Broken Analogies and Climate Change

The Third Ten Million Years is a weekly Precipitate feature exploring the mysteries of life on a single planet, as seen through a single pair of eyes in a single body composed of the same fine material as the deserts of Mars.

Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage (STScl/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Collaboration

The world is a mystery unfolding, if I can be trite, and we encounter such mysteries as often as we care to. For example, last week I traveled far from home to the picture above. It’s from the Hubble Telescope and represents the mysteries I love: I can see the “what” but not the “how,” not the “why,” none of the good stuff. For me, the attempt is not to see an image like this one and float into a fantasy of romanticism. The attempt is to see the mystery and unfold it, to heighten understanding and find new mystery.

I spend a lot of time trying to understand things that seem beyond anyone’s ability to comprehend. Until a few years ago such attempts focused on subjects like God, or at least god, romanticism, and Nature with the capital N. But not so much these days. I have left behind God and god for interests more corporeal but no easier to grasp: the universe, the solar system, the Earth, nature as an actuality, physical laws, natural systems and how they interact. Subjects that at first glance appear beyond understanding. But, occasionally, you see something anew, if only a small part of it, and find a way into something incomprehensible.

Such mysteries are often captured by a simple sentence I don’t understand despite my best attempt to fool myself. Like above. That’s a photo of the birth of a star cluster in the Giant Nebula NGC 3603. Okay. I pretend that means something, but really I’m just a writer, so I look at it and the write down words and try to find a way to pry in to what the birth of a star cluster means.

Back on the terrestrial scale, there’s a simple sentence that drives our country crazy and will be much of the focus of my weekly posts: Our climate is changing and we are causing it. That seems simple enough. But how do we make sense of that? The “what” is pretty easy, but the implications of the how and why are just too grave to bother with. Our political system crafts back-door end-arounds, or else just lies openly to avoid the problem. And it’s easy to blame the liars and deniers, because that’s much simpler than putting in the effort to examine what that sentence means. It takes time and thought to unravel, and a strategy. I tend to find an analogy and use it as a way to crack open something impenetrable. Here’s an example of the process.

I took writing classes back in college, and a professor reinforced an important lesson with a pithy saying that has stuck with me: Form Is Content. What you write is also how you write, and vice versa. This is inescapably true for all writing, and if you aren’t paying attention to it, then you are not paying attention to your craft. So he would say. And if you want to accomplish a goal, to woo a sexual partner for example, how you make the point is also the point you are trying to make. You might speak sweetly in to her ear that, ‘had we but the world enough and time, this coyness lady were no crime,’ thus implying now is all the time that we have and we should seize the moment. A solid strategy, which is likely to have a greater level of success than saying ‘excuse me, can we have sex?’ A crude example to help comprehend mysteries of the universe, but this is 21st century blogging, not 17th century metaphysical poetry (which, to be fair, is mostly about sex anyway).

But I have taken the “form is content” lesson far beyond its writing reach. It has taught me that the “what” and the “how” are related and must always be so. I love this lesson, and in such a lesson I have found an analogy for how I view the universe and the physical world that all life inhabits. It tells me that the content of the universe will be necessarily related to the form and behavior of that content. Or on Earth, all the life that lives here will determine how all that life lives. Got it?

That may not make sense, because like all analogies, it can only be moderately successful. It means that I cannot help but know that the climate is changing. If I take the time to consider the reality of reality, there is no end-around maneuver on climate change. The inseparability of the “how” and the “what” is already determined. I cannot help but know that humans are humans, that we impact our surroundings, and disrupt the balance of nature’s systems, even if it is terribly complex to understand. Because form is content. The “how” and the “what” are not separate because we are humans: we are what we do, just like star clusters and liars.

So this is the project and the premise of this blog: to get at the good stuff of understanding climate change and the Earth, peel back the layers of mysteries and science with words to try to see reality more clearly, and to fail at doing so. As such a project is likely to do.

Christopher Zumski Finke, Staff Blogger