Off The Grid In The Ancient Forest

I’m here at Opal Creek Ancient Forest Center for the weekend, off the electricity grid, yet wi-fied onto the Internet grid. A huge snowdrift (it was a hard winter) blocks half my view out the window of the lodge. But it and pretty much all the snow in Oregon is melting fast with the sudden warm weather. Hence, Opal Creek, its sister Battleaxe Creek and the fork of the Santiam River that they flow into are all engorged, flowing so fast and wild they remind me nature is the one in control, not us humans.

It’s water-flow that turns the Pelton wheel that powers this little village of Jawbone Flats, along with solar panels installed a year ago by PGE. I can’t tell you how much I love being here. It does take some effort — you have to hike (I mostly jog) the 2.5 mile dirt road in to Jawbone from the little dirt parking lot. The staff will take your sleeping bag, etc. in on a gear shuttle, and they’ll take you too if you can’t walk it. Electricity is down for the moment and so is my battery, so I’ll go ahead and post ‘prematurely.’

Love In The Time Of Global Warming

“Love In The Time Of Cholera” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez is about a fifty-year love triangle. Love in the time of global warming is, for me, my own love triangle. The three players are the world, global warming and myself.

Perito Moreno Glacier calving, Patagonia.
Photo by Hanmi Meyer

When I am even halfway happy I experience the world as my lover. I cherish it, I notice a hundred endearing things about it, I want to nurture it and help it flourish. Global warming threatens the world with pain, suffering, the destruction of species and millions of people. I feel about global warming the way I’d feel about a person trying to maim and mutilate my in-person lover. I want to do whatever is within my power to prevent my beloved’s pain and suffering.

I see what’s within my power as being both big-picture things like political and policy work (macro) and hands-on-in-my-own- household things (micro). The CRAG (Carbon Reduction Action Group) I’m starting (with Ewan O’Leary, Colleen Kaleda and their spouses) is largely the hands-on type. But I think it can spread and become a big-picture thing, also.

Our culture construes love as primarily a romantic one-to-one thing, but I find that an impoverished notion of love. I say that even as I am happily married. A narrow, couple-only focus can suck two people dry, in my experience, while a shared mission in the world can bring a couple into community with others. I actually met and fell in love with my husband Thor Hinckley in the context of fighting global warming. He was leading a workshop on renewable energy that I attended. Our relationship is the best one I’ve had (and I’ve had several).

Love feels like joy to us, like haven and happiness, and global warming way different from love, like doom, danger, a dark future. But love and global warming are wrapped tightly around each other in my heart. My love for the world means I cannot passively tolerate a business-as-usual life as global warming menaces it. Here I am, in an ongoing love triangle, but a healthy, vital one: love in the time of global warming.