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Where There’s a Will There’s a Way – But Where’s the Will? [1]

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Date: 2023-05-10

I write this in an interregnum in my life – working my job in the Pacific Northwest from the dining room of our family farmhouse in northeast Iowa, as my husband awaits a work visa that will take us far away from this MAGA-riven, blood-soaked, gun-bedeviled country.

We drove out of town for the last time on March 28, headed east on Interstate 90, our destination just outside of Dorset, in Chippewa County Iowa. Our sleek little mid-life crisis sports car sped bravely through mountain passes, snow, and slush, though Idaho, Montana, a snippet of Wyoming, the numbingly immense length of South Dakota, and half of Minnesota, before we turned south at Albert Lea to find our way south and east into Iowa on 2-lane highways.

Acre after acre of empty fields unspooled beside us, all in Serengeti colors – dun, tawny, straw. We reached Chippewa to find it still below freezing, barren and sere as deepest February. The county’s characteristic little spinnies of burr oak were Bob Ross sketches of trees – jagged black trunks with a tracery of boney branches waiting for spring’s brush, dipped in chartreuse and emerald paint.

We passed Carroll City and whizzed on to Dorset, a little town of about 50 souls a half mile from the farm, then turned up Fernsby Hill (“hill” – this is Iowa, after all) on a driveway paved with crushed honey-colored stone that’s locally quarried and gives much of the county its faint aura of the Cotswolds.

Once inside I plugged in my laptop, there was a night of terrifying (to us city slickers) thunderstorms, we survived a dying mouse on the dining room carpet and a mild infestation of Asian beetles (in the house!) and now – rodent, beetle, and figuring out the recycling adventures behind us – it is May.

Just a scant month since we arrived in the drear and cold, we can almost hear the roar of burgeoning things. Every morning leaves are larger, catkins fuzzier, lilies taller, dandelions showier. The black walnut saplings in the yard are threatening to get too tall for a lawn mower.

Indigo buntings, redheaded woodpeckers, and Baltimore orioles jostle with cardinals and goldfinches at Mama’s bird feeders. The lilacs outside my office window are trembling to burst into flower, while the Hosta bed is a magnificence of green – pear green, parakeet, shamrock green and lime – mingled with dots of mauve and white where violets have volunteered.

Wild turkeys stalk across the yard, foraging like herbivorous velociraptors. There are pheasants in the fence row down where the orchard once was. When startled they erupt like feathery bombs, squawking their oddly mechanical squawk and flapping madly. The groundhog that lives out near the barnyard looks like a cuddly plush toy, and I *think* I trust that when it darts under the car it is not dining on the wiring.

It is, in short, a perfect Iowa spring. There’s been enough rain. We’ve had thunderstorms, but nothing too nasty, and no tornados hereabout. It’s warming up, but not too fast. When a neighbor stopped by yesterday for coffee, he brought bounty from his garden: an enormous bunch of immense rhubarb – the stems already 3 feet long – and a bag of perfect asparagus, each stalk as big around as my ring finger.

We are standing on the precipice of global disaster – but in the moment here, and in many other local, insular places, it is as though nothing is amiss. Here, it is perfect. It is an idyll of balmy breezes and a riotous jumble of flowers. Crops are going in and the weather is lovely.

NOTHING.

TO.

SEE.

HERE.

While Pakalolo and Meteor Blades and boatsie and angmar and many others here do mind-boggling, heroic work reporting on the utter terrors that await humanity, in America writ large it’s difficult to sense a pulse of anxiety about climate change.

In Chippewa County and Norfolk, Nebraska – in Rock Springs, Wyoming and Grand Ledge, Michigan – in Oneonta, New York and London, Kentucky – Americans are going about their daily activities utterly unconcerned.

Democratic politicians have mostly now learned to weave the words “and climate” into their stump speeches and lists of top concerns.

Emissions keep rising.

Some folks may now answer “very concerned” about climate change on a survey, but as President Biden backslides on his climate agenda – and as Republicans and Joe Manchin viciously oppose it – emissions rise.

Emissions keep rising.

We are not even close to reigning in the fossil fuel corporations. Drilling and exploration continue apace. There are small victories – all of which are amazing – but:

Emissions keep rising.

The vast majority of Americans are not moved. This isn’t their number one political issue. They are motivated on the right by drag shows, “groomers” and scary Black faces. They are motivated on the left by the debt ceiling crisis, saving Social Security, gun control and social justice.

And the climate crisis isn’t stopping to wait for this appalling lack of fervor.

Meanwhile, here are just a tiny selection of headlines from dailykos…

Everywhere is the frontline for climate crisis as the Beaufort Gyre set to release its freshwater.

Over four hundred are dead, and fifty-five hundred are missing from flooding in the Congo

Temperatures of up to 36 Fahrenheit above average in the Northwest Territories

NASA climate scientist and activist Dr. Peter Kalmus recently tweeted:

x This heat in April and what's surely coming later this summer is still only a foretaste. Civil disobedience now to jumpstart climate emergency mode, end the fossil fuel industry, and save what can still be saved. The people in power still don't get it. — Dr Peter Kalmus (@ClimateHuman) April 29, 2023

He was eviscerated in the replies.

Eager to see how your efforts progress where it actually matters—in China. Good luck.

x Eager to see how your efforts progress where it actually matters—in China. Good luck. — adanac-41 (@41Adanac) April 30, 2023

I’m not experiencing any heat. If anything it’s been colder here than usual.

It's spring. Happens every year. Then it gets hotter, that be summer ☀️. Heading into a new solar maximum too. El nino event primed so weather will be erratic.

If we end the fossil fuel industry you can wave goodbye to all the comforts you take for granted.

I have no idea what these people are talking about. It's been a very cool wet spring in Las Vegas. These people just claim every year is the hottest on record and hope most people will believe their lies and never bother to check the actual facts.

And so on, and so on, ad nauseum.

Most humans cannot see further than the nose on their face.

Most humans aren’t concerned with any crisis that isn’t right on top of them – a local flood, or a local hurricane.

Even then, if they don’t connect that local crisis to the larger issue of GHG emissions and the changing climate, they won’t be motivated to act by voting for politicians who put climate change at the top of their agenda, much less by marching, or occupying, or disrupting.

We need massive nonviolent civil disobedience to move the needle and force a change to governmental policy and corporate practice. We need it NOW – not in 5 years, or 10, when it becomes even more blindingly obvious that we’re headed to disaster.

We often hear the old maxim, “where there’s a will, there’s a way.”

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/5/10/2168647/-Where-There-s-a-Will-There-s-a-Way-But-Where-s-the-Will

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