This is an episode in the 鈥淲hat Makes Us Human?鈥 podcast from Cornell University鈥檚 麻豆视频 & 麻豆视频, showcasing the newest thinking from across the disciplines about what it means to be human in the twenty-first century. Featuring audio essays written and recorded by Cornell faculty, the series releases a new episode each Tuesday through the fall.
Some years ago, I became enchanted by Atlantis. I was thinking about the possibility of common ground, amidst the rising waters of climate change. We all start off enwombed, surrounded by lapping water. But soon we crawl out onto the shore and cling to mother earth, and then water, the universal solvent, with its power of erasure, comes to embody our fear of death. When the deluge arrives, it wipes out any hint that you ever lived.
The legend of Atlantis gives our shared dependence, our shared fear, our shared humanity, a specific name and place: it belongs to everyone. It is the ultimate commons.
Often, I wish that environmentalists would stop trying to 鈥渟ave the planet鈥 and focus on the injustice of unequal exposure to environmental threats and unequal access to environmental necessities. Yet it鈥檚 worth noting that those necessities鈥攕unlight, air, water, soil, and the rooted things that soil nurtures鈥攁re universal. Each community is a threatened Atlantis, and they are all connected in a web of relationships.
The Atlantis story has its limits, though, and ultimately I got tired of its moralistic logic. Our society is certainly guilty of some of the same hubris and systematic oppression that supposedly doomed Atlantis. But most of the people currently suffering from the impact of climate change are not the ones most responsible for causing it. In the ancient world, tragedy seemed to abide by a certain logic; in the modern world, I find more sense in the theater of the absurd.
I watched both of my parents develop Alzheimer鈥檚 Disease, watched as their damaged brains turned them into completely different human beings. I went from having almost everything in common with them to having almost nothing in common with them. Friends and acquaintances always asked me: do they still recognize you? Well, yes, usually. But I didn鈥檛 recognize them.
Most people who have been through The Dementia Maze agree that the only viable coping strategy is to find humor in the surrealism. So: there鈥檚 my dad, insisting that his 鈥渕ixed drink鈥 requires a splash of every single liquid in the fridge. There鈥檚 my mom, telling me on the phone that she鈥檇 like to put my (dead) father on the line, but he鈥檚 gone to the apple orchard and won鈥檛 be back until tomorrow.
We鈥檙e all born, we all die, and in between most of us develop an acute sense of tragedy. Thankfully, at a very young age, we also learn to laugh.
So how do I think about climate change now? I think: isn鈥檛 it possible that we鈥檒l be better off without Miami?
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