So true: "In the Anthropocene, if you’re not grieving, you’re not paying attention." Thanks for the work, Jason! Appreciate all 100 essays. Keep them coming! --Liesl
One last point. Using the Oregon fire as a metaphor was pretty useful. A takeaway is that recovery is very, very slow, and that the climate is changing so rapidly that the new forest ecosystem may not resemble the one that was consumed in the conflagration.
The other takeaway is how rapidly the Oregon fire grew from a dozen square yards to scores of miles. Everyone thinks climate change is slow and incremental- that it won't be even in our grandchilden's lives. NOT SO! We must disabuse ourselves of that notion. Abundant evidence exists that some past major changes were very very sudden, and it doesn't always take asteroid strikes or volcanic eruptions to generate enormous changes in the planet's energy, atmospheric and oceanic chemistry budgets.
Yes, speed is everything, Michael. It's something that people don't talk about enough, I think. The radical difference between planetary/ecological timescales and Anthropocene ones is at the heart of the problem. The tipping points and consequences that await us if we're not equally quick to reverse our impacts are difficult to contemplate (if easier now to see).
You are so right. I truly believe we're past a tipping point, but in all likelihood there are more than one such points leading to different domino effects. Maybe we can theorize three tipping points each leading to different deleterious outcomes. One point already reached is where parts of the world become uninhabitable to us, but temperatures don't rise to unbearable levels. Perhaps another tipping point, not yet reached, will lead to massive changes in atmospheric and oceanic currents leading to widespread polar and Greenland melting: the flooded Earth scenario. Perhaps a third point will be the coupe de grace for us: changes in atmospheric and oceanic chemistry: the under a green sky scenario and the extinction of most land and sea life. I think we will avoid the last but the second is a toss-up.
Congratulations on the 100th issue, Jason. Your readership deeply appreciates what you are doing even if too rushed, as I was yesterday, to stop and thank you. So for all of us: "Thank You".
I am a climate change maximalist. I believe terrible changes are coming, the genie has been let out of the bottle and cannot be put back. I can foresee even the destruction of human civilization and the reduction of our numbers to a minute fraction. And though I grieve the losses of all the myriads of species, a sober, dispassionate, rational part of me realizes our human species is the problem; that the natural world would be better off without us, and relief rather than grief would be the rational reaction to our diminishment.
My crystal ball is my own state of Oregon. Six years ago, in 2017 I think it was, a teenager and his friends were hiking in the Columbia Gorge and he threw some lit firework into a ravine. This caused one of the biggest forest fires in our state's history. It blew up incredibly fast and the young man and his companions had to flee ahead of it to reach safety. The fire was completely uncontrollable and burnt for days. That first day my wife and I were driving west back from Hood River, further east in the Gorge and barely made it through the fire as it came down to Cascade Locks. The sky had turned black and there was fire on both sides of I-84 by then. We may have been one of the last cars to get through. We turned off at Bonneville dam and parked in the big visitor parking lot, looking back at the billowing clouds with other refugees, unable to grasp the enormity of what was happening. That was the first day of the fire. The fire lasted for days and some subsurface parts of it continued to burn for months.
Now, these many years later, the Gorge has still not recovered on the Oregon side. Mile after mile of burnt trees, a spectral brown, are on the steep walls and extend miles back out of sight. There's not even the slightest recovery visible. As the seasons pass the underground root systems, completely burnt, will lose their grip on the soil and that ghost forest will topple over and litter the slopes like matchwood, and the young people born since the first year will never know what was lost.
That, I think, is what is coming for us. We were thoughtless and we are going to see, are seeing, the results of our heedlessness.
And unlike in Oregon, there will be no place to escape the fire.
Thank you as always, Michael, for the thoughtful response. Sorry I didn't get back to you sooner. I thought I had responded... I know how right it feels to be a climate change maximalist, and a biodiversity crisis maximalist too. The signs are everywhere, not least in OR as you've described. I see that and feel it too, but I take heart in the scale of rapid change that's possible, and in the scope of rapid improvement in the natural world if we allow and encourage it. The losses will build, no matter what we do, and the world will never be the same, but so much can be done if we let ourselves do it that will reduce the suffering. May it be so.
So true: "In the Anthropocene, if you’re not grieving, you’re not paying attention." Thanks for the work, Jason! Appreciate all 100 essays. Keep them coming! --Liesl
Working on it, Liesl... Thanks as always for the support.
One last point. Using the Oregon fire as a metaphor was pretty useful. A takeaway is that recovery is very, very slow, and that the climate is changing so rapidly that the new forest ecosystem may not resemble the one that was consumed in the conflagration.
The other takeaway is how rapidly the Oregon fire grew from a dozen square yards to scores of miles. Everyone thinks climate change is slow and incremental- that it won't be even in our grandchilden's lives. NOT SO! We must disabuse ourselves of that notion. Abundant evidence exists that some past major changes were very very sudden, and it doesn't always take asteroid strikes or volcanic eruptions to generate enormous changes in the planet's energy, atmospheric and oceanic chemistry budgets.
Yes, speed is everything, Michael. It's something that people don't talk about enough, I think. The radical difference between planetary/ecological timescales and Anthropocene ones is at the heart of the problem. The tipping points and consequences that await us if we're not equally quick to reverse our impacts are difficult to contemplate (if easier now to see).
You are so right. I truly believe we're past a tipping point, but in all likelihood there are more than one such points leading to different domino effects. Maybe we can theorize three tipping points each leading to different deleterious outcomes. One point already reached is where parts of the world become uninhabitable to us, but temperatures don't rise to unbearable levels. Perhaps another tipping point, not yet reached, will lead to massive changes in atmospheric and oceanic currents leading to widespread polar and Greenland melting: the flooded Earth scenario. Perhaps a third point will be the coupe de grace for us: changes in atmospheric and oceanic chemistry: the under a green sky scenario and the extinction of most land and sea life. I think we will avoid the last but the second is a toss-up.
Congratulations on the 100th issue, Jason. Your readership deeply appreciates what you are doing even if too rushed, as I was yesterday, to stop and thank you. So for all of us: "Thank You".
I am a climate change maximalist. I believe terrible changes are coming, the genie has been let out of the bottle and cannot be put back. I can foresee even the destruction of human civilization and the reduction of our numbers to a minute fraction. And though I grieve the losses of all the myriads of species, a sober, dispassionate, rational part of me realizes our human species is the problem; that the natural world would be better off without us, and relief rather than grief would be the rational reaction to our diminishment.
My crystal ball is my own state of Oregon. Six years ago, in 2017 I think it was, a teenager and his friends were hiking in the Columbia Gorge and he threw some lit firework into a ravine. This caused one of the biggest forest fires in our state's history. It blew up incredibly fast and the young man and his companions had to flee ahead of it to reach safety. The fire was completely uncontrollable and burnt for days. That first day my wife and I were driving west back from Hood River, further east in the Gorge and barely made it through the fire as it came down to Cascade Locks. The sky had turned black and there was fire on both sides of I-84 by then. We may have been one of the last cars to get through. We turned off at Bonneville dam and parked in the big visitor parking lot, looking back at the billowing clouds with other refugees, unable to grasp the enormity of what was happening. That was the first day of the fire. The fire lasted for days and some subsurface parts of it continued to burn for months.
Now, these many years later, the Gorge has still not recovered on the Oregon side. Mile after mile of burnt trees, a spectral brown, are on the steep walls and extend miles back out of sight. There's not even the slightest recovery visible. As the seasons pass the underground root systems, completely burnt, will lose their grip on the soil and that ghost forest will topple over and litter the slopes like matchwood, and the young people born since the first year will never know what was lost.
That, I think, is what is coming for us. We were thoughtless and we are going to see, are seeing, the results of our heedlessness.
And unlike in Oregon, there will be no place to escape the fire.
Thank you as always, Michael, for the thoughtful response. Sorry I didn't get back to you sooner. I thought I had responded... I know how right it feels to be a climate change maximalist, and a biodiversity crisis maximalist too. The signs are everywhere, not least in OR as you've described. I see that and feel it too, but I take heart in the scale of rapid change that's possible, and in the scope of rapid improvement in the natural world if we allow and encourage it. The losses will build, no matter what we do, and the world will never be the same, but so much can be done if we let ourselves do it that will reduce the suffering. May it be so.