Thirty six degrees celsius (97F). In May.
And on the radio, driving back from the market with the windows down, the voice called it du beau temps pour le week-end. Nice weather for the holiday. Get to the coast. My stepson had his matches canceled in New Jersey the same week, too much heat to let children run, and the man on the radio was selling sunscreen. The whole sky was screaming and man, in his mind-sickness, turned it into a forecast for the beach.
Here is what I cannot put down. You can hear a fact like that, file it next to the war and the markets’ endless talks, and walk into a grocery store an hour later where the shelves are full and the lights are on and the bananas sit there in their absurd little stickers, and some animal part of us decides everything must be fine. The shelves are the proof. The shelves are the prayer we say without knowing we say it. Look, there is bread. There is always bread (and butter :)).
But what are we standing on, really?
Let me start by saying the daunting thing the way I wish someone had said it to me when I still wore a suit and ran companies worth tens of millions and believed the ground was (solid) ground. Almost everything we call stable could stop in a week. Not in a decade. Not in some grandchild’s nightmare. Days.
In the autumn of 2000 some truckers in Britain blocked the refineries. The petrol stopped moving and within seventy two hours the supermarket bosses were telling the Prime Minister the cities were three days from empty. The report that came back named it: “Nine meals from anarchy.” Three days. Nine meals. That is the whole fucking margin between the world we know and the one where a loaf of bread is worth fighting over. And it was not even a disaster. Nobody bombed anything. Some men parked some trucks, and the most powerful nations on Earth looked down and saw how thin the floor was.
Just in time, the logistics people call it, and they say it with pride. Our supermarket has no back room full of food. The shelves are the storage. Everything else is on a truck, a ship, a schedule so tight there is no slack anywhere, because slack costs money and Empire never pays for what it can squeeze. A body with no fat walking into winter, and we call it “efficiency.”
And every link runs on oil. The truck, the ship, the plastic, the cold that keeps it from rotting. And the one almost nobody knows, the fertilizer that grew it. Stay with me, because this took the breath out of me as a man who studied soil and bodies both. Roughly a third of the food on this planet grows on synthetic nitrogen pulled out of the air in factories. And those factories run on natural gas. Methane, cooked into the stuff we feed the fields. That single trick, gas turned into fertilizer, feeds close to half the people alive.
Half of us. Eating gas. While we think we are eating wheat.
So when I say fragile I am not being poetic. I am being a veterinarian (I graduated 25+ years ago and still remember). The organism has one kidney, one lung, half its liver, and is bragging about how fast and long it can run.
And it is getting worse, I will not feed you the sedative the radio feeds. The Pacific has tipped into a Super El Niño, peaking through the winter ahead, loading the dice for more of this. And the great current that keeps Europe gentle, the AMOC, is measurably slowing, the canary going quiet. The cruel joke is that the same heat roasting us in May could, if that current fails, throw Burgundy (and most of Europe) into brutal cold. The weather is forgetting how to be weather.
What are we standing on, really?
I used to answer that question with my bank account and my privileges. Now I answer it with my hands, and the hands know something the bank account and privileges never did (hence why most billionaires are so lost…).
I want to tell you what the hands know. I want to tell you what those in power are sitting on and praying you never ask about, because they buried it on purpose, because the truth would cost them everything. I want to tell you some specific indigenous wisdom we might need right now. And I want to tell you what we might do now. Tonight. This season.
But first, I have to take you into the dirt with me, into ancient wisdom and cosmologies thread (because the Ancient Ones knew), because that is where I finally understood all of it, and it does not reach a neat CEO desk nor a supermarket shelf.
And it is where something really precious and important for your life is to be known.
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