February in Vienna

“Antarctica sets record high temperature“

When the headline makes its way to the papers and excites the pixels on my smartphone, I had already been in Vienna for 48 hours. During that time, the streets told me stories of some of civilization’s great achievements. Meanwhile, evidence of its potential collapse becomes ever clearer.

I left for Europe on an early morning flight from Portland. It was the day after the Iowa caucus, but official results were yet to be announced. Bernie had managed a comfortable victory among caucus-goers, but a murky calculus conspired with opaque technical errors indefensible in any major democracy to cast doubt on a path forward for determining candidates’ delegate counts.

And like that, our institutions are proving woefully inaccurate for the challenges facing us.

For the Romans, February was the last month of the year. In fact, the Romans wrote February into the calendar only much later, previously believing that winter didn’t have months. Is that where we are now? Humanity’s February. The last month of our collective calendar.

Perhaps we’ll pull it together in time for spring.

A few days after arriving in Vienna, I took a train north to climb a nearby mountain called Schneeberg. Nighttime on the mountain was still and quiet, and a full moon and cloudless sky illuminated Schneeberg’s stark, gray face and bathed the snow in silver light. I remembered the Christmas pilgrimage I made to my Indiana hometown just over a month ago, and how unseasonable it was. Is this the last time I’ll see snow? I ask myself, and know that it’s not. But the outlook grows dimmer every winter.

My assignment in Vienna is to develop strategies to restrict European private-sector support for coal and other fossil fuels at the root of our changing climate. I wonder if I could be doing more. I wonder what more I could be doing.

As our democratic institutions fail us back home, I wonder if we can come together in common cause for the preservation of a habitable planet.