Political and Socially Conscious Writing - A Literary e-zine: The Fear of Monkeys: Issue Six

My parents, God love 'em, never throw anything away. Usually this is a source of concern and physical inconvenience--as when you try to maneuver around the tottering towers of decades-old newspapers that litter their home--but occasionally it can be a source of revelation, a recovery from a buried personal archaeology. That's what happened recently.

I was searching for their old copy of The Night before Christmas, the book my dad used to read to us every Christmas Eve. I figured the original, if it were there at all, would be too shabby to risk salvaging, but I thought I might find the same edition on Amazon to read to my own children. Keeping alive our almost eleven-year-old daughter's flickering faith in Santa Claus has been something of a crusade with me and my wife lately, though I'm not sure why.

I didn't find the book I was looking for. What I did find, among the moldering, masking-taped series of Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew mysteries that crowd their attic shelves, was a book from 1974, when I was nine, a book titled Dar Tellum: Stranger from a Distant Planet. It's the kind of book my daughter still likes to read between hefty chunks of her favorite fantasies, Harry Potter and Percy Jackson: a chapter book, yes, but with large print, pictures on every third or fourth page, and only sixty-four pages in all. So I snatched it--one less piece of junk for my parents to deal with, one less for me to deal with when they're gone--and took it home.

That's when I discovered a certain eerie appropriateness in my choice. I'd remembered the book's basics as soon as I beheld it: the narrator, a lonely boy whose father works in a top-secret government think tank, begins to receive telepathic communications from an intergalactic sentience, Dar Tellum, with whom he forms a friendship. What I hadn't remembered was the plot's principal conflict. Here's how the narrator tells it:

"It seems that the planet Earth was right in the middle of a big crisis. Dozens of cities were in danger of becoming flooded. . . . And the reason for this flooding was that the oceans were getting higher.

"From what I understood, and I'm sure there are gaps here and there, the smoke from cars and factories goes into the air. A part of this smoke called carbon dioxide gets into the atmosphere of Earth. It lets the sun's heat in, but it won't let much heat out. This carbon dioxide makes a kind of one-way lid on Earth. Heat in, but not much out.

"And this extra heat was warming up the north and south poles. So the ice was melting and the oceans were getting higher."

How could I have forgotten my introduction (in 1974, mind you) to global warming? Was the idea so scary I wanted to forget? Or--and this is another way of asking the same thing--did the concept seem so preposterous, even more far-fetched than telepathic communication with interstellar strangers, that I'd dismissed it? To put this succinctly: was I, at age nine, a climate skeptic?

I suppose I was. And I suppose, at age nine, I was entitled. But now here we are, a third of a century behind us, an earthling eternity filled with warnings from senators and scientists alike, and collectively we are still nine years old. Still wishing the problem gone, stashing it in our parents' bookshelf, treating it as fantasy rather than fact. Still, to cite the final words of a grown-up book, Elizabeth Kolbert's Field Notes from a Catastrophe, waiting for someone else (Dar Tellum?) to magically make it go away:

Kolbert is referring to the destruction of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina; she finds in our non-response to the warnings that loomed over that doomed city an apt analogy to our refusal to accept the reality of global warming. Had she read Dar Tellum, she might have found an analogy there too: smoke from factories and cars, warming poles, rising oceans, drowned cities. The stories have always been there for us to read.

But we've preferred to tell ourselves a different story. A story that preserves us blameless, childlike, without sin. A story that justifies our continued denial. A story that erases the one book in our parents' attic that, years ago, might have told us the truth.