So, here is what you need to know, right now, about climate change. Now, don't thank me.
Thank McKenzie Funk
Smoked Out/London Review of Books/Feb. 7, 2019
McKenzie
Funk
· Firestorm:
How Wildfire Will Shape Our Future by Edward Struzik
Island Press, 248 pp, £22.99, October 2017,
ISBN 978 1 61091 818 3
· Extreme
Cities: The Peril and Promise of Urban Life in the Age of Climate Change by Ashley Dawson
Verso, 384 pp, £20.00, October 2017,
ISBN 978 1 78478 036 4
· Seeds
on Ice: Svalbard and the Global Seed Vault by Cary Fowler
Prospecta, 160 pp, £29.99, September 2016,
ISBN 978 1 63226 057 4
· Storming
the Wall: Climate Change, Migration and Homeland Security by Todd Miller
City Lights, 272 pp, £7.99, September 2017,
ISBN 978 0 87286 715 4
Last spring, my wife, wanting to change
career, was accepted by nursing school, and our family – the two of us, two
young boys, a middle-aged dog – suddenly had to move house. We were leaving
Seattle, where we had lived for a decade, a city with ample rain, though one
within range of volcanoes and earthquakes, for a small town in the mountains of
southern Oregon. I put the climate change books I had agreed to write about for
this paper in a cardboard box and put the box on top of the others starting to
fill our garage, and soon spring turned to endless, destructive summer.
The town we were moving to is called Ashland.
It’s beautiful, a surprise cluster of civilisation just north of Oregon’s
border with California, where restaurants and shops and stately wooden houses
sit at the foot of a forested mountain range called the Siskiyous. It has
twenty thousand residents but swells during the academic year with students and
in warmer months with tourists, many of them here for the summer-long Oregon
Shakespeare Festival. There are flower-filled parks, excellent schools, people
riding carbon-fibre mountain bikes, retirees driving luxury cars, travellers
with dreadlocks, nice dogs reliably on leashes. Restaurants and real estate
agencies line Main Street. People in Ashland are often from somewhere else, and
they pay good money to be here. The town’s economy relies, above everything
else, on its quality of life.
I first heard about the smoke problem from a
publisher of religious and philosophical books who had lived in Ashland for 24
years, raising his three children in a blue, three-bedroom house near the
business district. Now they were grown up and publishing was dying and he found
he had trouble breathing in the summer months because there were an increasing
number of fires in the surrounding hills. The forests here are dense and dry.
The valley is shaped like a trough. When wildfires burned, the smoke lingered
in the valley for weeks, and he had to stay indoors. It had happened almost
every summer for the previous six years: it was the ‘new normal’, people in
Ashland said, an effect of climate change. The publisher was moving to Los
Angeles, a metropolis once famed for its smog, partly because the air there was
sure to be better. When I visited him one rainy May evening during a
house-hunting trip – his home was supposedly a steal because it was selling for
under half a million dollars – we drank tea at his kitchen table, surrounded by
his boxes and furniture and former life, him at the end of something and me at
the beginning. The house wasn’t quite right for us. I decided we should rent
instead and found a place a few blocks away, across the creek.
Jenny liked the old house we ended up with. We
moved her in one June weekend, the boys crawling in and out of the doors of the
secret closet in their new bedroom. She would live here alone for the first
month, riding her bike to and from the university, eating at the grocery co-op,
revelling in the fact that in a small town everything is ten minutes from
everything else. The boys and I returned to Seattle, and wrapped up our existence
there. ‘We’re going to need new sunglasses for the boys,’ Jenny told me early
on. It was always sunny. The air was so crisp. It was so easy to get around.
We’d be spending a lot of time outside. Then, a week before we were to drive
the nine hours down Interstate 5 and finally join her, bad news: ‘The smoke
started,’ she said. ‘It came early this year.’ Although there was little
imminent danger of its spreading to Ashland, the nearest fire – the result of a
lightning strike near Hells Peak – was just nine miles from our new home.
When a building is burning, firefighters
usually try to extinguish every last flame. It’s a fight to the death, over in
a matter of hours. When thousands or tens of thousands of acres of forest are
burning, the major goal is containment, a kind of negotiated peace with a force
greater than man. Wildland firefighters try to halt a blaze’s progress,
encircling it with natural or manmade firebreaks. They work to keep the flames
away from people and property, hoping to hang on until environmental conditions
– humidity, wind speed and direction – change and the autumn rains finally
arrive. Many wildfires are left to smoulder, and to smoke, for weeks or months
on end, causing little newsworthy damage. Disasters like the conflagration that
consumed Paradise, California, in November, killing 81 people – the deadliest
and most destructive wildfire in the state’s history – do happen. But the
climate disaster facing millions of other residents of the American West is
more insidious. In a town like Ashland, the smoke blots out the colour of the
houses and the hills, rendering everything in grayscale, a slow-burn diminution
of the way life here used to be.
On the afternoon the boys and I arrived the
town and the Rogue Valley where it sits were surrounded by nine separate
wildfires. The next day, Ashland registered the worst air quality in the United
States: 321 on the Air Quality Index. The AQI scale is colour-coded –
green-yellow-orange-red-purple-maroon – to denote health risk, and we were well
into maroon, or ‘hazardous’. Outside, the air was totally still and the
temperature had hit 100°F. It looked like dusk in the middle of the day.
Inside, the boys’ upstairs room was like a furnace, but we couldn’t open the
skylights for fear of letting the smoke in. We rushed out to buy an
air-conditioning unit. At the hardware store down the road, we got the last
child-size smoke masks on the shelves, the ones rated N95 for the particulate
matter the internet said we really needed to keep out of their lungs. Prepping
for the unknown, we ordered a dozen more masks from China on Amazon.
The boys’ first summer camp was in a nature
area five minutes from our house. They were meant to spend the whole week
outside. Instead they spent it in the cramped quarters of the visitors’ centre,
where they sang songs about the forest and built fairy houses out of bark and
moss and acorns. Some days, the AQI dropped into the orange zone, and at least
once into the yellow, but the smoke always returned when the wind shifted. I
tried to walk the dog whenever the air looked best, helped by the AQI app I’d
downloaded to my phone, and I grew used to wearing my smoke mask in public,
grunting muffled hellos to other pedestrians in masks of their own, fellow
travellers in the apocalypse. It began to feel normal. In the café where I went
to work on my laptop, I noticed how routine this existence was becoming for
others, too. Walk in, take off mask, order coffee. Put mask back on, walk out.
In Seattle, I had always taken my rain jacket when I went outside. Here, one
had to remember the smoke mask. Your baselines shift. You adapt.
By the end of the week, however, our younger
son, then three, had developed a rough cough. I took him to a clinic, and the
next day we decided to get him and his brother out of Ashland until the smoke
had gone. I loaded up the car again and drove the boys and the dog four hours
north-east to the other side of the Cascade Mountains, where my extended family
had a cabin. We were climate refugees, I joked, escaping to higher elevations
and latitudes in search of a more hospitable environment. The six-year-old
asked me what ‘refugee’ meant, and I had to explain, but told him I didn’t
really mean it. All we could honestly claim was a new-found feeling of dislocation,
of being stuck between lives. I had brought the long neglected box of climate
change books with me, and now, safe in the mountain air, I began reading.
*
There were four books in the box. They
are very different from one another, but as a whole they represent a
generational break with the climate change books before them. This is because
not one of them is strictly about the topic at hand. Not one of them bothers to
argue that climate change is real. Not one bothers to explain how societies can
work to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Not one gets hung up on atmospheric
science or computer models or the Paris Agreement. Instead, they simply take
for granted that temperatures will rise and that the world as we know it will
soon be fundamentally altered. The migration scholar writes about migration and
the seed scientist about seeds and the ecosocialist about urban capitalism, but
climate change – the biggest, most pervasive ongoing event in the world – is
always present in the background. This is by necessity. Climate change is and
will be everywhere. It doesn’t stand apart from our daily existence, not any
more.
Edward Struzik’s Firestorm is
about the coming age of ‘megafires’ – wildfires covering an area of 100,000
acres or more. The phenomenon isn’t new, but megafires now occur with
unprecedented frequency, and are uprooting more and more people from their
homes. In Canada, the average area affected annually has doubled since global
temperatures began their abrupt rise in the 1970s, and it is likely to double
again by 2050. Quoting a favourite scientist, Mike Flannigan, Struzik lays out
the three simple reasons for this. First, warmer temperatures mean drier
forests. Second, warmer temperatures mean more lightning strikes. Third, warmer
temperatures mean longer fire seasons. Struzik centres his story on the Horse
River Fire, also known as the ‘Beast’, which struck Fort McMurray in Alberta, Canada’s
tar-sands capital, in 2016. It spread across 1.5 million acres, destroyed 2500
homes and 12,000 vehicles, and forced 88,000 residents to flee. The firestorm
was of such ferocity it created its own weather patterns, including lightning
strikes that set off smaller fires to herald its approach. The irony of the
fire’s location wasn’t lost on Struzik. ‘Behind us glowed the lights of fossil
fuel-driven human activity,’ he wrote of a night spent in the burned-out forest
not far from the site of the $7.3 billion tar-sands project, ‘emitting
greenhouse gases that are warming the climate and triggering atmospheric
disturbances, driving wildfire to burn bigger, faster, hotter, and more often.’
Struzik describes how Fort McMurray residents
escaped from the Beast while bureaucrats were still fighting over how to
respond; dives into the scientific mystery of the fire’s lightning-producing
pyrocumulonimbus clouds, or pyroCbs; describes how politics have caused forest
managers to retreat from the practice of controlled burning, allowing forests
to become choked with unburned fuel; explains how drought and invasive beetles
have made trees more susceptible to fire; explores the way people’s
encroachment on woodland has made more homes susceptible to fire; and underscores
the fact that water supplies which may already be facing climate stress are
further threatened through contamination by wildfires. He dedicates an entire
chapter – bless him – to the dangers unsuspecting people face from smoke
inhalation from distant fires. But when the book concludes with a quiet call
for better evacuation planning and more research – in both Canada and the
United States federal budgets go overwhelmingly to firefighting rather than
fire science – the reader is left with an uncomfortable realisation: it’s too
late. From here on it’s triage. Some future fires may be allowed to burn so as
to clear out accumulated fuel, and some may be suppressed as they are today,
even if this increases the risk of later megafire. Either way, our forests will
burn.
This human knack for increasing long-term risk
by trying to diminish it in the short term doesn’t apply only to fires.
In Extreme Cities, Ashley Dawson, a New York-based activist
and scholar of postcolonialism, argues persuasively that cities are becoming
ground zero for climate change. They are home to most of the world’s people and
the source of most of its emissions. We have built our megacities – 13 of the
largest twenty are ports – in sinking river deltas. Half of the world’s
population already lives close to the sea, and now more people, fleeing rural
drought or poverty, are moving there. ‘Two great tides are converging on the
world’s cities,’ Dawson writes. ‘The first of these is a human tide. In 2007,
humanity became a predominantly city-dwelling species.’ The second tide, of
course, is the literal one: the rising seas, which may be metres higher by the
end of the century.
Dawson’s book is about the way responses to
climate change are being shaped by the entrenched interests of capital. He takes
aim at the comfortable notions of ‘resilience’ and ‘green growth’ pushed by –
among others – the former mayor of New York Michael Bloomberg and his cast of
visiting Dutch architects, questioning post-Hurricane Sandy projects like the
Big U seawall proposed for lower Manhattan: it would attract tourists and
protect Wall Street, but displace storm surge waters to surrounding, poorer
neighbourhoods. ‘Under present social conditions,’ he writes, such schemes are
‘likely to be employed by elites to create architectures of apartheid and
exclusionary zones of refuge’. For Dawson, New York is the ‘extreme city’
problem in microcosm. The affluent invest their money in such places because
real estate is where the big returns lie as people move into cities – 60 per
cent of global wealth, he claims, is in real estate – and because under
capitalism investments must grow in value. City planners are then compelled to
protect these growing investments, which gives speculators confidence that the
city is a safe harbour for yet more investments, and thus overall risk creeps
up with the tides.
The $40 billion, Dutch-built Great Garuda
seawall in Jakarta, soon to be the biggest in the world, will displace
thousands of shack-dwellers on an existing seawall and put tens of thousands of
fishermen out of work – but it will give developers a chance to profit from
selling luxury homes on artificial islands. The Eko Atlantic development on a
peninsula off the coast of Lagos is patrolled by heavily armed guards and
surrounded by shanty towns built on stilts where the chefs and nannies live.
‘Both Eko Atlantic and the Great Garuda,’ Dawson writes, with excusably
escalating rhetoric, ‘offer visions of the extreme social injustice of emerging
neoliberal urban phantasmagoria in a time of climate change.’ Just as Struzik
makes it plain that some forests will just have to burn, Dawson asserts that
some cities – Miami, for example – will have to be abandoned. Eventually,
taking a page from Naomi Klein’s concept of disaster capitalism, he calls for
‘disaster communism’ in the face of climate change – a radical redistribution
of wealth that liberates poor and rich alike from our cult of growth before it
literally sinks us.
Before the boys and I had to leave the cabin I
had time to read the third book, Cary Fowler’s Seeds on Ice. It is
a retelling of the creation of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, commonly known
as the ‘doomsday’ seed vault. Built into an Arctic mountainside to safeguard
key crops – rice, wheat, sorghum, maize, beans – from climate change or
terrorist attack, the vault holds almost 900,000 seed varieties from almost
every country in the world. Fowler explains that he and a colleague at the
international agricultural research organisation CGIAR became afraid for the
world’s seedbanks after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. He describes his first
visit to Svalbard, where he ate polar bear carpaccio in an old hotel in the
coal-mining town of Longyearbyen. The island’s political and climatic stability
added to its appeal, and the Norwegian government was persuaded to pay for the
project. To make the vault impregnable it was decided to tunnel into solid
stone and permafrost rather than repurpose an old mining shaft.
Fowler explains why this all matters.
‘Agriculture faces its most severe set of challenges since the Neolithic
period,’ he writes. One problem is the need to grow more food for more people
with less water and land and phosphorus. The other problem is climate change:
warmer average temperatures, warmer extreme temperatures, warmer nights, longer
heatwaves, variable rains. ‘We are headed towards climates that our crops have
never before experienced. Global warming will give us climates that are
pre-rice, pre-wheat, pre-potato, pre-agriculture.’ Even if Germany’s future
temperature range becomes like that of Italy today, Italian crops are not
guaranteed to grow in German fields. Soil and pests will remain different, and
so too will the length of the days. What plant breeders and farmers will need
is a stockpile of heat-tolerant traits so they can produce new crop varieties,
and this is what the seed vault was designed to be. When I looked up the vault
online, however, I found that it had suffered a breach soon after Fowler’s book
was published. No seeds were damaged, but a dramatic Arctic warm spell during
what had been Earth’s warmest recorded year had brought heavy rain to Svalbard
instead of the usual light snow, and the vault’s entrance had been flooded with
meltwater. Norway has recently pledged one hundred million kroner – about £10 million
– to build a new entrance tunnel and revamp the vault’s emergency power and
refrigeration systems: a Plan B for civilisation’s Plan B.
I didn’t do much reading after that one, not
for a while. The boys and I had to drive to our next destination – my parents’
house, two hours from the cabin – and as soon as we were halfway settled I had
to complete another late writing assignment that might at first seem unrelated
to this one, an investigation into immigration enforcement in the age of Trump.
Jenny was still stuck in class in Ashland in the smoke. Now she drove an
air-conditioned car to and from the university with the windows rolled up, and
her bike sat idle. I kept checking my AQI app. Smoke was still choking the
Rogue Valley, and haze spread from other fires to the rest of the Pacific
Northwest as the summer dragged on. The boys and I stayed away from Ashland
until the end of August, when the AQI edged more frequently into the yellow
zone and their school year began and I dressed them in smoke masks and new
shoes and took them to meet their teachers.
There was no distinct moment when the smoke
stopped. But in September it was more often the case that when the wind blew it
away, it didn’t get blown right back again. We went outside with sunglasses on.
We kept waiting for the hills to disappear again, for our fragile string of
yellow and green days to turn orange, but eventually we realised it was over.
Now we could assess the damage. That month, regional vineyards got a letter
from a major buyer, a California winery, saying that their contracts were
cancelled due to ‘smoke taint’. The Oregon Shakespeare Festival, engine of the
local economy, announced that the smoke had cost it at least $2 million in lost
ticket revenue. The knock-on effects on hotels, shops and restaurants amounted
to many millions more, and a few businesses closed down. For me, it hadn’t been
nearly that bad. I’d lost some savings and some time, but suddenly the air was
crisp and the boys were at school and I could sit and type for uninterrupted
hours.
I thought I might find a moment to read the
last book in my pile during our reunited family’s first trip together, a long
weekend in California to attend a friend’s wedding. But the day before we were
meant to leave, a wildfire just south of the state border jumped over
Interstate 5, the major north-south artery. The news showed images of abandoned
trucks, smoke still spiralling up from their blackened shells. To get to the
wedding, we took a detour through the mountains on a series of minor roads,
driving late into the night behind an endless line of cars and trucks. The
drive was long, and the drive back even longer – 12 hours – and I didn’t read a
thing.
In early October, the Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change, meeting in South Korea, issued its worst report yet: the
consequences of even a 1.5ºC rise in global temperatures, as opposed to the
previously studied threshold of 2ºC, would be widespread catastrophe. The worst
effects – a mass die-off of coral reefs, coastal flooding, widespread food
shortages – could come as soon as 2040, well within the lifetimes of most
people living today. The report’s authors stressed that it was still
technically possible to avert this through a massive transformation of our
energy economy, but even they admitted that this was according to the laws of
physics and chemistry, not politics. When I saw the headlines about the IPCC
report, I was at a conference in Florida, where Hurricane Michael – one of the
strongest storms ever to hit the continental United States, soon to be
responsible for dozens of deaths – was bearing down. I headed to the airport to
fly home less than 24 hours before Michael made landfall, the sky already dark
and the rain battering the windscreen of my taxi and flooding the streets. Back
in Ashland, things seemed pretty normal for a week or so, but then residents
began catching glimpses of a mountain lion. It was seen near the theatres. It
was beside the supermarket. It was by the university. It was roaming outside
the library, with two cubs. Biologists suggest that mountain lions may
increasingly follow their favourite prey – deer – into urban areas as the
hinterlands go dry. While there was nothing definitively to tie this particular
cat to climate change, you can forgive me for having my suspicions. It was that
kind of year.
*
When I finally turned to Todd
Miller’s Storming the Wall: Climate Change, Migration and Homeland
Security, the mid-term elections were approaching and Trump had
dispatched US troops to the Mexican border to repel a caravan of hungry
asylum-seekers from Central America. In the news, there had been little attempt
to explain why farmers from Guatemala and Honduras – two ‘dry corridor’
countries wracked by consecutive years of drought – were trekking to the United
States. Miller’s book was a welcome antidote. ‘Just like super-typhoons, rising
seas and heatwaves, border build-up and militarisation are by-products of
climate change,’ he writes. ‘Just as tidal floods will inundate the streets of
Miami and the Arctic ice sheets will melt, if nothing changes we will find
ourselves living in an increasingly militarised world of surveillance, razor
wire, border walls, armed patrols, detention centres and relocation camps.’
One important revelation in Miller’s book is
that climate change science is wholly uncontroversial inside the military and
security establishment, even high up in the Trump administration. It’s widely
accepted that the warming world will soon see many more refugees – 50 million,
250 million, a billion, nobody can say for sure – even if climate migrants
can’t formally be called refugees under present international law. Miller
attends security conferences and border-tech exhibitions on two continents, and
traces the use of the term ‘threat multiplier’, which has been employed by
governments and analysts since 2004 to describe the way climate change adds to
the usual array of threats against our financial and political order. He shares
Dawson’s concern that we’re hurtling ever more rapidly towards a world of haves
and have-nots. ‘More dangerous than climate disruption was the climate migrant.
More dangerous than the drought were the people who can’t farm because of the
drought. More dangerous than the hurricane were the people displaced by the
storm.’
Miller tells the story of Yeb and A.G. Saño,
two Filipino brothers whose hometown was largely destroyed by 2013’s Super
Typhoon Haiyan and whose home region was arguably destroyed by the police state
that rose in the typhoon’s wake. The brothers marched a thousand miles on foot
across the Alps to arrive in Paris for the start of the 2015 UN Climate Summit,
with Miller joining them for the last few kilometres. But the climate talks
took place just weeks after Islamic State’s attack on the Bataclan concert
hall, and Paris was in a state of emergency when the marchers entered the city.
The brothers – foreign, brown, idealistic – put their arms around each other
outside a café for a photo op, and a man came out and yelled at them, thrusting
a newspaper with an image commemorating Bataclan in their faces. ‘People here
in France are not concerned about climate change,’ he told them. ‘The people of
France are concerned about terrorism.’ The next day, Miller walked alongside
protesters demanding carbon cuts, running when they were attacked by riot
police. It’s a blunt but effective metaphor. ‘As I ran,’ he writes, ‘I realised
I had arrived at the true climate summit.’
In Ashland, the mountain lion disappeared from
town and the Shakespeare festival laid off a few dozen employees. State and
federal fire officials traded barbs in the local newspaper, which started
running a countdown clock to the 2019 fire season. A local lawmaker proposed
that college students should take a year off to work on tree-thinning projects.
The bookstore I frequented was put up for sale, but I overheard two long-time
patrons predicting that there would be no serious bids. ‘Ashland’s not what it
used to be,’ one said. My younger son learned to ride a bike in the sun in the
park just down the block. My older son started playing soccer, and by the pitch
one morning another parent told me about a campsite near the Pacific that
filled with local families every summer once the smoke began. ‘Maybe we’ll be
like Europeans,’ he said. ‘Everyone will just leave every August.’ It almost
sounded reasonable.
Next: Running for Your Life: Making Choices
