A Moonshot for Planet Earth
The most consequential climate change legislation ever, designed to reduce carbon emissions by forty percent and solidify America’s position as the world leader in the fight to save our planet, is being called the “Inflation Reduction Act.”
Come again?
We should be shouting from the rooftops the pending enactment of the “One Earth Act,” or the “Planet Fitness Act,” or even the “Al-Gore-Was-Right-All-Along Act.” But no. Reducing inflation is important, no doubt, as are the bill’s other features. But an earth-shaking $370 billion for climate change shouldn’t be slipped through the back door.
So here we go. This week’s liftoff was horizontal, not vertical, and the focus must turn now from outer space to inner space, from the planets and stars to the overflowing rivers and parched forests. But there is much that the prior moonshot can teach the current one.
Ron Howard’s new film, “13 Lives,” brings us back to the tense early summer of 2018, when an international team of experts and volunteers joined forces to rescue a boys’ soccer team stranded in a flooded cave in Chiang Rai province, in northern Thailand.
As I watched the film, I couldn’t help but note the similarities to one of Howard’s prior films, “Apollo 13,” where, using teamwork, ingenuity and outside-the-box thinking, another skilled team was able to bring home three astronauts from an equally dire predicament. In one case, adults were rescued from an infinite void, with no atmosphere, no climate, and no possibility of sustaining life. In the other, the rescued children were imperiled by a supercharged atmosphere driven by a changing climate.
The boys were trapped as the Chiang Rai cave was flooded very early in what turned out to be a particularly extreme monsoon season throughout eastern Asia that year. The rescue of the thirteen was cause for celebration, but it was a Pyrrhic victory when we consider the deaths of so many climate change victims before and since, including those who died these past few weeks in rain-drenched Kentucky, fire-torched California and sunbaked Europe.
There is a sense that the Earth itself is angry at our hubris and is sending us one final, ferocious warning before it all goes up in flames. In Howard’s new film, the wrathful rains are personified by the mythical princess Jao Mae Nang Non, also known as the “reclining goddess,” whose image looms over the mountain and cave (that both share her name) where the boys were trapped. Legend has it that her ill-fated love met a tragic demise in that spot. Villagers make offerings to appeal to her for mercy, while the rains fall like tears from her grieving eyes. She is a constant, visible reminder that we have made a mess of our relationship with nature, and now we are paying the price.
Recalling last year’s metaphoric climate change film, “Don’t Look Up,” the message of “Thirteen Lives” is that we need to look down, into the darkest fissures of the earth, the caves and sinkholes, the submerged rice paddies and gushing tributaries. Look down into the eyes of the princess– and look around – and follow the advice of the Psalm 115:16, “The heavens belong to the Lord, but the earth God gave over to us.” We need to fix what’s in our backyard and not to be distracted by the shinier objects above.
Both of Howard’s rescue films have the number thirteen in the title, which points to another shared lesson, that both the celestial and earthbound moonshots are profoundly spiritual missions, boosted by a fusion of humility and hope. “Who knows thirteen?” – Jews sing at the conclusion of the Passover seder. “Thirteen are the attributes of God,” referring to the thirteen qualities of mercy through which God governs the cosmos. Through these attributes, we can sense God’s presence and the unity of all creation.
This summer, the James Webb telescope enabled us to see galaxies being born and dying and light that was generated at the dawn of time, just after the Big Bang, thirteen (yes, thirteen) billion years ago. In the Israeli media, the Hebrew word used for this Webb’s eye view of the universe was Ein Sof, which in the secular context means “infinity,” but it is also well-known kabbalistic name for God’s most mysterious and unknowable essence. When we gaze back through those thirteen billion years, and slip the surly bonds of time and space, we approach the Face of God. The closer we come to seeing the Beginning – and touching God – the more we recognize that we are not God, and the smaller we feel.
That stunning vision from the heavens should fortify us with humility for the struggle that awaits; for back here on earth, the reclining goddess is growing impatient. In the Talmud, thirteen is also the age of responsibility. And what greater responsibility do we have than to take those God-like qualities of mercy and apply them to sustaining life here on our home planet? For while we look up and our Webb-enhanced view gets clearer and sharper, we look down and our view of what lies beneath us becomes muddier and murkier. And as more sinkholes start to appear, the ground gives way and the waters rush in. The princess is begging us to act.
“Chiang Rai,” the princess of the cave cries, “we have a problem!”
We need to summon the same dogged determination of Apollo 13 astronaut Jim Lovell and flight director Gene Kranz, as we grapple with humankind’s most intractable predicament. “From now on, we live in a world where man has walked on the moon,” said Lovell. “And it’s not a miracle, we just decided to go.”
And from now on, this generation’s moonshot will be to protect our own little livable orb. We can gaze up there, but only in as much as it inspires us to change things down here. For we have no choice.
Kranz put it best as he wrestled with the unmanageable challenge of bringing the boys home:
“Failure is not an option.”
Now the work can begin, at long last, thanks to the “Inconvenient Truth Act” of 2022.
