Notes on a hot day

A vor­tex of house mar­tins, hun­dreds of birds, fun­nels down to the mir­ror sur­face of our cir­cu­lar bassa. Drag­on­flies, fish, frogs and water skaters scat­ter. The sur­face rip­ples with splashes as the fa­tigued, stale sum­mer air is sud­denly a blur of fran­tic life. Swifts and swal­lows ride the cloud­less blue, watch­ing, await­ing their turn to drink.

It is both daz­zling and all too dan­ger­ous.

Our bassa is vast, the largest in this Pri­o­rat vil­lage, but it is per­ilously de­pleted. The top two me­tres of the round wall are dry as a bone for the first time in my mem­ory, so the birds' swoop must be sheer, the tim­ing crit­i­cal. I wait with my res­cue net, apolo­get­i­cally.

The mighty flock comes daily now, queu­ing on the phone line be­fore quench­ing of thirsts in one of the few places it is still pos­si­ble. We are deep into Sep­tem­ber and the un­re­lent­ing heat re­fuses to yield. The birds scoop up tiny drops while the dry sum­mer has sucked out nearly half of our water re­serve. We are for­tu­nate. Our spring still drib­bles and our well pump works, while neigh­bours have seen their sources run dry.

Rip­pling out from the bassa are scorched grasses and gasp­ing trees. Sit­ting on the bassa wall, try­ing not to meet my eye in the re­flec­tion, only the head-high fen­nel flow­ers (just about all there is for the pol­li­na­tors) and the dis­ease-free gar­natxa vine­yard offer pos­i­tives. For the first time we will har­vest the grapes be­fore the Na­tional Day of Cat­alo­nia.

Some­thing, of course, is ter­ri­bly wrong.

The world is a tiny room and there is an eff­ing, enor­mous ele­phant in there too, if we could but ac­knowl­edge it.

The day fades to black and I stare up at the in­fi­nite stars.

We, the one dom­i­nant Earth species (among the mil­lions), are so trans­fixed by our own image, in­creas­ingly dis­con­nected from what is real and our im­mense im­pact upon it, that we prob­a­bly ap­pear to far more in­tel­li­gent life from other plan­ets to be in­sanely self­ish, stag­ger­ingly dim, dis­as­trously vi­o­lent and, hence, so prim­i­tive and de­struc­tive to be avoided at all costs.

The only cloud when I wrote the above was my deep anx­i­ety. I fear it will never lift.

Why? Be­cause I can see so sim­ply, on one sin­gle sheet of paper, on one com­puter screen with­out scrolling, how, in my 58-year lifes­pan, we have done so much to un­bal­ance every­thing.

The US and China have fi­nally rat­i­fied the Paris cli­mate change agree­ment – hur­rah - but deeds not words please. The wheels con­tinue to turn far too slowly if at all, the dam­age al­ready done so deep that we all now need to brace for im­pact.

Ninety-plus per cent of cli­mate sci­en­tists point to the easy to com­pre­hend Keel­ing Curve (or Kirby Curve) that, from the year of my birth in 1958, plots the on­go­ing change in con­cen­tra­tion of car­bon diox­ide in the at­mos­phere. Read about it. It is an es­sen­tial piece of sci­ence, of ev­i­dence of the man-made in­creases in green­house gases and global warm­ing. The sci­ence is abun­dantly clear on the topic, even if ma­jor­ity of hu­mans are man­i­festly not: our greed, weak­nesses, waste­ful­ness ig­no­rance and he­do­nis­tic, un­sus­tain­able and fail­ing ideas of what makes life ful­fill­ing are re­spon­si­ble for un­stop­pable con­se­quences.

We are com­plicit and are about to be woken from our slum­ber. Or, like me, maybe you al­ready have been, dur­ing those un­easy, air­less nights .

Link: bit.​ly/​2cUHvxh