This week, I’m off to a country estate to immerse myself in The Novel!
I’m not that far from home—about an hour north. Once a year, hubby teaches sail camp for teens, and this year, I decided to come up to the lake with him, writing while he teaches, immersing in natural beauty while I write a hopeful climate fiction novel that renegotiates some of our relationships with nature.
Meanwhile, the climate reminded me it was changing with my own personal encounter with a mini-tornado.
I had returned home briefly to pick up my farm share when the storm suddenly hit, with the operative word being “sudden.” Quickly-escalating, extra-intense storm cells seem to be a feature of our warming world. This is the second time in as many weeks that a storm that was supposed to be a “normal” thunderstorm quickly escalated into something that ripped up trees, spun up hailstones, and sometimes had an actual funnel cloud. It happened so fast, there was no warning—no tornado sirens, no warnings on the weather apps, and not even that weirdly colored sky that often gives a visual indicator. I popped into the Starbucks to use the restroom: going in, the sky was clear; two minutes later, the employees were trying to keep the patio furniture from flying away.
I sheltered in place (in my car). Power was out and trees were down everywhere. When it had passed, I returned to my house to make sure a tree hadn’t fallen on it and the cats were okay. We have solar, and our backup battery meant we had power, unlike the rest of the neighborhood. Thankfully, no tree damage. But it was wild.
I’ve lived through plenty of thunderstorms and even a few near-tornado storm cells. What was different about this was the sudden escalation without warning. If the weather services had predicted possible tornado-level storm conditions, I would have stayed home. It wasn’t like I wasn’t paying attention.
But this is the hottest year in a 100,000 years: the unexpected is going to happen.
And that’s really hard for folks (including me) to wrap their heads around. More people are dying in the heat every year, partially because the heat is extreme, but also because it’s outside our normal experience. We tell ourselves we know how to handle the heat, but we don’t know how to handle this kind of heat.
We rely on weather systems to tell us if the storm is bad enough to stay home, so when the storm is suddenly stronger than the systems predicted… you get tons of people caught out in the storm (I was far from alone).
A shifting baseline has an adaptation gap, even for folks who are paying attention. And most people are not.
I’m safe, my kitties are safe, I’m up at a lovely retreat, writing about a world that is literally changing as I type. Engaging in that imaginative process helps me understand how urgent the crisis is, how far we have to go in the fight, and what that adaptation is really going to look like.
But I’m also living through it: eyes wide open, so I can see how we have to change.
I’ll be back next week on the pod, talking about how engaging in that imaginative process is one way we adapt. People are resistant to change, even those of us who are actively trying, but the world is constantly changing around us. Envisioning the future, where all this is headed, is one way to simply catch up to what’s already happened. We will have to make changes (again and again) if we want to build resilience (personally and societally) on a constantly-warming planet.
I’ll talk more about that next week.
In the meantime, enjoy some of the friends I’ve met on my retreat, check out the upcoming Solarpunk: Rays of Resilience conference, and don’t forget to enter your story in the Imagine 2200 contest.
With Hope,
Sue