Global Warming Could Be a Good Thing IF ...

We let it liberate us from what is not working

Every time my wife and I go to the Oregon coast it makes me want to stay. I fantasize about living there, my body sandwiched between the beaches washed with foam and the evergreen sentinels of the coastal mountain range; my soul in a temperate, peace-inducing heaven.

We’d live idyllically minimalist in a yurt. I’d spend more time outdoors, walking the beaches and seeing more sunsets.

Leaving that environment is painful. In its own way, it is every bit as painful as the fear that humanity’s place on Earth may be at the cliff’s edge.

I cannot describe how I feel about these special niches of Earth and the times I’ve spent in them. It is love. Heart-filled love.

Just looking at our pictures of them can nearly move me to tears.

A few years back I decided it was a fantasy and I needed to face the ‘reality’ of living life in the city. That didn’t improve my outlook because my love for those sea-sprayed, forested mountain places is not a fantasy. That love is real.

Just recently I realized I’ve lost affection for the city where we land every time we leave the coast. My affection was only ever for Portland’s people and its parks, hills, buttes, and occasional surprises of breath-taking peaks at the distant mountains.

The topographical bowl Portland nestles in seems to act as a city dweller’s blinders to what really matters long-term for all of us — our larger place as part of nature, the planet we share.

And now, with work-from-home, there seems to be no more reason to be bound to any particular urban location. Can’t a laptop be operated just as effectively sitting on a tree stump or under a tree archway like this?

The general response to the secular apocalypse news that the sky is falling in the form of higher temperatures and rising oceans has been to try to “save the planet.” But do we actually know how to do that? And does Earth need us to save it?

Isn’t the point to live collectively in a way that is more sustainable, more compatible with (our) nature? Or do our ideas about that seek mostly to perpetuate a way of life that may not be sustainable at all — for our mental health?

Maybe we need Earth to save us.

Maybe global warming will force us to change.

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Rising ocean levels over the coming years may chase many out of our coastal cities. Coastal cities currently hold about 60% of world population.¹ U.S. migration is already heading out of large cities to smaller cities and towns, and inland.

People are fleeing California for Texas and Idaho. Illinois, New York, and New Jersey are the three states with the most outbound moves ... Despite pandemic, people continued to move at rates comparable to 2019.²

The trend has already begun for a myriad of reasons, most of which seem to me to be the various forms of wicked problems found in urban living, at their worst in our largest cities.

What is a wicked problem?³ It is the modern urban phenomenon of systemic problems of a socio-economic nature seen at the community level which become even more complicated with unintended consequences when experts step in to try solve one or more of those problems. Because of the myriad rules, regulations, habituations, contradictory policies, and bureaucratic enmities, there is as much resistance to solving these problems as there is sincere humanitarian effort to resolve them.

Effectively, any urban setting can function like a bowl of consciousness that keeps us from seeing and consciously experiencing nature’s wise ways. Urban living would seem to require an even more concentrated inclusion of nature in our lives in order to keep an essential healthy balance. There have been significant efforts aiming to do this. Architect Christopher Alexander and his team authored a beautiful, inspiring tome called A Pattern Language⁴ that has been not only virtually ignored by city planners, but treated with disdain by mainstream architecture.

Even though I don’t own a copy (it’s out of print and used copies are very expensive), it is one of my very favorite books. Once every several years I get a copy through inter-library loan and sift through its pages, viewing its drawings with affection. The book puts forth an evidence-based approach with much research cited to back many of its 253 patterns. They are suggestions that can be taken one or all as practical ways of reuniting people with nature even in an urban setting. It presents a how-to for cooperative design and building (and cooperative living).

That is entirely at odds with the practice of professional architects or architectural firms as authors of our work spaces, dwelling spaces, and communities. Talk about a wicked problem.

In our current socio-economic-political climate, it’s unsolvable.

So nature will have to nudge us elsewhere until we resettle into a different place, form new a pattern, find a way of life that actually sustains our mental health and harmonizes with our spirits again. It will push us away from our coasts. Visit those tourist traps while they still exist. It will push us away from our congested cities. Wave goodbye, but don’t look back. It will push us towards more open spaces where we can see again.

Thank you, work-from-home. I’m now free to live anywhere. Thank you, pandemic. I’m not isolated, but liberated from office cubicles.

Thank you, Earth for still being here for us. Thank you, amber waves of grain and purple mountain majesty.

Thank you, virion, messenger of nature. I am bending my ear to your quiet murmurings.

1. http://www.coastalwiki.org/wiki/Coastal_Cities

2. https://www.northamerican.com/migration-map

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_problem

4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Pattern_Language