On seeing & remembering
As my ancestors would say in Tigrigna:
ዓሻ ዝተኸሎስ ለባም ነይነቕሎ (A tree planted by a fool is not uprooted by a wise person).
There is a temptation, when surveying the current state of the world, to locate a single moment of origin. A single decision, a single election, a single man, whose removal would in principle allow a return to what came before. This temptation is understandable. It is also, the old saying tells us, a mistake.
There is a Tigrigna joke my people tell.
A child comes home from school and asks his father: is it true that we came from apes? The father thinks for a moment and says, I don’t really care where we came from. I am more concerned about where we are headed.
I have spent years watching war films. Not for entertainment, exactly, though they are entertaining. I watch them the way some people read history, to understand how catastrophe arrives, and more specifically, to understand the people who saw it coming versus the people who didn’t notice until it was too late. Downton Abbey, where a family discusses the approaching war over dinner as though it is a weather system that will pass. Winds of War, where Herman Wouk traces the slow accumulation of the inevitable through the eyes of one American family moving through Europe in the late 1930s. The New Look, about Dior and Chanel navigating occupation and liberation and the strange moral compromises that survival requires.
The USSR, despite having world-class geneticists and seed banks, chose to silence and discredit them in favor of the convenient narrative of a poorly educated charlatan, Trofim Lysenko. He pushed Lamarckism, the long-discredited idea that organisms pass on traits acquired during their lifetime. He rejected chromosomes, genes, and the foundations of modern genetics as “bourgeois” constructs. One particularly devastating initiative was his “cluster planting” method, based on his belief that plants of the same species would never compete with each other, a rejection of Darwinian competition that he considered a capitalist concept. Farmers were ordered to plant seeds in dense clusters. The plants competed, of course, and yields plummeted. Over 3,000 biologists were fired, imprisoned, or executed. Among them was Nikolai Vavilov, the world’s foremost agricultural scientist, who was arrested for defending genetics and starved to death in a Soviet prison in 1943. A man who dedicated his life to preventing famine, killed by famine, because he wouldn’t abandon evidence.
In Stalin’s USSR, ideology at least pretended to be a theory. There is no Lysenko of climate. There is no alternative theory. There is just erasure. And yet, eighty years later, with more evidence and far higher stakes:
As the Soviet biology eventually recovered, climate science will too. But, climate doesn’t wait. Carbon emitted today commits the planet to warming for centuries. The grounds we lose today will never be regained.