Our California ranch was idyllic. But Earth will never be that green again: Patti Davis
I’m old enough to remember a time when – short of a nuclear disaster – we believed the earth would go on through lifetimes and generations. Seasons would unfold, rains would come, and oceans would remain full of life, some of it mysterious and hidden at great depths.
But we are killing the earth and for anyone who had even a whisper of doubt, the 3,000 page report released this week from the United Nation' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change makes it chillingly clear. It warned of a "code red for humanity," and found that extreme weather events are going to be more severe and more frequent.
We are running out of time. Every additional amount of warming ushers in more danger, more damage, more certainty that human beings have accomplished what once seemed unimaginable – we are destroying the planet. Plants and animals going extinct because of our greed and carelessness would get along just fine without us; we, however, can’t get along without them.
What we've lost
Just before this report was published, I received some photographs of the Malibu ranch my parents owned when I was a child. Images that now look like paintings. Was the land ever that green?
USA TODAY Editorial Board: Climate change is at 'code red' status for the planet, and inaction is no longer an option
I took it for granted then – the sweep of green fields after winter rains that fell for days on end, the way the land turned brown and golden in summer but would look like it was preparing for winter when Fall brought colder air and deep blue skies. There was a fire season, but it was only a couple of months, and the fires, when they came, were nothing like the infernos now which destroy hundreds of thousands of acres and wipe out entire towns.
I thought the earth would always be like that. And the reality that it’s not, that it may never be green and healthy again, with dependable seasons, tosses me into a pool of grief that feels bottomless.
We’ve all heard about the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. We are supposed to move through those stages – not in a linear way necessarily, but with some kind of forward trajectory. How is it that humankind has, to a frightening degree, stalled at the first stage of denial for so long we may never be able undo the damage we have caused?
Stuck in grief
Not everyone has been steeped in denial, of course. Cries of alarm have echoed across the planet for decades. But the governments, the elected or appointed leaders who could make substantial changes, have allowed the destruction to continue. Like millions of people, I toggle between anger and depression. I sign petitions, write to elected officials, donate money, but nothing eases the grief I feel.
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I’m not sure what the last stage of grief – acceptance – might look like in this context. Would that mean that we accept the end of this earth – the cataclysmic weather patterns, the fires, floods, droughts, and extinction of species we’ve been warned about? I don’t want to accept that, I want to “rage against the dying of the light.” But it’s possible that what we are going to have to accept is the fact that no species is immune to extinction, including us.
I’m fortunate to have memories, and photographs, of a time when acres of green land spread out before me and winter rains fed the soil. Those images stand side by side with my grief over what we have done to the earth. I don’t know which will end up winning.
Patti Davis is the author of the novel “The Wrong Side of Night.” Her next book, "Floating in the Deep End," will be published by Norton on Sept. 28. Follow her on Twitter: @patti_davis.
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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Patti Davis: United Nations climate change report threw me into grief
