Bill McKibben is on the road today and asked me to post his diary for him.
As the Rim Fire burned out of control in Yosemite this month, the press attention was focused mostly on how it was affecting tourists in the Valley, or covering the smoke-filled air of Reno, where children were told to stay indoors.
Those were important, of course—but to me the fire—still burning, and by now the largest in the history of California’s Sierra Mountains, was actually burning across history. As it reached the shores of Hetch Hetchy Reservoir, it also reached the place where the modern environmental movement was born, and where our greatest wilderness advocate had the epiphany that helped change our understanding of the world around us.
John Muir, in that fateful season described in his Summer in the Sierra did nothing less than invent a new vocabulary—a new grammar, a new rhetoric—of wilderness. Suddenly it was not something to be feared, but something to be embraced.
“Another glorious Sierra day in which one seems to be dissolved and absorbed and sent pulsing onward we know not where. Life seems neither long nor short, and we take no more heed to save time or make haste than do the trees and stars. This is true freedom, a good practical sort of immortality,” he wrote. “No Sierra landscape that I have seen holds anything truly dead or dull, or any trace of what in manufactories is called rubbish or waste; everything is perfectly clean and pure and full of divine lessons.”
That high granite Sierra was preserved, much of it, thanks to Muir’s eloquence and persistence. It was here that the Sierra Club was born, in some ways the prototypical crusading NGO. It was here that Ansel Adams and David Brower cut their teeth.
And it was here, this summer, that a hideously out-of-control fire raced through the canyons and groves, after the driest year on record. Foresters described the trees as being “as dry as a board you’d buy at a lumber store.” In the world we’ve built by burning so much coal and oil and gas, fire season now lasts months longer across the West than it used to—in fact, there’s hardly a season any more. There will still wildfires burning in Rocky Mountain National Park last December.
Scientists expect the burned-over area to double in coming decades as the temperature keeps warming. But already it should be enough to make us take notice. “How glorious the shining after the short summer showers and after frosty nights when the morning sunbeams are pouring through the crystals on the grass and pine needles, and how ineffably spiritually fine is the morning-glow on the mountain-tops and the alpenglow of evening. Well may the Sierra be named, not the Snowy Range, but the Range of Light.” May the flames of the Rim Fire help cast some Light on our predicament, so that we act as boldly as Muir in his time!
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"Hummingbirds" Blogathon: September 9-September 13, 2013
In May 2006, the late environmental activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai addressed 7,000 international educators who had gathered in Montreal for the 58th annual conference of the National Association of Foreign Student Advisers (NAFSA). Here is the story she shared with them.
One day a terrible fire broke out in a forest - a huge woodlands was suddenly engulfed by a raging wild fire. Frightened, all the animals fled their homes and ran out of the forest. As they came to the edge of a stream they stopped to watch the fire and they were feeling very discouraged and powerless. They were all bemoaning the destruction of their homes. Every one of them thought there was nothing they could do about the fire, except for one little hummingbird.
This particular hummingbird decided it would do something. It swooped into the stream and picked up a few drops of water and went into the forest and put them on the fire. Then it went back to the stream and did it again, and it kept going back, again and again and again. All the other animals watched in disbelief; some tried to discourage the hummingbird with comments like, "Don't bother, it is too much, you are too little, your wings will burn, your beak is too tiny, it’s only a drop, you can't put out this fire."
And as the animals stood around disparaging the little bird’s efforts, the bird noticed how hopeless and forlorn they looked. Then one of the animals shouted out and challenged the hummingbird in a mocking voice, "What do you think you are doing?" And the hummingbird, without wasting time or losing a beat, looked back and said:
"I am doing what I can."
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In this time of escalating climate change, this is our challenge.
To refuse to surrender to the apathy of denialism and fatalism.
To be fierce in our defense of the Earth.
To continue to fight in the face of overwhelming odds.
And always, always, to do what we can.
Because it is only by each of us doing what we can, every day, that we will save the Earth – for ourselves, and for the generations to come. Like the hummingbird.
Our Daily Kos community organizers are Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse, boatsie, rb137, JekyllnHyde, citisven, peregrine kate, John Crapper, Aji, and Kitsap River. Photo credit and copyright: Kossack desertguy and Luma Photography. All rights reserved. Used with permission.
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