THE EXPEDITION Chapter 1: Plot Twist (section 1)

Date: Fall 2018 Place: Calgary, Alberta

In which Ann reads the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Report 

I’m writing this under my own name, Ann Cognito, because although the Walk was certainly not all mine, the name is. My legal name is everywhere it ought to be and I don’t hide it, and one of these days I’ll get around to legally changing it from the label that got stuck on me. I made this name up almost twenty years ago and have been using it more and more, till the one that never fit fell off. Ann is my own.

The walk wasn’t. It was a mission I took on because I could, and I couldn’t justify not doing what I could. It belongs to all the people who became part of it along the way and those who were part of the Camp when we reached Ottawa. I’m just the feet on the ground and the person telling this story.

Starting to walk was easier than starting to write about it. The world is full of words and stories, and there’s so many ways to tell them, and the combinations could go on forever. Plot twist – the world and forever are suddenly very finite. That made walking a simple decision.

Normal everyday garden-variety decisions have always been hard for me, because in the whole big picture, they’re generally pretty inconsequential, so there’s really nothing to base a decision on. Sometimes it’s even paralyzing. But the huge life-changing momentous decisions? Those I can make in a heartbeat. It’s easier to turn my world inside out than to choose cereal in a shop. The big ones matter.

I’m a 50-something year old woman with a boatload of disabilities, and a service dog, who walked out of what was left of my comfort zone, headed off across one of the biggest countries in the world, mostly by foot, and set up the Climate Emergency Camp at the seat of our federal government during a truly crazy Canadian winter. I gave up my own little unpromising future to and try to help us all avoid an even more unpromising future.

In October 2018, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Control (IPCC) released the bombshell report that should have shocked the world into action. A couple days later, when it was already clear that wasn’t happening, I heard about it through TreeSisters, a truly beautiful organization (not only women, now) dedicated to regrowing forests and growing greener ways of living. I trust TreeSisters deeply, especially when it comes to the state of the planet.

I read the IPCC report summary first, then I surveyed where else it was being posted, printed, and released, and what they were saying, and then I read all 82 pages over and over till the pieces made sense and were firmly lodged in my head. Then I chased all the reference breadcrumbs I could and read and read till my brain was exploding, and then I cried my face off on facebook with my TreeSisters, and my other green friends.

Life as we know it is either completely changing, or ending. I’m not writing to debate science here – the research is increasingly accessible, even making its way into mainstream media, in steps the size of megafires and dead glaciers.

Drowned out by the comfort of the status quo, researchers have tried to pull all the alarms, but lack of care and awareness has pushed our planet past too many tipping points. The beautiful blue-green world we spent a mere few hundred years industrializing is a smelly mess. There’s too much carbon in the atmosphere, too many chemicals everywhere, the global average temperature is too high, weather is too extreme, the forests are nearly gone, the seas are no longer sustaining life, the animals are dying out, the insects are nearly gone, the soils are depleted, the list goes on.

From my reading of the research, we have caused a catastrophic breakdown of the global ecosystem. This is what activists have been banging on about for decades, to the point where most folks tune it out. Even many of those who saw it coming thought it would be much farther down the line. Western culture, especially, filters perception – the consequences of the habits of our daily lives seem far enough away, in every sense, that they seem smaller and worry seems irrational.

It’s all pretty much the opposite, though. We are locked into higher increases in temperature and atmospheric carbon than most – if not all – life can withstand. It may even be more than the planet can regenerate from as she has so many times before, because we’ve created this situation exponentially faster than any natural cycle or system can handle or adapt to, and that process is doing exactly what exponential curves do. It’s getting worse faster. Like the proverbial frogs, we’ve let the pot boil and now our brains are poaching and we can’t move ourselves enough to reach the switch.

The systems – natural cycles as well as the human constructs and processes that now parasitically prop them up – that keep life working on this planet are broken. But even the daily news shows would prefer us to pay more attention to the commercials than science. So, often, would the people around us. Nobody wants it to be real.

I remember all the times I got in trouble when I was little for worrying out loud about the exact same climate-related catastrophes we now see happening. “Bunch of hippie alarmists” they scoffed, and didn’t want to explain what hippies were. I asked why we use cars and burn oil and use plastic and chemicals, and live in ways we do, if it would someday come to this. I was told that such events were thousands of years away, and would never happen because “they” would change things long before it was a real problem… they meaning governments, the same governments who’ve brought us to this point now with their eyes wide open and their industry-lined pockets open even wider.

I also remembered dreams I’ve always had, not always while sleeping, of witnessing the kinds of events now happening around us. I dreamed iceless poles and burning continents and dead seas, and little left alive left to witness it… hardly anyone… but not no one. I also dreamed about clear skies over a blue-green planet supporting life and being supported by the life upon her.

What is there to believe in if not possibilities?

#IPCCclimateemergencyTreeSistersexpeditionbook