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A winter without sledding. A reminder of what climate change is taking from us [1]
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Date: 2023-03-26
Finally, in early March, the forecast said we would get as much as 11 inches of snow in one storm. That was the upper bound, but 5 inches would have done the trick. I woke up early that morning to the sound of rain, and when I looked out the window I saw a film of slush. I didn’t get back to sleep.
My grief over this is outsized, I realize. My child is allowed minor disappointments; they’re even good for him. But this, for me, is about him growing up in a world with disappearing winters. We’ve taken him to a couple of ski lessons, but will there be even manufactured snow by the time he’s well into adulthood? I grew up cross-country skiing and to do that these days you have to drive far north or into the mountains, so the activity of my childhood, where we’d drive into the Berkshires for a few hours at a locally owned ski area with few amenities, is simply not a thing anymore.
We are losing things, and our children will lose more. Sledding and skiing aren’t the biggest things people are losing—homes and livelihoods and lives will be or are already being lost by the millions. Ecosystems will collapse. Where those things can be too enormous to wrap your mind around, though, a child sad at not being able to go sledding with his friends is close to home and very personal when it’s your kid. The little loss of childhood joy comes to stand for the bigger, harder-to-contemplate losses, and for my bigger, longer-term fears for my child and the world he will inhabit as he grows.
The feeling made me think of a 2018 piece by Alison Spodek Keimowitz, about returning to her work teaching college classes about climate change following a bone marrow transplant to treat leukemia. During her treatment, “My mind and soul were also broken apart, fragmented, and brought to the edge of ruin. In medical terms, I became depressed, hallucinatory, and delusional,” and what got her through was the simplest possible mindfulness practice: “to count to four, in line with my breath. And then to do it again. And to come back to this simple counting whenever I needed it. I could get to four, and then four again. I could get through my pain, my nausea, my misery, for the count of four breaths. And then I could ask myself to do it again.”
Returning to thinking and teaching about climate catastrophe, Keimowitz brought what she had learned from her close experience of death.
“To fully process what we are losing on Earth, I had to stop responding only as a scientist,” she wrote. “My way forward comes instead from my experience of illness. My stem cell transplant wasn’t pointless just because I will, eventually, die of something. The years I’ve gained, however few or many they may be, are precious beyond measure. So too with the Earth. Each generation of humans living in relative abundance, each species saved from extinction for another 50 years, and each wild place left to function and inspire in its wildness, is precious beyond measure.”
We keep fighting to stave off the worst of what’s coming, to buy extra time. We do it knowing that it’s already too late to avert much of the damage. The latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report says we have about a decade before Earth’s average temperatures are 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, above where they were before humans started burning things at industrial scale—an amount of warming generally agreed to be catastrophic.
On the day of the snow disappointment, I posed my kid a question: Did he want to try to go a couple towns over, where there was reputed to be some snow, not great sledding snow but not complete slush? He thought about it and said, “We can go sledding next year.” I hope so.
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https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/3/26/2156244/-A-winter-without-sledding-A-reminder-of-what-climate-change-is-taking-from-us
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