Again last night I had that strange dream
Where everything was exactly how it seemed
No concerns about the world getting warmer
People thought they were just being rewarded
For treating others as they’d like to be treated
For obeying stop signs and curing diseases
For mailing letters with the address of the sender
Now we can swim any day in November.
— The Postal Service in 2003
Last week, on an 80-degree day in November, I headed out for a 10-mile run from my house. I descended the dusty road, squinting in my sunglasses beneath the harsh glare of the afternoon sun. Sweat streamed down the small of my back as I ran past the trailhead overflowing with parked cars.
“This looks just like Covid-times,” I thought, feeling almost nostalgic for the days when no one had anywhere to be but outside. Even if they have anywhere else to be, everyone wants to be outside on an 80-degree day in November. Who can blame them?
Personally, I wished for a day that was 30 or 50 degrees colder. A temperature that didn’t feel so oppressive … so strange … when autumn light glinted off the tree tops and decaying leaves littered the ground. And still, the summer sun beat down.
I continued past the busy trailhead and up the road. Where I crossed a steep gully — this time of year, any north-facing trench is cast in daylong shade — patches of snow lingered long after last week’s storm. The crusty snow, too, seemed eerily out of place. Beyond the protection of the gully, a sudden gust of wind blasted my bare arms and legs with bits of gravel. I’d already pulled a buff over my face to protect my lungs from the blowing dust. This, too, felt like a strangely nostalgic fallback to 2020.
Bipolar weather has always been the way of winter along Colorado’s Front Range — one day is 70 and sunny, the next will bring a foot of snow, and every day the west wind sweeps down from the mountains. Still, there was something particularly unsettling about this 80-degree day in November. I couldn’t determine why.
At the top of the road, I paused to drink water from the small bottle in my hip pack. A half liter was definitely not enough water for ten miles on a hot day like today. But instead of admonishing my under-preparation, I savored what I had. I glanced down the intersecting paved road toward another crowded trailhead and the open hillside behind it. I hoped to catch a glimpse of the elk herd, which recently returned to these mid-elevations from their summer pastures in the high alpine.
Most of the hillsides on the north side of Walker Ranch are open thanks to the burn. That’s the reason this space is so inviting to elk. I scanned a row of skeletal tree trunks, looking for signs of motion. But I only saw shadows — shadows flickering like an old filmstrip over wind-driven stalks of golden grass. As I stood, accidentally finishing most of my water while I marveled at the dancing shadows, I felt a glimmer of sadness. The trees creating these shadows — the burned husks of ponderosa pine and Douglas fir — are now 23 years dead. The standing remains still look freshly charred and undisturbed by new growth, as though the burn happened last year.
The Walker Ranch fire is something I think about often whenever I pass through this open space. It happened long before I moved to Colorado so I have no experience of the fire, but the evidence that remains is so jarring. The September 2000 wildfire burned 1,100 acres before it was contained, scorching much of the landscape surrounding the historic ranch and its trails. The wildfire has since become the subject of studies on forest regeneration. Walker Ranch, in particular, has been a poor performer with less than 15% of the burned area showing any significant regeneration of seedlings. Even then, the rate of growth has been exceedingly slow. A University of Boulder study concluded, “Colorado forests stricken by wildfire are not regenerating as well as expected and may partially transform into grasslands and shrublands in coming decades.”
So many Colorado forests are burning. The common factor in every burn is rising temperatures, which accelerate beetle kill and other diseases while extending the wildfire season and increasing fire severity. The common factor in the forests’ ability to regenerate is also heat, which severely limits seedling survival and growth.
And so, it seems, Colorado is transforming into the new New Mexico. And the transition is not going to be slow and natural like that of old New Mexico. When I look at the skeletons of Walker Ranch — part of the land that I love and call my home — I remember that it’s not a matter of if the wildfire comes, but when.
“It's sad, he tells me, to see something that held so much permanence for him as a child, and to watch it so quickly and effortlessly fade away. But when I look at Mendenhall Glacier, I don't feel his same sadness. My emotions are closer to the sadness one would feel watching a snowman grow emaciated in the March sun — a nostalgic sadness, dulled by the inevitability of it.”
— A blog post I wrote on Oct. 16, 2006, recounting a conversation with a Juneau-born coworker about the changes he observed in the Mendenhall Glacier in his lifetime.
Throughout the summer of 2020, when many of us were staying close to home and away from family and friends because of Covid, I indulged in long runs while listening to audiobooks about climate change. The books had titles like “The End of Ice: Bearing Witness and Finding Meaning in the Path of Climate Disruption,” “The Uninhabitable Earth: Life after Warming” and “Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future.” I was already spinning down a rabbit hole of anxiety and despair surrounding the pandemic, so my sisters and friends were flabbergasted as to why I was reading these books.
“I’m just not capable of embracing hope without evidence,” I told them. “The only way I can find hope is through answers.”
Climate grief isn’t just a reaction to what we believe we might lose in the future — it’s a response to what we’ve already lost. I hoped these authors could provide insight into what it means to live in a world where extensive loss is happening all around us, and how we can cope and still seek a meaningful life as more loss becomes increasingly inevitable. Often this loss feels abstract, but in some areas — such as burned forests — it becomes starkly visible. Another example of this stark visibility is the world’s glaciers.
I lived in Juneau, Alaska, from 2006 to 2010 — a small blip of my life and a seeming lifetime ago. But these few years in Alaska had an enormous impact on the person I’ve become. While living in Juneau, I frequently visited the Mendenhall Glacier — usually to ride my fat bike across the snow-dusted ice of Mendenhall Lake and eat lunch on an iceberg while Juneau’s habituated black wolf, “Romeo,” pranced along the banks with unleashed dogs. These rides were so surreal and romantic, so indicative of the unique Alaska lifestyle I sought to embody. I loved the Mendenhall Glacier. But even in 2007, the evidence of its rapid transformation was undeniable. Now, in 2023, my jaw drops when I see photos of the glacier’s current state. I compare them to photos I took with my own hands just 15 or 16 years ago and feel the same kind of sadness my Juneau-born coworker felt in 2006. The glacier of my innocence is gone. A few examples:
2008 was not that long ago. And yet, it feels as though so much has changed. What will the Mendenhall Glacier look like 15 years from now? What will Colorado forests look like? What will the world look like? As much as I love life and the exhilaration of living, the probability that I will still be alive to witness all of this change fills me with dread.
In “The Uninhabitable Earth,” David Wallace-Wells succinctly states the root of my fear about living through climate change: “We are only just entering our brave new world, one that collapses below us as soon as we set foot on it.”
The overarching point of Wallace-Wells’ book was that the rate of change we are witnessing now is already baked into the world’s climate equation. The only plausible solution to keep this relatively steady state is immediate and extensive action, reducing our carbon emissions by at least 10% per year. This will increase to 30% per year if we choose to wait another 10 years beyond the book’s publication — 2019 — to make any meaningful changes. And, of course, we lack the political will to do any of this. Our distrust in our collective institutions is only deepening. Our malaise and denialism are getting worse, not better. Individual changes can help, but even the most sacrificing individual is extracting mere dew drops from an ocean rising faster than we can conceptualize.
So what do we do? Pull the covers over our heads and escape into comforting delusions? Buckle in and hold on? What is there beyond despair?
Amid chapter after chapter of gloom and doom, Wallace-Wells throws in a paragraph that I found surprisingly heartening. In it, he reflects on the future he imagines for his daughter:
“I have to admit, I am also excited, for everything that Rocca and her sisters and brothers will see, will witness, will do. She will hit her child-rearing years around 2050, when we could have climate refugees in the many tens of millions; she will be entering old age at the close of the century, the end-stage bookmark on all of our projections for warming. In between, she will watch the world doing battle with a genuinely existential threat, and the people of her generation making a future for themselves, and the generations they bring into being, on this planet. And she won’t just be watching it, she will be living it — quite literally the greatest story ever told. It may well bring a happy ending.”
I too have no interest in climate nihilism. The idea that all is lost is just as fantastical and delusional as the notion that all is well. But I admit that — just as in any stage of grief — I’m not sure where to find acceptance, or if that even truly exists. Meanwhile, I can’t help but ponder what I will do, and what I will be, when the wildfire comes.
For that, at least right now, I don’t think science or even philosophy has the answers. For that, at least right now, all we have is poetry:
It is a serious thing
Just to be alive
On this fresh morning
In this broken world.
— Mary Oliver
Really loved reading this piece. As a Gen X'er who lived through the heart of the cold war and fear of nuclear annihilation in my youth, Climate Change stress feels really familiar. The sense of helplessness, but still striving to find some hope. Plus, a prodding to get out and explore the world around me before it changes more.
I often feel grief for all the living creatures sharing this planet with us who have suffered or will suffer because of destructive human actions. I've also been following Skip's images of the Mendenhall on FB. Astounding change in such a short time and just since I left Juneau in 2011.