Uma antecipação ?
Um esboço aterrorizador do futuro de Portugal !?
OVOODOCORVO
Has the
climate crisis made California too dangerous to live in?
Bill
McKibben
As with so
many things, Californians are going first where the rest of us will follow
@billmckibben
Tue 29 Oct
2019 06.00 GMTLast modified on Tue 29 Oct 2019 06.02 GMT
Monday
morning dawned smoky across much of California, and it dawned scary – over the
weekend winds as high as a hundred miles per hour had whipped wildfires through
forests and subdivisions.
It wasn’t
the first time this had happened – indeed, it’s happened every year for the
last three – and this time the flames were licking against communities
destroyed in 2017. Reporters spoke to one family that had moved into their
rebuilt home on Saturday, only to be immediately evacuated again.
The
spectacle was cinematic: at one point, fire jumped the Carquinez Strait at the
end of San Francisco Bay, shrouding the bridge on Interstate 80 in smoke and
flame.
Even areas
that didn’t actually burn felt the effects: Pacific Gas and Electric turned off
power to millions, fearful that when the wind tore down its wires they would
spark new conflagrations.
Three years
in a row feels like – well, it starts to feel like the new, and impossible,
normal. That’s what the local newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle, implied
this morning when, in the middle of its account of the inferno, it included the
following sentence: the fires had “intensified fears that parts of California
had become almost too dangerous to inhabit”. Read that again: the local paper
is on record stating that part of the state is now so risky that its citizens
might have to leave.
On the one
hand, this comes as no real surprise. My most recent book Falter centered on
the notion that climate crisis was making large swaths of the world
increasingly off-limits to humans. Cities in Asia and the Middle East where the
temperature now reaches the upper 120s – levels so high that the human body
can’t really cool itself; island nations (and Florida beaches) where each high
tide washes through the living room or the streets; Arctic villages relocating
because, with sea ice vanished, the ocean erodes the shore.
But
California? California was always the world’s idea of paradise (until perhaps
the city of that name burned last summer). Hollywood shaped our fantasies of
the last century, and many of its movies were set in the Golden State. It’s
where the Okies trudged when their climate turned vicious during the Dust Bowl
years – “pastures of plenty”, Woody Guthrie called the green agricultural
valleys. John Muir invented our grammar and rhetoric of wildness in the high
Sierra (and modern environmentalism was born with the club he founded).
California
is the Golden State, the land of ease. I was born there, and though I left
young enough that my memories are suspect, I grew up listening to my parents’
stories. They’d been newlyweds in the late ’50s, living a block from the ocean
in Manhattan Beach; when they got home from work they could walk to the sand
for a game of volleyball. Date night was a mile or two up the Pacific Coast
Highway to the Lighthouse, the jazz club where giants such as Gerry Mulligan
showed up regularly, inventing the cool jazz that defined the place and time.
Sunset magazine showcased a California aesthetic as breezy and informal as any
on earth: the redwood deck, the cedar-shake roof, the suburban idyll among the
eucalyptus and the pine. That is to say, precisely the kinds of homes that
today are small piles of ash with only the kidney-shaped pool intact.
Truth be
told, that California began to vanish fairly quickly, as orange groves turned
into airplane factories and then tech meccas. The great voices of California in
recent years – writers such as Mike Davis and Rebecca Solnit – chronicle the
demise of much that was once idyllic in a wave of money, consumption, nimbyism,
tax dodging, and corporate greed. The state’s been booming in recent years –
it’s the world’s fifth biggest economy, bigger than the UK – but it’s also home
to tent encampments of homeless people with no chance of paying rent. And it’s
not just climate change that’s at fault: California has always had fires, and
the state’s biggest utility, PG&E, is at this point as much an arsonist as
electricity provider.
Still, it
takes a force as great as the climate crisis to really – perhaps finally –
tarnish Eden. In the last decade, the state has endured the deepest droughts
ever measured, dry spells so intense that more than a hundred million trees
died. A hundred million – and the scientists who counted them warned that their
carcasses could “produce wildfires on a scale and of an intensity that
California has never seen”. The drought has alternated with record downpours
that have turned burned-over stretches into massive house-burying mudslides.
And so
Californians – always shirtsleeved and cool – spend some of the year in face
masks and much of it with a feeling of trepidation. As with so many things,
they are going first where the rest of us will follow.
Bill
McKibben is an author and Schumann Distinguished Scholar in environmental
studies at Middlebury College, Vermont. His most recent book is Falter: Has the
Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?
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