Republish this content

<h1>On Unraveling and Resilience</h1>

<p>The world will unravel but you will not<strong>.&nbsp;</strong></p>



<p>These are the words I want to say to my 17-year-old daughter. When I finally do, it will be my most important act of parental love.&nbsp;</p>



<p><em>The world will unravel but you will not.</em><strong><em>&nbsp;</em></strong></p>



<p>Sober realism. Unconventional optimism. Broken pieces that reassemble into something that redefines, and reconstructs, our notions of what we call <em>home</em>. The enduring pull of our core humanity.&nbsp;</p>



<p><em>The world will unravel but you will not.</em></p>



<p>These words reflect the worldview that has overtaken me while working at the front lines of conservation science alongside undying Indigenous knowledge. In a world of accelerating climate disaster, political doublespeak, and horrific colonial legacies, the conviction that we can remain our essential selves throughout the unraveling is what gets me up in the morning.&nbsp;</p>



<p>Most entities—biological, cultural, personal, planetary—can absorb shocks and still maintain their essence. This is what we call resilience.&nbsp;</p>



<p>We log a forest, but given enough time and a stable climate, a community of trees returns that supports myriad organisms, from lichens to goshawks to fungi. This new community does not replicate the one before, yet the interrelationships that define it advance legacies and adaptations from the ancestral forest.</p>



<p>The Nobel Prize-winning activist and author Elie Wiesel gifted the world with his memoir, <em>Night</em>, and many other stories of enduring universality. Holocaust survivors like Wiesel are my people—I am a Jew whose grandparents barely escaped the Nazis. Yet the insights I most need to make sense of today’s world come from survivors of settler colonialism. I live in Canada, where the shocks of intergenerational trauma from 150 years of genocide against Indigenous peoples reverberate everywhere. I feel it in the deaths and near-deaths of friends seeking refuge in substance abuse. The entire nation felt it when the unmarked graves of children who died in residential schools were discovered, en masse.&nbsp;</p>



<p>The flagrant brutality of colonialism continues. It is embodied in the acquittal of the White farmer who killed a 22-year-old Cree man who dared seek help from neighbors for his flat tire. It manifests when armed paramilitary police violently raid and arrest unarmed Wet’suwet’en women defending their traditional lands against fossil fuel corporations.</p>



<p>Yet, despite these horrors, survivors of settler colonialism continue to rise as great leaders. The writers among them give us narratives of survival and resilience to help us understand what is required to navigate the unraveling caused by environmental injustice and climate change. &nbsp;</p>



<div><figure><img src="https://dev-wp.yesmagazine.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/01_Lee.jpg" alt=""/></figure></div>



<p>Canadian First Nations writer Lee Maracle (Stó:lō), nearly silenced for decades by a Eurocentric, male-dominated literary establishment, held on to her immutable conviction that her stories contained profound messages for colonized and colonizer. In her novel <em>Celia’s Song</em>, a double-headed serpent guards a dilapidated longhouse. Inside the longhouse are the unburied bones of people long dead from colonial disease. In return for protection, the people had committed to feasting and singing for the serpent, but “the singing had stopped for the house protector before the inhabitants had died. It stopped during the prohibition laws.”&nbsp;</p>



<p>Despite the intervening decades, descendants of the original people have yet to return to song. Slighted by this disrespect, the serpent unleashes itself. One head of the serpent urges gentle coercion back to song and ceremony. The other is out to consume the spirit of humans. “When two heads from the same body go to war, no one wins,” and chaos ensues. Not until Celia’s people rebuild a longhouse and return to song does deep darkness yield to a chiaroscuro of possibility. Colonizer and colonized consider the gifts of coexistence.</p>



<p>In his own life, Canadian First Nations activist Clayton Thomas-Müller (Cree) survived turmoil reminiscent of Maracle’s war between the two heads of the serpent. In his recent memoir, <em>Life in the City of Dirty Water</em>, he writes of being abandoned by his father and displaced from his traditional lands. Urban disenfranchisement and sexual victimization led him to substance abuse and gang violence. It was reconnection with song and ceremony that enabled him to become a dedicated father and one of the great voices of climate activism.&nbsp;</p>



<p>I have felt Thomas-Müller’s words infuse large crowds at climate rallies with hope. As he conveys in <em>Life in the City of Dirty Water</em>, we must stop “the corrosive tide of nihilism” and approach climate change as “a question of justice, and of community, and about the innate value of what we are fighting to protect.”</p>



<div><figure><img src="https://dev-wp.yesmagazine.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/02_Clayton-1.jpg" alt=""/></figure></div>



<p>The writings of Maracle and Thomas-Müller reiterate that resilience is real at multiple levels. Like many genocide survivors, our atmosphere can take a lot of abuse and retain its essence. It did exactly that for about 200 years, from the onset of the Industrial Revolution until the latter part of the 20th century.&nbsp;</p>



<p>But any entity, no matter how resilient, can be hit only so many times—or with so much force—before a threshold of disruption is crossed and unprecedented change accelerates. Irreversibly.</p>



<p>This is no longer abstract. In 2021, my Canadian home province of British Columbia experienced devastating fires as well as high temperatures comparable to a Middle Eastern heat wave. Extreme rains and flooding followed and turned thousands of people into climate refugees—twice in the same year. This was merely a local manifestation of the planetary condition.&nbsp;</p>



<p>I have been watching industrialized society hurl itself toward ecological disruption for over 40 years. Even if we could magically stop all fossil fuel consumption overnight, the climate of my childhood would not return. About two-thirds of the carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere will stay there for decades to centuries, the remaining third for a whole millennium. Heat already absorbed by the oceans will spend centuries dissipating back into the atmosphere. The great unraveling<br>is well underway.&nbsp;</p>



<p>The climate possibilities ahead now range from plain rough times (the Paris Agreement’s 1.5-to-2-degree warming scenarios) to effing horrible (where our current trajectory is heading). Achieving the former is possible, but only if we debunk misconceptions about ourselves. The notion that humans are inherently destructive is false propaganda invented and exploited by the power-hungry.&nbsp;</p>



<p>The world began to unravel when a subset of cultures and economic systems bullied their way to the top, espousing the belief that species and ecosystems are commodities to be exploited, not relatives who sustain and protect us.&nbsp;</p>



<p>Yet as Maracle and Thomas-Müller remind us, there are other ways humans have lived in the world. Prior to colonization, Indigenous peoples throughout Turtle Island were populous societies that chose <em>not</em> to obliterate local resources. Clam gardens, tended forest patches, and other human-modified landscapes boosted the productivity of desired foods while elevating species diversity. Humans embraced gratitude, respect, and reciprocity in relations with our nonhuman kin. That ethos never died, writes Thomas-Müller: “Since the beginning of colonization Indigenous Peoples have been trying to communicate to the colonizer that everything is inextricably connected.”&nbsp;</p>



<p>Sober realism. The threshold of climate disruption has been crossed. Unconventional optimism. In <em>Celia’s Song</em>, Maracle creates a moment when Steve, a doctor from the White side of the river, crosses the bridge to rise above the racist zeitgeist. I like to believe that ripples from Steve’s moment are still expanding.</p>



<p>In the words of Thomas-Müller, “The most renewable energy on the planet is not solar energy. It’s the human capacity for love, kindness, and forgiveness.”</p>



<p><em>The world will unravel but we will not.</em>&nbsp;</p>

<p>This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.yesmagazine.org">Yes! Magazine</a> at <a href="https://dev-wp.yesmagazine.org/issue/personal-journeys/2022/02/16/climate-scientist-indigenous-resilience">https://dev-wp.yesmagazine.org/issue/personal-journeys/2022/02/16/climate-scientist-indigenous-resilience</a>.</p><link href="https://dev-wp.yesmagazine.org/issue/personal-journeys/2022/02/16/climate-scientist-indigenous-resilience" rel="canonical"/><p>Yes! Magazine is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of ... . Learn more at <a href="https://www.yesmagazine.org">Yes! Magazine</a></p><img id="republication-tracker-tool-source" src="https://dev-wp.yesmagazine.org/?republication-pixel=true&post=99077&ga4=G-74QJNNY44Z" style="width:1px;height:1px;">

On Unraveling and Resilience

The world will unravel but you will not.

These are the words I want to say to my 17-year-old daughter. When I finally do, it will be my most important act of parental love.

The world will unravel but you will not.

Sober realism. Unconventional optimism. Broken pieces that reassemble into something that redefines, and reconstructs, our notions of what we call home. The enduring pull of our core humanity.

The world will unravel but you will not.

These words reflect the worldview that has overtaken me while working at the front lines of conservation science alongside undying Indigenous knowledge. In a world of accelerating climate disaster, political doublespeak, and horrific colonial legacies, the conviction that we can remain our essential selves throughout the unraveling is what gets me up in the morning.

Most entities—biological, cultural, personal, planetary—can absorb shocks and still maintain their essence. This is what we call resilience.

We log a forest, but given enough time and a stable climate, a community of trees returns that supports myriad organisms, from lichens to goshawks to fungi. This new community does not replicate the one before, yet the interrelationships that define it advance legacies and adaptations from the ancestral forest.

The Nobel Prize-winning activist and author Elie Wiesel gifted the world with his memoir, Night, and many other stories of enduring universality. Holocaust survivors like Wiesel are my people—I am a Jew whose grandparents barely escaped the Nazis. Yet the insights I most need to make sense of today’s world come from survivors of settler colonialism. I live in Canada, where the shocks of intergenerational trauma from 150 years of genocide against Indigenous peoples reverberate everywhere. I feel it in the deaths and near-deaths of friends seeking refuge in substance abuse. The entire nation felt it when the unmarked graves of children who died in residential schools were discovered, en masse.

The flagrant brutality of colonialism continues. It is embodied in the acquittal of the White farmer who killed a 22-year-old Cree man who dared seek help from neighbors for his flat tire. It manifests when armed paramilitary police violently raid and arrest unarmed Wet’suwet’en women defending their traditional lands against fossil fuel corporations.

Yet, despite these horrors, survivors of settler colonialism continue to rise as great leaders. The writers among them give us narratives of survival and resilience to help us understand what is required to navigate the unraveling caused by environmental injustice and climate change.

Canadian First Nations writer Lee Maracle (Stó:lō), nearly silenced for decades by a Eurocentric, male-dominated literary establishment, held on to her immutable conviction that her stories contained profound messages for colonized and colonizer. In her novel Celia’s Song, a double-headed serpent guards a dilapidated longhouse. Inside the longhouse are the unburied bones of people long dead from colonial disease. In return for protection, the people had committed to feasting and singing for the serpent, but “the singing had stopped for the house protector before the inhabitants had died. It stopped during the prohibition laws.”

Despite the intervening decades, descendants of the original people have yet to return to song. Slighted by this disrespect, the serpent unleashes itself. One head of the serpent urges gentle coercion back to song and ceremony. The other is out to consume the spirit of humans. “When two heads from the same body go to war, no one wins,” and chaos ensues. Not until Celia’s people rebuild a longhouse and return to song does deep darkness yield to a chiaroscuro of possibility. Colonizer and colonized consider the gifts of coexistence.

In his own life, Canadian First Nations activist Clayton Thomas-Müller (Cree) survived turmoil reminiscent of Maracle’s war between the two heads of the serpent. In his recent memoir, Life in the City of Dirty Water, he writes of being abandoned by his father and displaced from his traditional lands. Urban disenfranchisement and sexual victimization led him to substance abuse and gang violence. It was reconnection with song and ceremony that enabled him to become a dedicated father and one of the great voices of climate activism.

I have felt Thomas-Müller’s words infuse large crowds at climate rallies with hope. As he conveys in Life in the City of Dirty Water, we must stop “the corrosive tide of nihilism” and approach climate change as “a question of justice, and of community, and about the innate value of what we are fighting to protect.”

The writings of Maracle and Thomas-Müller reiterate that resilience is real at multiple levels. Like many genocide survivors, our atmosphere can take a lot of abuse and retain its essence. It did exactly that for about 200 years, from the onset of the Industrial Revolution until the latter part of the 20th century.

But any entity, no matter how resilient, can be hit only so many times—or with so much force—before a threshold of disruption is crossed and unprecedented change accelerates. Irreversibly.

This is no longer abstract. In 2021, my Canadian home province of British Columbia experienced devastating fires as well as high temperatures comparable to a Middle Eastern heat wave. Extreme rains and flooding followed and turned thousands of people into climate refugees—twice in the same year. This was merely a local manifestation of the planetary condition.

I have been watching industrialized society hurl itself toward ecological disruption for over 40 years. Even if we could magically stop all fossil fuel consumption overnight, the climate of my childhood would not return. About two-thirds of the carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere will stay there for decades to centuries, the remaining third for a whole millennium. Heat already absorbed by the oceans will spend centuries dissipating back into the atmosphere. The great unravelingis well underway.

The climate possibilities ahead now range from plain rough times (the Paris Agreement’s 1.5-to-2-degree warming scenarios) to effing horrible (where our current trajectory is heading). Achieving the former is possible, but only if we debunk misconceptions about ourselves. The notion that humans are inherently destructive is false propaganda invented and exploited by the power-hungry.

The world began to unravel when a subset of cultures and economic systems bullied their way to the top, espousing the belief that species and ecosystems are commodities to be exploited, not relatives who sustain and protect us.

Yet as Maracle and Thomas-Müller remind us, there are other ways humans have lived in the world. Prior to colonization, Indigenous peoples throughout Turtle Island were populous societies that chose not to obliterate local resources. Clam gardens, tended forest patches, and other human-modified landscapes boosted the productivity of desired foods while elevating species diversity. Humans embraced gratitude, respect, and reciprocity in relations with our nonhuman kin. That ethos never died, writes Thomas-Müller: “Since the beginning of colonization Indigenous Peoples have been trying to communicate to the colonizer that everything is inextricably connected.”

Sober realism. The threshold of climate disruption has been crossed. Unconventional optimism. In Celia’s Song, Maracle creates a moment when Steve, a doctor from the White side of the river, crosses the bridge to rise above the racist zeitgeist. I like to believe that ripples from Steve’s moment are still expanding.

In the words of Thomas-Müller, “The most renewable energy on the planet is not solar energy. It’s the human capacity for love, kindness, and forgiveness.”

The world will unravel but we will not.