THE WHETHER REPORT

The rain in Maine was totally insane. The 18 inches in 24 hours broke local precipitation records just like those 22 inches of snow in Boston months before. San Francisco never got its sunny September while the Gulf Coast got whacked by the most intense, extensive parade of hurricanes in history. Hurricane Stan smashed central Guatemala while the longest drought in Spanish history was cut by the first ever tropical cyclone to strike the place. Even the monsoon turned vicious when 37 steady inches rain almost drowned the entire city of Mumbai/Bombay. It all makes one feel like Mrs. Astor in her stateroom supposedly saying as the Titanic skewered that frozen berg: “I rang for ice but this is ridiculous.”

And then there’s been the whole lot of shaking going on: the sudden eruption of a dormant volcano in New Guinea, the killer earthquakes in remote Iran, more remote Himalayan Pakistan and ridiculously remote under the sea in Sumatra where the clash of tectons launched that gargantuan tsunami which, oddly, went thataway, by which I mean the people of Japan have a word for this sort of disaster but the people on the other side were speechless.

The most violent headlines of the year have been weather reports and sandwiched between the elegies and excruciating pleas for help were attempts to figure out what is going on here. “Interdecadal climate variabilities”, the newspaper reports, "are a hot research topic." Prime culprit for Mother Nature’s bad mood is our failure to clean up our room, which is to say, to stop playing with all those nasty gases that destroy the ozone layer protecting Earth from the negative impact of the Sun. Those who don’t like global warming theory offer “cycles”, insisting with a shrug that our time has simply come, so be it; this too will pass--it’s not our fault. There are also scattered votes, some cast by comedians, for the hand of God smiting the wicked, striking the burning Bush.

Traditional wisdom has it that people talk about the weather because we can’t do much else about it but what we have here is a debate about human responsibility. Global warming theory is the inkling that maybe we can do more about our weather than we suppose. We are waking up to the ancient Eastern notion of cause and effect, action/reaction endlessly repeated as a chain. The cause for the effect known as global warming is that our SUV’S and air conditioners and jetsetting like a big pot of boiling water turn the steam heat up. The reason weather damage is so mindbogglingly extensive is that our clearcutting slopes and “developing” wetlands has compromised Earth’s defenses.

Mother Nature does indeed smite the wicked. Flush your sewage into the ocean and it washes up on somebody’s beach or in the belly of a striped bass you were hoping to cook. Flush your coal smoke into the ocean of air all around you and it rains back down into your lungs and onto the trees which soak up its toxins. Get excessive with carbon dioxide and watch what cycles back.

Physics tells us that energy is never destroyed because it has a chameleon’s capacity to morph: sunlight hits the tree, sap rises, leaves bloom, leaves fall fertilizing the tree and where it stops nobody knows. What then is the consequential impact on our atmosphere of all the bombs that have been detonated over the past decade? Of all the roasting fires they unleashed and the arsonist’s wildfires that melted acres of trees or thousands of metal cars? Of the unending gunshot explosions? Can Earth absorb all this hellfire and remain calm? Why is it that the so called cyclical years of hurricane hysteria —1940s through 1960s, mid 1990s to now, coincide so uncannily with our historical years of hysterical violence: World War II through Korea, Tibet and Vietnam for one and Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Central America, Indonesia, Sudan/Somalia and of course Iraq for the latest? Imbalance doesn't much like itself.

More urgently, what becomes of the energy that animates us? When we’re smiling and sunny and giving off “good vibes” or when we’re fuming with black rage that releases volcanic ones, where do our personal emissions go? What happens to that energy? If our moods can change ring colors and human demeanor, do they make us rainmakers? Here she is: cloudy with a chance of thunder? Why did the once-in-an-eon tsunami begin in an area pockmarked by nasty energy and get sucked toward the epicenter of the deadliest human eruptions in the world? Why did Hurricane Katrina actually pass over the goodhearted people of New Orleans (let us remember it was the levees that broke two days later thanks to human indifference)? All the blackness of thought and mind the world is awash in, what does it turn into? Etna is rumbling again; is this intelligent design?

Two days after a handful of blindly misguided men turned their own bodies into weapons of mass destruction that blew up New York City, my teacher—a Tibetan guru who can make rainbows appear in the sky on a sunny day--was asked what we should do in a world so fueled by hate and fear. How were we to live in such brute times? “Radiate positive energy,” he said. “We must strive to regain a balance by emitting as much positive energy as we possibly can. Do not cease in this effort.” His intelligence design left us feeling noticeably better by implying we did have some control, could make a difference.

What the Buddha said 2600 years ago is looking better all the time: you have to monitor your every thought because every thought will eventually become an action that will set off a chain reaction. Evidence is literally pouring in that whether our thoughts are positive or negative can make a world of difference. So perhaps we should all think clear with a chance of warmth to find out whether or not we really are the weather channel.

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