Mary Oliver, climate anxiety and the comfort of ancient disasters
Come for Mary Oliver's poetry, stay for the dinosaur facts.
There are few people better at describing the bond between nature and the human soul than Mary Oliver. That’s just one of the reasons she’s a favourite poet of mine - that, and the joyous honesty that permeates her work. The clarity with which she describes the flight of wild geese and our desire for a connected purpose in the same breath. The way she puts words to feelings many struggle to describe.
However, it’s been a little harder to read Mary Oliver lately. A few months ago, I treated myself to a copy of Devotions, a poetry anthology of her work that Oliver curated before her death. Sometimes, I read it and feel all the things I’ve described above. Other times, I read it and feel a sense of dread.
Oliver’s connection to nature was somewhat spiritual. She speaks of the trees and the flowers and the wildlife with reverence: “I would almost say that they save me, and daily.”
I have begun to feel that same sort of reverence, but with the sense that it’s a little too late. After another heatwave in the UK last week, reading headlines about how scientists ‘say intense droughts, wildfires and heatwaves are the new reality’ is certainly enough to kickstart some climate anxiety.
A recurring theme in many of Oliver’s poems is the cycle of the seasons, how there will be periods of decay, and from that decay comes growth, always. And then I hear mention of warm winters and snow in spring and it feels as though someone has tipped Oliver’s precious seasons on their heads.
I’m sure there’s no need for me to preach to the choir. We all know warm winters aren’t good, that frozen fields in spring don’t bode well, that an aerial image of the UK recently showing the damage this dry weather has caused doesn’t make for a pretty picture.
It becomes difficult, then, to enjoy Mary Oliver’s poems with any kind of innocence. Yes, the violets are flowering and the geese are heading home and the otter is rolling in the river, but for how much longer? I swear I have the date we’ll run out of fossil fuels etched into my brain. It’s 2060, by the way.
So how do I try to curb my climate anxiety? Most self-help guides for climate anxiety have you practising mindfulness, which is actually great, but I feel like the impending doom of our planet requires some more hard-hitting coping mechanisms.
Take comfort, then, in the knowledge that we aren’t actually killing the planet. Climate change is happening, of course, but the only things hurtling towards cataclysm are the human race and the other species who have the misfortune of existing in the same time period as us. The climate change we are seeing right now is man-made. When we are finished, Earth will recover. It’s done so many times before.
I am really into dinosaurs. One of my favourite stories from my childhood is how, when taken to the Early Learning Centre, a toy shop chain, I would make a beeline right to the dinosaur figurines.
If you, too, are also really into dinosaurs (and if you’re not, you will be soon) then you should read The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: The Untold Story of a Lost World by Steve Brusatte. It is the perfect bedtime read (trust me), though my partner probably disagrees - I bet he hears the words “dinosaur fact” in his nightmares.
What I’m getting at here is that, before T-rex and diplodocus were doing their thing, and long before that asteroid came to wipe most of the dinosaurs out of existence, there was another, far larger, far more terrifying extinction event that occurred. It’s called the Permian-Triassic extinction, also known very cheerfully as The Great Dying. Brusatte puts it best: “As horrible as the end-Cretaceous extinction was, it had nothing on the one at the end of the Permian. That moment of time 252 million years ago… was the closest that life ever came to being completely obliterated.”
No one entirely knows what caused The Great Dying, though consensus seems to point in part towards volcanic events that poisoned the air and water and caused temperatures to rise. This extinction event ushered in the Triassic period, when dinosaurs evolved and charged their way to the top of the food chain. Before that, however, as the volcanoes erupted and the seas boiled (presumably), life was hanging on by a thread. Brusatte paints an apocalyptic picture:
“I get the creeps when looking at the earliest Triassic tracks. I can sense the long-distant spectre of death. There are hardly any tracks at all, just a few small prints here and there, but a lot of burrows jutting deep into the rock. It seems the surface world was annihilated and whatever creatures inhabited this haunted landscape were hiding underground.”
It makes me think of the myriad dystopian and post-apocalyptic societies featured in various art forms. The desert wasteland of Mad Max, the nuked ruins of the Fallout video game franchise, the deadly, endless sands of the Silo series. I could go on (apocalyptic fiction is a strange passion of mine), but you get the idea. As humans, we have always enjoyed imagining our demise.
I say always, as world-ending floods are a feature in many world mythologies and ancient texts, like The Epic of Gilgamesh. It’s assumed that a catastrophic flood happened at some point, seeing as so many cultures from a similar time describe somewhat identical, yet differently embellished, flood stories. For the people living then, this flood must have very much felt like the end of the world.
During last week’s heatwave, I read Kiran Millwood Hargrave’s latest novel, The Dance Tree. It’s set against the backdrop of the Strasbourg dancing plague in 1518, when temperatures soared and, coupled with psychological stress, women took to the streets of the city to dance as though possessed. In the novel, the main character Lisbet at one point laments how it seems to be the end of the world - the heat is unbearable, women are dancing to their death and the poor are starving. Take out the dancing plague, and this era sounds somewhat familiar.
The cost of living is rising and so are the seas. Like the citizens of Strasbourg in 1518, we are hurtling towards a man-made disaster with no clear escape. I can recycle as much as possible, refuse to even contemplate the idea of a plastic straw, but my efforts will pale in comparison to the change desperately needed from the top - change that doesn’t seem forthcoming.
I am sure it felt that way for the women caught in the grips of the dancing plague. There was nothing left for these women to do but dance, to carve out joy with their feet. It likely felt the same for the epic poets of ancient Mesopotamia when they pieced together Gilgamesh’s story in the wake of a natural disaster.
And so it seems silly to read Mary Oliver’s hopeful poetry and allow myself to wallow in dread. Instead, I’m trying to take a leaf out of Oliver’s book and see the beauty in nature no matter what. I want to live life like the writers of the flood myths and see disaster as an excuse to create, and especially (just like Zeus in the myth of Deucalion and Pyrrha when he sent a flood) to create something better. Perhaps instead we can take comfort in the knowledge that life will go on, in some way and in some form, no matter what we do. It’s happened many times before.
If you enjoyed this newsletter, I’d love to hear your thoughts! Do you feel climate anxiety? Are you also a dinosaur aficionado?
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