This is the entirety of the story.
A man was shot and killed while waiting in line at a Louisiana gas station on Friday, police said.
Gas supplies are low and long lines common at gas stations after Hurricane Ida made landfall on Sunday. More than two-thirds of stations were without fuel in Baton Rouge and New Orleans as of Friday, according to GasBuddy.com.
It’s one death, with one straightforward cause.
It’s one shooting, and in America, we have an urgent need to deal with our out of control gun violence, a thing that seems to most folks entirely unrelated to the problem of climate change.
It’s one death, among the almost 50 that we directly attribute to Hurricane Ida.
But it was a death caused not PHYSICALLY by the hurricane that brought death and misery from its howling winds and torrential rains. It was a “secondary death,” if you will — a killing that was a breakdown in civilized behavior, set off by the breakdown of one of the crucial systems humans have set up to keep our civilization ticking along smoothly.
And so it feels like a harbinger.
It feels like a tiny human-corpse-shaped window into the future, where disaster after disaster – fires, floods, hurricanes, food scarcities, outbreaks of disease, and fuel shortages – reduces many of us to quivering piles of shredded nerves and unmeet basic needs, lurching from catastrophe to calamity and lashing out inchoately in response.
A stable climate allowed humanity to develop civilization. Regular crop yields and stable animal husbandry meant that cultures could flourish, and that we could develop ever more sophisticated cultural products like the printing press, intricate governmental structures, geometry, astronomy, chemistry, complex mathematics, and all the rest.
The collapse of civilizations has often occurred in the past in conjunction with, and because of, drought. These were short term and localized as compared to the globe-spanning droughts, storms, fires, and sea level rise that are experiencing now. And even then, these changes in the climate could and did bring down entire advanced civilizations.
The idea that we here in the United States, or anywhere else, might escape the fate of the Mayans, the Akkadians, or the Khmer empire of south-east Asia is naïve, I think.
It is looking increasingly unlikely that we will “tech our way” out of our current predicament. For complex reasons that others can explain in more detail than I will here, carbon capture technology – while virtually required to keep emissions at a level that keeps the world from warming beyond 1.5°C beyond pre-industrial levels – is not yet ready to roar up to speed and save us. It’s expensive, for one thing, and there is really no other reason (than solving global warming) to invest in it. And so we haven’t.
It’s always appropriate to quote Yeats at a juncture like this one, so here are the first four lines that you knew were coming:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world
Those words were written in 1890 and feel more prescient with every passing day.
It really is time to bite the bullet and DO SOMETHING NOW. To do something big. To do something that matters. To do anything we can in the hopes of saving human civilization.
It was one death in Louisiana, but it felt like a shot heard ‘round the world.
Thanks for reading. Now for some musings about what, exactly, to do? I still haven’t been able to locate any big, in person, possible civil-disobedience-based actions near Seattle.
Want to give a senator a visit in person and make your feelings known? They’re not working hard enough on climate change – not even our Democratic senators (much less the lying fascists in the GOP) – and they’re also not expecting their constituents to just drop in and demand more action on this most pressing of issues. We need to do that more, I think.
Here’s info on the physical office addresses of just three senators on the “Top Twenty” list of senators getting significant money from the fossil fuel and agribusiness industries.
Each website blurb says something mealy-mouthed along the lines of “due to the high volume of emails received, we cannot respond….”
But they might jolly well respond to people turning up IN THE FLESH, in meat space, and quietly occupying the lobby until the good senator comes out and takes notice.
It’s time to be the sand in the gears. It’s time to physically confront the people who claim to represent us and yet do a much better job of representing the corporate interests that pay them. If not now, when? If not us – who?
#HairOnFirePeople
Kira Thomsen-Cheek, Seattle
@KiraOnClimate