The Rising Sea

I am old enough, but just barely, to remember Robert Frost reading his poem, “The Gift Outright,” from memory at President Kennedy’s inauguration on January 20, 1961. (I was just in second grade, but our teacher, Mrs. Slass, made sure—apparently successfully—that we would remember both that day and that poem for the rest of our lives.) But far more important to me in Frost’s magnificent body of work, at least later on, was his poem “Fire and Ice,” which I memorized in high school and still know by heart. True, it’s only five lines long. But even at that length, it is still very satisfying to read along as the poet famously wonders whether the world will one day end in a fiery conflagration that consumes all that humankind shall by then have built or in a new Ice Age that will simply overwhelm the peoples of the earth with a lifeless blanket of frozen water. I hadn’t thought about “Fire and Ice” for a while, though, until it suddenly resurfaced in my consciousness the other day as I was reading—coincidentally just days before hearing the story of Noah read aloud in synagogue—an article in the New York Times reporting on a new scientific study published just last week in the journal Nature Communications. (To read the study in Nature Communications, click here. To read the summary report in the New York Times by Denise Lu and Christopher Flavelle, click here.)

The Nature Communications study, by Scott A. Kulp and Benjamin H. Strauss, determined that previous methods of calculating the effects of rising sea levels were seriously inaccurate, and that the correct figures are infinitely more devastating than the ones formerly proffered: the study concluded that 150 million people are currently living on land that will be submerged beneath the rising sea by 2050, a mere thirty-one years from now. They are not necessarily doomed, of course. There are, for example, about 110 million people already living on land below sea-level but whose dry-land habitat has been secured through artificially constructed sea walls and barriers of various sorts. The same could theoretically be done in the course of the next three decades for a significant portion of the 150 million people whose land will be flooded by mid-century. The questions, therefore, are as few as they are sharp. Do we have the knowledge to prepare in advance for this almost unimaginable catastrophe hovering over the horizon? Do we have the skill to translate theory into practice and to pre-rescue the land on which so many millions live while we still can? And, most unsettling of all to ask out loud and seriously and honestly to attempt to answer: do we have the collective will to address this issue on a global scale and in a way that sets aside the petty concerns of individuals and single nations in order to respond to a humanity-wide crisis in a way that encompasses the collective will of all humankind to act forcefully, thoughtfully, and successfully on its own behalf?

Looking further into the future only yields an even more unimaginable prognosis: Kulp and Strauss predict that a plausible, albeit worst-case, scenario puts 630 million people living today on land that will be submerged by 2100, a year that only sounds distant until you begin to figure how old your grandchildren’s grandchildren will be around the turn of the next century. To describe the situation even more starkly (and without relying on projections or estimations at all), a full billion people live right now on land less than ten meters above sea level, of whom a full quarter (i.e., 250 million people) occupy land currently less than one single meter above sea level.

And so we finally have an answer to Frost’s question. Yes, the world will be toast (in both senses of the expression) in five billion years when the sun turns into what astronomers call a “red giant” that, as it expands into its next stage of being, will engulf first Mercury and Venus, and then Earth in a thermal cocoon of almost unimaginable heat. Perhaps we will by then have long since decamped to some alternate planet with a better prognosis for long-term survival. But long before that (and in our own lifetimes), human life as we know it will be disrupted by water as the seas rise and we either do or don’t find the wherewithal to stem off at least the most potentially devastating of the effects that the rising sea will bring in its wake. So what if Frost and Dante were wrong in supposing the devastating water would come all froze up? They had the right basic idea! So at least that’s settled.

Poets vied with themselves in ancient times—or at least in Israelite ancient times—to find an appropriate metaphoric range along which to describe the great goal of all mystic endeavor, the attainment of a state of ongoing communion with God. It sounds almost simple when written out so plainly, but the journey to God was (and is) truly daunting—and for one single reason: since God by definition exists outside human experience and since all human language is rooted precisely in the warp and woof of human experience, any effort to speak honestly and clearly in any human language about God should be impossible. And, ultimately speaking, it probably is impossible…but only for writers of prose. Poets are used to using language somehow to describe the essentially indescribable and so, at least in theory, the task should not be beyond the best of them. Nor was it beyond the poets of ancient Israel, as the various efforts in the Book of Psalms to describe what it would be like experientially and sensually to know God—or at least to know of God—seem unequivocally to prove.

Different ancient poets choose different metaphoric ranges along which to express themselves and more than a few described the experience as one of drowning and then, at the very last moment, feeling oneself miraculously saved from certain death. The poet whose ode to God encountered is our eighteenth psalm, for example, writes movingly about the sense of being lifted up by divine hands from a sea in which he was at that very moment about to perish. The author of the sixty-ninth psalm writes about waiting for God to speak as he sensed himself sinking slowly into the seabed and the water rising all around him. The authors of the 88^th and 124^th psalms wander the same metaphoric path, as does the author of the psalm that appears as the second chapter of the Book of Jonah. These odes to God’s palpable presence are different in lots of ways, but they all have in common this single feature of likening the experience of God to the sensation of being almost drowned and then being miraculously being saved. And, of course, this was the Israelites’ story as well: they too almost drowned in the Sea of Reeds on their way to their experience of intimate communion with God at Sinai. (One of my earlier essays in the journal Conservative Judaism was about this notion of drowning in God; click here to read what I wrote back in 1999.)

Along with Frost’s, these poems too came to me after I read that piece in the paper about the Nature Communications study. At first, they seemed antithetical: the biblical poets were using the notion of being almost drowned and then at the very last moment rescued to describe how it felt to them to be elevated out of mundane reality and—even if just for a long moment—ushered into the reality of the divine, whereas the authors of the Nature Communications study were talking about the possibility of countless numbers of people drowning—or almost drowning—as they flee their homes for higher ground that they either will or will not actually reach in time. But then I changed my mind and in an uncharacteristically hopeful way: perhaps, it struck me, the ancient poets were actually offering us the wherewithal to deal with this new study productively and meaningfully.

The waters are rising, that much seems certain. Nor is there any question that the seas are rising because of human intervention in the natural eco-system of our planet. (Click here to visit the website of the National Ocean Service of the U.S. Department of Commerce if you still need convincing on either of those assertions.) And so the only real question is whether humankind can respond meaningfully to the implications of a changing climate and a changing environment without becoming mired in a swamp of indulgent self-interest from which ultimately none will get out alive. If we just apply to everybody’s better angels to get on board, I suppose we will end up with nothing at all. But if the faithful of the world—and particularly those whose Bibles feature the full text of the Book of Psalms—were to understand that the rising sea actually is God speaking to us, warning us, remonstrating with us, reminding us of our responsibilities to all who bear the divine image (which is every living soul on earth) and to the planet on which all those people bearing God’s image live—then perhaps we can still act meaningfully, and as one, to save ourselves before it really is too late. As all my readers know, the Book of Psalms is primarily a prophetic work. But even the most authentic prophetic prediction can be averted through concerted human action. The Book of Jonah teaches that clearly enough. So the question is only really whether we are prepared to act on that lesson or not.

I close with another favorite poem. In the fifth book of his “The Prelude,” William Wordsworth describes a strange encounter he had in a dream with a mysterious stranger. In the dream, his gaze is drawn in the direction of the stranger’s. “And looking backwards when he look’d, I saw / A glittering light, and ask’d him whence it came. / ‘It is,’ said he, ‘the waters of the deep / Gathering upon us,’ quickening his pace / He left me: I call’d after him aloud; / He heeded me not; but with his twofold charge / Beneath his arm, before me in full view / I saw him riding o’er the Desart Sands / With the fleet waters of the drowning  world / In chase of him, whereat I waked in terror, / And saw the Sea before me; and the Book, / In which I had been reading, at my side.’  I first encountered those lines in W. H Auden’s remarkable book, The Enchafèd Sea, then sought them out in their original context. I offer them to you all today, however, not as poetry but—in the style of the ancient bards who created the Psalter—as prophecy. And so are we just where the poet himself also was: between the word (in our case, as published last week in Nature Communications) and the sea itself. Shall we just read? Or shall we act? That wasn’t precisely the poet’s question to his readers back in 1805, but it is mine to all of you this week.

So what else happened this week? Oh yes, the United States began the procedure intended formally to withdraw our nation from the Paris Climate Accord.