The rains still haven’t come. It’s the end of May, and there isn’t a cloud on the horizon. What I can see of it anyway. The air is bleached white with brush smoke, shrouding the mountains between me and that familiar soft planetary curve, the one that reflects December sunsets for a few lingering seconds after the Pacific has swallowed the star itself. Right now our sunsets are smeary golds and reds; our moonrises are downright bloody.
When I was in third grade, our teachers read us a book, “Bringing the Rain to Kapiti Plain” by Verna Aardema (here’s a fabulous reading by James Earl Jones). I remember the knot in my belly as we read about how the animals migrated and Kipat’s herd suffered, and how a “big black cloud” hung over the plain, but refused to release its rain. The relief when the rain came made me want to cry. I couldn’t understand why my white teachers were smiling as we recited “the big black cloud all heavy with rain.” I felt as though I were one of those starving cows. I couldn’t imagine anything worse than baking on the Kapiti Plain and praying for water. Even after Kipat shot down the rain at the end of the book, I couldn’t help but feel suspicious that shooting the raincloud would always work.
I grew up solidly upper middle class, with water so abundant we would throw it on our yards to maintain thirsty grasses that grew thick as carpets. Water was not something I had been raised to concern myself with. On some level, the very idea of a drought confused me, considering the ample humidity of the DC area’s converted swampland. And yet—I felt that story in my bones. The cracked earth, the dying animals, the ominous cloud. I realize, now, that my teachers were smiling and my classmates laughing because to them the Kapiti Plain might as well have been Mordor or Candyland. To them, the suffering was a parable, like the stories of Job or Noah that we’d hear in chapel services every morning. Yes, they explained to us that the Kapiti Plain was a real place in Kenya, but as we were all apparently supposed to understand, Africa didn’t matter—except as a place to pity people, I suppose. Those were the years of Bob Geldof and “Do They Know It’s Christmas” (Well, Bob, they’re mostly Muslim.) and Sally Struthers weeping over large-bellied black babies with stick-thin arms.
Looking this book up now, I have discovered that its author, Verna Aardema, was a lifelong collector of African1 stories, a midwestern white woman who took it upon herself to package these legends into picture books for the entertainment of white children. I am sure that this book was made to entertain white children, because it turns the notion of rain, of regular, predictable climate cycles, into an exotic necessity, a primitive need she is dramatizing for the delight of western readers. “Famine” and “drought” were things that happened on the Kapiti Plain, not the Chesapeake Basin.
Except, it turns out that our “civilized” society is the one that’s been causing all those droughts and famines and floods and hurricanes. It turns out that the Kapiti Plain is Kansas and California, too.
For the last month, every day that we wake up to that brushfire haze and a day even hotter than the last, my hindbrain kicks in and I think: “Still no rain on Kapiti Plain.” The rains came late last year, too. This year all the wells are drying up. Everyone in town is buying water from the three wells that still have something in them. When the rains come (when?), they’ll be filling the water table on a deficit. If things keep going the way they are, the wells will dry up even earlier next year. This town uses less water in a year than a Manhattan city block probably uses in a day, but we can’t wash our clothes or scrub our floors with that disparity. No, we have to figure out how to save even more water: gray water systems, green roofs, dry toilets, rainwater harvesting. We have to do something to save ourselves, because you assholes sure as fuck aren’t doing it.
“You assholes” are also, still, “me, marginal beneficiary of the asshole state.” I’m still regularly taking greenhouse gas-bombing airplanes to various professional events. My carbon footprint is otherwise small, but I haven’t been able to stop air travel. (I haven’t been willing to accept the limitations to my career implied by stopping air travel.) But individual guilt is also not a societal solution. Poor brown people on the Kapiti Plain or western Oaxaca or southern India or in the most of the planet being terrorized by climate change right now are not the primary people who need to take steps to demand the societal changes needed to stop the worst of this. The gross power differentials that enable the Western lifestyle in fact make it impossible for them to do so. So step up, friends in the Western world. Yeah, I know the US presidential election is a shit sundae, but there are direct and specific demands you can make at a local level:
Mandated gray water systems for all new constructions, including setups that allow the gray water to be used for toilet flushing.
Mandated solar energy for all new constructions.
Green roofs and green buildings for all new constructions. No more reflective glass towers. Build carbon sinks directly onto every new building.
Renewable and recycled building materials with better insulation and designs that promote passive heating and cooling.
Change building codes to a) allow people to build their own houses out of renewable material, and b) accept traditional building materials and methods, such as adobe and cob, and newer innovations (such as straw-bale and superadobe).
End subsidies for livestock farming.
Require the industry to harvest methane from livestock farming.
Reusable bottles instead of single-use plastics.
Restore and defend the water and land rights of indigenous peoples; critically in areas with rivers and pipelines.
Close all golf courses in drought-prone areas (looking at you, California).
Give support and tax incentives to any older building willing to retrofit solar energy, gray water plumbing, green roofs, and renewable insulation.
Strict minimum gas efficiency standards that are immediately effective and a sunset on new gas-powered cars for personal use in ten years.
I’ve read (in some cases extensively) about each of these possibilities, but I don’t feel like spending three hours hunting down links. I’m just writing them down because I can’t stand calls to combat climate change that aren’t specific about shit that every comfortable Westerner can and should demand from their local governments. Some of these are things that you can do yourself, and if you have the means, go for it! But most of this has to be mandated at a government level for it to have a big impact. Oh, and I forgot a big one:
A freeze on the construction of new airports and a ban on private jets. Taylor Swift should not be allowed to have the carbon footprint of a European nation because she’s got a hot boyfriend. The number of flights needs to be going down, not up. Maybe fewer flights on bigger planes is a way to deal with this. Maybe just doing more zoom (I know, I know). But whatever the answer is, more flying carbon bombs ain’t it.
That last is more semi-local, but imagine how much of an impact it would have if just two or three municipalities with big airports banned expansion and private jets?
I don’t know, maybe this heat and this dust and the woodsmoke in the air is making me a little crazy. There are, as we all know, such a number of gross injustices occurring in the world right now (the genocide in Gaza and my deeply unloved alma mater’s thoroughly predictable but horrifying suppression of student protestors of that genocide, first and foremost) that it can be hard to focus on any one. But I’m living on the Kapiti Plain right now. We all are—even those of you who still haven’t been forced to confront the fact.
Maybe that’s all I want: for us to notice. For people to pay enough attention and sustain that attention so that they can demand change. I’m as guilty of passivity in the face of disaster as anyone. But I’ll say this for living at the frontier of a global disaster: it clarifies your priorities. You, too, are living at the frontier of one. So think. Then let’s do our best to bring some rain.
I looked up the original story her “adaptation” was based on, and…that white lady just made up some “African folk tale” out of a whole goddamn bolt of polyester. Seriously, it’s not about climate uncertainty at all! It’s about acquiring the basic necessities of life in Nandi society. You throw some goat dung at the clouds to get it to rain in the original (found in The Nandi: Their Language and Folk-lore by Sir Alfred Claud Hollis, p. 123).
Who will cast goats' dung at me?
What will you do with goats' dung ?
I will throw it at the heavens.
What do you want with the heavens?
That they drop a little water on me.
Why do you want a little water ?
That the burnt grass may grow.
Why do you want young grass ?
That my old cow may eat.
What will you do with your old cow?
I will slaughter it for those eagles.
What do you want with those eagles ?
That they drop their feathers for me.
Why do you want feathers ?
That I may fasten them on my arrow.
Why do you want your arrow?
That I may hunt the enemies' oxen.
Why do you want the enemies' oxen?
That I may obtain my wife.
Why do you want your wife?
That she may bear me a child.
Why do you want your child ?
That he may look for my lice.
Why do you want lice?
That I may go and die (with them) as an old man.