Things that were once freak occurrences steadily become routine events, and then one day, here we are
Crows at Twilight, Shibata Zeshin 柴田是真 (1807-1891), Arthur M. Sackler Gallery https://asia.si.edu/object/S1997.72/
Well every month it seems some fresh serving of hell is delivered up as a reminder, in case it was not clear already, that we are really in the shit now. I think it was just last week that I linked to an article that was headlined “California’s Apocalyptic August,” and not halfway into September we’re seeing images from the West Coast of the sun blotted out by wildfire smoke and ash. One of the difficulties with selling people on climate change for the past several decades was the lack of defining lines that demarcate success or failure, arrival or avoidance, but the nature of the crisis is that things we’ve always had to deal with become intensified, and things that were once freak occurrences steadily become routine events, and then one day, here we are.
I try to not make this newsletter a weekly laundry list of awful things happening although sometimes I guess that’s the laundry list you’re dealt for the week. So right now we’re seeing what could be the biggest wildfire outbreak in the US since 1910, which has consumed more than 3 million acres in California and almost a million in Oregon. Six of the 20 largest wildfires in California history started in August and September. Towns have been destroyed, hundreds of homes lost, and locals are describing it as “apocalyptic,” leaving even experts “searching for stronger superlatives.”
Wildfires are one of the clearest examples of the consequences of climate change, with hotter temperatures, longer summers, drier conditions, and less snowpack leading to bigger and faster-moving fires. In Oregon right now, one frightening hallmark of the fires is their remarkable speed, moving through timber at a pace you usually only see in grassland fires. Dry winds are leading to “extreme fire behavior” including “mushroom cloud-like plumes of smoke that reach 40,000 feet in height.”
Climate change is a crisis of recurring and concurrent disasters, so these stories always sound familiar because something similar happened just a couple years ago or even within this year in different location like Australia, and it used to only get this bad every 5 or 10 years maybe. And alongside this wildfire season alone, the Midwest was hit by a violent storm with hurricane-force winds called a derecho, Hurricane Laura hammered the Gulf Coast, the Southwest is experiencing drought conditions, and my hometown of Phoenix is about to wrap up the hottest summer ever recorded.
I remember reading somewhere that scientists tend to be far more measured in the descriptions of what they study than the press or the public—except when it comes to climate change, where the experts are almost always far more freaked out than the rest of us. Annie Lowery has a great article that I will also blurb below, but has this particularly upsetting quote from NASA climate scientist Peter Kalmus:
I am absolutely terrified. What’s happening to the Earth system, it is happening so much faster than I thought it would,” said Kalmus of NASA. “The observations, the interpretations, the projections from the climate model—when I translate that into the emotional part of my brain, what I feel is panic and terror. I struggle to breathe sometimes. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night, and I just feel like there’s no place to hide. I can’t do enough to wake people up.”
For a long time, I feel like there was this sense that climate change was always something that would arrive decades from now, perhaps in the year 2050 or beyond, hence the hollow climate pledges to do X by some much later date without the radical steps needed to hit that target. But that date sure seems to be looking like it is actually this date as in today.
One of the ways it is unfolding in front of us is by forcing people to move, in the most literal sense of having to go from one place to another with no choice in the matter, temporarily or permanently. This is an impact that also gets talked about in big, distant terms, as in this new report that projects 1.2 billion people could be displaced by 2050 (there’s that 2050 number again). But two days ago, tens of thousands of people were ordered to evacuate Medford, Oregon. Depending on the disaster we are fleeing, sometimes there’s no home to return to, or no job to return to, or sometimes people try to escape but are not allowed. I keep thinking back to that mental image of New Orleans post-Katrina, of families attempting to walk across the river to a nearby suburb for dry land only to be greeted by the sheriff and a group of men forming a blockade to stop them.
To see what climate migration looks like, we can look to present day Louisiana. Since Katrina in 2005, every one of Louisiana’s 64 parishes has been included in a federal major disaster declaration, with large swaths being swallowed up by the Gulf. Back in April I wrote about the work of an organization called Foundation for Louisiana, which helped fund and organize a community-driven process that resulted in a plan for regional adaptation, published in 2019. (Quartz recently ran an article on the same issue and planning process, and it is a good read.)
When I talked with the team at FFL, they were explaining to me all of the ripple effects of climate migration they were dealing with in Louisiana’s communities. For example, vulnerable areas don’t entirely close down—rather, some portion of the houses may be safely elevated, while some other portion may have to be evacuated. That leaves a partly hollowed out neighborhood where the number of people shrinks, as does the tax base, along with infrastructure, schools, resources and social services, in the places that need help the most. There’s also a huge cultural and psychological impact—there’s the stress of being forced from your home, but also imagine some significant percentage of your neighbors disappearing. It can shred a neighborhood’s social fabric and fuel anxiety. At the same time, so-called “receiver communities” on higher ground may see their populations boom, overwhelming their own infrastructure. So one thing about the LASAFE process is that it funds projects like green infrastructure and flood control measures, but also mental health centers and efforts to preserve local arts and culture.
All of this is to say that, when we think about climate migration, maybe places like the Maldives come to mind, or populations fleeing famine-stricken areas in poor countries in years to come. But we’re also talking about psychological trauma, unemployment, loss of community, all happening right now in the United States.
One more thing on this topic, I recently did some consulting on a report about city resilience in Massachusetts (I’ll email it to you if you want to read it). One of the biggest points was that there needs to be a shift in how we think about climate resilience. Right now, the common perception is stuck in the realm of infrastructure—sea walls and city planning departments, depressing, distant work done by engineers and policymakers. When in reality, climate resilience is a social problem that encompasses public health, housing, transportation, racial equity, and more. It requires collective action and needs to center those who are closest to the problem in planning efforts.
To make that shift, we need to draw clear connections between climate change and how it is impacting people’s lives. I don’t think we know what a climate resilient community looks like at this point, and that’s part of the difficulty in planning them. But we don’t have to imagine the distant future to understand what the human impact looks like; we just have to ask the right people, right now.
Links
- Here’s that really good Annie Lowery article. I have written here a couple of times about how individual action on climate change is important, even though it’s corporations and governments that need to change. This kind of goes against the climate activist gospel these days but it has to do with social pressure and movement building, and the fact that individual action doesn’t actually distract from collective action.
- This is the other must read this week, on how the SUV took over the world and became a major source of traffic fatalities and climate change. “They are killing machines. They cause a lot of damage to the global climate, to air quality and to the people they hit. SUVs are terrible for cities and neighborhoods, they serve no purpose there. You don’t need them to run to the store to buy a gallon of milk.”
- Eric Holthaus, a climate writer I like, is leaving The Correspondent, and his goodbye note had some nice takeaways, including: “The climate emergency isn’t the main story, it’s a symptom of the main story” and “Climate dystopia is a choice.”
- People keep saying that the pandemic is sending people fleeing cities for the suburbs, but the evidence doesn’t support it.
- The landlord of a craft brewery in Jamaica Plain is suing to stop a new affordable housing project because he says there is not enough parking. Turtle Swamp Brewery says they have nothing to do with it but did take a moment to complain about the development projects, you know generally speaking, in the area.
- “Pedestrian infrastructure” is a lie in that it is really just little features added on in order to justify more single-passenger vehicle infrastructure.
- The Gentrification Font (it’s neutraface)
- Disability is a social phenomenon created by a rigid built world.
Listening
Reading
Brown Girl in the Ring, by Nalo Hopkinson
OK that’s good for today sorry this one was a little meandering what can I say it’s a topsy turvy time to be alive. We did however recently celebrate Jamie’s birthday, which included many gifts, a signature cocktail, and a meatless charcuterie board that turned out so great that I am considering maybe that is what I should be doing for a living so hit me up if you’re interested but my rates are honestly not reasonable at all.
We also went kayaking on the Charles which is a safe and healthy pandemic-era activity that I would recommend. It was my second time kayaking and I am bad at it, but it’s still nice you get some spectacular views of the city. We did crash into things a couple of times, including one time we crashed into a canal wall while trying to avoid a duck boat tour. Afterwards, I told Jamie those tourists were probably all laughing at us and she said yeah I’m sure they were. “Well you know what,” I said, “they can shove it up their asses” and we had a pretty good laugh.
Keep paddling down that river everyone, even if everything around you is on fire. And if any boat full of tourists tries to crash your little kayak and then laughs at you I have your back and they will not get away with it.
Tate