Afew decades ago I had a near death experience. Now its changed my mind about climate change.
During a college break some friends and I pooled change for gas money, gathered our camping gear and drove down to Joshua Trees National Park to recover under glass blue skies and crisp winter sun amid the otherworldly yucca and massive sandstone monoliths. It wasn’t popular yet back then, and the high desert was empty of people and most of their trappings. Which was the point.
The first day we spent hiking the desert trails and scrambling (to call it climbing would insult climbers) up the rocks, enjoying the challenge and thrill and primeval solitude. If you’ve never been, much of the rock at Joshua is coarse, like really heavy sandpaper, and erosion has created rounded joints on cliffs and outcrops, like house sized boulders of varying shapes stacked tightly together. Human-dwarfing vertical constructions, hundreds of feet high. They beg to be climbed.
As an absolute amateur I was confident enough to get myself high up onto a ledge, well above the desert floor, up where solid stone, slowly weathered by heat and cold over untold eons, had evolved into rounded towers.
The views were magnificent.
Photo by Brent Cox on Unsplash
At one point, following a ledge around a corner, I discovered the flat step I was on had disappeared. For about a three foot stretch it melted away into a vertical smooth face, before picking up again. The smooth wall dropped about forty or sixty feet straight down onto more rock. Fortunately (I thought) there was at that very spot a parallel vertical wall on the opposite side of the open chasm, just an arms length away.
I had the creative idea that, since the rock was rough and grippy, I could get round to the next bit of ledge by propping my legs across the gap, and by keeping pressure on my boots and back and hands, wedge myself securely between the two walls, and crab the three feet over to where I could stand again. Piece of cake. My boots gripped snugly, my back hugged the rock, and when I pushed away, I could scoot sideways using my hands and feet above the chasm. Off I went.
There have only been a few times in my life when the earth stopped turning, silence reigned supreme, and in a spurt of pure adrenaline-infused clarity, became instantaneously aware that I had tripped an invisible wire, and real death was accelerating toward me from some distant ambiguous future to right here, now.
Halfway across, I sensed or felt that, rather than having a vertical wall behind my back, there was instead a slope, opening down, just enough so that I could not remove the pressure from my hands or feet without falling. The gap below me was wider than above, and I’d moved too far down the funnel.
I couldn’t go forward, I couldn’t go back.
Electric fear, friends frantically trying to find someone with rope, then muscle cramp… You already know how this turns out, I’m here writing it.
The point is, for a period of time I became more deeply, intimately familiar with, and bonded to a slab of rock than I had ever thought possible.
I had the opportunity to closely examine its fine grain, and mix of colors. Its unevenness, its texture beneath my skin, its temperature, composition, patterns of cracks in its surface, its essence. There, suspended high above the gorge, for a time my entire life was literally defined by the strength of my relationship with that ancient slab of sandstone.
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We are all in that kind of relationship with nature.
Whether we know it or not.
It’s easy to forget, caught up in our human driven world, with it’s demands and complexities and allure, that our air, and water, and the soil that grows our food, and all the things that keep our world working, are still part of that side of the relationship.
As relationships go, our modern affair with nature has been rocky from the start. It’s been pretty one sided. Frankly, abusive. And even though we show up with apologies and kiss some trees, we’re not really fooling anyone with what’s really going on.
So, it’s time for a reckoning.
Out of all the things we do all week — how much personal attention are we actually giving to our most important life partner? Not screen time, not chat time. In person.
We don’t show up, we don’t spend quality time together, we don’t listen, we act like we don’t care.
Should we be surprised nature is breaking up with us?
…
Maybe we’re coming at this climate change thing all wrong. Rather than focusing on the wilding climate, or the acidifying oceans, and all the rest of the dire warnings, maybe our time and energy would be better spent working on our side of the relationship we have with the natural world.
When was the last time we took a walk in the woods, or went searching for birds at daybreak? Or used a hand to restore or repair a piece of land or body of water? Took children out to show them that world?
We talk about the environment, but are we tangibly engaged with it in any meaningful way? And no – selfies and IGs absolutely do not count, any more than they’d satisfy your other significant other.
How long has it been since we put down the phone, and listened to the wind in a wild place? Or skipped washing the car, and watered a tree?
When was the last time we camped under the stars? Nature is out there, all around us. Surf crashing, babies being born. Maybe it’s time we got to know each other better. A lot better.
‘Nature is not a place to visit. It is home.’ – Gary Snyder
Yes, the human juggernaut we’ve built and live in is carving a wide path of destruction. But the real question isn’t, ‘what can we do about climate change’.
It’s ‘what can we do to rescue our relationship, the one we depend on for our lives’. We’re at the point now where nature will not fix itself without our direct help. We need to have an entirely new perspective on our role in this relationship. We need to shift our attention away from ourselves — from the damage we’re doing – to the attention nature needs.
If we address that first, I’m confident, the other will start getting worked out, too.
Imagine what would happen if every day, tens of millions or hundreds of millions of people simply invested personal time in keeping up their side of the relationship with the living, breathing natural world? Take it some gifts. Do what nature wants to do for a change. Do healthy things together. Fix the place up. Show some respect, love and affection. Stop whining about how anxious we feel, and find ways to make the relationship work. For both our sakes.
No, of course it’s not the only thing we need to do. But it’s probably the only way to get enough people to do what’s needed. Fear of climate upheaval may raise awareness, but it doesn’t fix the underlying problem:
For too many people on the planet, nature is just a word, an abstraction, not a living partner we depend on.
That has to change.
Humans are remarkably resourceful, and creative. We’re capable, when we give something our full attention and concentration, and put away all the distractions, of pulling ourselves out of some pretty dire cliffhangers.
Sometimes it all comes down to an intimately close contact, less thinking about ourself, and digging deep to make the powerful effort we didn’t think we had in us.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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Photo credit: Junseong Lee on Unsplash
