Everyone Did It

Winter is coming, little girl. The blue birds and the hummingbirds left several weeks ago and by now are thousands of miles away. Only finches, wrens, woodpeckers, and the bossy blue jays come to the feeders that we still take in at night, though the black bears that love to raid them are settling down for hibernation. White-tailed deer wander through the forests, despondent at the lack of greenery. At night you are scared by the howling of the coyotes.

Winter is coming. The bird baths have begun to freeze overnight. The ground is covered inches deep with swaths of leaves despite our hard work to rake them away. With the canopy removed, we can now see far into the woods and, for small animals, there is now no hiding from the hawks, screeching on their topmost perches in our woods.

They scare me too sometimes, Grand Dad.

Your Grand Mother and I like to call them “our woods”, though our possession is fleeting and the trees, which care greatly for one another, care little for us, though they shelter us from the now frequent storms. In turn, we cut up their fallen boughs and trunks and warm ourselves on the colder nights with roaring fires in the fireplace where, sadly, last year, that unfortunate bat had nested.

I remember! The poor little thing. And will there be snow this winter?

Winter is coming, but more slowly than of yore. Some forty years ago, when we built our little house, hidden in these woods near the big river, little because by then we no longer had hope of children, winter came more quickly and more deeply. By Thanksgiving, the river was always frozen over and, by mid-January, the ice was two feet thick and men dragged fishing huts out to sit by the fishing holes they drilled and peacefully consume quantities of beer. End to end the river was capped with ice. Except below the dam, built a hundred years ago to make electricity, where the water churning off the spillways never froze and dozens of bald eagles would fish all winter.

But I would like to have snow!

Winter is coming, little one, but winters are too mild now to kill off the deer ticks that shelter in the woods, harbouring the Lyme disease that was born in a little seaside town not far away. Too mild to drop two feet of snow overnight. Too mild to sustain the frenzy of snow ploughs or to require scattering many tons of salt on the roads. But there may be some snow for a few days.

Winter is coming, but even far, far to the north, it can no longer keep frozen the permafrost, the ground that, since a time before humanity, has held captive the billions of tons of methane buried in the ground below. How clever of the Earth to sequester such volumes of a potent greenhouse gas! How silly of us to enable it to escape! Do you know what a greenhouse gas is?

Oh, yes. We learned about climate change last year already. But billions of tons! Will we smell it?

No, it has no smell of its own, but often it is mixed with other gases that do smell.

Stinky planet!

Yes, stinky planet! But there are worse things yet to come.

What could be worse than a stinky planet?

Oh, my little girl, I want you to give your Grand Dad and Grandma two presents for Christmas. And they won’t cost you any money!

What are they, Grand Dad?

First, while you are very young, come with me and explore nature. Walk in our woods and far beyond. Climb hills and swim in lakes, build snowmen and grow peas and beans, listen to the owls, and foxes, even the scary coyotes and raptors, and make lots and lots of pictures and videos of what you see. Second, as soon as you are old enough to travel by yourself, tour the wide world, all seven continents, and marvel at what you see.

And will you come with me then?

No, by then it will not be safe for me to travel. I will have to stay quietly at here home.

Why? Will you be ill? I would take care of you!

I know you would, my love. But by then the world will be changed, not just the Earth, our Gaia, but the people living on her. Everywhere people will be divided and violent, fighting and killing one another. Young people wanting change and many old people resisting. Country against country, cities against cities. You will be safe, but I will need to hide from those who would kill me.

But why? Why? Who could hate you?

Oh, my love, even you may come to hate me in that strange and violent world.

For what? What have you done?

I have done what everyone did. Done what we knew we should not have done.

I don’t understand.

Do remember seeing on the news the statues of men that were being torn down, sometimes thrown into a river?

A little. I didn’t understand it.

No, of course, you are so young. In their days, centuries ago, these were famous men, rich and powerful. They often did great things for their countries and, in their days, they were loved and respected and those big statues of them were built.

So why are they now being torn down? Did they do something wrong?

Yes, they did something very, very wrong. They kept slaves. They owned people, black people, originally brought from Africa. They could buy and sell them like horses. They could kill them if they misbehaved.

Uggh, that is ugly! Terrible! But, why didn’t they know that it was ugly? Why did no one tell them to stop? How could anyone ever do these things? How could they not know it was wrong?

Because everyone did it. It was normal. That was the way the world was. Today, it seems horrid to us, but in those days, it was just the way the world was. Many people told them to stop. But they refused. They fought wars over the right to own slaves. And, after they were defeated in the wars, they still treated black people badly for many, many years. Even today.

But Grand Dad, why are you scaring me like this? And why would people want to kill you? Have you done something really bad?

Yes, I did do something bad. Although it did not seem bad to me in the beginning. But it turned out to be very bad.

As bad as keeping slaves?

I am afraid so. What I did, what everyone did, is destroying our life on Earth.

No, no! That cannot be true! In school they told us that the Earth is getting a bit warmer, but surely, we can still live here?

In school they do not want to tell you this. They do not want to scare you. Yes, for the time being we can live here, but you, and your children, and their children will face many threats — fires, flooding, the deaths of many wild creatures, and hundreds of millions of people will be forced to leave their homes in search of food and water.

But why? Who did this? Can’t we stop it?

We did this to ourselves. We used the Earth badly, harshly, as if we were punishing a slave. We have been taking more from Gaia than she can provide. Even when we knew that this was really bad, we could not stop ourselves doing it.

We did it because everyone did it. It was normal. It was the way the world was. We didn’t even think about it. Today, it seems horrid to us, but in those days, it was just the way the world was. Today it is too late to change, too late to stop the damage. And soon your generation, quite rightly, will seek to punish us, those whose actions lead finally to this destruction. So, build your memories of the beautiful Earth today, my little one. And, if you can, forgive me. When you are as old as me, remember what a beautiful place this was. And the wonderfully cold, snowy winters.

Now, off to bed with you!