Timothy Egan has been travelling California's blackened landscape and he's appalled:
The story it tells is grim, a portent of nature altered and convulsive. It’s not just that this audacious experiment — a huge parkland on the doorstep of a metro area of 13 million people — is now on life support. It’s that, as we are the first species to radically disrupt the world that gave us life, much of that world may soon be unsafe for human habitation.
California used to have distinct fire seasons. Now the storms of flame and smoke are year-round, and all of the nation’s most populous state is a fire zone. One in eight Americans lives in a land that could turn catastrophic on any given day.
The President of the United States looked at the same landscape, opened his mouth and proved why his former Secretary of State called him a "fucking moron:"
After a drive-by look at the wastelands, he suggested raking the forest floor, as he imagined they do in Finland. He said he wanted to “make climate great.” The Finns set him straight. The world laughed.
Trump has a crackpot for acting attorney general, Matthew Whitaker, a man associated with a company that promoted time travel and Bigfoot. And yet the president denies the peer-reviewed, consensus driven evidence on climate change.
In the face of such appalling ignorance, what's the world to do? Hope that Trump gets caught in a fire zone and doesn't make it out?
Image: Patheos
8 comments:
A book on climate change I read recently, Owen, suggests that in the not too distant future, it will be necessary to evauate the populations of California and Florida, the former because of perennial wildfires,the later because of sea level rise and the increasing salination of aquifers. It seems far to many people are still inclined to ignore what is all too obvious for others: the word has changed, and not for the better.
Here's what the Idiot-in-Chief twittered recently:
Brutal and Extended Cold Blast could shatter ALL RECORDS - Whatever happened to Global Warming?
When a man is delusional, Lorne, there's no hope for him. When he's the president of a country, there's no hope for the country.
Trump knows climate change is real. That's why he's building sea walls off the coast of Ireland to protect his golf course from sea level rise.
But Trump and Trudeau are like Thelma and Louise enjoying the speed and the wind in their hair as they drive the car off the cliff. The difference is that Trump and Trudeau have the kids in the back seat as well.
Cap
We're on the Titanic, Cap. And we know exactly where the iceberg is located. But that makes no difference.
I honestly think the earth has a mind of its own, and is trying to balance its ecosystem back to its original state as much as can be done at this point in time and given the amount of damage done over the last two-and-a-half centuries. Even when it means destroying man-made additions to its surface and reducing some of the populations of humans and creatures.
I don't think it's "revenge" on the earth's part so much as it is an act of desperation.
I think there may be something to that, Tal. It's not just about our survival. It's also about Nature's survival.
What Tal is expressing is closely akin to James Lovelock's 'Gaia hypothesis." Lovelock formulated the idea that Earth, while plainly inanimate, has systems that behave much like living creatures'. When, as now, some destructive force (humankind) comes along and exceeds the planet's limitations, it responds as a body does with a fever that gets hot enough to kill off the virus. I did a course in environmental geology at a local university. The prof spoke a lot of Lovelock and how, initially, his Gaia theory was ridiculed and dismissed but, as the years passed, one element after another came to fruition. The skeptical scientific community wasn't at all quick or eager to accept Lovelock's theories until they came to be.
Thanks for that context, Mound. As the evidence of climate change mounts, Lovelock is proved right.
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