What did we know; when did we know it?

 Yesterday we began an exploration of shifting baselines and some questions surrounding what’s normal. This morning my email inbox provided a fantastic example of such shifts. Emergence magazine shared a story on The Great Tree Migration:

Let’s step back to about 14,600 years ago, near the end of the Pleistocene, that phenomenal age of mile-high ice, when glaciers ebbed and flowed over the land. We might notice that as the Laurentide Ice Sheet begins its slow retreat as temperatures warm, spruce trees are flowing up from the south: we watch as pointed evergreens with splays of emerald needles work their way across present-day Maine and southern Quebec, spreading farther into Canada, settling along the rocky slopes and poorly drained soils that were recently carved from the ice. Fast-forward 3,000 years to the beginning of the Holocene. The climate is warmer and drier; the ice sheet is vanishing further; the range of the spruce is now shrinking as the trees are pushed farther northward and replaced by pine to the south. Then, in the mid-Holocene, roughly 6,000 years later, there is a period of drought. Much of the eastern hemlock disappears as the lack of water leaves the trees stressed and vulnerable to the infestation of a pest that overtakes the population. It takes 2,000 years for the hemlock to return. During this time spruce move southward again, settling into roughly the configuration that we find them in today.

In Minnesota, early voting starts soon

Photo by J. Harrington

Someone who read yesterday’s posting noted the issue of normalization affects politics by pointing me to a story in the Los Angeles Review of Books back in 2017: Against Normalization: The Lesson of the “Munich Post”.

And after Trump’s victory I began to follow the debate over how much deference Trump was owed, how much responsibility he had for the hate speech the alt-right morons cheered. Some found solace in the hashtag #notmypresident. David Remnick seemed to have woken the next morning with an especially felicitous gift of disgust, writing: “The fantasy of the normalization of Donald Trump — the idea that a demagogic candidate would somehow be transformed into a statesman of poise and deliberation after his Election Day victory — should now be a distant memory, an illusion shattered.”

We are clearly living in a time of disruption, strife and turmoil. It behooves each of US to carefully consider what we consider acceptable, tolerable and abnormal. There are no “alternative facts,” although there are often alternative interpretations of the same facts. We’d best be sure whether we’re voting for demagogs or statesmanlike leaders as we complete our ballots. Remember, much of North America was once covered by water, also by ice. Do we consider either of those normal?

Let Them Not Say

Jane Hirshfield - 1953-

Let them not say:   we did not see it.
We saw.

Let them not say:   we did not hear it.
We heard.

Let them not say:     they did not taste it.
We ate, we trembled.

Let them not say:   it was not spoken, not written.
We spoke,
we witnessed with voices and hands.

Let them not say:     they did nothing.
We did not-enough.

Let them say, as they must say something: 

A kerosene beauty.
It burned.

Let them say we warmed ourselves by it,
read by its light, praised,
and it burned.

—2014

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