Day after tomorrow is here

It may not have yet turned so bizarre that it demands human evacuation as depicted in the movies, but the weather hereabouts is going crazy. Anyone who contests that can go shirtless out of the house, especially after sundown, to feel cold like we have never felt in decades.

Crazy Agaton stayed far too long did it not, showering light but never ending rain that caused flooding and softened road shoulders and mountain sides, threatening deadly landslides and cave-ins. Thank God  us here in Negros were spared the deceptively silent but deadly wrath of Agaton, the unprecedented furies of Yolanda and early on, the life-turning earthquake that whipped and shook our neighbors in the islands around us.

But we cannot escape the effects of the changing climate pattern that’s hit the entire planet. It is said that the earth’s axis has tilted, shifting temperatures and climate conditions all over. It is said that because of this, the Visayas is now  the country’s new typhoon belt and by all indications, we are feeling that now. We are about to close the first month of 2014 and you can just count with your fingers the number of days we saw the sun. The first two months of the year really is the traditional season when cold Siberian winds blow into our country, but this is the first time we are feeling cold this kind, one that sometimes literally bites into our bones.

All those talk of shifting weather patterns and bizarre climate conditions lushly told in the sci-fi tale The Day After Tomorrow are now finally becoming realities in our neighborhood. Sure it has come in a much lesser scale and a more subtle and stealthy way, but yes the day after tomorrow is here, so to speak.

And whether we are ready or not, these realities must now be met with lifestyle changes and adjustments– for one, it is time to bring out our jackets and  hoodies, boots and knee-socks, and other thick clothing to protect us from the cold and water. It hasn’t gotten as bad as requiring us to put on four-layered clothing but it looks like we now have to have clothes thicker than the t-shirts and longer than the short pants we are so used to wearing hereabouts. Ditto our footwear: haven’t we set aside our favorite havianas and fit-flops in favor of closed-toes and high-cuts these days?

The cold has forced us to put to rest, hopefully temporarily, our airconditioning units. We have not gone so far as installing heaters and building fire places yet, but there were days during this month when we did feel the need to have them already, those times when no amount of layered clothes could keep us warm.

And then our menus: the cold days necessarily inspire in us a predeliction for certain types of food, hot soup especially, but for many Negrenses I know, the cold and rainy days almost always bring out the fried salted fish, scrambled eggs, and canned sardines in tomato sauce to the table.  There is no apparent nutritional reason for that; the old folks say that in the old days, that table fare was popular during the wet and windy days because those were the most accessible stuff , when it was difficult to have fresh fish from the ocean and livestock from the mountains. Over time, these humble foods must have become part of our collective memory they eventually became our comfort food in this type of weather.  Will they now become our everyday fare should the cold and damp days become the new normal?  We may not be aware of it yet, but slowly and surely we are being forced to confront this question, and in all areas of our lifestyle, not just with food.

Indeed, we have lived far too long with stable weather conditions we have not really appreciated how our lives are in fact built around those conditions. We used to know exactly when to plant and harvest, store and work, fatten and kill, because we knew when the sun shone and when it hid. Why, we even knew then when to make love so that our off springs can be born at the right seasons!

These days, we must struggle with the new realities of nature like never before. The phenomenon of those animals dying or getting sick of hypothermia in our uplands is a clear warning in this regard. The threat of frost bites killing or stunting our crops are forcing our farmers to learn new things to cope and survive. Now they have to get up before the sun is up and wash off the frost off their plants to prevent frost bites, you bet a new task that they are doing only now. As the crazy days continue, I’m sure we will have to develop new farming practices such as this.

I guess this is all about survival, that single most important impetus that drove the development of mankind and the world: didn’t humanity get to where it is now, problems and all, because of the basic need to survive? Don’t look now, but we may yet be in the midst of the most profound cultural changes of the century, given the new challenges to survival that we face.

Isn’t it exhilarating to realize that what we are going through now, and the changes that we must take, are all part of the human evolution and that whatever we do now in response to our changing climate will become part of the coming culture of the coming generations.*

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