Something strange happens when we call a hurricane or a typhoon by name. Lately we’ve had Beryl and Otis and Helene and Milton. It seems arbitrary that the snow in New Orleans and the fire in Los Angeles go nameless.
Yes something very different happens when there’s a name. Meteorologists and FEMA officials and news anchors seem to quickly get on a first name basis with a new windstorm, regardless of the body-count. When the storms have a personal identity and their atrocious behavior is reported at the coffee machine at work like a kind of super-gossip, as happened with “Katrina” and “Sandy” and “Helene”, then there is a feeling that the storms might be standing nearby, ready to talk their loud language of screaming wind, breaking trees, whistling debris. Do these storms inhabit a culture unknown to us, some atmospheric city of extreme beings? A bit of a sci fi imagination and we might think, “Oh! They all know each other! They planned this!”
We citizens from “the modern world” can cross over to talking about the flood and fire the way native people do. The Earth has a goal in mind, wants a change to take place. Is the Earth a kind of Spirit? But no, when we get the feeling that the tragic disasters are coming from some great life… we think that we have “gone too far.” Our culture can only represent such notions in an animated movie, or in a comic book…. Any depiction of nature that is that fanciful must be delivered as entertainment product.
Compare that to the way we talk about the heatwaves, which lack the resemblance to the emoting human body that delights us about storms. Hurricanes and tornadoes have charisma. Well, tornadoes get the name of the town they hit, like “the Joplin tornado.” But Heatwaves have only numbers, charts and graphs. Hurricanes are like James Earl Jones, entire horizons lifting in malevolent flight, spreading wings everywhere. Tornadoes are Sid Vicious, dying in a drugged spin-out.
Heatwaves are merely explained with temperature, windspeed, bodies, dollars – which returns us to our old wrong-headed “experts” way of thinking about the natural world, which declares that the climate is like a car that overheats, a mechanical problem, could be the fan-belt.
The personalized storm, as in “Helene was relentless, a year’s worth of rain in one day, sweeping towns from the riverbanks…” This kind of reporting, a story with a character going overboard, gives Earth-defending protesters the hope there is another way to impress people with the seriousness of the problem we face. Yes, let the Earth have a purposeful will, an intention.
Persuading the public with information only has proved to be – not persuasive. We’ve been trying this approach for years and still to this day – even with all the fire and flood – the environment is not high on the public’s list of what worries them. That’s the result of leading with nothing but facts.
Make a story, make a song. And give that over-emotional storm a name. Lead with the story and the information will follow. Can we allow this breakthrough? …that the Earth is a living being that we can have feelings for? That would put so much more punch into that shout of “Emergency!” Here in New York, even Helene didn’t get through the 10,000 advertising events we encounter each day. We are stranded in the wrong emergency, the virtual reality of capital.
We are badly in need of planet criers right now! Looking back across the years, the big social movements that won our freedoms, like Civil Rights and ACT UP, were always led with mad comedians and singer-songwriters. The latest named storm is battering Ireland, and has the name Éowyn (pronounced Ay-oh-win). Eowyn is from the Old English, and means “horse lover” or “horse joy”.
She is a supremely powerful noble-woman in Lord of the Rings, able to change the tides of battle with her fierce determination that she will never be left behind.
Earthalujah!
Reverend Billy