Last year was the hottest summer on record in the Northern Hemisphere. Earth’s ocean surfaces were warmer in the first month of 2024 than any previously recorded January. And by the end of this year, global climate-related deaths since 2000 could exceed 4 million people, according to one estimate.

The immediacy and the stakes of human-driven climate change have never been clearer. Yet journalists reporting on climate-driven disasters are still pulling punches in their coverage. They often don’t explicitly invoke climate change in their reporting, and even more rarely do they identify the primary culprit behind it: the human consumption of fossil fuels, egged on by oil and gas companies that have long known better.

Journalists cherish their performance of neutrality when reporting on controversial issues. But this commitment to appearing “balanced”—even when one side is relying on evidence and the other is making things up—has come at a profound cost. It’s led major news outlets to cover what should be the science story of our time through the lens of politics, resulting in a delayed, diminutive planetary response to the once slowly, and now rapidly, accelerating climate emergency.

Journalistic neutrality posits that it’s possible to approach a news story without filtering choices through some system of values: about what’s right and wrong, true and false, important and trivial, “normal” and deviant. But this long-held reporting norm is a fallacy. Contemporary media critics such as Jay Rosen and Lewis Raven Wallace have aptly argued that all communication originates in “a view from somewhere”: We are inevitably influenced by our experiences, our families, our peers, and our moral commitments, and it’s more productive to recognize and acknowledge these commitments than to delude ourselves or (as journalists often do) over-represent views we find harmful just to demonstrate impartiality.

Right-wing actors have weaponized the fear of being labeled “biased” to manipulate reporting by insisting on “both sides” treatment that offers equally credulous depictions of crystal-clear science and cynical “skeptics.” Reporters who are believed to have crossed a line into opinion or “advocacy” can lose prestige, or even their jobs, by not adequately acquiescing to an elusive and idealized standard of neutrality. This has led journalists to violate their own sense of morality or legitimize movements of which they are rightfully skeptical in their coverage. Veteran environmental journalist Amy Westervelt has spoken about this on her groundbreaking “Drilled” podcast: “I myself have had editors remove mentions of climate science from a story about worsening wildfires because they don’t want to ‘make the story political.’”

A late-20th century campaign exploiting this neutrality norm through well-promoted pseudo-science and supporting rhetoric from fossil fuel-friendly politicians prompted journalists to waste years tepidly “balancing” empirical truths about rising climate risks against bad-faith claims that climate change was a “hoax” or conspiracy. Max Boykoff, a leading scholar in exposing these patterns, found in one study of climate coverage from 1995 to 2004 that journalists’ failures to clearly portray the scientific consensus “have led to the appearance of amplified uncertainty and debate, also then permeating public and policy discourse.”

Journalists now face an ethical choice that affects the fate of life on Earth: Do they stick with the vaunted value of “neutrality” and keep balancing good-faith climate communication with bad-faith, debunked denialism? Or do they cover the climate emergency as an increasingly urgent fact and mitigate the muddle that has plagued our public discourse?

Inspiration for an alternative path can be found in the Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics. This widely influential code, revised in 2014 by the century-old organization representing journalists in the U.S., offers four main principles: Seek Truth and Report It, Act Independently, Be Accountable and Transparent, and Minimize Harm.

In the context of climate change, the directive to minimize harm is the most overlooked. This tenet has guided journalists through many discrete cases where the safety, well-being, and privacy of individual news sources are at stake. Protecting a sexual assault victim’s identity, for instance, might mean being less transparent and delivering less truth than would naming that victim. In such cases, journalists generally err on the side of minimizing harm.

Yet because the mandate to minimize harm is narrowly interpreted to focus on individual sources and subjects, its highest potential is largely untapped. Journalists’ much broader obligation to minimize harm—by considering the safety and well-being of communities, societies, and the very planet that sustains life and journalistic work – has been almost entirely neglected.

Climate change is perhaps the most compelling case for applying a broader interpretation of the principle to minimize harm: favoring evidence over equivalence and making coverage choices that starkly clarify the stakes of continued inaction.

Scientists have recently warned that averting global catastrophe will require a radical restructuring of economic and social life on Earth — an astonishing statement that calls into question nearly every element of our daily lives. But while this warning was duly reported, it has barely interrupted the largely episodic nature of climate coverage in mainstream media, which continues to look from day to day as though we weren’t on the precipice of irrevocable disaster.

The historian Howard Zinn famously said, “You can’t be neutral on a moving train.” As the train of humanity barrels toward a potentially unlivable world, anyone who’s not trying to slow it down might as well be driving it.

There’s only one way for journalists to minimize harm around climate change—and that’s to fight it.

The post Why Journalists Shouldn’t Be Neutral on Climate Change appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Last summer was my first in my new apartment. I’d moved into the building in the fall, several weeks into a cool Vancouver November. The trees were bare, and our famous winter rain had set in for its months-long stay, but I stood on my balcony, looking out over the cityscape and mountains behind it, and thought: This will be heaven in summer.

Buildings in the Pacific Northwest are built for cold, despite our relatively mild winters. They’re made of wood and insulated, or of concrete, which retains heat naturally. Mine, a big block complex in a dense urban area, was concrete, completed only a year prior. When the building manager handed me my apartment keys, she explained the heating system. I asked about air conditioning, and she said the building didn’t have it, but that it wouldn’t be a problem. We were in Canada, after all.

Five months later, I received a notification on my phone’s weather app: An extreme heat alert was in effect for British Columbia. A spring heatwave was headed for the province, with temperatures expected over 30 C (86 F), nearly 20 degrees above the seasonal average. On May 14, I awoke in the morning from a fitful sleep and checked my thermostat: 29 C (84 F). An uncomfortable indoor temperature for a Southern Californian, but hell for a Northwesterner. My concrete home had become a sauna. That afternoon, I encountered neighbors in the elevator carrying box fans and portable air conditioners; the higher the floor they were stopping at, the more their agitation level seemed to rise. It unsettled me, but I still believed my building manager: I could survive the summer heat.

I was born in Vancouver in the late 1980s and have lived in the city most of my life. Vancouverites regularly bemoan our dreary climate, but anyone who’s lived in the Pacific Northwest long enough knows what makes living here worth it. When the rain finally lifts and the trees turn green, our corner of the planet transforms into a northern paradise. Summer’s long, light-filled days—even if they have historically lasted only a couple months—are enough to forgive the rest. When a cool ocean breeze blows in at 10 p.m. on a July evening, the sky still filled with color, anything feels possible.

Summer was always my favorite season here. As a child, I anticipated it with mounting excitement each spring, certain of its transformative potential. Summer meant freedom from school and the confines of a world determined by adults; it meant water parks and beaches, crushes and bike rides late into the night.

Two decades later, I feel differently. Like many in the Northwest, I’ve come to dread summer.

Solastalgia is a word many of us have learned, as the places we grew up in and the seasons we spent there have been irrevocably altered by climate change. It’s a word drawn from the past (the Latin solacium—“comfort” or “solace”—and the Greek algos: “pain”) to describe our present. It holds both our current grief for what has been lost and anticipatory grief for a world that will be even more changed.

Where Vancouver summers were once associated with clear afternoons and gentle temperatures—a calling card that made the Pacific Northwest a promising option for climate apocalypse preppers—they’ve become seasons of extreme heat, fires, and smoke. June, July, August, and increasingly even May and September now often bring long, scorching days and the distinctive orange haze of a smoke-blanketed sun.

For many British Columbians, the summer of 2021 was a psychological turning point. Fifteen years ago, I can’t remember a June day in Vancouver reaching anywhere near 30 C; in fact, between 1976 and 2005, the city averaged just one day over 30 C per year. But in late June 2021, British Columbia experienced a heat dome that saw inland temperatures soar to nearly 50 C (122 F), shattering heat records, killing hundreds of people, and sparking fires across the province, one of which destroyed the entire town of Lytton within hours.

In Vancouver, temperatures hovered at nearly 40 C (104 F) for days, with wildfire smoke adding to the suffocating claustrophobia. Public libraries became cooling centers, and stores across the province sold out of air conditioners. Climate data analysis suggested that the event would have been 150 times less likely without human-induced climate change.

Last year, while I baked in my apartment during the May heatwave, parts of British Columbia and neighboring Alberta again burned—an early start to a Western wildfire season that would be Canada’s worst yet. In June, Canada made international headlines when smoke from wildfires in Quebec traveled south, enveloping New York City and large swaths of the Northeast for days. By the fall, flames had scorched 16.5 million hectares.

I couldn’t afford the expensive air-conditioning units my neighbors had purchased, so I spent June, July, and August in a state of chronic sleep deprivation and mental stress. I didn’t realize how much the summer’s heat had affected me until late August, when the smoke started to roll in from British Columbia’s devastating inland fires, forcing me to keep my windows closed and my air filter running to mitigate it.

Being shut in in 30-degree weather undid me. I caved and purchased an air conditioner—on sale, to mark what would usually be the season’s end. I’m glad I did. September in Vancouver was also hot and smoky. Being able to cool down inside my home provided immeasurable relief.

This year, I’m better equipped psychically as well. As Canada emerges from the warmest winter in the country’s history, and drought fuels fires that have already forced thousands to evacuate in the West, I’m planning for the likelihood of days spent indoors, avoiding the heat and smoke. I know I’m privileged to have an escape. Like many Pacific Northwesterners, I’ve had to accept our new reality: Summer is no longer a time of freedom.

My solastalgia encompasses my grief not just for the climate I knew and how it has changed in my lifetime, but how I have changed in tandem. I mourn the Vancouver summers of my childhood but also the version of me that associated summer with pleasure and joy, instead of anxiety and danger.

I hope there will still be days when the sun sinks late over the Pacific on a cool evening and the future feels expansive, but I’ll experience them differently, knowing they’re a reminder of a fading season. The future they conjure will likely bring a different version of summer with it.

The post An Elegy for Vancouver Summer appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

At the end of 2023, four environmental groups sued the National Park Service and invoked the Wilderness Act to stop the replanting of trees following a catastrophic wildfire in Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks. Around the same time, the National Park Service announced that it aimed to invoke the Wilderness Act to limit the use of fixed anchors on Yosemite’s iconic big wall climbs.

How did a law created 60 years ago to protect nature in undeveloped areas come to do something else entirely—and, in the process, become counterproductive to its own goals? Today, the Wilderness Act of 1964 preserves nearly 175,000 square miles of public land in the United States, largely roadless expanses only accessible on foot or pack animal. We need to preserve such wild spaces more than ever: They are where threatened species and their habitats can best flourish with minimal human impacts.

But the California national parks where environmental stewards are applying to the Wilderness Act are neither remote nor roadless. Instead, the appeals to the Wilderness Act in those parks are part of a shift in approach to the law that may, in the end, run counter to its aims—and that needs to be rethought.

In addition to these cases, the Wilderness Act has increasingly been used to limit scientific research in protected areas. This includes research on habitats being ravaged by the effects of climate change and disease outbreaks that directly affect the biodiversity that the act seeks to protect. Many of the limited activities are essential to understanding the ecological and evolutionary processes needed to manage these lands in the future, but they are not permitted—or are permitted only in highly exceptional cases—under the Wilderness Act.

As conservation biologists, we work in remote natural laboratories around the globe. Dan Blumstein spends his summers studying marmots at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory (RMBL) near Crested Butte, Colorado. Crested Butte is a renowned recreation and nature tourism destination; RMBL is an internationally recognized research station that abuts the 283-square-mile Maroon Bells-Snowmass Wilderness Area.

Over the past decade, the RMBL has started to host hydrological and atmospheric studies with staggering possibilities thanks to new, remote-sensing technology that can collect constant data. Small weather stations and sensors create increasingly precise models of the ground growth conditions and help us understand precipitation and snowmelt. Conducting these studies near Crested Butte, at the headwaters of the Colorado River, is essential to understanding the hydrological dynamics that ultimately provide water for 40 million people in the southwestern United States and northeastern Mexico.

However, Wilderness Act protections mean that scientists cannot establish weather stations, deploy semi-permanent sensors, establish remotely triggered cameras to monitor wildlife, permanently mark individual plants with small metal tags, or leave small, plastic rain gauges out on these lands. There is a process to request exceptions, but it is arduous—and the government almost always denies them.

Should there be research in Wilderness Areas, and if so, what degree of research-related impacts are acceptable? Should we, as a society, permit recreational use, but not science in these minimally impacted areas? The government must reevaluate how the Wilderness Act is deployed. We assert this not because we view natural areas as unimportant, but rather because we view them as essential resources that can help us manage biodiversity.

Human-driven change—an unplanned global experiment on the Earth—is happening everywhere in this Anthropocene era. We are living through a global experiment with the planet’s biodiversity. We urgently need wilderness areas with limited human impacts as safe harbors for the biodiversity we depend on. At the same time, it’s futile to pretend that those areas experience no human impacts at all.

Scientific research helps find solutions for restoring habitat and protecting biodiversity while managing the impacts of humans. This includes research on how human activities alter the traits and resilience of existing species. For instance, Thomas Smith researches how climate change will affect biodiversity in Central Africa as species have to move to new habitats or adapt to avoid extinction. He and others used genomics to identify where a given species would be best adapted to future, warmer climates. Then, they worked with conservation officials to select areas for new parks that would best protect species.

In the Anthropocene, we need the Wilderness Act more than ever before, in part because humans’ myriad assaults on the environment have increased the value of minimally impacted land. Yosemite, Sequoia, and Kings Canyon National Parks welcome millions of annual visitors, and they serve an important—but entirely different—purpose than the areas the act protects, which are both repositories of nature and necessary places to study ecological processes.

When people—often with good intentions—invoke the act in ways that hamstring both effective federal management of public lands and scientific research, we’re left with the Wilderness Act being used as a bludgeon against effective natural resource management and a barrier to obtaining necessary scientific knowledge. As we face climate change’s unprecedented changes on our natural surroundings, we also have to rethink how we interpret the laws that protect those surroundings in novel and unexpected ways.

Aldo Leopold, the father of conservation biology, once said, “One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.” Leveraging the very best science and ecological knowledge gained from wild areas to become better stewards of our small planet is one way to help redress those wounds.

The post Is the Wilderness Act Still Protecting Nature? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

If the world really is going to hell, you should get your brakes checked. The ride is going to be very downhill.

I learned that lesson, among others, after my own brakes started to smoke while descending down, down, down Highway 190 into California’s answer to the underworld—Death Valley.

I did not run into the Devil on this Death Valley visit. The thermometer on these winter days never surpassed 70, and Satan, suggested one local tour guide, feels more comfortable this time of year in the hellish Southern hemisphere summer of Australia’s Great Sandy Desert. Instead, I enjoyed some hiking and the otherworldly vistas of mountains, deserts, and salt flats in Death Valley locations like Dante’s View, Hell’s Gate, and the Amargosa Chaos.

Despite such sights, Death Valley attracts just over 1 million visitors annually, about a third of the hordes that cram into Yosemite to check an item on their bucket lists each year. Although it’s located in California, the park is easier to access for Nevadans, who don’t have to go around or over the Sierra to get there.

This relatively lower number of visitors is healthier for the sensitive desert ecosystems. But Death Valley deserves Yosemite-level respect, and not just for its staggering temperatures or the damage that a drive to the lowest point in North America can do to your car.

Death Valley is bigger than Connecticut. It’s the largest national park in the continental United States, and one of the world’s largest sections of protected desert. Nearly all of it is officially wilderness, allowing adventurous visitors with high-clearance cars or backpacking skills a level of quiet, darkness, and solitude you can’t find anywhere else in our state.

Death Valley is also an extraordinary teacher. The National Park Service bills it as a “vast geological museum,” for the way you can see examples from most of the planet’s geologic eras.

Now, Death Valley offers a portal to our planetary future. As the climate changes, our world is becoming a place of extremes. Death Valley is already there. It’s at once the hottest and driest place in the country, and a place where a sudden, dangerous rain storm can bring snow, level hills, or revive ancient lakes.

Because of its scary extremes, Death Valley is misunderstood. Just as Voltaire famously joked that the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy nor Roman nor a real empire, Death Valley is not exactly a valley, nor is it dead.

It’s a graben, the geologic terms for a block of the earth’s crust that has dropped between two higher pieces of crust, often seen as mountain ranges.  And it’s full of life—with more than 300 species of birds, 50 species of native mammals, and even species of native fish. Its plant life is unusual (the beautiful evening primrose can only be found in one group of sand dunes) and highly diverse. That’s the result of the park’s mix of extreme low and high altitudes—the Panamint Mountains within the park surpass 11,000 feet above sea level—and its location in the Mojave Desert, a place of species overlap between the Great Basin Desert to the north and the Sonoran Desert to the south.

Understanding the way life flourishes in Death Valley should demonstrate that, as California’s landscapes and climate change, we shouldn’t trust our eyes. Places may come to look more barren, but they still contain much that is worthy of our attention and protection.

Protecting places of extremes will demand more sharing of responsibility, and more varied participation in governance. In recent years, Death Valley has received some notice for a novel system of governance that gives its Indigenous residents, the Timbisha Shoshone, real power in the park.

In 2000, after decades of activism and lobbying, the federal government created the first reservation inside a national park for the Timbisha Shoshone. Since then, the Timbisha Shoshone and the National Park Service co-managed Death Valley in the service both of protecting its treasures and allowing its Native people to use the park for their traditional practices.

The collaboration initially drew criticism from some environmentalists who didn’t want people, whether park visitors or the Timbisha Shoshone, touching too much of the park. But in recent years, such criticism has faded because of the powerful and mounting threat of climate change to the park, and the ability of the Timbisha Shoshone, or anyone else, to survive there.

As the writer and philosopher Margret Grebowicz described in a powerful January essay for the New Republic, Death Valley’s already scorching summer temperatures have been rising. The mercury has reached 130 degrees the last three summers in Furnace Creek, where the Timbisha Shoshone live and where overnight visitors to the park often stay. Such heat is drying up the piñon pine nuts and killing off the honey mesquite, both of which the tribe’s members harvest. The heat also makes the Timbisha Shoshone’s traditional summer migration more dangerous.

Along with the greater heat has come unusual rain, and the damage and danger of flash floods. Death Valley has seen a “thousand-year” storm in each of the last two years, forcing temporary park closures.

The 2023 storm—the remnants of the Pacific Hurricane Hilary that hit parts of California hard late last summer—created ephemeral lakes, some of which are still present. This includes Lake Manly, which last appeared in 2005 in Badwater Basin, North America’s lowest point, and is the remnant of a large lake that dominated Death Valley in ancient times.

After a Furnace Creek mechanic added some brake fluid to my car, I visited Lake Manly, which demonstrated one silver lining of our downhill drive to climate hell: there will at least be some compensating beauty.

To get to the lake from the road, you walk across white salt flats that resemble freshly fallen snow. The lake perfectly reflects the Panamint Mountains to the West. Its color is silvery blue, and feels not quite of this planet.

Several visitors removed their shoes to wade into the two-feet-deep waters. Among them was a Nevada church group, one of whose members appropriately recited the 23rd Psalm, and its famous lines about facing future peril:

Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me. Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.

The post The Road to Climate Hell Is Downhill—and Scenic appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

On June 30, 1908, a sudden blast knocked down over 2,000 square kilometers of forest in a sparsely inhabited part of Siberia. Witnesses saw a fireball from hundreds of miles away. At least one Indigenous Evenki man, and possibly two more, perished, and several individuals suffered minor injuries.

Meanwhile, our knowledge about the class of smaller near-Earth objects between 10 and 140 meters in diameter—like the one that exploded over Tunguska—is much more limited. These could still do significant damage depending on their composition and where they hit, eviscerating cities and decimating their populations. Only a small portion of these asteroids have been identified, making it more likely that they could hit with little warning. If anything big barrels our way, we will likely have time to prepare and react. But that doesn’t mean our troubles are over. Scientists and policymakers are still figuring out how to react to learning of an impending cosmic collision.

Photo from the Tunguska explosion on June 30, 1908. (Public Domain)

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The first time I met someone from Tucson, Arizona, I asked him a burning—pardon the pun—question. How did people there tolerate the summer heat? I pictured my childhood summers in Denver: hours-long games of “ghost in the graveyard” with my cousins, backyard badminton, and Frisbee at the neighborhood park. None of that would be fun in triple digits. He replied that it was easy: You just stay indoors. “It’s like winter in other places—a season where you can’t do anything,” he said.

In an unexpected twist, I now live in Tucson, which, along with much of the Sunbelt, has seen record-breaking, triple-digit days this summer. The media coverage of this extreme heat has, rightly, focused on those who are most vulnerable to high temperatures’ impacts: unhoused individuals, seniors, those with chronic illnesses, and in under-resourced neighborhoods, and the 20% of Arizonans who work outdoors. In Europe, where the temperatures are unprecedented, new research has raised concerns about how the absence of widespread air conditioning makes Europe unprepared for increasing heat.

But in the Sunbelt, most people have A/C. According to the Energy Information Administration, 94% of Arizona households use air conditioning, along with 95% of Texans and 96% of Floridians. That doesn’t mean that those of us who are healthy, housed, and work indoors are spared any need for heat-related concerns. But it does mean that the recommendation for tolerating the extreme heat is simple: Stay indoors.

The effect of this is that the experience of extreme heat isn’t dominated by danger, stress, or even grief, but something simpler and more surprising: Extreme heat is boring.

Discovering this made me think a little harder about what my Tucsonan acquaintance had said. Arizona summer wasn’t like winter—because winter wasn’t boring. Colorado not only had winters, but had built a massive economy around the season’s sports. Winter was full of activity. My brother and I took a “ski bus” to the mountains six Sundays each year. When local news announced a snow day, we went sledding and built forts. Once, when an unusually thick layer of snow had collected, my P.E. teacher led us into a forgotten basement room that held dozens of pairs of aging cross-country skis and boots, which we fitted to ourselves haphazardly. We spent class gleefully gliding around the school’s soccer field.

In contrast, one July weekend in Tucson, my partner and I collapsed into our couch after breakfast and couldn’t think of anything to do. Habituated to reading in bed in the early mornings, we missed the short, slightly cooler window of time that our neighbors used for walks. We liked to swim, but over the course of May and June, the nearby high-school pool had warmed to a temperature so hot it felt dicey to swim laps there. We considered driving somewhere, but I felt guilty about releasing more fossil fuels into the suffocating atmosphere simply so I could find marginally cooler temperatures. So we sat there, groaning, our sweaty thighs adhering themselves to the cushions.

At the time, I was reporting an article about heat in Tucson’s manufactured homes, many of which were built before federal standards for insulation were enacted. During my workdays, I was knocking on doors at run-down parks, asking people whether their home was too hot. But nearly everyone I spoke to had some form of air conditioning—even if operating it was a financial burden. Some of them mentioned that the biggest problem was blackouts, which affect manufactured homes disproportionately because entire parks are often connected to the electrical grid with a single hookup.

But while things were functioning, they, too, were bored. One woman told me that her family of three spent the summer in just one room, because they had only one window unit. Another mother and daughter invited me in for a glass of water. Their home was too temperate for an on-topic interview; they just wanted someone to chat with.

Evenings weren’t much better than weekends. The Tucsonans I had spoken to about the heat upon arriving in the city had assured me that things cooled down at night. In reality, the temperature rarely dropped below 86—the temperature at which I kept my own aging air conditioner, heeding the dictum that home units can only reliably cool 20 degrees. That meant running the air conditioner all night, which we hadn’t expected. In other places I had lived, I had always enjoyed opening the windows to let in cool air at night. As we struggled to adjust to sleeping with the stale air and loud intermittent fan, I longed for the crisp summer evenings of my childhood, for sitting outside rubbing my bare arms and thinking I should go put on a sweater.

Later, Arizona Daily Star environment reporter Tony Davis told me that there used to be a more reliable nighttime cool-down in Tucson, but it’s long since been a casualty of the urban heat island effect. Though high daytime temperatures get the most media buzz, it’s warmer nights that are accounting for the greatest warming trends across the Western U.S. Tragically, the loss of cooler nights is also killing saguaros.

I knew that hot nights made me sad. I quickly learned that they were also boring. During weekdays, my computer kept me busy, accompanied by ungodly amounts of flavored seltzer and occasional forays into the infernal backyard, just to feel something. But after work, I got cabin fever—or perhaps it should be more precisely termed “climate ennui.” I was too brain-dead to read. I ran out of shows to watch on Netflix. I scrolled and scrolled until it really felt like my brain was empty. I started going to the grocery store multiple times a week, to have a diversion that wasn’t sedentary.

Hardier desert-dwellers than I will roll their eyes at my lack of stamina and creativity, pointing to the hikes at dawn, the nighttime bike rides, the self-congratulatory pleasures of simply sweating it out. But what we’re living in now is no longer the old desert heat they know and have loved. As each successive heat dome drags on longer than the last, I suspect that even the most committed desert rats will have no choice but to spend more and more time indoors.

Ennui is famously an affliction of the privileged. But those of us who are privileged enough to suffer from climate ennui—for whom extreme heat is not life-threatening—are numerous. We are a class that could be mobilized, lashing out against our boredom. Where anger, grief, and reminders of our “grim reality” have failed to effect widespread climate activism, perhaps pushing back against boredom could do it for us.

In demanding a world where we’re not trapped indoors, twiddling our thumbs in front of vents of cool air, we would also be demanding a world with the housing and health care justice necessary to address the already-present and already-worsening effects of heat. Instead of thinking of our retreat into air-conditioned homes as a means of turning away from the reality of climate change, we should lean into the boredom it creates—in order to reject it.

The post Extreme Heat Is Boring appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In the Western U.S. and the north of Chile, large-scale mining has produced similar landscapes of extraction: open-pit and underground mines, smelter stacks, and large masonry structures. Transportation networks connected remote places to the world market, while many labor camps evolved into complex and vibrant communities. They also left their footprint on the natural environment: Polluted water and toxic fumes have made many of these sites inhabitable.

No other company left such a strong imprint in the mining regions of the Americas as the Anaconda Copper Mining Company—a “monstruous and complex organization,” in the words of historian K. Ross Toole—whose investments stretched from Butte, Montana to the Chilean desert. As the energy transition and its demand for lithium, cobalt, and other minerals drives a new mining boom, the history of Anaconda’s copper mining towns in Nevada and Chile can help us reimagine a just future not only in terms of how we power our lives, but in terms of fostering sustainable communities.

Though Anaconda’s history started in the late 19th century, much of the contemporary mining landscape dates to the boom that followed World War II, when growing demand, technological improvement, and massive capital investment, drove to increase production across the western hemisphere. As construction became more efficient, engineers spent considerable time perfecting the layout of crushing plants, smelters, and other facilities. At the same time, the company dedicated energy to perfecting the layout of workers’ domestic lives.

In the early 1950s, Anaconda started working in Yerington, Nevada. While many investors had tried to exploit the mines in the area with little success, in just two years, the company started producing cement copper at its new mine about 70 miles southwest of Reno. Isaac Marcosson, a journalist who wrote a 1957 history of Anaconda, called Yerington a “miracle” for transforming a “waste area” into a “productive community.” Its facilities included an open pit mine, metallurgical plants, and a townsite for workers called Weed Heights. Yerington was part of Anaconda’s larger corporate network. The mine required sulfur, which was brought from the Leviathan mine, some 50 miles away on the eastern slope of the Sierras, and its copper was sent to Montana for smelting and refining.

In the late 1950s, Anaconda built a modernist fantasy at 7,500 feet of altitude in the Chilean Andes. Chilean and foreign visitors marveled at the mine’s efficient organization and its perfect layout. While buses transported people back and forth to the mine, the ore moved quickly from the mine to the crushing plants to the concentrator. Before traveling to Anaconda’s elaboration plants in the United States, El Salvador’s copper took its final shape at the Potrerillos Smelter.

The designs of both the Yerington and El Salvador mines reflected ideas about efficiency and modernization that were coming into vogue at the time. In April 1960, Anaconda board president Clyde Weed wrote in the Engineering and Mining Journal that El Salvador was a great engineering achievement made possible by the combination of “capital, technical skills, and modern specialized equipment” and the “willingness of Chilean workmen.”

The mines, however, left permanent scars on the land, “ugly reminders of the visual and environmental price of extracting resources,” in the words of geographer William Wyckoff. In the north of Chile, Anaconda had started dumping copper tailings in the Pacific Ocean as early as the 1930s, destroying the local maritime life and embanking the bay. Yerington closed in 1978, shortly after Atlantic Richfield Company bought Anaconda. Like other abandoned open-pit mines, its pit quickly filled with toxic waste, leaving Nevada and Environmental Protection Agency authorities trying to sort out responsibilities and devise a cleanup strategy.

Workmen from an Anaconda smelter in Montana. Courtesy of Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Black-and-White Negatives.

Despite these environmental tensions, Wyckoff reminds us not to forget that mines “have also been places of work that produced paychecks and built communities.” People fostered a sense of belonging in isolated places and under harsh conditions, building homes even as their lives were marked by backbreaking work, violence, and conflicts.

In the 1950s and ’60s, narratives of technological progress and efficiency also included workers’ living quarters. Historically, mining companies relied on the company town model, whose replicable urban grid and company-run social services promised order that would increase worker efficiency and avoid tensions that could undermine production. But many of the old camps fell short of expectations, and company abuses, control, and material limitations created sparked conflicts and strikes.

The new camps built in the 1950s attempted to remake the company town model by improving living conditions. Anaconda called Weed Heights the “most beautifully constructed and maintained mining camp in the United States”—an attractive place to raise a family, own a home, and pursue the American Dream. Rent was low, and residents could apply for a one-, two-, or three-bedroom house. Built at the height of what the historian Lizabeth Cohen refers to as the “consumer republic,” shopping areas guaranteed residents access to consumption in all forms: restaurants, sports, and recreation. There was also a ballpark, sports courts, and a swimming pool. “Neat” and “order” frequently appeared in the town’s descriptions.

Similarly, in El Salvador, the company’s architects wanted to avoid the “industrial look” and “develop an attractive, modern town that would be a highly desirable place to work and live.” Workers’ duplex houses, made of concrete blocks and painted in pastel colors, contrasted with the arid landscape, while the curved streets gave the illusion of an American suburb. By the late 1960s, the town had about 8,300 residents and, in addition to the curving streets of duplex homes, infrastructure that included a modern hospital, a school, and stores.

The Anaconda era was tainted by its projects of social engineering, its anti-union practices, and impact on the environment. Living conditions were better than those of many other working-class suburbs, but geographical isolation and managers’ control over the living and working spaces created many tensions. In Chile, the Cold War political climate and the attitude of U.S. corporations created sharp divisions between managers and employees. Conflicts were common, and strikes lasted for weeks at the time. In 1971, the Chilean government nationalized U.S.-owned mines, including Anaconda’s properties.

Today, few mines consider building permanent camps or invest in local communities. Instead, they prefer to bus in workers, establish commuting systems, or offer temporary dormitory-style lodging near the worksite. These practices have created new problems, such as long and dangerous shifts and workers isolated from their families for extended periods of time. In places like Chile, the low-income communities that surround mining complexes have become sacrifice zones, areas that are heavily dependent on mining-related informal jobs and commercial activities and that bear the harsh environmental consequences of extraction.

Rethinking mining booms in a time of climate change and job insecurity should start by incorporating input from a diverse array of voices, including labor unions, environmental activists, businesses, and local populations. Only through working closely with communities directly impacted by mining can the transition to renewable energy truly create a sustainable future.

The post Is There Such a Thing as a Sustainable Mining Boom? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The environmentalist Paul Hawken says, “The most complex, radical climate technology is the human heart and mind, not a solar panel.” What would it mean to imagine the heart and mind as the most important green technologies, and to invest in them? To broaden our idea of climate action beyond the tunnel vision of international agreements and infrastructural solutions?

These “technologies,” if you will, are not new; they apply ancient wisdom to our current moment and shift our attention toward connection, not (just) reducing emissions, as the medicine for what ails us and the planet. If a technology is merely an application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes, then all kinds of approaches can be technologies.

Increasingly understood as science, too, many wisdom traditions offer a compass for such an endeavor—including traditional ecological knowledge, Theravada Buddhism, and Black spiritual traditions. These ways of understanding the world come from a variety of cultures and perspectives, but they all reframe the climate “polycrisis” (because it is not one crisis but a constellation of many) from a problem of individual suffering into one of collective strength.

Many of us feel powerless about climate change, in part because we feel small relative to the immense scale of the crisis. I often hear people ask, “Why should I deprive myself of X pleasure or Y entitlement, when it won’t really make any difference?” Such a narrow focus on individual impact reveals how much the myth of individualism constricts us. If we believe ourselves to be alone in everything we do, of course, we are too small to address a systemic, global problem. This explains why such a large number of people in America care about climate change, yet so few are doing anything about it in their lives.

We don’t just worry about the climate when disaster strikes; we worry because we feel alone in facing it. Contrary to appeals to “transform your anxiety into action,” studies have shown that it isn’t action itself that alleviates anxiety; it is the experience of participating in a collective toward a shared goal.

A “deep, unnamed sadness stemming from estrangement from the rest of Creation, from the loss of relationship,” or “species loneliness,” as Potawatomi botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer defines it, is arguably at the root of our polycrisis, but it may also be the reason we struggle to face it.

One solution is to first recognize, then take solace in, and then do the work of honoring that we are part of a larger system of human and non-human beings, across both space and time. We can start by cultivating an “ancestor perspective,” not unlike the Haudenosaunee notion of an ethic of “seven generations.” This means seeing ourselves as existing in a temporal frame that gathers entities together in a net of moral obligation much larger than a lone individual’s lifespan.

In his recent book, Reconsidering Reparations, the climate philosopher Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò writes that an ancestor perspective “helps ground a kind of revolutionary patience while, at the same time, rejecting complacency.”

How does this work? For someone like me, a descendent of white settlers and abolitionist Quakers, the invitation is to reckon with the legacy of harm I carry, and recognize that I can choose which of my ancestors’ calls I want to answer, which projects I want to move forward in my short time on this earth. It is also a reminder that my descendants will do the same, and that I need not finish it all in one lifetime.

Such a perspective dispels the illusion of the self-as-island. It soothes despair because we see how many good intentions and actions have come before us, are occurring alongside us, and will continue long after we are gone. This perspective is both a moral obligation and a cause for existential relief.

We can feel buoyed that we are not alone in our efforts, too, when we recognize that we are part of what Martin Luther King, Jr. called a “network of mutuality,” Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh called “interbeing,” and Indigenous epistemology recognizes as “all our relations.”

Consider, for example, Kimmerer’s question: “[W]hat would happen, I wonder, to the mountain of junk mail if we could see in it the trees it once had been?” If your community’s livelihood or health depended on the tree that was used to create a mountain of junk mail, you would grieve for it. You would act to protect it. This kind of recognition honors our entanglement with the material world; everything we touch and are made of came from somewhere, and will go somewhere after we experience it.

Individualism seduces us to imagine we’re free of these entanglements, but consider this science: investment in social ties, community trust, and strong relationships is more predictive of our ability to survive a natural disaster than strong physical infrastructure. Care is a more critical ingredient to climate resilience than concrete.

Further research has shown that the most important factor in a person’s survival in a disaster is how well they know their neighbors. And we are more likely to take actions to protect the natural environment if we know our more-than-human neighbors, too. Rather than seeing interdependence as a burden, we can come to see it as a practice of self-preservation.

In “The Parable of the Burning House,” from Buddhism’s Lotus Sutra, a wealthy man tries to get his children out of a burning house, but they are so distracted by all of their toys that they don’t want to leave. This parable has been used to describe people who are unwilling to let go of their attachments in order to see, much less save, the world around them. In this era of social media, simulacra, and selfies, a more apt description might be that we are playing with mirrors, not toys. Distracted by our own self-image at every turn, we cannot perceive, much less address, the problem.

What we need is a cultural container to process collective trauma. This technology won’t directly draw carbon out of the atmosphere. But it does get to the root of our polycrisis in a way that climate science does not.

All of these ideas are very humbling. But humility offers more riches than it costs. Those of us who have benefitted from individualism may struggle to let it go. Ultimately, not all climate actions are not about personal sacrifice. Ideally, they can be about what is both personally and collectively gained.

The post There Is No ‘I’ in the Climate Crisis appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

When Hurricane Fiona hit Puerto Rico on September 18, 2022, the U.S. colony had still not fully recovered from Hurricanes Irma and Maria, in 2017. Collapsed bridges had not been rebuilt, houses still lacked roofs, and most recovery funds had not been distributed.

Fiona’s rains only added to the woes, causing house collapses on the interior part of the island, devastating mudslides, and a widespread power outage that lasted for weeks. There was no drinking water: The Puerto Rico Aqueducts and Sewers Authority failed to acquire power generators before the storm hit, and drinking water or sewage systems run mainly on electricity. Simple tasks such as getting gas for the generator (for those who had one) or obtaining drinking water could take a whole day—and become life-and-death situations for people with chronic illnesses who needed ventilators or refrigerated insulin.

The three hurricanes severely impacted the island’s wellbeing. But their effects aren’t simply the result of intense storms. These “natural disasters” are political, stemming from a long colonial history culminating in years of austerity imposed by the U.S. With federal and local government support at a standstill, people in the colony are pulling together to make things better. Mutual aid groups and rural water systems have driven recovery pathways across the island, creating a new model for effective disaster recovery.

Puerto Rico’s history is one of exploitation. The island became a Spanish possession in the 1500s, with a colonial governance built on the genocide of Indigenous people, the enslavement of Africans, and the mistreatment of land and animals to develop the coffee, tobacco, and sugar industries.

After the U.S. took control of the island in 1898, tax incentives for U.S. corporations have come and gone, driving increases in poverty, unemployment and emigration. Starting in the 1950s, Operation Bootstrap allowed companies to establish themselves on the island without paying Puerto Rican taxes; then, in 2006, the federal government swung in the other direction, repealing a corporate tax exemption on income originating from U.S. territories. Companies left the island, and the economy plummeted. Currently, 45% of Puerto Rico’s population lives below the poverty line, and its debt is estimated to be more than $70 billion—a debt that has never been audited and was pushed by Wall Street interests.

The U.S. government’s response—decreasing Puerto Rico’s debt through austerity measures—has made the island ever more vulnerable in the face of disaster. Under President Obama, the Financial Oversight and Management Board for Puerto Rico was created to develop a deal for debt repayment between Puerto Rico and its creditors. However, the Board knew that paying back the debt would be disastrous for the island. Drastic cuts to the island’s education and health systems, including emergency medical technicians, meant that when Hurricane María hit the island, local agencies had minimal capacity to respond. Another measure, a new public-private partnership for the electric grid, has raised energy costs for consumers and caused regular power outages that create daily disruptions in education, water delivery, and health services. In disaster situations, these become catastrophic.

The U.S. and Puerto Rican governments’ disaster recovery efforts have fallen short for Puerto Ricans. Instead, it is community strategies that have enabled life on the island to continue. Mutual aid efforts—defined as collective coordination to meet each other’s needs, usually growing from awareness that top-down systems aren’t working—have picked up the slack, establishing relief actions for the island such as providing water, food, shelter, and medicine in remote, mountainous regions.

One of the most important of these solidarity efforts are community aqueducts, which provide drinking water infrastructure to areas that the government’s water utility does not serve. The aqueducts usually consist of a water pump or gravity-driven channel that moves water from wells or small rivers to a central water reservoir. The water is then treated by a chlorine disinfection process, and distributed through pipes to houses, schools, churches, and public pick-up stations.

There are 241 of these aqueducts in Puerto Rico, and they are managed largely by the community residents who they serve. Most systems are operated by neighbors that take care of everything from initial installation to day-to-day oversight. (Aqueducts with greater financial resources tend to hire external operators.) Some members oversee physical components, including daily operations and pipe and plume repairs; others take charge of organizational duties, like organizing and running their assemblies and accounting. The aqueduct organizations can take many forms. Many have one person in charge, others have an informal board of trustees, and a few have 501(c)(3) status and a well-defined structure with positions such as president and chief operator.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, community aqueducts were often the only means communities had to access potable water. Having clean water allowed Puerto Ricans to recover some sort of normality, allowing them to clean, do laundry, and flush toilets. In addition, having drinking water saved residents hours that would otherwise be invested in buying or collecting it from public pickup stations.

The network created by the aqueducts also served a more expansive mutual aid role, becoming a conduit for collecting essential goods from foundations and NGOs and redistributing them to residents in need. Members drew on the aqueducts’ networks to facilitate resource-sharing. For example, a member of one community aqueduct in Añasco shared with me that because one person in the community had an excavator available to loan to the post-María cleanup effort, aqueduct managers were able to quickly remove debris and get their system back up and running.

While community aqueducts have had success, they are not immune to the political and economic factors that constrain life in Puerto Rico. They deal with high costs for water tests and privatized energy, and marginalization from local agencies. But they are paving the way for new directions in the recovery and collective organizing. They underscore how collaboration can put even limited resources in motion to tackle emergency needs, in ways that are often more effective than government-sponsored relief efforts.

Mutual aid’s success doesn’t mean that governments should walk away. On the contrary, the U.S. and Puerto Rico should learn from these community strategies how to better respond in times of need. They should support community aqueducts and mutual aid groups, heeding their needs and concerns, and removing bureaucratic hurdles to accessing funds. There is progress: Legislation introduced on the island this year includes community aqueducts on an advisory committee developing drinking water strategies for the island.

As more and more extreme weather events take place across the world, building and maintaining solidarity networks that recognize our mutual interdependence are crucial to a resilient future. Puerto Rico’s mutual aid strategies offer an example to follow as we rethink disaster preparedness.

The post Is Puerto Rico a Global Model for Disaster Recovery? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

That’s the most interesting question posed by the most interesting measure on this November’s statewide ballot. Prop 30 might be dismissed as just another attempt to raise taxes. But it actually represents the launch of a new political era. We’re watching the beginning of an existential contest between the urgency of the 21^st century climate crisis and the endurance of the state’s dysfunctional 19^th century constitutional order.

As such, Prop 30 reveals the real nature of power in California, and the fact that most significant political divides here exist within the progressive and environmental movements.

On one side of Prop 30 and this divide are the measure’s supporters, who might be called the destructionists- progressive Democrats willing to play hardball with erstwhile allies and wreck the governing system to address climate change. On the other side are institutionalists—the progressives who have the most power in the current system, such as the governor and potent public employee unions like the California Teachers Association. In opposing Prop 30, institutionalists also align with leading defenders of California’s Prop 13-based tax system such as real estate interests and the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association.

This contest—over Prop 30 and many measures likely to follow—will decide whether the climate crisis can be addressed within the current system, which bakes its complicated and inflexible formulas for taxes, budgeting, and decision-making into an overly long constitution. The alternative: Climate forces California to remake its constitution and create a brand-new system of governance.

Proposition 30 proposes changing state law to raise taxes on high-income earners—1.75 percent on individual annual income above $2 million—for the next 20 years. According to the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office, such a tax would generate revenues fluctuating between $3 billion and $4.5 billion each year. Prop 30 would dedicate that money to a complicated mix of programs addressing two large sources of greenhouse gases: transportation and wildfires. Importantly, that includes providing additional subsidies for the purchase of electric vehicles and for charging infrastructure.

All that may sound straightforward and attractive to Californians who are worried about climate change- and who don’t understand our state’s complex governing system.

But in context of that system, Prop 30 looks like more disease, not cure.

It’s questionable as tax policy, since it increases the state’s dependence on the highest earners, adding to the system’s volatility and unpredictability.

It’s abominable as budget policy. It uses inflexible formulas to lock up billions of tax dollars in special accounts that can’t be touched for the state’s core functions: schools, healthcare, prisons, and emergency response. Indeed, Prop 30 makes repurposing any of that money a crime. It also restricts money for audits, thereby limiting oversight.

These provisions are noteworthy, because Prop 30 is also a bank robbery: In essence, the measure’s chief funder, Lyft, is conducting a raid on the state treasury as audacious as the casino heist in Ocean’s 11. Under current state law requiring a shift to electric vehicles, ride-sharing companies like Lyft will likely have to spend a great deal of their own money helping their drivers obtain electric vehicles. Prop 30’s subsidies would mean that taxpayers cover more of Lyft’s costs in this transition.

Prop 30’s many flaws seem likely to sink its chances, especially with a slew of opponents including Gov. Gavin Newsom, who is appearing in TV ads against it. But the measure’s audacious awfulness also is compelling, making a case for putting climate first and signaling the shift to this new era.

Prop 30 demonstrates that California’s environmentalists no longer want to be loved, or thought of as allies of good government. Instead, our greens—including Prop 30 backers Clean Air California, California Environmental Voters, and leading environmentalist politicians like Fran Pavley—are unapologetically putting on the black hats. They are willing to fight allies, wreck coalitions, and pick Hobbesian fights against other progressive interests.

And if the climate threat is truly existential, they may well be right.

Prop 30 says that those fighting climate change don’t need your love. They need money and action. They have no time for political pablum about California’s global climate leadership- a claim that even California’s assembly speaker has acknowledged is nonsense. And they can’t wait anymore for small measures, like the long-fought gas tax hike of recent years. The data and the climate science say 2030 will be too late.

With such ruthless urgency behind it, Prop 30, whether or not it gets a majority in November, already is a winner. On the defensive, Newsom rushed through a new package of climate legislation and investments late in this summer’s legislative session. Now he is touting his $54 billion California Climate Commitment and pledging more. “We are not only doubling down, we’re just getting started,” he says.

Of course, the people behind Prop 30 may just be getting started, too. Win or lose in this vote, they seem likely to come back with measures that are even more aggressively awful—because that’s what they have in their toolbox, in California’s current era.

If there’s anything wrong with Prop 30, from a climate crisis perspective, it’s that it’s not urgent enough. It doesn’t take enough in taxes from enough people to make every vehicle electric in this decade rather than future ones. It doesn’t remake the budget enough to make climate our true first priority.

So while Prop 30 backers have already gone too far for the taste of the governor and the teachers’ union, they’ll soon learn that they have to go much further. They’ll recognize that California’s 19^th century governing system is simply too old and inflexible for the rapid social and economic transformation the climate crisis requires.

What will they do then? Prop 30 shows they have some nerve. But do they have nerve enough to tear up the state’s tax and budget systems? Or give us a new constitution?

Because Californians face a choice: save the climate or save our strange system of government. We can’t do both.

The post California’s Prop 30 Is So Bad It Might Be Good appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.