Hodgson's Prophecy

 The last few days brought unseasonably warm weather to the Midwest. I found myself yesterday morning wandering through the streets in disbelief, allowing the sunlight and warm air to seep into my skin as if I had to stock up on both before they ran out. "It feels too good to be true, for February," I told my sister. "Well," she said, "climate change." "Ah," I said. "So it is too good to be true." "Well," she replied, "it is true; but it's not good." "Oh right," I concluded. "It's too true to be good." 

Indeed, the unusual warmth and spring-like weather of the last month has been eerie. I've enjoyed it, to be sure; but it gives one the feeling of living on a precipice. This may feel good in February, one thinks—but what will this mean for summer? Will we be roasted once again in record heat waves? Will there be catastrophic flooding? Rampant wildfires? The answer to all those things—and it is sad to realize in saying it how much we have come to regard all this as normal—is almost certainly yes. 

Of course, climate change is only part of the explanation for this most-atypical Midwestern February. It's also El Niño. But the two forces are working together in a way that feels very destabilizing. And lo and behold, scientists are indeed upping the ante on their warnings about the risk of potentially catastrophic climate disruption. One attention-grabbing report recently indicated that a crucial oceanic current may be nearing collapse, all much sooner than previously anticipated. 

The image that comes into one's head is dramatic, but not necessarily exaggerated: Western Europe suddenly plunged into Arctic winters; large parts of the low-lying U.S. coast inundated with water. The largest contributing factor to the current's collapse would be the massive inflows of fresh water expected from melting polar sea-ice and the Greenland ice sheet. What we're really looking at, then, is a deluge of near-Biblical proportions. 

I am not generally drawn to the metaphor of climate change as Nature's divine punishment. I don't believe in collective punishment, for one thing. (Or in divinities, for another.) Visiting the sins of the fathers on the children—such as by drowning future generations for the fossil fuel use of prior ones—"may be a morality good enough for divinities, [but] it is scorned by average human nature," as Thomas Hardy once wrote. Besides, most of those prior generations could not have foreseen the consequences of their actions. 

Still, though, it's hard not to think of Genesis when contemplating the decades ahead. And reading Ralph Hodgson's poems yesterday, I came across one that seemed eerily prescient on this subject of divine fury. His proto-environmentalist verse, "The Last Blackbird," imagines the poet conversing with an outraged Nature, who descends to Earth and is appalled to discover the hash her one-time creation Man has made of the planet: polluting the Earth's natural landscapes and slaughtering its other inhabitants.

When Nature asks the poet what forces still stand in the path of humankind's destructive avarice, he observes in passing that the sea seems the only force that our species has never fully managed to tame. This gives Nature an idea. In plotting a fit punishment for humankind, at the end of the piece—to retrieve Nature's honor in the face of all this despoliation and massacring of animals—she contrives a second Flood. "How say'st thou, poet, to a wider sea? [...] To wash my world, a deeper, wider sea." 

The poem ends with the poet casting his eyes to heaven and seeing ominous clouds overhead. The outraged deity's punishment seems about to be fulfilled. Likewise with us: ominous storm clouds are now coming into the Midwest, on the heels of this unnaturally pleasant weather. And so too, on a larger, planetary scale, it's hard not to feel—as the news mounts of the looming climate catastrophe due to disrupted oceanic currents—that Hodgson's prophecy is about to be fulfilled in an ever bigger way. 

Hodgson could not have known, at the time he wrote the poem, about the looming threat of climate change. But in some inchoate way, he sensed that our abuse of the planet would eventually redound to our own harm. For our wasteful mishandling of our natural environment, there is a price to be exacted: and judging from the recent news about the ocean current collapse, it sounds increasingly like it will take exactly the form Hodgson's "Nature" prescribed for us: "a wider sea."

Many of us, myself included, are likely to shudder at this prospect briefly—but then return to our normal lives. It's not happening yet, we think. It's something to think about later. Yet, the reports warn that the starkest changes of climate change are not actually all that far in the future. 2050 is not as distant as it once was. And the article linked above says that major disruptions to this crucial system of ocean currents may come as soon as 2025. Which—and I blinked over this for a moment—is next year. 

So many of us are inclined to think, in some shameful corner of our hearts: "Après moi, le déluge." We think: so what if the deluge comes? We'll be long gone by then. But, if it's 2025... we won't be long gone. We'll still be here. We won't have gone anywhere, when the "deeper, wider sea" appears. As D.H. Lawrence once asked in a poem, it's all well and good to say "après moi, le déluge"—but what if the deluge doesn't wait for you to be gone, but "come[s] along and hits you on the head"?