Climate Change has smashed its fist into our face.

Halloween Weekend, 2011

In northwest Illinois, this year’s late summer and early fall is going to go down in the history books as one of our most memorable.  It’s times like this, that I wish I was a poet. It would be so cool to be able to describe the wonders of nature including our miraculous weather. It has been drop dead gorgeous. Day after day, the sky has been pure and clean, and as bright blue as the skies over a Greek isle. The temperatures remind one of heaven. So far, we’ve had just a touch of frost. Every few nights, there has been just a tease; just enough to kill the tomatoes and peppers and coat the car windows, but not quite enough to blacken the still stunning geraniums and mums. The frost whispers that winter is coming, but not yet. The trees have never been more spectacular.

It was a godforsaken July, with days of record heat and torrential rains. The ferocious rains tore up roads, ripped out culverts and destroyed bridges. Saddest of all, a friend was swept to his death in a flash flood which carried him and his car downstream. Cool winds finally brought relief and moderate temperatures.  What at first we welcomed as a short respite before the dog days of August arrived turned out to be over three months of bliss. The dog days never came.

Here at home, every day, the air is clean. The wind is soft and delicate, like a lover’s touch. In July it had been too hot for the tomatoes and peppers to set fruit, in August, the plants finally developed fruit and the late harvest with its bounty almost made amends for the delayed start. And now, in late October, just after the hummingbirds left, the juncos arrived right on schedule. Now the deer are leaving the timber during the day and are more visible. The young turkey poults have matured.  Most of the corn has been combined and we’ve regained the sense of openness and spaciousness associated with hill prairies.

Today, Sunday, October 30, even as the grey clouds move in low and slowly swallow the sky and as the clouds move from west to east and bring rain and a damp nasty feel, I’m reassured. It is a familiar pattern. I like the cliché a, blustery, November day. It reminds us not of winter but of Thanksgiving; reminds us of all the reasons one chooses to live in the country, the things we have to be thankful for.

To me at least, the weather has become more real lately. Today, as I write, I listen to the wind and watch the grey clouds fill the sky. Right now, I’m watching the wind tear the leaves from the trees. Many of the leaves aren’t quite ready to fall, but the wind grabs them, throws them to the ground and then picks them up and hurls them across the yard.  An hour ago, it was quieter, a lovely dance. A few leaves were lightly falling from the trees and pirouetting across the yard before gently landing on the ground only to get up again, waltz, and twirl across the grass.

 I like to think that since we moved to the country, I’ve become more observant.  I’m proud that I’ve learned to watch for the changes in the light, to the feel air on my face, to see the sumac just a second before it burst into flame, and to note the arrival of the first bluebird and the departure of the last swallow. On the other hand, I worry that it is old age.

I worry that watching the changing of the seasons is a sign not of a new vitality, but a step, however small, toward old age. I wonder how many more falls will I have a chance to be a part of, not just to observe, but to actually experience.  I know that I have seen more than I will see in the future. I’m ashamed to say that many of them passed me by and I wasted away those precious days, my thoughts and eyes someplace else. I was oblivious to their comings and goings. I’m convinced, however, that it is not my heightened awareness of the beauty and mystery of nature or looming old age which has made me more cognizant of my natural environment.

 I think that my heightened awareness comes from a growing realization that climate change is already disrupting our world and that over time our world will become unrecognizable.  We may never have such a long and glorious fall—ever again. Right now, I live in the loving embrace of the four seasons honored in song and poem since the very beginning. From teachers, troubadours and friends, I’ve finally learned to see, to listen for and even smell the world just outside my door and now we may lose it all.

 The tiny changes that have already happened are frightening. As I write this, thinking only about today, putting aside for a moment all that has happened this year, I’m frightened. This weekend, while we in the Midwest are enjoying heaven on earth, the south west is still being destroyed by heat and drought. As the tumbleweeds begin to roll across new deserts, desperate cattlemen are shipping the best of their herds north in a last ditch effort to save them, they’ve sold others prematurely and they have had to stand by and watch still others slowly starve to death. There is no hay not even a blade of grass left in Texas. At the same time, the northeast from Pennsylvania to Maine is covered in record drifts of snow while high tides smash again the New Jersey shore. (Later in the week, a hurricane would come ashore in New Jersey tearing, ripping and destroying everything in its path.) Arizona is still suffering from record heat. In Europe, Dublin is still trying to recover from flooding and Tuscany, one of the world’s most idyllic spots is trying to recover from major flooding.  Around the world, more than half of Thailand is still under water and Bangkok, the capitol and a world famous tourist destination, is threatened with inundation. Cambodia, more poor and backward than Thailand is suffering even worse from the same floods.

Our world is being turned upside down. Climate Change is smashing its fist into our face.

 Global warming is annihilating Nature’s clock, the four seasons; destroying cycles of birth and rebirth; and disrupting age old migration patterns. Everything stands on the brink of destruction. This year it was a friend or two here at home, a few more in New England, four hundred in Thailand; next year it will be more. More fires, more dust storms, more floods and tidal waves, more mud slides, more record snowfalls and cold spells, more dead cattle, more land gobbled up by the growing dessert, more crops withering in the summer heat, and more climate refugees. The world, that has nurtured every generation of humans and provided shelter and a home for the animal kingdom since the first cell divided, faces a worldwide calamity.

We have to put every other issue aside and act. We can’t turn the clock back. We can’t stop the future from bringing more chaotic climate disruptions, but we can stop the worse from occurring, but only if we all act right now.