We Are Firefighters: A Talk About the Climate and the Trees

This is a slightly edited version of a talk I gave at last Saturday's benefit concert by the adventurous and world-renowned Kronos Quartet for Oil Change International, a climate group on whose board I've served since 2017. It was at the Oakland studio of the dance company Bandaloop, whose dancers danced up the walls--literally--during one of Kronos's pieces. We were celebrating OCI's twentieth anniversary.

We are creatures of the air, for when we stand, all but the soles of our feet are in and of the air. We move through the air to dance, to walk, to explore, and while gravity pins part of us to something solid--the earth itself, a chair, a bed, a ladder--all the rest of us is up there in the very bottom of the atmosphere, the air all around us. We travel across the bottom of the sky the way a crab moves across the bottom of the sea. Breath by breath from our first to the last we take this atmosphere, this sky into where our lungs separate out the oxygen and our hearts send it coursing through our bodies and we exhale the rest, the nitrogen and the carbon dioxide. We think we are solids, but we are two thirds liquid, and survive through taking these sips of sky into our lungs. 

Trees on the other hand, take in the carbon dioxide, making their bodies of it or sending it into the ground, and excrete oxygen, so the breaths each and all of us are taking in at this very moment are full of oxygen released into the atmosphere by plants, dating back to the origins of life and the blue-green algae that radically changed the composition of the atmosphere by giving it this oxygen. Then came billions of years in which plants pulled carbon dioxide out of the earth and buried it in the ground, where some of over the ages became coal, became petroleum, became the methane marketed as natural gas. 

I first met Steve Kretzmann, the founder of Oil Change International, ten years ago at the Paris climate conference that gave us the Paris Treaty, and my first action with OCI was a protest inside the conference area, at which I was given a scarf, which says keep it in the ground. Which is where all this fossil fuel belongs, because when we bring it to the surface of the earth and burn it, the carbon that those ancient forests, full of giant ferns and strange plants, buried goes back into the sky as carbon dioxide, insulating the earth more than it should be insulated.  

A warming layer and in this warmer world the old patterns and order, the music of time, the rhythms and cadences, the songs of migration and seasons, begin to fall apart. Fall apart because the world is on fire, because if you add up the tiny fires in our internal combustion engines and our stoves and water heaters and furnaces, in our coal and gas-fired power plants, in our container ships and airplanes, you see billions of small fires that add up to a conflagration, a world on fire. 

We are here to put out the fire, and we can, we all can, because there has been an energy revolution in our time, and we can run almost all our machines on the boundless, inexhaustible, free power the sun and wind give us, these gifts that come daily from the sky, rather than run our machines on the dead matter from the bowels of the earth. Oil Change International exists to protect this song of life, this music of time, this atmosphere in which we all swim, the sky above us, as it should be; OCI exists to do this by building campaigns and writing reports to orchestrate this business of keeping it in the ground, of stopping the fossil fuel industry, of hastening the transition to a clean energy economy, of putting out the fires.  

We are firefighters. You are firefighters now too, here to help us put the fires out. For the sake of life. 

Firefighters. 

Sky protectors. 

Good ancestors. 

Peacemakers, making peace with nature. 

Here to make a future that welcomes all life. Protects all life.

With the knowledge that if we do what the climate crisis requires of us, we enter an age not of austerity but abundance, an abundance of hope, of confidence in a liveable future, of peace between us and the natural world, of clean air and well-being for humans and nature, of decentralized clean energy production and the end of the geopolitics of petroleum, an age of abundance for all those things money can't buy, all those things like someone looking out her window through clean air and seeing the mountains no longer hidden by smog, all those things like a forest that didn't burn down, a species that didn't go extinct, an ocean not turning to acid, all those things like the people no longer dying of the literal poison of fossil fuel, which kills nine million of us through particulates alone every year. 

Things money can't buy--but donations do help climate activists secure. All those abundances that are waiting for us if we can prove stronger than the fossil fuel industry and its backers. We have both won and lost along the way, again and again, and the world would be far worse had there been no climate activists; it will be far better if we prevail--with your help. Because right now, in this decade, we are deciding the future for the next ten thousand years and more.  

In a few minutes you'll hear a concert played on four wooden instruments, the oldest of which is more than three hundred years old, made when the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was at about 270 parts per million, the pretty stable pre-industrial level we have been leaving, faster and faster. David's violin was born in 1721 at about 270ppm, I was born in 1961 at 313 parts per million and we're now over 420 parts per million, far above the threshhold for stability. The violins, the viola, the cello that Kronos's generous and gifted musicians play are made of wood, from the temperate forests where maple and spruce go, sometimes with tropical woods like ebony from Africa or Asia in the fingerboard and tailpiece. They are forest creatures, these wooden instruments, and when we say they make music, they make vibrations that travel through the air to reach our ears, for music is an atmospheric art. 

Bandaloop's dancers are climbers who go up the side of buildings who fly free with the safety of a climbing harness, who like birds separate themselves briefly from their shadows to be entirely in the air. We are creatures of the air too, the air all around us and the air we take in at about twenty thousand breaths a day, maybe six hundred million over a long lifetime. We're here to breathe in the possibilities, to give back to the air that gives us life, to reach for the sky with our ambitions for a liveable planet and a just new era. We're glad you're with us. At the bottom of the sky, at the beginning of the future, at the end of the age of fossil fuels. 

 That benefit concert with Kronos reminded me that what we're trying to do for the climate is beautiful and in protection of beauty, so beautiful art to support that work makes perfect sense. I've spent less time focusing on climate over the past three months than at any other time in the past ten years, out of the sense that we have to claw back our democracy in order to have the freedoms to protect the climate--and climate science and climate measures, including wind power projects are under attack with this administration--but I'm still thinking and writing about climate and doing my work with Third Act (the climate-and-democracy group on whose board I also sit) and Oil Change International and talking to climate activists all the time. Join us!