no subject

[lotesse]

Emotively, I think part of why climate change is hitting me hard hard right now has to do with the warming in the Arctic.

I feel safe, secure, in long cold seasons. I've always dreamed about going further north, surrendering to the deep dark of real, real winter. I grouse when it's wintertime, but I do love it, and haven't much interest in living somewhere that's temperate year round. How do you know you're alive without a good sharp winter to remind you of your place in things?

And now it's the north where we're seeing the most dramatic impacts from anthropogenic climate change: the arboreal forests burning, the glaciers receding, the permafrost collapsing.

Somehow I've always believed that if I needed to, I could always escape to winter, away up at the top of the world where it would inevitably be waiting for me.

it does something twisty in my heart when I see that ice being released by the heat into its liquid state, the water rushing out and away. It's an intensely selfish feeling, I know; the equatorial regions of the world, and the global south, are most threatened. That's where climate change has the most potential to harm human lives. Whole countries vanishing beneath the rising sea; and where do the refugees go? Me, I'm stuck like a burr to the Great Lakes, in the hope that maybe it will be safe here for a while.

It's hard to know how much the looking head-on at climate change is a self-harm-by-information thing. It hurts to see, and it leaves me very pessimistic and hard-mouthed about my own prospects in the remainder of my life.

Comments

[starlady]

I keep thinking of all those due South fics where Fraser and RayK get a happy ending in the North, and how much what's happening now would just kill Fraser.

[lotesse]

Yes, that's very much it. Fraser feels the same way I do about winter. He would know that things were going wrong from a thousand small signs.

I've been watching my father, who loves the winter and knows how to read weather and climate with a technical depth, deal with his knowledge this last year by retreating into flood myth conspiracy theories. I think he's looking for hope that there's life on the other side of the cataclysm. He doesn't want to know what he knows.

[ilthit]

I've been living away from home for a long time now and I still miss snowy winters. There IS still a cold north to escape into. It's just that it's getting to be further north.

[lotesse]

You're right; and the winters here are getting harsher, if anything, so it's not like I'm lacking in cold irl. But still, the cold places melting, or even burning, has such a feeling of sadness attached!

[starshipfox]

I relate to this so much. I really struggle to read about or process the stories about destruction of arctic regions -- I always felt that I too could one day escape to winter. I find it hard to read stories set in wintertime now, or look at pictures of snow: it seems to rub in the grief. It's impossible to control what causes you emotional pain -- don't beat yourself up for finding this particularly hurtful.

[lotesse]

I'll be buried under the snow myself soon enough, so at a personal level I really can't complain! But the iconography of thaw is much less stirring now ....

Thank you for sharing your own sad feelings about the climate destruction. I find that it's difficult to voice, or write about, the feelings associated with this great and terrible tragedy, because it's so big, and we are individually so small in the face of it; and it seems rude, somehow, to go about reminding everyone of the pain. I've only really started to let myself feel it in the last year or so; I've started reading more and more, trying to get my head around the reality of what's happening. Denial/ignorance has started to seem more frightening and risky than knowledge, even if the knowledge hits like a body blow sometimes.

[starshipfox]

it's so big, and we are individually so small in the face of it; and it seems rude, somehow, to go about reminding everyone of the pain.

This is a really good way to put it. Also, the more one learns about it, the more it feels like a full body blow: yes.

[stultiloquentia]

I relate to this, especially as a Canadian living abroad at a lower latitude. I like the cold and the dark. They're home.

[lotesse]

They are the most homely of all things. They will wrap you up so securely that you'll never get away! I've always wanted to try an Artic winter, do the full dark season when the sun never rises at all. I think it would have to be deeply meditative -- or you'd go bonkers.

(Then again, Alaska's economy is terrifying, especially with the way they just pulled the plug on their state university with no notice. My best friend from childhood's emigrated to Canada for a PhD. I swear, if anything could lure me back in ...)