A Love Letter to Addie - Entropy, Part 8
February 6, 2020

     Let's say they're wrong.  All those climate scientists – and it's the vast majority of them – who have painstakingly, over decades, collected and analyzed the data, developed hundreds (thousands?) of models, run millions (billions?) of simulations, and concluded that the Earth is warming, mostly if not entirely as a result of human activity (chiefly the burning of fossil fuels), and that the consequences are likely to be dire for the future of life on this planet.  Let's say they're wrong.

     We still have a problem.  We still cannot go on living as we are, burning fossil fuels like there's no tomorrow and ignoring the giant real-time nuclear reactor in the sky.

     * * *

     I am a woman.  I am a mother.  I am a practicing attorney.  I write.  I advocate for progress in my community, and people listen to me and work alongside me.  I am learning the gardening arts and the husbandry of small livestock.  Perhaps I will learn the business of keeping large livestock someday.

     My life was unimaginable as little as 100 years ago.  I have often considered how very different my life would be, if I had happened to be born in 1879 rather than 1979.  For one thing, there is a good chance I would not have made it to the age of 41.  Even if I was fortunate enough to escape polio and scarlet fever and the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic, I could have easily met my demise giving birth to a child.  And even if I had survived my childbearing years, I know enough about Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf, and the longings and wanderings of my own young mind, to know that I would have likely contemplated (if not committed) suicide at some point, given the powerful constraints that society placed on a woman‛s expression of her intellectual or artistic gifts.  And even if my chafing under those constraints did not drive me all the way to suicide, when and how would I have found the time to hone and express my gifts?  Odds are I would not have been born into privilege or affluence.  Odds are I would be washing a lot of laundry – my own or that of others – by hand.  That would leave precious little time to study or practice law, write, or lead a charitable community foundation.
 
    And yet, I do all of these things today.  And with Brad's help – a lot of Brad's help – I do the laundry too.  And the dishes.  And we bathe the children (somewhat regularly), feed the chickens, make dinner, and do the grocery shopping.  What would Virginia Woolf think of my life?  I wonder.

     I also wonder whether my great-great-granddaughter – let's call her Addie – will be able to live as full and rich a life as I am leading.  

     Recall that at least 66% of my life is powered by fossil fuels.  This means that at least two-thirds of what I do everyday is enabled by an energy source that cannot be replenished within any humanly comprehensible timeframe.  Oh, it can be converted into another type of energy source.  By planting trees, helping to curb deforestation, and supporting practices that enhance the ability of grasslands and farmlands to draw down carbon dioxide rather than release it, I can (and should) recapture nearly all of the material loosed by my use of fossil fuels.  The greenhouse gas problem – the climate change problem, if you choose to believe the climate scientists – is solvable.  We need only to summon the personal and collective imagination, creativity, and will to solve it.  And shovels. 

     What we – what I – cannot do is turn those greenhouse gases back into fossil fuels.  I cannot convert them back into coal or oil or natural gas.  I cannot return them to the kind of dense and liquid forms that make my life so easy today – that enable me to do my laundry in seconds by pressing a button, as opposed to whaling away for hours at a washboard.  I suppose that some group of techno-whizzes may come up with a way to conjure this alchemy someday.  And I understand that research and development on such technology is being explored.

    But I am a skeptic.  And in any case, I cannot, I will not, gamble on a techno-miracle to materialize in time – that is, before we burn through the trust fund of fossil fuels we have inherited. 

     I cannot wait.  I will not wait.  Addie‛s life is on the line.