an incredibly long and depressing explanation for Hibernation 2014’s replacement

Hibernation 2014 fixed a lot of things.

No, scratch that: Hibernation 2014 gave me some space while time fixed a lot of things. Like the creepy ex, losing my job, finding the new one, the thyroid thing, and adapting to all of Frances’s new health gizmos and routines, for starters.

But there’s one thing Hibernation 2014 will never and can never address, and that’s climate change. I don’t mean that it can’t solve it–though it can’t, and please spare me the speeches about how making your own stuff is good for the environment, usually it’s not–I mean that it can’t really help me cope with it, in a permanent way.

You know that feeling that comes over you when you visit a historic battleground, or the site of a massacre or tragedy? How the blood that was spilled somehow hangs in the air; you can feel it, or shadows of it, around you? Well, being well-schooled in climate change and trying to do something with your life to solve it makes the whole world feel like that. Of course there are the environmental catastrophes that underlie every step we take; the forests that have already disappeared, the passenger pigeons that should be in the air, the charismatic megafauna that were wiped out before the europeans ever set foot here in Canada. But there is also the knowledge of the catastrophes to come, the knowledge that everything you could possibly do for the rest of your life will not be enough to keep even a small part of it from dying.

And yes it is technically possible for some super-scientist to come along with a miracle technology sometime in the next thirty years and save us from ourselves. Just like it is technically possible for a doctor to come along with a miracle drug and save a cancer patient in palliative care. But it is awfully unlikely.

I’m still doing what I do. You know, I pay for bullfrog power and I drive as little as possible and I recycle and use reusable bags and I haven’t been on an airplane since 2010. I use the library for books whenever I can. I work in renewable energy, and boy, I’d love it if I were working harder in renewable energy. But I still live a mostly-typical north american existence on top of a mountain of stuff I don’t really need, and the climate (speaking in purely scientific terms) would be better off without me (and you).

I think this may be why I have been so obsessed with apocalyptic fiction for the last few years. BattleStar Galactica can be read as a climate fable pretty easily. And there’s the Last Policeman trilogy, Station Eleven, the Hunger Games, The Girl with All the Gifts, Area X, The Clockwork Century, Drowned Cities, Spin, the Windup Girl–it goes on. Even though I recognize that this is a failure on my part to engage with the reality of the situation and, where this obsession is shared by the culture at large, a failure on all of our parts to engage with the reality of the situation. This is no virus. It is no alien or robot invasion. It isn’t zombies. It is no asteroid. It is us, all us, all of us. We are the gun, the bullet, the victim, and the hand that pulled the trigger. It’s just us, living our lives in the world we inherited, finding it easier to hold on to what we have now and let tomorrow take care of itself. Even though it can’t.

Do you remember how all of the science fiction in the 1960s was all sparkly spaceships, personal jet backpacks, robot servants? Star Trek and the Jetsons.  And now all of our science fiction is the End of Everything. Zombies and asteroids and brittle intergalactic totalitarian empires. Killer androids and deathly viruses. I think we all know, deep down, even those of us who can’t admit it out loud. And I think we are all scared.

So in a not insignificant way, Hibernation 2014 was a way to hide from all of that. And chances are, sewing and making things will remain a way for me to continue hiding from all of that. Oh hey, don’t get me wrong; I’ve always loved making things. But that’s the reason it’s so therapeutic, you see: I love it. And it is totally unconnected with the end of the world.

Anyway, I am going to rename Hibernation 2014 ‘burrow & sing’ for the time being. It is just as unconnected with sewing and making as Hibernation 2014 was, but without the now-outdated year reference, and with the added benefit of being a line from a Dennis Lee poem called hang- that pretty well describes how I feel. (Google Books has Testament, the book it’s from, if you’re interested, and hang- is on page 34.) Yes, it’s pretentious and obscure, I know. But I really love Dennis Lee’s environmental poems, so if nothing else, I’ll get that little reminder every time I post.

I could just call it sewing. Yep. But I don’t want to. So there. Plus, it’s not always going to be sewing, per se.

I had a lot of hope right up until about 2012. I knew it was 20 years too late to actually fix it, but first I thought that Copenhagen might actually get us to a climate deal that would get us somewhere and stave off the worst of it, and then when that fell through, I thought that there were enough smaller initiatives like the Green Energy Act and municipal plans to make some kind of difference. But our emissions keep climbing, and we keep having international climate negotiations which consist of poorer and developing nations screaming for help and first-world countries (particularly Canada) snubbing them, and the ice keeps melting and species are going extinct and it’s not even that no one seems to care, but that the people who care the most are the deniers and are working tooth and nail on the coat-tails of significant funding from fossil fuel companies to make sure that nothing changes. Our likely continuum of outcomes at this point is from catastrophe to a Canfield Oceans mass extinction event. It’s not like coming to terms with the death of a loved one, where there is one loved one and the rest of the world carries on; it’s the death of all loved ones, human and not-human, and when I’m not busy living the life I know is contributing to all of that, I need to hide out from it all in a burrow of fabric and thread.