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In his essential essay, “Fate,” published in 1860 in the book The Conduct of Life, Ralph Waldo Emerson writes:
The book of Nature is the book of Fate. She turns the gigantic pages, –leaf after leaf,–never returning one. One leaf she lays down, a floor of granite; then a thousand ages, and a bed of slate; a thousand ages, and a measure of coal; a thousand ages, and a layer of marl and mud: vegetable forms appear; her first misshapen animals, zoophyte, trilobium, fish; then, saurians,–rude forms, in which she has only blocked her future statue, concealing under these unwieldly monsters the fine type of her coming king. The face of the planet cools and dries, the races meliorate, and man is born. But when a race has lived its term, it comes no more again. The population of the world is a conditional population…
Of course, Emerson’s “coming king” has seemingly found a way to turn one of Nature’s gigantic pages and reveal just how conditional the human population is.
Dahr Jamail shows us this as well in his new book The End of Ice: Bearing Witness and Finding Meaning in the Path of Climate Disruption, published by The New Press, in which, chapter by chapter, he takes us on a tour of our endings: the end of ice, the end of forests, the end of the coral reef, the end of coastal cities. It is in this way, as he stands within the sites of destruction, that he bears witness for us.
So, too, Jamail asks us to begin to grieve for the world that is surely lost and to find a way toward adaptive change so that something may be salvaged. It may seem strange to say so, but, to quote Emerson again, this time from the essay “Circles,” The way of life is wonderful; it is by abandonment.
“A man” said Oliver Cromwell “never rises so high as when he knows not whither he is going.” This is our plight; may we rise to meet it.
GUEST
Dahr Jamail, is an award-winning journalist whose previous books are The Will to Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan (Haymarket Books, 2009), and Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches From an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq (Haymarket Books, 2007). Jamail reported from Iraq for more than a year, as well as from Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Turkey over the last ten years.
RELATED
When the ice melts: the catastrophe of vanishing glaciers by Dahr Jamail
Dahr Jamail at Truthout
The Coldest Spot on Earth, Melting (Counterpunch)
MUSIC
“You Don’t Pull No Punches, But You Don’t Push the River,” Van Morrison
“What Difference Does It Make,” Bobby Bare, Jr.
“Too Early,” Son Volt
“Groovy Tuesday,” The Smithereens
CREDITS
Producer & Host: Doug Storm
Executive Producer: Wes Martin
