are diminishing year by year. Many are not much bigger than baseball diamonds where 16 boaters look for a place for the kitchen, 10 tents or so, (the best spot always reserved for the “groover,” the water-tight, portable toilet box no one can be found on the river without.) We spent one night in a tamarisk fan-forest in a space no bigger than old sailing ship foc’sls – 16 men stacked end to end and three levels high. The kitchen that night was in constant danger of falling into sandy sink-holes created by undercuts in the bank.
The black-chinned hummingbird that delights us from time to time, improbably hovering mid-river as though disoriented, or scouting, trying to pick up the flash of some flower, who knows, is not native to these parts, drawn by what not yet known.
But all these things are small scale, fixable – like hammer holes in the wall, with a global Katrina bearing down. Tamarisk could be pulled out, over years or decades. The river could be released seasonally to scour the bed and rebuild the banks. The dam could be reduced to rubble. All of this is doable, and is laughably small scale compared to reversing the global impact of human habitation and letting the earth begin its mending.
The scale of imagination needed to comprehend and respond to the projected climate change is not yet understood. Local and regional restoration of habitat and creatures will be stones tossed in a river, no longer capable of slowing the flow as the sun, rain and wind that are the DNA of the local eco-cells is all changing, year by year.
There are some 35 species of non-migrating butterfly in the Northern Hemisphere. The habitat of over 50% of them has been moving north – pole ward—by 10 miles a decade for 50 years or so, and in one case by 150 miles. The southern part of their original home is no longer habitable. The good case of habitat change is when all the components move together. Other situations are worse. The necessary food for the new born is no longer available – coming earlier, or later, or not at all. The larvae of the Edith’s checkerspot butterfly no longer finds the plants they are deposited on nutritious enough for growth, having wilted weeks earlier than the critical period — because of temperature change. The ring-necked seal, not able to pup or raise the pups in the warming Canadian Arctic, no longer supplies enough diet for the polar bear, whose young are dying of malnutrition and drowning. The young die, the species blinks out.
Perhaps new species will arise, tuned to the new situation. Not perhaps: certainly. New species have been born out of almost total catastrophe, 250 million years ago, 65 million years ago, 50 million years ago. Just notice the periods here. Not in two years, not in ten; not in a hundred years, not in five hundred; not in the time since Christ; not in the time since homo sapiens made his way off the African savannah.
Climate change will not destroy the earth, only the earth as we know it, and of so much of what we know, of who we know.
It may come slowly, year by year, season by season, even over centuries. It may only be odd and irritating for the wealthy and mobile and protected while seeming to be just more of the same old catastrophe that has affected the poor and the vulnerable for centuries. On the other hand, it may come as in past epochs, in a year or two – the slowing and collapse of the great Gulf Stream – Europe returning to the ice-ages as far south as France and Germany. It may come in a decade as the Amazon dries out, the stomata of its leaves diminishing to protect themselves from over-dosing on CO2, and so closing down their vapor intake and output until, like me on the Kaibab Trail, collapsing from heat and lack of moisture.
*
Waking often through the night disturbed by heat or wind or hard knots of sand in my back I see the stars. They seem to be ratcheting down over the high cliffs like the clocks of classrooms past jerking at each minute’s end. Time itself is measured, against the great black forever, not in rivers of smooth flowing eternity but in jerks of wakefulness, of attention. Yes, suddenly, an hour has passed, a year, a decade. Suddenly, the opportunity is gone.
*
On the third day, almost 72 hours after my descent and collapse my thighs seem magically to recover their strength. Until then every tension, every standing up and sitting down, every stepping, bracing, climbing, carrying had been an agony, each cell signaling the brain: not well! Not well! All howling in a chorus against misuse.
The large patches of skin on the bottoms of my feet were falling off or ready to be pulled. No river-cause redness was appearing around the edges of the fresh new skin. River infection is well known in the Colorado, and guarded against, even in minor scrapes and cuts. The blood accumulated under both big toes seemed to promise the nails would eventually fall off giving way to new ones grown by the miracle of the body.
Rest and simple care had been enough to bring me back to normal, to carrying my share of the loads. One of the great lessons of such trips, once the anti-gravity fields of money and status from the outside world fall away, is that the elemental bonds of humans in small groups reassert themselves. We depend on each other for everything and knowing that, our better selves push back against their frightful twins. What counts is who helps, who carries a load and looks around for another, who reaches out a steadying hand, who has a knife for cutting, for opening, who will carry the groover, who will wash the dishes. Knowledge matters: where is a good campsite? What is the mid-river rock like in water of this volume? What should be done about nausea during a hike? Are the bites from spiders likely to inflame? Where is the toilet paper stowed?
Healing the whole earth is not such an easy matter though it will depend on many millions of us finding our such elemental characters. Want it or not, the sun is going to be shining through in different ways, the heat rising, the winds increasing and direction changing, the fall of rain blessing some and cursing others – in abundance and in scarcity.
There will be homelands under water before most of us pass on and many millions fleeing. If Hurricane Katrina, displacing 400,000, caused such misery in a country of great wealth imagine what Bangla Desh will look like. You could interview islanders today, whole cultures transplanted, who have been relocated to Australia, their ancestral homes already under Pacific water.
In essence the mending of the earth must be much the same as the mending of a body: cease the cause of injury, rest and simple care. In practice, personal hurt focuses our attention much tighter; the information is near at hand and remedies well understood. The hurt of Earth deceives us. Tomorrow is a word that brings us solace, dangerously. The breath of breeze that brings us joy is too easily felt as a false positive instead of a sweet reminder. The numbers of creatures and species already committed to extinction even if all human caused CO2 emissions were to stop as you read this are beyond counting. So we begin.
Our attention must be focused, our energies, knowledge and wealth reallocated. We might begin as religious folks do, Muslims with their Allah, Christians with their Jesus, by reciting the name of Earth with every passing event: when cutting the meat, Thank you Earth; when serving the meal, Thank you Earth; when escaping the downpour, Thank you Earth; when escaping the heat at the beach, Thank you Earth.
We might begin by taking our CO2 foot print and planning its diminishment. We might get our town and municipalities to answer why street lights are not run from solar, why energy audits have not been done. We might hang signs on freeway overpasses calling for SUV scrap-piling. We might drive at 55 mph instead of 70. Six billion things would be done if we each would just do one. You might get The Weather Makers, by Tim Flannery, or Field Notes for a Catastrophe by Elizabeth Kolbert. You might listen to the reasons the US has not signed the Kyoto Protocol and take on changing minds. You might make a one year personal plan and share it with others in churches and Rotary lunches. You might do many things. I will be.
Thank you Earth.
Thank you friends.
Will Kirkland
June 2006