As we smash through climate records—so far this summer we’ve had the hottest day, the hottest June, the lowest Antarctic sea-ice, and the highest ocean temperatures—Miriam’s admonition—Don’t wait—reverberates as a message for us all, writes Pam Spritzer.
—Miriam’s admonition—Don’t wait—reverberates as a message for us all. Adapting Montaigne’s aphorism on death, we might say, since we cannot conquer nature, the best course is to keep it conscientiously in mind.
We’ve seen this collective nonresponse before in recent memory. Americans watched Covid-19 death counts rise in one country after another while doing nothing to prepare for the virus’s plainly foreseeable arrival on our shores. In other words, we waited—until bodies piled up in 18-wheelers.
In dying we meet our ultimate vulnerability. Any aspect of our being may break down: Clear vision turns cloudy or dark; chewing requires arduous effort, swallowing goes awry, and digestion induces distress; loss of bladder control plunges us back to infantile dependency; our arthritic hands can’t button a shirt or trim our fingernails . Even the mind, the epicenter of our sense of self, may lose its bearings.
Yet however inventive we may be, to survive we need climate stability within a fairly narrow temperature range, and we already face devastating volatility and heat—from Dubai to Death Valley—with worse to come. Despite the fact that every one of us wants to inhabit a clean environment, we continue to poison it.
To have a chance of saving civilization, we must act now, “at dramatic scale and with dramatic speed,” writes McKibben. As biblical bushfires threatened to engulf homes in New South Wales, the Australian authorities issued this alert: “You are in danger and need to act immediately to survive.” Climate scientists are sending the same message to us all.Throughout the fall and winter, Miriam shrank, her royal blue sofa seeming to grow around her.
The stark clarity of our circumstances presents a choice: We can deny the mounting temperatures, monumental inequities, and mass immiseration until we areby them in “the era of global boiling,” to borrow United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres’ phrase, or we can design an economy to maximize mutual care rather than individual consumption and promote biodiversity rather than monoculture.
Imagine if instead of fearing for our children’s future, we knew that our afterlife—the world that survives us—would be verdant, robust, and joyful.
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