19 From Beetles to Boardrooms: Closing the Hermeneutic Loop of an Existential Crisis

Humans are infatuated with disaster. Perhaps, among the many pitfalls of human nature, our continual fixation with “the end” leaves us the most helpless, the most docile, and the most ineffectual at handling the complex set of ecological changes known as “the climate crisis.” When we are no longer able to conjure up magical explanations for a global loss of biodiversity, contaminated freshwater resources, or polluted air, we can escape to the cathartic thrills of a motion picture. Climate change, so far, rarely comes in such a cimematic form. The oncoming threat to our very existence is often too slow, too “grand”, and too insidious to forge that type of connection with our collective imagination. In another respect, when we see them, the byproducts of what scientists label “anthropogenic global warming” are simply too frightening for our ability to interpret connections. Rather than shrink from the challenge, maybe we need more interpretations, connections drawn, loops closed, in order to start understanding the changes we are going through together.

In the American West, these phenomena have been arriving in the form of wildfires. Unlike a simple drought or polluted wastewater, a wildfire speaks the language of the disaster film – vividly ablaze with the natural element we have spent so much of human history trying to harness. In the 2013 article, “Wildfires Point to Global Warming,” Colorado educators Brook and Gaurav Bhagat utilize this quality to unpack the causes of recent destructive wildfires and connect this phenomenon to the context of our climate crises, vividly yet dryly explaining how the acceleration and breadth of these events is both directly and indirectly linked to global warming. This interpretation may not be novel to the ears of many, but their solutions neatly situate our most familiar selves –consumers – in the driver’s seat of change.

Such solutions are at the ready for many, whether practiced or not: conserve energy at home and drive less; buy from responsible companies and support governmental policies that can actually address the problem. The Bhagats conclude their list ofsolutions with a shift  in the perspective toward the reader, adopting an imperative set of actions. “Take initiative” they write as an antidote to helplessness (5). The final paragraph makes this important turn, acknowledging that individual action will be inneffective unless larger systems change. Short of responding to increasing wildfires by metaphorically “burning down” the system, the primary shift suggested in our personal lives is a change toward an active recognition, holding ourselves responsible to build the type of government and the type of consumer culture we want to live in. The active verbs, “ask,” “demand,” and “get informed/get involved,” (5) help place the reader back in control of a destiny from which we have built so many diversions to avoid.

Of course, this is established by the Bhagats in a thorough description of the nearly incalculable devestation of these fires. Using enumeration, the authors spell out the staggering number of acres and amount of destroyed property,  as well as lost animal and human lives. The effect of these numbers can be numbing, forcing readers to retreat to ignorance. While numbers alone won’t always convince, the focus and background of the pine beetle might be more compelling. An unwitting cause of creating the “virtual tinderbox” (3), pine beetles become an excellent metaphor for the seemingly minute changes caused by warming temperatures. If the “grand” narratives of climate change seem either too distant or too daunting to fully absorb, drawing the connection between these creatures and destructive government policy, corporate greed and/or apathy, and the domino effect of longer summers, warmer winters, expanding the life cycle of a once useful part of forest ecologies, creates an effective visual image that actualizes the “points to” action of the article’s title. Statistics often mean little to a reader unless they come in the form of a meaningful comparison, and the Bhagats cite the “60 fold” increase in beetle populations in recent years (3). These types of illustrations are not only useful for a visual culture obsessed with disaster films, but they reinforce the logical connections between ourselves and the slippery concept we call “nature.”

Clearly, humans have long been troubled by their own relationship to nature, particularly in our increasingly atomized existence. Media is catered directly to our interests and tastes. We have come to expect a robust collection of consumer choices, each one built around abundance and personal detachment from natural resources, technology and human labor. In reality, a disproportionately few of us possess the political or economic power to seize the type of control that might match our knowledge or concern. Unlike the backyard sludge of Love Canal, the asbestos-tainted rain of Libby, Montana, or the indelible underwater images of the gushing Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill, climate crises don’t always create the “downstream” effect that allows us to “point to” corruption and negligence at the source, mobilizing real people to collectively demand even a little bit of political power and influence for change.

Wildfires are a “natural” part of a forest ecology, and they have long been a reality of the late summer months in places like California or Colorado, but recent years have introduced so many people to the experience of a burning red summer afternoon sky “crackling through the clouds like vericose veins” (1). Sensory details like this help us feel the fear in the form of a phenomenon, a discrete event that forces us to try to understand our changing environment.  Closing the “hermeneutic loop” relies on creating such links between phenomena and the contexts that create them, as well as the contexts which form and manipulate the discourses that matter. These types of connections are going to be evermore crucial as time goes on, and as the problems we face grow less avoidable.

Works Cited

Bhagat, Brook and Gaurav Bhagat. “Wildfires Point to Global Warming.” Blue Planet Journal, 2013, http://www.blueplanetjournal.com/ecology/wildfires-point-to-global-warming.html.