The Octopus in the Parking Garage by Rob Verchick

Author:Rob Verchick
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Columbia University Press

Walking along a road one winter day in 1892, the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch was seized by a “wave of sadness,” accompanied by a reddening of the atmosphere and an eruption of “flaming clouds like blood and swords.”58 Short of breath, he stopped to lean against a fence. His companions kept walking. “I stood there quaking with angst,” Munch wrote in his diary, “and I felt as though a vast, endless scream [had] passed through nature. 59

Meteorologists have long wondered what might have caused those broiling skies that so impressed Munch. Some opined that it was smoke and gas wafting from an explosive volcano, Mount Awu in North Sulawesi, say, or legendary Krakatau. A study in the Journal of the American Meteorological Society speculates that it may have been the ghostlike ribbons of “polar stratospheric clouds” that made Munch’s stomach drop.60

Years ago, during a visit to Oslo, I ducked out of an academic conference and caught a cab to Norway’s National Gallery, where the best-known rendering of The Scream is on permanent display. (There are at least four versions.) I wanted to stare into the face of that suffering figure—drained of sex, race, and even language—as he or she covered his or her ears in a vain attempt to smother nature’s primal shriek.

And, as I stared into that abyss, I recall being a little disappointed.

The painting was smaller than I had imagined and, to be honest, seemed a little haphazard in execution. On close inspection, I could see that beneath all the pain and terror that walloped me on first sight were just grainy streaks of tempera on unprimed cardboard.

I’m not criticizing—add visual art to the list of things on which I have no prescribed training. But the experience calls up what has become one of this book’s central themes: Within the wallop of pain and terror that so many of us feel in this carbon-drenched epoch, there can be relief when one chooses to stop, inspect, and reorganize one’s perception. It’s true that climate change is a lot more than cardboard and paint. But it need not paralyze us.

When Sam Perkins jumps from a plane into whirl of gas and soot, his focus, he told me, keeps fear at bay. When Cinthia Zermeño Moore troubleshoots her son Liam’s allergies or defends her polluted neighborhoods in local hearings, she is choosing action over gridlock, agility over angst. What would it mean for society to do that?

Resilience work means reaching beyond carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. We know climate disruption is amplifying the wildfire crisis and that cutting carbon emissions is paramount. But that can’t happen fast enough, so we must also minimize the alternative contributors to wildfire hazard, in particular the contributors that we have more control over and that we can address more quickly. That means improving the ways our forests are managed and the ways our communities are built.

Most fire experts agree that the nation’s forest-management strategy, particularly in the western and southeastern parts of the country, needs an overhaul.

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