Mní wičóni

It’s a well-known fact that climate change is happening, that we are on the edge, that the world is melting and frying to death simultaneously. We complain, but we do nothing, and all the while the apocalypse is closing in. Actually, it’s here already, but we do nothing but rant and rave about it. Maybe telling a simple little story will help wake the world up? Probably not, but if I don’t speak up, I won’t be able to sleep tonight.

Mní wičóni

Since I am one of those people who simply can’t bear to talk about cruelty to animals, I will limit what I plan to say here to what occurred with plants the time of the apocalypse that is not so far in the future perhaps. It is the period when most of them died off. I say most of them, because there was still about twenty-five per cent of the plants there had been fifty years before that, but the amount was clearly in decline and people were panicking. In five years, they knew that eighty per cent of the world’s plants would be gone. 

Note: That time hasn’t actually come yet, but it’s only a few days away. Put that in your pipe (I’m not asking what kind you use) and smoke it. That’s the story I’m telling, as if it were already reality, because it will be, that’s for sure. So settle in for our future-just-around-the corner…

Every year after the loss of a quarter of the vegetation on this planet, it was projected that another one per cent would disappear. This was a slow apocalypse, but it was one nevertheless. Because it was taking place over a period of time, causing not immediate but rather gradual starvation, people were mostly not behaving well with others. That’s logical, because everybody was competing for the same few scraps. It was the survival of the fittest, or craftiest, or cruelest. It was not fun, that’s for sure.

It’s not a bad idea to take a moment to describe the loss of vegetation, so powerful was the image, so disheartening. Take the grass. That alone, which fed farm animals, shriveled up. The consequences of having no food for the livestock should be evident and cause for worry. There was still some water to drink, but barely. Everybody was dehydrated. The surviving grass was like thin sticks, not nourishing, and very hard and splintery. 

Grass wasn’t the only fugitive from earthly existence, though.

Flowers ceased to exist, along with the grasses. People who knew which varieties of flowers were edible, or at least not poisonous, would keep some blooms hidden away in their gardens or in pots in their homes. Other people didn’t have that much cunning, so they just ate less. 

Like in the nineteenth century, out West, when some pioneering gold diggers got snowed in and tried eating tree bark, these recent apocalypse victims found it wasn’t all that edible and left it. Pine needles and acorns could be ground up and eaten, but they turned out to be so resiny or bland that most people didn’t want to make the effort. The conditions were becoming increasingly dire.

People would pass away sitting at their supper tables, looking at empty plates. They would just be staring down at the circles with nothing on them, then cease to exist. One really ought to note that this unfortunately is a condition in parts of the world that have not yet suffered an apocalyptic event. Anyway, we can all agree that it is a tremendously sad thing to happen. Just think of the state of mind of the person who sets a table knowing the only things on it will be the plates and silverware...

We mentioned the idea of eating bark, which was a failure. There were some who opted to sample other things: certain types of dirt, mold, maple leaves (when they could find them), and so forth. All the people really tried, but there was simply less and less o be had. Nobody was able to enjoy the marvels of nature any more because there were no marvels. Also, who stops to look at natural beauty when every single plant is a potential source of nourishment, nothing more? Beauty is a concept no longer in vogue.

Tensions grew stronger and harsher, and people were always looking at one another, starving. Coledrige’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner comes to mind, although perhaps the comparison isn’t totally accurate. The mariner in the poem only bites his arm and drinks his own blood so he can call out for help when another ship comes into view. Some who were in the throes of the apocalypse ushered in by climate change might have considered that option, but nobody wanted to confess to what amounted to self-cannibalism. That was like the snake that starts to consume its own tail and even consuming part of your body won’t solve the problem. Think about it.

Oh, it’s all so grotesque, but we know perfectly well that humans brought the apocalypse on themselves. They could have avoided it. They were warned that a couple more degrees of heat annually would start to burn off the plants everywhere, not just the ones in deserts and on high steppes. Survival was unlikely.

So what gave the people a change of direction, a chance to recover, survive? War was not an answer, since nobody had anywhere near enough strength to wage war. Nobody could attack anybody, because they were all so weak. Carrying a weapon was out of the question. Ensuring one’s own survival by killing others just doesn’t seem right, anyway, does it? Yet the scarcity of food - now seen in terms of plants, since nobody had the heart or the strength to kill and gut an animal any more - was now putting the world population on the verge of life or death. Death was more likely.

Then the people did something very smart, very right: they kept talking, talking about the impending extinction of life on earth. They talked and talked, then talked some more. Finally, after they were all talked out and were utterly exhausted from making so much of an effort on an empty stomach, they realized that all they had in their mouths were words. 

Only words, but they now had realized that wasn’t something to scoff at. They had mouths they could still fill with sounds and syllables and they began to pay attention to what that felt like. Edible conversations, articulation using the components of the mouth to fill the space between their ribs. Food for thought, words for consumption. That realization was as delicious as anything else the people could eat. Beggars could not be choosers. Choosers, the finicky, were goners.

The people then figured out what had to happen, if they did not want to perish, if they had any way at all of returning to a pre-apocalypse lifestyle. They were going to need to eat their words. That knowledge was so elementary, so simple, but it was what turned things around. So plain, but very effective.

The people who wanted to survive made up their minds: they read, thought, discussed, searched for solutions to the dying world they lived in. They wanted desperately to crawl back to life, having learned how pigheaded it had been to look away when the North and South Poles were turning to mush. Nobody denied what was happening as the plants withered away to nothing, but was it too late?

The people did not fully realize yet that they would need to recover the old, forgotten skills, set up workshops, study well-digging, foraging, so much more. They had forgotten, they had acquiesced to technology. They were about to wither away like the grass, and die.

The fact is, words were beginning to taste really good. People were able to stay alive by consuming them. They got creative and reached out to import words from other countries. The flavors that the words from abroad had were quite exquisite. They tasted like kumquats, lichee nuts, dragonfruit, persimmons, quince - so many tropical and non tropical edibles. The possibilities were clearly endless, and the world’s population shared because they were famished.

The next phase was for everyone to see there were always words available. Language had no end - unless every last human was dead. That made the ones who were still hanging in there, hanging on to the scraps of existence that remained, decide to use the excess words. Nothing was to be thrown away. A dangerous mistake. 

The people, the talkers, decided they had to make one last effort to rebuild. Even if they had no idea what would come out of their mouths when they opened them, at least they had the satisfaction of feeling they could produce something that contained a bit of humanity, no matter how fragmentary. Some were encouraged by this.

To understand what feasting on words meant for the pitiful skeletons roaming the neighborhood looking for something solid to put in their mouths, we should take a look at the things that can be crafted from words. 

A good example were plays. These could be used the way they were in colonial Mexico: to teach people (back then, the indigenous population) about Christian values. With the climate apocalypse, nobody was worried about converting anybody else to a specific set of religious beliefs. The plays were not faith-based, but they did instruct the public in ways to be resourceful, to forage with great skill, to collect what little rain fell, to determine their main priorities. Attention was paid to planting trees instead of felling them, to paving fewer parking lots as well. This is also reminiscent of the song that had lyrics about paving Paradise and putting up parking lots. Joni Mitchell composed Big Yellow Taxi as if she knew what was coming:

They took all the trees

And put them in a tree museum

Then they charged the people

A dollar and a half just to see ‘em

It was only 1970 and she nailed it.

Don't it always seem to go 

That you don't know what you've got 

Till it's gone 

They paved paradise 

And put up a parking lot 

This leads us to songs people were starting to sing, some old and others newly written. The songs served a number of purposes. Some of the people wrote, played, and sang in order to recall history. This might be said to resemble the Mexican corridos. The music was use to teach and create shared knowledge, so there was a clear link to the plays that were previously mentioned. Again, this was proof that words had a purpose, could do something good. They weren’t useless vowels and consonants. They weren’t the screams of banshees or the sobbing of La Llorona as she wanders through darkness searching for her lost children. The words definitely pointed somewhere and people were interested in seeing where.

Additional word works included cookbooks, with many recipes to share, always using ingredients frugally. At first this caused some serious distress, because food was so scarce, but at least they gave hope. Maybe there actually were ways to collect and use water, maybe there were underground sources for obtaining it. Maybe not using gallons and gallons in showers, on lawns, and for washing cars could create a larger supply. 

Some of the cookbooks included instructions for people to plant their own vegetable gardens. Now that sounds a bit like the victory gardens (also called war gardens or food gardens for defense). They were cultivated during both the first and the second world wars. Their purpose was to both supplement the small amounts of food being rationed out and to improve the people’s morale. It’s a rather complex concept, but victory gardens really were all the rage, so much so that President Wilson is quoted as saying ”Food will win the war.” 

Woodrow Wilson was in office during World War I, but he definitely knew what it meant psychologically to eke out an existence by using the land. The use of words in the climate apocalypse was therefore quite effective. Slowly, ever so slowly, the greening of the earth began to take effect. 

Nowhere to be seen were the paved Paradises that Joni had sung about, but it seems that once the total collapse of life on this planet due to abuses by the ones in power was about to occur, parking spots were the least of anybody’s worries. 

Then the people really fought back. They weren’t polite anymore. They said no, vehemently. They said lots of other things. They banded together and spoke. They said, wrote, and sang smart things and so were able to avert complete destruction. They knew they would never be silent again.

Moral of this story: 

The next time you see a starving polar bear on a small ice floe, don’t look away. The melting water isn’t going to irrigate any crops. Silence will not make grass or tomatoes grow. Making contraptions that bore holes in the ozone layer with the gases they emit won’t, either. Pipelines - black, venomous snakes - that run through places like Standing Rock will starve the area of its water. Scream if you need to, but speak up in some loud way or you will die, dehydrated more than you can imagine.

Climate change affects us all. 

Unless, of course, you don’t live on the Planet Earth.

Mní wičoni. Water is life. Use your words wisely.