My Climate Change Rap debut at the 2012 Monterey Institute of International Studies Follies Talent Show. I’m 99.99% sure this experience was not replicated anywhere else that (or any) evening on Planet Earth. Watch the standup that preceded this gem here.
Today I got blood work done at CHOMP, the local hospital (isn’t 21st medicine amazing?). Before I could get any tests run, I had to be entered into the system. After disclosing my name, address, social security number, insurance information, relationship status, religion, and receiving a full cavity search (jk), I was allowed to go get stabbed and pee in a cup.
I felt like I’d been the victim of identity theft by the time we were through – all they needed was one of my eyeballs and they could have cleared all seven levels of security to my super secret vault. It definitely drove home how much personal data gets jacked every time an employee gets an unencrypted laptop stolen. Hopefully my total lack of assets will deter would-be impostors.
But when she handed me the final printout to confirm all my details, under Religion she had listed Other when I had clearly stated Atheist. Apparently that gets and Other categorization in our healthcare database! Fine, maybe atheism itself isn’t a religion unto itself in the Judeo-Christian sense, but Secular Humanism contains all the moral codes of traditional belief structures, just fewer Crusades and Jihads. I can’t think of a war that was started by people who don’t believe in a God.
For this year’s talent show I debuted my first enviro-rap about anthropogenic climate change. Let your eyes and ears feast upon this glorious creation until they explode from its awesomeness!
I feel blessed to have been born in my particular place in the time/space continuum. I have an unhealthy love for electricity, indoor plumbing and the internet. And as a woman, there are few times in history that I wouldn’t have been treated as chattel or worse – even as states are overturning equal pay legislation and ignorant bigots are proposing trans-vaginal probes, at least I have access to birth control and freedom of speech (they haven’t come for me yet, maybe when I’m famous).
The best part about being a child of the 80s is that I’m not totally B.C. (Before Computers – a.k.a. how do I reach my AOL account through Safari), but I’m not part of the Facebook Generation either. Instant Messenger and other precursors of modern-day hyper-connectivity were available, but not as ubiquitously, and anyway I didn’t have anyone to chat with (I would console myself with the trope that if you’re cool in high school the rest of your life will probably be an epically painful plateau/descent scenario).
Reading Grist today, ‘I withdraw’: A talk with climate defeatist Paul Kingsnorth particularly resonated with me. The author Wen Stephenson dissects Kingsnorth’s attitude towards environmentalism and climate change mitigation in less than glowing terms.
Stephenson writes that Kingsnorth is “done with “hope.” He’s moved beyond it. He’s not out to “save the planet.” He’s had it with the dream of “sustainability.” He’s looked into the abyss of planetary collapse, and he’s more or less fine with it: Collapse? Sure. Bring it on.”
But reading Kingsnorth’s manifesto struck a deep, bougie chord in me. “We are environmentalists now in order to promote something called ‘sustainability.’ What does this curious, plastic word mean? … It means sustaining human civilization at the comfort level that the world’s rich people — us — feel is their right, without destroying the ‘natural capital’ or the ‘resource base’ that is needed to do so.”
Um, duh! If I can’t run my washing machine on solar power, how am I supposed to have time to take my electric car to the all local organic food coop, in my awesomely utopic post-carbon future?
Humanity isn’t prepared to deal with the complex and esoteric existential threat of climate change. Our flight or fight biology can’t comprehend the grandiose yet invisible nature of catastrophic ecosystem collapse. Yet our Darwinian success has enabled us to extract and drill and pollute and dominate nearly every corner of the globe. It’s part of our ethos, especially in America’s White Man’s Burden, Wild West, pioneering spirit mentality to keep pushing further afield to ‘new planets, new civilizations, to boldly go where no (wo)man has gone before’ (thanks, Gene Roddenberry).
Now that we’ve basically run out of planet to conquer, I wonder what’s Plan B? Relocate to the moon, perhaps? Gingrich 2012! Just Kidding. But seriously, what’s gonna happen when we hit 2°C in a decade or three, and suddenly there’s massive crop failures, epic droughts, 100 year floods every year, massive climate refugee migrations, and fossil fuel prices through the roof?
Would be totally different. That’s what I learned today, bizarrely enough, while visiting the token hippy homestead here on Lopez. The original settler was a quintessential Californian transplant (let’s call him Cali), with a lot of ‘what was I saying…?’ if you know what I mean. He was slightly disgruntled with life on Lopez, mostly because of the short growing season and the long line of building codes derailing his ideal off-grid lifestyle.
He dreams of moving to the Big Island (Hawaii) or back to California, but the plethora of illegal dwellings on his back 40 make it unlikely he’ll be able to recoup their full value if he ever does decide to sell (see the ‘temporary’ bus/house that one master carpenter tenant constructed). Plus his kind and centered wife **Wind** would probably have something to say about it if his plans ever threaten to come to fruition, considering she has four grandchildren on the island and is a chef, dula and raiki practitioner.
Friday morning I left for Lopez Island in the San Juans with a dozen of my classmates, for a week of hands-on resilience and sustainability-ness. We’re coming in as consultants to help design an energy descent / sustainability plan for the island, but this undertaking is phenomenally amorphous beyond that esoteric terminology.
We’ve read the Transition Handbook, local energy plans and surveys and Skyped with numerous local experts on agriculture, waste, water, electricity, energy and transportation. But what deliverable we’re aiming to create, or the process to achieve these outcomes, is unclear. It seems like every idea of low-hanging fruit and quick wins we come up with has already been explored and either implemented or abandoned after cost-benefit analysis of a professional degree beyond the scope or abilities of our class.
I attended my first apiary and cooping classes at the Biofuel Oasis in Berkeley to learn how to keep chickens and bees. Despite being only bee-curious and not bee-committed yet, it was fascinating to learn about the bizarre hierarchical structures of both species, and consider their similarities with human interactions.
Chickens are like a group of Queen Bee middle school girls (is this ironic?). If a chicken gets so much as a speck of blood on herself, there’s a decent chance the other hens will peck and cannibalize her to death. And watch out if you get sick! Sometimes a flock turns on one hen, and she has to be in solitary for life, because they will always attack her if given the chance. That’s a G-D pecking order for you! And if you want to introduce young chicks into an existing flock you need to toughen them up for bullying and illness – just like in middle school!
Bees are a different thing entirely – kind of like the Borg (Star Trek: TNG). If I understood this correctly, the actual Queen Bee mates with the drones one time (all of them? that seems poly-orgiastic!), then flies off to her brood spot and lays eggs for the rest of her life. She stores all that bee-sperm inside her for years as she selectively fertilizes some eggs to become new drones. The rest become worker bees, and last a mere few weeks before they die of shredded wings. Every hive has bouncers – guard bees that stop workers from other hives entering. But the drones are like the kept men, and can go wherever they want. Someone should tell these bees that women have the right to go places too! Guard bees are vicious, give them a chance and they’ll go straight for the eyes!
I plan to perform the following standup act and rap at this year’s school talent show. It feels a bit edgy, but why not just let it all hang out?!
