Powerless

We were watching TV last night. The lights went off just after the world news and just before bedtime. I switched on an electric candle, which gave us some light for a few seconds before its battery died. I stumbled to the bedroom and found a flashlight. When I got back to the TV room, there was Dorothy stuck in our powerless recliner couch. She had to scramble out around the footrest to get free. Then to bed where darkness was OK for a time.

Around 4:00 AM I awoke from a strange dream about how optimism distorts reality, an undigested bit of blog stuck in the hippocampus. While I lay there staring into the cold dark, the lights came on. Then the heat pump kicked in and the house began to warm up. By the time I arose, everything was back to normal except the clocks on the appliances. They needed to be reset. Oh, and the computer. It usually goes to sleep, but this time it was unresponsive, which meant I had to press the restart button instead of tickling the mouse. Woe is me.

We heard today that a drunk driver had taken out a power pole.

The point of this not-so-baleful tale is that we have become dependent on reliable, cheap energy and don't dream of being without it for long. Try imagining a day or a week or a year when switches do nothing: no morning coffee, no wifi, no drive to work, no work to walk to, no elevator to escape the condo, nothing on the shelves at the grocery store; just freezing in the winter dark; and finally no tool but a shovel to dispose of the corpse. Write your own book of things that don't work without energy. Last chapter: include eight billion people without the necessities of life or death. 

Watch the pilot episode on the TV news while the remote still offers control. We get energy by laying waste to the biosphere as if we are drunks. When we can't get what we want by exploiting nature, we withdraw into tribes and bomb the neighbours until nobody has what they want. Long live the sun, earth, air and water, viruses, bacteria and fungi, algae, meadows and forests, insects, fish, reptiles, amphibians, birds, mammals, every sort of sapiens and all the miracles I left out. They are a regenerating system to which we belong as poorly behaved late arrivals. If we use things up faster than they can regenerate, we're done. Alternatively, shall we respect the world that has spawned and sustained us, and restrain our appetites? 

Our not-so-remote control
is right here between the ears in the hippowhatsis.
We can choose the Future Channel
and The Story of Our Children
and whether there will be
yet another season of this saga,

or we may collide
with what gets in our drunken way
and finish
powerless.

*******************

New Hearing in Youth Climate Case: Jordan Olmstead, CBC News, Oct 17, 2024

Politicians Pour Fuel on an Overheating Planet: David Suzuki and Ian Hannington, Oct 17, 2024