As the disaster drags on in the Gulf, complicated by the start of the hurricane season, it’s easy to grow despondent. Our species can act so stupidly, and on Independence Day I don’t feel independent. In America we’ve chained ourselves to a way of life utterly dependent upon the passenger car. And while I really enjoy cars and driving, I don’t enjoy the more quotidian uses of the vehicles for most Americans: commuting and running errands. In fact, those activities, to me, take the fun out of being behind a steering wheel.
The nation won’t give up its motorcars easily or painlessly. Imagine your own life without access to a car; many of us live far enough from shopping, schools, and our places of worship to quickly elevate vague concern to active alarm. Then imagine the US Southeast without readily available air conditioning, from a series of brownouts or an aging electrical grid.
Our entire civilization is one oil crisis away from something I cannot predict, though many writers I admire have given this a try. The best treatment of such a world–and by far not a bleak one–is James Howard Kunstler’s fine novel World Made by Hand. The folks in his fictional Union Grove, NY make do. They get by. They’ve learned something we soft Americans have forgotten.
In my last post, I noted a few simple things we all can do as we prepare for what I believe will be a time of privation and uncertainty. I don’t know that my advice implies a philosophical stance, and while I might turn to Marcus Aurelius or the Taoists for the fine expressions of Stoicism, I need only look out the window. That’s where I see a Ginkgo tree.
In the spring, the city planted a Ginkgo biloba across the street from us. The home owners are new to gardening and lack proper tools for tending their yard in very dry weather. I volunteered to do a deep-watering treatment with a watering probe, something that saved a few saplings of mine over the years. The neighbors knew they were going to lose their shade tree, so they were happy to have my help. Now the little tree should live–one hopes, in this awful heat–to adulthood in a city with a climate markedly warmer from today’s.
Facing climate change and the looming end of cheap oil, I stare at the little tree. If you don’t know about the Ginkgo, do some research. It’s a living fossil, as shown in the photo a plant common in the Eocene Era, a period of time stretching from 56 to 34 million years ago. That era ended with massive extinctions caused by impacts of meteorites, one of them in the Chesapeake Bay.
And the Ginkgo survived it. In fact, it’s a tree ideal for the disturbed soils, dirty air, and baked conditions of cities. It has no other living relatives on Darwin’s Tree of Life. It comes down the eons to us intact.
Whenever I see the fanlike leaves, identical to those leaves browsed by the first mammals on our planet, I take a very deep breath. I’m in the company of Deep Time, the sort denied by the fearful and overly literal of our time. Yes, the Earth is many many times older than the 6,000 or 10,000 years they claim. And the Earth will be here after 2012 and the Apocalypse of those who misread the meaning of the Mayan calendar.
For these reasons, the Ginkgo gently mocks us. It will be here if we bake the world and our civilization vanishes. What if we hairless apes could be so persistent? What if we could adapt to changing conditions and live down the eons gracefully?
That’s our challenge as the oil gushes from the ocean floor and the temperatures soar. I don’t know what our specific “Ginkgo Strategy” should be, but in the end, the tree reminds me that survival is not only possible but inevitable for those who can adapt.