23 Elul: You Don’t Have To Make It Up

Thanksgiving is always a big deal in my family, but the Thanksgiving I learned the truth was even bigger. I was writing a dystopian novel: bad chemicals in the ground, strange substances in the air. Birds were dying and frogs were heating up. I started telling my older sister about it and I’ll never forget what she said. “You don’t have to make it up.” She plopped me down in front of her computer and showed me a graph. It was like a hockey stick: the shaft of the stick along the x axis representing the world I had grown up in. On the right side, growing out of the stick and heading upwards were heat, carbon dioxide, and methane. Temperature and greenhouse gases growing out of control. “That’s real?” I asked. 

“Hockey stick graph” Global temperature reconstruction of the last two millennia with instrumental temperature from 1880 to 2020

The computer screen was sitting on a black desk built into the walls. I could hear my cousins’ voices from the dining room and the clinking of silverware. I remembered times in my life when I had felt the beauty of the world. How I sat outside my tent one night at Death Valley at four in the morning. The air was so clear it twinkled. Vermillion mariposa lilies were in bloom, their petals smiling in the coolness. A coyote ran by. I could feel a slight mist on my skin as my pores breathed in the dew. I had never liked the desert until that moment. I could feel life pulsing. It was far from dead. No one had ever told me that deserts are alive. 

My sister smiling in a desert with wildflowers

And then there was the time I stood at the top of Glacier National Park looking back over the five miles I had just hiked. Three pristine pools of glacial waters were below me like sparkling steps, one feeding into the other—paternoster lakes of blue-green water contrasting against the white quartzite and dark green Jefferson pines. It was magical.

Glacial lakes

My sister nodded yes. Staring at that graph, I began thinking of future generations, my grandchildren and their grandchildren, how they will never know the subtleties of a benign nature. How deserts will die as harsher windstorms carry off the sand and microbes. How flower seeds will get too hot to sprout. How glaciers will dry up and breath-taking turquoise lakes will disappear. How we can be filled by the brilliance of life around us and take it for granted. It has been so easy to forget that we – that I –contribute to the destruction of our world on a daily basis. That I am destroying the deserts and the glaciers. As are the fossil fuel giants through their massive disinformation campaigns.

The Jewish word “teshuvah” reminds me to acknowledge wrongdoing and to change. After that Thanksgiving, I began working on reducing my carbon footprint. I joined protests and advocacy campaigns. And I went home and started rewriting my novel. There was a lot to say.

Thea Iberall, PhD, is on the leadership team of the Jewish Climate Action Network-MA. Iberall is the author of “The Swallow and the Nightingale,” a visionary fiction novel about a 4,000-year-old secret brought through time by the birds. In this fable, she addresses the real moral issue of today: not whom you love, but what we are doing to the planet. Iberall is also the playwright of “We Did It For You!” – a musical about how women got their rights in America, told by the women who were there. Along with her family, she was inducted into the International Educators Hall of Fame for creative teaching methods. In her work, she bridges between heart and mind and teaches through performance, the written word, poetry, sermons, workshops, and storytelling.  www.theaiberall.com.