Animal, Vegetable, Miracle_ A Year of Food Life - Barbara Kingsolver [176]
I do know the answer to that one: that’s called child abuse. When my teenager worries that her generation won’t be able to fix this problem, I have to admit to her that it won’t be up to her generation. It’s up to mine. This is a now-or-never kind of project.
But a project, nevertheless. Global-scale alteration from pollution didn’t happen when human societies started using a little bit of fossil fuel. It happened after unrestrained growth, irresponsible management, and a cultural refusal to assign any moral value to excessive consumption. Those habits can be reformed. They have been reformed: several times in the last century we’ve learned that some of our favorite things like DDT and the propellants in aerosol cans were rapidly unraveling the structure and substance of our biosphere. We gave them up, and reversed the threats. Now the reforms required of us are more systematic, and nobody seems to want to go first. (To be more precise, the U.S.A. wants to go last.) Personally, I can’t figure out how to give up my computer, but I’m trying to get myself onto a grid fueled by wind and hydro power instead of strip-mined coal. I could even see sticking some of the new thin-film photovoltaic panels onto our roof, and I’m looking for a few good congressmen or-women who’d give us a tax credit for that. In our community and our household we now have options we didn’t know about five years ago: hybrid vehicles, geothermal heating. And I refused to believe a fuel-driven food industry was the only hand that could feed my family. It felt good to be right about that.
I share with almost every adult I know this crazy quilt of optimism and worries, feeling locked into certain habits but keen to change them in the right direction. And the tendency to feel like a jerk for falling short of absolute conversion. I’m not sure why. If a friend had a coronary scare and finally started exercising three days a week, who would hound him about the other four days? It’s the worst of bad manners—and self-protection, I think, in a nervously cynical society—to ridicule the small gesture. These earnest efforts might just get us past the train-wreck of the daily news, or the anguish of standing behind a child, looking with her at the road ahead, searching out redemption where we can find it: recycling or carpooling or growing a garden or saving a species or something. Small, stepwise changes in personal habits aren’t trivial. Ultimately they will, or won’t, add up to having been the thing that mattered.
We all went crazy over finding the ivorybill because he is the Lord God’s own redheaded whopper of a second chance. Something can happen for us, it seems, or through us, that will stop this earthly unraveling and start the clock over. Like every creature on earth, we want to make it too. We want more time.
Natural cycles persist in being predictable, despite all human caprice. It probably happened by the grace of biology, rather than magic, that the very date Lily had circled on her calendar one year earlier got circled now on mine, for the same reason. When Number One Mother sat down on her clutch of eggs, I’d made note of it in my journal. Now I counted forward like expectant mothers everywhere: My babies due!
I was on pins and needles, watching the date approach. Having done it myself twice, I knew