Flood

My new favorite expression in English comes, perhaps not surprisingly, from someone to whom English is at least a second language—after Gujarati—and on a good night of the telling, a third or fourth or fifth, behind French, Spanish, and Farsi. This is the same friend who didn’t so much coin, as call into existence for its obvious need, the word “parouse”, to peruse while carousing. One of the many delightful things about Neville is the casual conviction with which he invents language, and it was with nothing less that I first heard him say, “Don’t worry about that. It’s just water over the bridge.”

Like the phrase “heels over head” (for is not one’s head almost always over one’s heels under normal circumstances?), this expression packs much more weight than the original and/or intended statement. Water under the bridge carries with it the reassuring familiarity of the hydrologic cycle: the moment may have passed, but just wait for the river to become the ocean to become the cloud to become the snowflake to become the stream, and it will return again. History is a circle. Have a cookie, and by the time you finish it you’ll feel right as rain.

Water over the bridge implies a linearly rising tide, infrastructure swept away, a calamity, a natural disaster, poodles on rooftops, get out the lifeboats. A flood.

Growing up I heard over and over again that history comes in cycles. Water under the bridge. The Egyptians, the Mayans, the Romans, the Anasazi, civilizations rising and falling, the regularity a lullaby. If there was a thread pulling anything forward, it was that of progress. Yes, thousands might die in a tribal conflict, but now we have…the wheel! Yes, millions might die in a world conflagration, but now we have…toaster ovens! morality! iPhones!

Lest you think I thumb my nose at progress: I love my iPhone, aspire to lead a moral life, and am eyeing a toaster oven (less electricity than a conventional, less nukes than a microwave). Neither progress, nor, for that matter, cycles, are bad ideas.

But what gets lost in this representation is the fact that almost everything we as humans have meted out upon the earth—most notably, ourselves—follows the mathematical model of water over the bridge. We and our phones and our ideas and our infrastructure are a flood. We are a natural disaster actively happening.

And by this I do not mean that what we have, that who we are and what we have created and are yet capable of creating, is anything short of wonderful. I simply mean that it is unsustainable. A river rises and falls with the seasons, but a flood by definition rises and rises and keeps on rising. Eventually, on a finite planet with a finite amount of water, it too must fall. My concern is the destruction that a flood leaves in its wake. In the process of converting as much as possible of Earth’s arable land to human food production, we drive other species to extinction. In the process of building the Grand Coulee and Hoover and Three Gorges dams to light our casinos and fill our swimming pools, we condemn salmon runs to oblivion and sanctuaries to wastelands. In devouring our fossil fuels we have already put enough C02 into the air that the ocean, in absorbing it over the next century, will become so acidic that up to 90% of all shell life—including half of the phytoplankton that is the base of the entire marine food chain—will simply dissolve. From the number of new McDonalds in developing countries to the obesity rates that follow to the health care costs of that obesity, from the inequality and abject poverty our unfettered capitalism ensures to the violence that that inequality promotes to the wars we wage in the name of combatting that violence (and, tacitly, to ensure unfettered capitalism), we have removed ourselves temporarily from a cycle of giving back to the earth at a rate equal to that we are taking from it.

Wow. This posting itself has become a flood, a tirade.

Someone recently asked me if I would ever again be able to write about anything other than my new baby. In some ways the answer is that I never have, even from long before he was born. All of the above, this torrent of words, concerns the world that we have created and that our children will inherit.

In wanting to make sense of this world, I also choose to believe that everything that we humans have brought about derives from a parallel flood. This other flood is that of a deep animal desire to take care of each other, to love and protect and provide for our young, our families. Bringing a child into the world is water under the bridge. There is no turning back. There is no return policy. There is nothing but a rising tide, at times overwhelming in the face of the trials of daily living, of love.

We do not invent toaster ovens and dam the rivers to power them out of malice, but out of desire to feed and house ourselves. When we wage war and plunder the earth’s resources, almost always it can be traced back to an urge to provide for our immediate needs, albeit at often-overwhelming cost to other humans, to other life, or to our future selves.

The question then seems to change. From, how can we stem the flood?, to how can we embrace the flood, expand our scope of the flood, to include the entire planet? Can we expand our love for our babies to include all babies, including those born today on the other side of the world, including those born right here 100 years from now?

That seems like a good subject to explore in next month’s blog. This bridge is long since underwater.