Weather has become malevolent. The floods and windstorms ravaging Vermont in recent days might lead us to that conclusion.
Vermont’s story is one among many. Millions of people in the Southwest and West are enduring temperatures well above 100 degrees day after day. It’s a kind of suffering that has become global in scope.
Of course, weather in itself is neither benevolent or malevolent. Weather is nature. Whether it is good or bad is a human judgment. But something has changed — the climate, of course — but the changing climate has caused our ideas about nature to change.
In the past we referred to nature as Mother Nature, a benevolent term. Nature provided for us. We lived with knowledge of nature’s ways, which were predictable within certain recognizable boundaries. If we were smart, we respected nature. Nature punished us at times (as mothers do), but the punishments meted out fell within certain expected norms.
Vermont’s flood of 1927, which in recent history was the state’s most extreme weather event, was damaging and cost Vermonters their lives (including the lieutenant governor), but Vermonters cleaned up their towns, rebuilt their bridges, and carried on.
People became accustomed to familiar threats. Florida had hurricanes, the Mississippi had floods (including a devastating one in 1927). The West had droughts and fires. But even considering these unusual events, humans believed weather generally followed familiar patterns.
When I moved to Vermont in 1975, I had to learn about those patterns. I came from California, and the humid summers of the East Coast seemed brutal to me.
But then I learned the patterns. It seemed in most summers humidity would increase to nearly unbearable levels, and then after about five days or so, a thunderstorm would clear the air. Sometimes there was drought (a news story I covered in 1978 involved a drought afflicting farmers in Addison County), and sometimes there was too much rain. But mostly the weather followed its patterns.
Because climate change has disturbed those patterns, drought, hurricanes, fires and floods have become the norm. The comforting predictability of the past is no more, and 12 years after the disaster of Tropical Storm Irene, Vermonters are contending with the disasters of 2023.
And that leads to a new kind of fear. That human civilization has brought about these changes adds a twist of guilt, outrage, or redoubled denialism to the sense of foreboding associated with what we may view as malevolent nature.
Why is Mother Nature punishing us, we ask? Because we have changed Mother Nature. And punish is not exactly the right word: She is doing to us what nature does, following nature’s laws, without regard to malevolence or benevolence. It’s not a punishment; it’s a consequence.
Bill McKibben, the author and activist who teaches at Middlebury College, foresaw in 1989 in his book “The End of Nature” how nature would change. It was the first book for a general audience describing and predicting climate change.
His central point was that nature as we had known it for centuries consisted of natural forces that acted upon humans but were largely unaffected by humans. He argued that nature so defined had come to an end. Nature from here on out would reflect the radical changes inflicted by human civilization — chiefly, the burning of fossil fuels.
Lately, scientists have declared that these changes are so far-reaching that we have entered a new geologic epoch, known as the Anthropocene period.
An organization of scientists called the Anthropocene Working Group has designated a small lake southwest of Toronto as an official marker pinpointing the beginning of the Anthropocene era. It is called Crawford Lake, and its sediments show plutonium from hydrogen bomb tests in the 1950s and other evidence of human civilization since then, such as traces of fossil fuels and pollution by plastics and nitrates.
The scientists studying these effects thought the changes to the environment were so great that designation of a new geological era was justified. Crawford Lake became what they called a “golden spike,” a place where the markers of a new geological era were clearly seen.
They had considered other sites where evidence of the new era is prevalent — coral reefs, a peat bog, Antarctica. But they settled on Crawford Lake to tell the story.
Of course, Vermonters can attest to the effect of climate change this summer, as can millions of others all across the country. The oppressive heat, the rain, the flooding — these are what we are enduring, and, as in the past, people are responding with bravery and community spirit.
It’s what happened after Irene. I remember after Irene the platoons of people on four-wheelers plying the woods to connect Rochester to the outside world, and the volunteers cleaning up the mess in Brandon, where the floods of Irene had placed a pizza parlor in the middle of Route 7.
Humanity must deal with it all. If one is beset by a sense that nature has become a malevolent force, the best answer is the benevolent determination on the part of us humans to look to the well-being of the human community. Treating nature with respect is a way of treating humanity with respect, because the natural world is our home, and if we trash it, our home will have been destroyed.
Certainly, outrage is justified at the mendacity and corruption of corporations and politicians who have conspired to delay action on climate change. But that outrage will be most useful when it is directed at the kind of protest action and political pressure that will bring about change.
It’s not nature that’s malevolent. It’s malevolent human action that must be contested. By engaging in that battle, the fear and hopelessness brought about by the new realities of the Anthropocene era can give rise to the hopefulness of action.
