The Perfect Winter Storm

Our local daily newspaper, the Bangor Daily News, is very good, and its editorial and op ed pages, in particular, are the best kind of this genre: a source of never ending conversation and infuriation.

Last week, in the midst of our second major snow and ice storm of the not-quite-here-yet winter, columnist Kent Ward from up in the County decided to use some newsprint inches by pooh-poohing, alongside a few seemingly “sacred cows,” global warming. He did so from a very particular, traditional Maine viewpoint, one which greatly informs our Down East island fishing culture and is therefore worth further consideration.

This viewpoint has several predominant characteristics, all of which Ward ably illustrated. The first and most obvious here in our own community is a pragmatic “what you see is what you’ve got” approach to the world. Ward’s expression of this characteristic sounds like this: we’ve had more major snowstorms, ice, and cold in the first days of December than at any other time in recent memory; therefore, there is no such thing as global warming.

The second and related characteristic of our rural Maine communities which Ward exemplified in this column is a separation of the human world of cause and effect from the natural world. Snowstorms and cold weather are forces that effect human beings, creating inconvenience and pain; yet their causes are disconnected from any human action.

The third and most important characteristic of Maine communities illustrated in Ward’s column is a natural resources-based fatalism. If “what you see is what you’ve got,” and the natural world is a force of its own, separate from human causation, then there isn’t a damn thing you can do about global warming. Just like the past ballyhoo about a potential “nuclear winter,” Ward writes, concerns about the negative effects global warming are just another creation of the “professional doom-and-gloomers of the world” (the polar opposites, if you will, of the cheery, optimistic, traditional folk in northern Maine).

Our local version of these characteristics sounds like this: the fish aren’t here this year; this has happened before; we don’t know why and we can’t control it; maybe they will be back when they’re ready. Or perhaps an angle like this: property values are increasing; we can’t afford our homes or taxes; “the economy" is a large, natural phenomenon and there is nothing we can do about it.

There is a lot of wisdom in this type of fatalism, which has its deep and understandable roots in rural experience and traditions that for centuries had no way of measuring human impact on our own environment; and in problems that seem so much bigger than we are that they are unsolvable. Fish DO come and go in natural, often unpredictable cycles—just like the weather. Fish and weather are natural elements of our world, with lives and spirit and meaning of their own; they are rightfully mysterious to us.

This traditional Maine viewpoint, however, also helps us to avoid taking responsibility for ourselves and our actions. It’s one thing to believe in god, or to recognize that the world is a bigger and more powerful spirit than our own individual self; it’s another thing to use this knowledge and respect to abrogate our individual responsibilities, as part and parcel of this world.

Luckily for our fisheries, most of our local fishermen are, in their own words, “waking up” to the fact that the demise of ground fish, and potentially lobster, are the direct result of fishermen’s own management of the resources; and they’re working to turn that management around.

What are our similar responsibilities for global warming or escalating property valuations? The tragic aspect of both phenomenon is that they are NOT “natural” or inevitable. They are a direct result of how we, in the richest and most developed country in the world, consume resources.

Our fierce ice and snow storms are a part of, not separate from, global warming. Our high property taxes are a direct reflection of how little we choose to involve ourselves with core community issues via land use ordinances and economic development initiatives.

It’s true, each of these is a very complex ecosystem, in and of itself; and, as individuals, we are small in the face of these much larger issues. But together we are powerful. The earth has born witness to both glacial and tropical ages throughout the millennia and, with our help, is quickly entering another tropical age. Our oil-and-consumption based economy is quickly entering a recession. If we’re unwilling to take both small and large actions to stem the effects of these very human phenomenon—rising tides, droughts, the loss of farms and fish and jobs and the polar ice caps—then at the very least, in another good Maine tradition, we need to be willing to let them go without complaining.