I often have dreams – nightmares, actually – of fires, storms and floods. In these dreams, I am with my daughters, desperately trying to escape. We run from one place to another, only to find that there is no place to run. There is no safe harbor from these storms.
Dreams are an integral part of our life experience, although I must admit I know little about their deeper meaning. What I do know is that I have them – vivid, sweat-soaked nightmares that wake me every two to three hours as my body and mind go through the nightly healing processes. They say our bodies only heal when we sleep, so why shouldn’t the same be true of our minds and dreams?
I think many of us have these nightmares – storms, ancient titanic forces creeping over our horizons. Maybe these aren’t just personal fears, but a connection to a communal, planetary network we could all be plugged into. It seems to me that everyone had nightmares when COVID-19 reared its slimy head around the world.
I believe my dreams of storms are related to the real fires our planet is enduring due to climate change. It’s as if the Earth itself is sending out a network-wide SOS, signaling that we’re all in serious trouble. But once the immediate danger subsides, we ignore it and breathe a collective sigh of relief at the end of “fire season,” only to return to our normal lives.
Take our lawns, for example. My parents and neighbors diligently maintain their water-hungry non-native lawns, the largest water user in urban areas. I see their sidelong glances and hear the whispers about my rewilded lawn as they fill up their gas-powered lawn mowers.
According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), about 30-60% of urban freshwater is used for lawn irrigation. In particularly dry areas like the Western United States – places like ours – up to 75% of a household’s water use is used for lawn care.
Lawns in the U.S. receive about 90 million pounds of chemical fertilizers and 78 million pounds of pesticides annually. Lawn care equipment, most of which runs on gasoline, contributes to 5% of U.S. air pollution. These lawns are typically monocultures dominated by a single grass species. This reduces habitat for pollinators and wildlife and leads to a decline in biodiversity. In contrast, native plants, which often replace lawns, are better adapted to the local climate and provide far more benefits to the ecosystem.
But one thing must be clear: the real enemy is not the lawns. The real problem is the way we live, a system that has been handed down to us and perpetuated for generations. It is the entire system – over which we seem to have little control. It is the oil mega-corporations that work tirelessly to suppress new technological innovations and greener alternatives. It is the food suppliers that package everything in environmentally harmful materials. It is the cars that drive us to jobs we don’t want, for salaries that don’t allow us to live on.
Most of us don’t even want to admit there’s a problem, even as we experience more and more days where the landscape around us seems to be on fire with alarming frequency. This cognitive dissonance is fed by the misinformation and blatant lies that profit-hungry corporations have been pushing on us for decades. But don’t worry – they’ve known the truth all along.
As early as the 1950s, Exxon’s own scientists warned that carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels were contributing to global warming. By 1977, Exxon was fully aware of the potentially catastrophic effects of CO2 and recognized that a global temperature increase of 3°C could have severe environmental impacts, including sea level rise. Despite this knowledge, oil companies like ExxonMobil funded campaigns in the 1980s and 1990s to sow doubt about climate science and thus delay fossil fuel regulation. In 1998, the American Petroleum Institute developed a plan to sow uncertainty about climate science among the public and policymakers. The goal was to make “acknowledgement of uncertainty” common knowledge – a strategy that has delayed global climate action by at least a decade.
Even today, when the evidence is irrefutable, these companies continue to evade responsibility. The 2015 Exxon Knew investigation uncovered extensive documentation showing that Exxon not only knew about climate risks but also took steps to protect its infrastructure from the impacts of climate change while publicly denying the science. A 2021 study estimates that fossil fuel companies’ disinformation campaigns have contributed significantly to the current climate crisis.
I honestly don’t know how we’re going to tackle this problem. Frankly, we’ve done next to nothing to accomplish the things we need to do for our species to survive. Like junkies staring at the collapsing veins in their arms, we continue to cook up just another dose of the green grass life we’ve always known.
I don’t think we’ll be the ones who really take on this catastrophic problem and make a serious effort to solve it. It will be our children and grandchildren – those who have lost their homes, businesses and loved ones to the ravages of climate change – who will eventually become disgusted with our inaction. They will realise that if they want any future at all, they must claim it for themselves by taking away our toys of greed and corruption and putting us old people in a corner while they clean up our mess.
Hopefully it is not too late.
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