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Those who always believed they were buffered from climate change’s impacts are discovering that nowhere is safe.
I think this summer marks the end of one of luxury travel’s oldest illusions: that if you have enough money, there’s always somewhere untouched to escape to. Heat waves don’t stop at the gates of a five-star resort, and neither do wildfires or ecological collapse. Nature doesn’t recognize wealth.
– Jenny Southan, travel trend forecaster, as reported in the New York Times
Dear Reader,
There’s long been an uncomfortable space between those of us in the Western world who’ve, in the past, largely been spared the drought, the floods, the fires of a rapidly warming climate, and those (typically in developing countries) who have already been experiencing the dramatic impacts of climate change. It’s one reason that polls in our part of the world often put “the economy,” and “taxes” at the top of voters’ concerns instead of “climate.” Sure, we’ve had disasters, but we treat them like anomalies. Unfortunate, certainly. But nothing that means we need to stop (for instance) building pipelines. Or flying.
(It often surprises people to discover that 89% of people around the world want their governments to take action on climate, though that’s an average. In the United States, it’s 74% — which is still a lot more than current policy would reflect.)
As Jenny Southan noted recently in the New York Times, however, this summer is waking a lot of us up. To date this year, Europe has had a total of five heatwaves, and Germany recently reported 14,000 heat-related deaths, its worst year on record. Ontario and much of the northeastern U.S. were blanketed with an orange haze and the distinct smell of smoke when wildfires devoured many Northern Canada communities. The Pacific Northwest has been on fire. And with a super El Niño at our door, we can expect the rest of this year and next to deliver more extreme weather. We’re running out of superlatives — record-breaking, unprecedented, deadly, shattering …
Nature doesn’t recognize wealth, Jenny Southan reminds us. This Native American saying puts it slightly differently: “When the last tree is cut down, the last fish eaten, and the last stream poisoned, you will realize that you cannot eat money.” Or, to paraphrase Southan, there’s increasingly nowhere to hide.
Vulnerably,
Dot
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