Orders of magnitude

(updated with text: Nov 22nd)

I was originally going to title this “See no evil, speak no evil, hear no evil”, as per my jack o’ lantern theme. On September 28th Shell Oil abandoned its plan to drill in the Arctic. This seemed—especially when followed in early November by Obama’s several-years belated rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline—a major victory against evil, and a cause for celebration. Or, to reframe the descriptor “evil”: these were major victories for anyone who believes that community, the environment, and the current and future livability of our planet are more important than the short-term profit of a handful of already obscenely rich old white men.

These victories are by no means an excuse to close our eyes, mouths or ears to the ongoing injustice and destruction wrought upon the planet and its species (including our own). However, rather than delve into this, let me take a moment to savor these two wins, focus on the hope they bring, and reflect on the scale of what we’re talking about.

In about an hour, with a kitchen knife and a few dollars worth of pie pumpkins, I can carve three fun faces for Halloween, and perhaps bring a smile or two to any parental figures who recognize my motif.

In a few weeks of Arctic summer—had they proceeded—Shell would have carved into the ocean floor, using a rig built in 1985 and retrofitted for $100 million in 2009, perhaps squeezing out a few barrels of oil at the cost of a when-not-if spill that would have imperiled grey whales, polar bears, walruses, seals and salmon, not to mention the symbolic avarice and indiscretion of drilling in the place already most affected by climate change.

In the 65 million years since Earth’s last catastrophic extinction, the forces of evolution, plate tectonics, and climate have created a myriad of fragilely balanced and beautiful ecosystems, of which the Olympic Peninsula is one (pictured is Hurricane Ridge).

In this comparison of orders of magnitude, there is an infinitely greater space between the 2nd and 3rd examples than between the 1st and 2nd. Carving a pumpkin and operating an oil rig are microscopic compared with the creation of a living mountain. With organization and enough pumpkin carvers, I or anyone else could build, or destroy, something comparable to the Transoceanic Polar Pioneer.

And yet our collective actions are without question transforming the world on a scale we can barely fathom. Snowfall on the Olympics may become a thing of the past. Salmon, seals, walruses, polar bears and grey whales, likewise, if ocean acidification unfolds as predicted. If ever there were a time to not lose hope, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary—in the space between when I posted the pictures, and now when I’m finally writing, the devastating Paris massacre has added yet another horror—it is now. We are creative individuals. We must now act with purpose, for good.