I wrote “What Do You Do When the Pavement Melts?” back in 2016. It was in response to the refugee crisis. If I wrote it today, it could be a comment on the world outside my window.
Seattle woke up this morning to an AQI of over 200. The wildfire smoke is thick and choking. As we drove along a stretch of the Lake Washington Loop this morning, we couldn’t see Bellevue, just a few miles away over the water. We can normally see all the way to the Cascades, but today a grim fug of almost greasy looking smoke shrouded the view entirely. It looked like a scene from a sci-fi movie about a dystopian future. But of course, that dystopian future is already here.
In 2016, I said,
Something essential about climate change that most conversations about it fail to adequately convey is just how inescapable one’s local climate is. Climate varies over the face of the globe, obviously. Some people are (IMHO) lucky enough to be freezing their nads off in Iceland, while others live in Miami Florida (hot and wet), or Hyderabad Telangana (tropical wet and dry), or Chelan Washington (mostly on fire last summer).
But what’s the same for 99% of people, no matter the local climate, is this: wherever you are, that’s where you’re stuck. Whatever your climate if you don’t have lots of freedom and enough money, then without the heroic determination it takes to flee, you have to deal with it.
It seems like such a simple premise, but it’s the meat of the matter. Your local climate influences everything. And if it becomes unbearable or uninhabitable, and you can’t change it back, then what do you do? What happens then?
In Telangana, India last summer, almost 600 people died, victims of a deadly heat wave that made news the world over. In all, over 2,300 people perished from the heat in India.
They were stuck. Stuck outside in the sweltering heat with no shade or water, doing day labor. Stuck being old and infirm and more vulnerable to dehydration and exhaustion. Stuck being delicate little kids in a heatwave that brought temperatures of over 113 degrees Fahrenheit – which was just the temperature, not the heat index.
There is no reason to suppose that the coming summers will be anything but the same, if not worse. Yes, next summer may be cooler, because that’s how these things work. We get a jagged upward trend line – always going higher in the end, but juddering up and down year-to-year. But remember that the ten hottest years globally have all happened since 1998, and climate scientists are predicting that 2015 will be the hottest year ever recorded “by a mile.”
And we’re stuck. We’re all stuck. That is, we’re stuck until it becomes unbearable. And when it does become unbearable, and you decide to flee, where will you go?
What do you do when the pavement melts? What do you do when your town’s power grid fails, and the lights go out? What do you do when your entire town burns down? What do you do when your city is drowned by a hurricane? What do you do when food shortages cause wide-spread civil unrest, and there’s shooting in the streets?
What a lot of people are going to do is summon the heroic determination to flee.
My segue then was to a discussion of the Syrian refugees who were so much in the news. Remember them? It’s been 4 short years, but it seems a lifetime ago that we were discussing their fate.
We all know intervened, of course. It’s been a firehose of putrescent news since then, capped off with COVID-19. Popular concern in the USA about refugees from far-flung countries seems almost quaint, now.
The refugee crisis didn’t go away, of course. It’s still out there, getting worse, getting more urgent, more terrible. It’s going to come here. Environmental migrants — climate change refugees — are going to arrive on our shores.
And so will many of us become climate change refugees: even more than have already moved after Sandy, and Katrina, and Maria.
If you’ve been burned out of your home in Lake Oroville, CA and are moving to live with family in Iowa, you’re a climate change refugee.
If you barely escaped the French Creek fire in Oregon and have decided to up stakes and move to Massachusetts, where you have some contacts in your industry, you’re a climate change refugee.
If your home in Lake Charles was flattened by Hurricane Laura and you’re moving to Chicago, you’re a climate change refugee.
Back in 2016, we looked at the stories about the refugee crisis and were shocked by the horror of the situation. We marveled at the guts and grim determination – or just plain desperation and panic and no other options – motivating the hundreds of thousands fleeing from war, from persecution, and from poverty. All those exhausted, hungry, frantic Syrian and Afghan and Senegalese moms and dads and kids, all those Nigerian and Serbian aunts and cousins, all those Iranian and Iraqi dispossessed shopkeepers, nurses, professors and office workers, all fleeing to the West. Some 350,000 in 2015.
And now, we’re looking in horror at the devastating wildfires, and some of us are living through them, and others of us are merely stuck with the atmospheric storm of particulate matter and smoke and we can move — we can go to Idaho, or we can go to Miami, but THERE IS NO OTHER PLACE TO GO THAN HERE. The Earth. We are all stuck here together on our friendly local only known inhabitable planet!
It’s one thing for people to leave war-torn countries. It is quite another to get off a planet that is increasingly inhospitable – and uninhabitable – all over.
If there’s gunfire in the streets and bombs going off in your city, you might be able to make it somewhere that’s at peace. But what do you do if the climate of your entire planet is altered beyond your wildest imagination? We aren’t there yet, but best estimates indicate we have precious little time — an astonishingly small slice of precious time — before the global sh*t really hits the fan.
As the global climate continues to change, there’s nowhere else for us to go. We’re not all going to fit into Alaska, or Switzerland, and anyway, you can bet your sweet bippy that your friendly neighborhood oligarchs are busily making sure they’ve got the best real estate all wrapped up, just in case they turn out to have been wrong all along about climate change.
We. Are. STUCK.
Carl Sagan said it better than I ever could, so I’ll close by quoting him.
Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
Let’s make that stand – together – against climate change, shall we?
#HairOnFirePeople
Post by Kïra Thomsen-Cheek
