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I am coming to you with this post from outside! Outside, in Wisconsin, in March. It’s a special time of year when it’s still about ten degrees too cold to do “first spring activities” – like wearing a tee shirt outside without a jacket or going for a bike ride or drinking outside (a classic Wisconsin summer activity) – but we all do it anyway. And we do it every time we have a warm-but-slightly-too-cold-still day because we know we could be plunged into a polar vortex anytime. So, even though I’m shivering, I’m staying on my porch until I’m done writing. 

The exploitation of days over 40 degrees here may seem deranged and desperate to those who live in more temperate climates, but I quite like it. Here, I have four or five “first spring days” where I get excited about the little things. When it comes to warm weather, Midwesterners have a kind of carpe diem mindset I think everyone could benefit from. 

Sure, my dad’s entire garage electrical system broke down in a deep freeze this winter and we still can’t open the garage door because of it. But when the day is nice we appreciate that niceness more and we go on picnics and put on our sandals prematurely, and one of the requisites for pure unadulterated exquisite happiness is that it can’t last forever.  

Climate affects culture in more ways than people realize, especially since the modern day miracles of AC and heating and those little fans that you can plug into your phones that have water misters built into them. I’ve lived in multiple climatic zones, from the warm wetness of the Mediterranean to the dry wind of the Colorado foothills, and visited more – California has its sunshine, Norway has its darkness. No where is culture more affected by climate that I’ve seen than in the Midwest. There is a special type of community in the days when all everyone cares about is being outside, and that community only strengthens in the dark, cold nights when we huddle around a bar to watch the Packers. 

Now, I am going to shift this conversation to philosophy, but stop ! Don’t turn away just yet, I promise this won’t become too academic and I do have a point. 

One of my Wisconsin springs in high school was spent, yes, spending the $20 my dad gave me on whole watermelons to eat outside with my friends and hammocking over our freshly melted creek on warm days similar to the one I’m experiencing right now. But it was also spent learning about the philosophical theories of transcendentalism and naturalism. 

These theories are long-reaching and twisted and I’m not going to talk about all facets of them because quite honestly, I don’t know enough about them to. But here’s the part of them that stuck with me when I was 14: thinkers of this movement believed in the absolute power of natural processes and nature itself. 

Transcendentalism holds that society is corrupted and we ought to focus on returning to individuality in nature. Think hermit in a cabin who lives off the land, Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1860s man in boots and a long beard and an affinity for campfires. 

Naturalism is a fascinating meld of science and philosophy. Part of it holds that nature, whether it be the atoms that build the universe or gravity pulling the earth on a leash around the sun or the trees that ground our soil, is the reigning power in our world (instead of a supernatural power, such as a god or gods or spirits). 

I don’t agree with a lot of the arguments of Transcendentalism and Naturalism, but the superiority of nature they push is something I think we need more of nowadays. 

The stories I read that high school spring were brutal sagas of nature, to put it honestly, beating the actual shit out of humans. Stories of man thinking he is better than nature, stronger than nature, and then being absolutely decimated by a blizzard or a flood or a tree fall, probably in the most gory way possible.  

My favorite, which I beg my family to watch the movie version of every year when the temperature drops below negative ten degrees, is Jack London’s To Build a Fire (available online for free, by the way). A man and his dog attempt to walk to a mining camp in Canada, in negative 75 degree weather, and just fail miserably. He fucks up so bad. He does such a Bad Job it’s almost funny, especially when you’re reading or watching from the comfort of your heated home and you can’t physically can’t comprehend how painful it must’ve been when he falls in a freezing river or a snow bank from a tree branch douses the fire he took forty minutes to make because his fingers have frozen solid. In the end the man dies, literally freezes to death alone in the Canada Yukon, and his dog almost immediately carries on to find another source of warmth and fire.

The scenario in To Build a Fire is an extreme one, to be sure, and at first glance we might scoff at the man and his ego. It is decidedly stupid to set out alone in the cold. It is decidedly stupid to not prepare for harsh weather, to not take natural dangers and disasters seriously, to think that you, a puny human, can survive against a force that doesn’t give a damn if you live or die…do you see where I’m going, or do I need to spell it out? That’s what we’re doing right now. We are in To Build a Fire RIGHT NOW. Don’t exit the tab! I know it’s scary to think about. Give me thirty more seconds. 

Something one of my environmental science professors in college tried so hard to nail into our heads during lecture was that the victim of the climate disaster is not the earth. It is us. Do you seriously think that the earth doesn’t have the processes to cool itself down, to regrow, to take the land back over? Are you haughty enough to think you and your technology are enough to protect from extreme cold, extreme heat, extreme mudslides and earthquakes, extreme fire? Then you are no better than the fictional man who is too insignificant to even warrant a name whose joints froze over 100 years ago in the Yukon. Stay with me, stay uncomfortable for one second longer. Please! 

The earth will be okay. It will be able to regulate the climate change that we have created, eventually. We are who we have to worry about. Us and every other living creature, but us. 

I’m sorry if this reminded you of the existential helplessness you feel when it comes to the climate crisis. I know it’s not your fault. But I do think we all could try a little harder and I do think the response to it not being your fault shouldn’t be “well, the oil corporations are still running so I might as well buy more plastic clothing from this huge polluter that I’ll throw away after one use”. Like, I just learned how abhorrent ChatGPT is for the environment and instead of feeling guilty about my previous extensive use of it (how should I have known?) I’ve just stopped using it. 

It feels good to try, I promise. No one will be perfect, and the corporations are still the problem and I still produce waste and I still don’t fuck with paper straws so I just don’t use any, and then I spill and get mad about it all. It’s okay. Just try. Because who knows? Maybe one extra layer of protection from nature would’ve gotten the man in To Build a Fire to his destination. 

And really the reason I have transcendentalism on the mind is because of this nice day outside and the impermanent nature of happiness. Because yeah, one day I might get mauled by a bear that isn’t tracked anymore because the park ranger who was supposed to do that got fired, or I might develop a lung infection because of a factory shutdown, and they cut down all the trees that could’ve helped the air quality. You might drown in a flood on the street outside your house and you might die of heat stroke when your air conditioning breaks for just one day too many. We all could end up as the man in To Build A Fire and nature will continue on just as his dog did.

But today the sun is shining, and the ground is soft and spongy with snowmelt and kids are learning how to bike on the same sidewalks that old women gossip on, the only ones wise enough to know that no, it isn’t warm enough to wear a T-shirt. Today a lot of us can go outside and take a breath of fresh air and feel the sunshine on our skin, on our skin dried, and our lips cracked from the cold, and no climate crisis or oil baron or evil obese tanned executive can take that one moment away. It’s yours forever. Let it give you something to fight for. 

(and for the love of god if you go to a national park this summer, don’t litter and keep your distance from wildlife.)