I n Western North Carolina, the 40 days and nights between the end of September and the start of November cued up a memory from early Bible studies. I found the source in Genesis 7:12, where God, aggrieved by human sin, readies a global catastrophe to redo Creation. Only Noah, his wife, three sons, and their wives embark on Noah’s Ark to repopulate humanity after the Great Flood of “40 days and 40 nights.”
A year before Hurricane Helene, UN Secretary-General António Guterres opened the first Global Ambition Summit in New York by declaring that by its failure to address global warming forthrightly, humanity is entering the “gates of hell.”
Our own time of 40 marks the failure of even the dubious prospect of reversing climate change that America’s President-elect calls a “hoax”, reaffirming the triumph of ideology over science. The outcome fuels the renewal of infatuation with “know-nothing” as national policy.
“Bonfire of the Vanities”
License becomes licentiousness. “All-inclusive” stands for “all you can consume.” Cruise ships ply unlimited booze packages while drunken passengers who topple from balconies are rarely recovered because entire fleets refuse to invest in safeguard systems. Hundreds have been lost since 2,000 alone.
“Drill, baby, drill,” looms over land and sea. Celebrations of Earth Day morph into fires that sweep across the Northeast and West Coast, Overheated seas tutor our first lessons in Spanish — La Niña, El Niño — while calving suggests not the picture books of newborn cows in pastures but glacier demise.
Changing ocean currents affect the lives of Indigenous communities still in Fitzcarraldo isolation.
We are everywhere becoming Ishi, Last of His Tribe, Florida’s last dusky seaside sparrow in our race to extinction.
From national catastrophe to national elections
Climate travelers now wait for how Europe will react to policy shifts that might affect America’s outlook toward NATO. NATO is a stand-in for the European Union, and the EU including Britain has been far more proactive about curbing the discharge of greenhouse gas emissions from mass tourism than our own country.
America’s defense policy is only one pillar of our national security that also includes food production, energy, and how we live daily lives, which are all up for reassessment. I will return to these matters in my Thanksgiving Day posting.
For now, I want to consider what we learn from Asheville about how Tropical Storm Helene continues to affect daily lives in Asheville and Buncombe County in Western North Carolina and hypotheses concerning leisure and business travel.
Much is getting said about purposeful travel
The talk has gone far beyond “Me“ at the center of things, as in traveling for the spas of wellness resorts and of respect shown for the people who live where we visit. We need to unbury the secret of throngs migrating dangerously from birthplace countries to America from which we can
extract the migrations within America itself, an assessment of all things considered where we might avoid those places of the new redlining, where data show development has left people at risk of annihilation whether from hurricanes, fire, flooding or toxicity in the same way that we avoid places that data show risk from crime or poor schools.
The story is about how people have come together in acts of purpose because they were able to and not paid to.
The story about people in Asheville is that those who have lost so much are still giving everything they can, says Taylor Seidler. a midlife graphic arts designer who in 2020 moved back east from Washington State to be nearer family in Sopchoppy, Florida. She was among the figures who stood out in the River Arts District that the head of ArtsAVL told Ch. 11 ABC News was “roughly 80% destroyed in the storm, a $1 billion [loss] in annual sales for the regional economy [that] supports thousands of jobs.”
Even as I post this blog, Taylor says “The water coming from our taps is still not drinkable. We go to nearby locations to get water for drinking and things like washing dishes.
“Many people still don’t have reliable wi-fi, and in communities further out, things like general access and power are still spotty.”
Taylor told me about friends who were vacationing in Hawaii while Helene came through. Neighbors texted that their house beat the odds but that nobody had power. They should just stay put. “They came back anyway to volunteer in the area.”
The community is still showing up for each other
“People are gathering to clean up areas, distributing supplies. Neighbors with chainsaws are still cleaning up downed trees and taking water to those who aren’t able to get it themselves.
“Some people have [food grade] 275-gallon water totes in their front yards for anyone to take what they need.”
“We’re still getting daily updates from the city and county, including updates on water, facilities, voting, damage reporting, etc. Which are all helpful, but there are things that could be even more helpful, like either a pause on rent or more help with cost of living, as so many people are currently without income right now.”
Yet in a report I first read in The Washington Post, something extraordinary was happening in purposeful travel.
Scores of military veterans were coming from everywhere to pitch in with recovery.
“This is what we do when we go to war. We go into bad scenarios with towns turned upside down,” said Mark Elkhill, an Army veteran with the relief group Christian Rangers. (The name Christian Rangers is taken from an exercise in Robin Sage, the nearly two-week special field “final exam” for would-be Green Berets.)
“The only difference is we’re not getting shot at here, which makes it a thousand times easier,” Elkhill said.
Said Steve Santos, “It’s restoring my faith in humanity, seeing people spend their own time and money to be here. I can’t think of a better place to be. . .”
Wrote the Post’s Allison Joyce “Here, in these mountains, veterans are rediscovering pieces of that purpose. In working toward the common original goal of helping their fellow Americans, they feel connected again, part of a team, dedicated to something larger than themselves.”
We can all find this predictive of the years ahead as global warming accelerates through the otherwise bedeviling Anthropocene.
