Tag: Climate change

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November 2024

Anyone who writes a dystopian story hopes that it will never come true. A few years ago, my novella, “Wasting Water”, was published in Undeniable: Writers Respond to Climate Change. It is a coming of age story of a young girl growing up in a world where continuous drought has ravaged the interior of the United States. This was my vision of a possible world where climate change had gone unchecked. When I wrote that story, I believed we could reverse the dangerous direction of our activities that contribute to this possible future. Sadly, the people on our planet may now have gone beyond the point of being able to reverse the effects of climate change and the deadly results of it. I am not alone is seeing the disaster unfolding.

The World Wild Life Fund says this: “More frequent and intense drought, storms, heat waves, rising sea levels, melting glaciers and warming oceans can directly harm animals, destroy the places they live, and wreak havoc on people’s livelihoods and communities.”

The United Nations says: “Climate change is the single biggest health threat facing humanity. Climate impacts are already harming health, through air pollution, disease, extreme weather events, forced displacement, pressures on mental health, and increased hunger and poor nutrition in places where people cannot grow or find sufficient food.”

This November there was an election. In the past, our new president-elect has stated that climate change is a hoax. He appears to have no intention of curbing the human activities that contribute to this undeniable future. Ironically, the very things he has promised to do, curbing immigration into the U.S. and reducing consumer costs, are the very things that a warming world will aggravate.

Climate refugees are fleeing places that can no longer support them through farming or that are so ravaged by extremes of weather that their homes are being destroyed.  Their numbers are increasing, and they will continue to flee to anywhere they can survive. They believe one of those safe places is the United States. Whatever measures will be taken to try to stop them, there will be more and more of them because they have no place else to go. Unfortunately for us all, the U.S. is becoming a place of doubtful refuge. Rising sea level, hurricanes of unprecedented severity, wild fires, floods, and droughts are causing people within the United States also to become climate refugees.

As for reducing consumer costs, especially the cost of groceries and housing, the new administration will have to deal with the challenges of food production becoming increasingly compromised by changing climate and the threats to housing in places ravaged by floods, storms, and fires . All of this is already observable.

The results of climate change increasingly threaten building and maintaining housing.  Even if a house can be built, no insurance company will take on the risk because it is too high, making getting a mortgage impossible. This may be a minor concern compared to the end of life on the planet, but for some people, this is such an urgent issue that the survival of all living things is secondary. That species are dying–the last white rhino died this week–and other species, both of plants and of animals, are declining in number or are vanishing, is less important than affordable housing. One’s own survival instinctively comes first, but the death of our fellow creatures is a harbinger of our own demise.

I don’t want my dystopian story to come true, but I’m afraid it has already begun. Perhaps, during this National Write a Novel Month,  I can write a new story. One where people change their behaviors to try to pull Earth out of the fire. Where people realize the world is fragile and full of humans and animals who deserve to live their lives without hate, fear, starvation, or extinction. Where there will be no wars across the globe causing terrible suffering. The role of science fiction has so often been to inspire hope. And perhaps even change. It may be too late, but I can’t give up. I owe it to my planet and all who live here.

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Hope Springs Eternal In My Garden

In An Essay on Man, Alexander Pope wrote, “Hope springs eternal in the human breast.” We quote him all the time, and because we dare not do anything but hope, because it is easier than wearing ourselves out with despair, or because we are fools, we keep hoping. I hope that next year my democracy will be intact, the climate will not kill us all, wars and assassinations will go away, and people will be civil to one another. I hope famine and homelessness will abate. But more than all of those, I hope my family and friends will stop dying for a little while, if only so I can catch my breath. And in addition to all this, I hope my garden will stop being an unmitigated disaster.

Yes, I know. With all the woes in the world, I shouldn’t be moaning about my garden. But honestly, the thing that is supposed to bring me joy and respite from the weary world is making me unhappy. Now that the beds are put to sleep and any pots that can be have been moved indoors, it’s time to take stock. In the war to have a few fresh fruits, vegetables, and flowers, I’ve lost most of the battles. But I have arms and armor. I have the entire winter to lay out a plan. So next year….

I keep hoping that rabbit-proof fencing will spare the greens, that diligence will thwart the squash bugs, that drip lines will make up for a complete lack of rain for weeks on end. I hope the squirrels will find someplace else to dig than in my flower pots. I hope I can give my poor, sad lilies of the valley some friends to fill their bed. I hope the stressed trees and shrubs survive the winter, the perennials come back, and the invasive species stay dead.

Gardening is always an act of faith. We trust the the dead-looking seed really is waiting to burst into life. We believe dirt and water and time will make a little sprout peek out into the daylight and reach for the sky. I watch eagerly as blossoms appear and insects travel from one to another, dispersing fertility. Every spring–in fact, every winter after the initial disappointment of the fall has faded a bit–I am wildly, madly hopeful that the spring will be wonderful, the summer will be bountiful, the autumn will be a celebration of abundant harvest. I hope the frosts will end early and return late. I hope to can and freeze and cook for everyone I  love. I hope to foist excess produce off on unsuspecting strangers.

So as we go into winter, I will lay out my battle plan for my garden. And I will vote in every election. I will reduce my carbon footprint. I will give plasma.  I will donate to Harvesters and the DAV and anyplace else that is fighting to stave off hopelessness. I will speak out against hate and violence, and I will strive to be kind. Because just hoping isn’t enough.

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Doing Good

In 1902, the Agriculture Department’s Chief Chemist, Dr. Harvey Washington Wiley, began what he called “hygienic table trials,” but soon the Washington Post reporter George Rothwell Brown came up with the name The Poison Squad. Dr. Wiley was attempting to prove that additives and adulterants in everyday foods were unsafe and unhealthy. In doing so, he took on powerful industries and their bought-and-paid-for government supporters. It took years of fighting, issuing reports, doing the right thing, but it wasn’t until Sinclair Lewis published The Jungle in 1906 that headway was finally made. Dr. Wiley’s story is told in Deborah Blum’s book, The Poison Squad, and in the  documentary based on the book (you can watch it in it’s entirety at the American Experience website https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/poison-squad/).

One of the many things that disturbs me is that over one hundred years later, the same excuses are being used to prevent doing the right thing. The arguments go: changes will adversely affect business, it’s too expensive, the people advocating for change are misguided radicals or alarmists, and other common protests. Special interests still buy off politicians, seek to cut funding to watchdog groups, delay, sue, ignore the law–whatever it takes to not do the right thing.

Writers have a unique opportunity to draw attention to bad behavior. Certainly journalists and writers of exposés do this, but writers of fiction sometimes make far more headway in capturing the attention of the public, raising awareness, and calling people to action. Sinclair’s novel was written to draw attention to the inhumane working conditions of the meat packing industry, but in exposing it his disclosures inspired  changes in hygienic practices. Science fiction writers have a long history of asking questions, proposing worst case scenarios, making us look at ourselves and the people we trust but maybe shouldn’t. Fiction puts us in the story so we can see the real costs of failure to do good.

I feel strongly that truth has great value, that lies once told take on a life of their own and can cause real harm. I believe doing the right thing s may sometimes be difficult but is never the wrong way to go. I am proud that my writing has been included in the anthology Undeniable: Writers Respond to Climate Change. I am proud to be one of the voices saying, take notice, this is important, we need to act. It is my personal goal to always try to write with truth and compassion. Though I may not always succeed, I will always try to do good.

Image: The Members of The Poison Squad. THE U.S. FOOD AND DRUG ADMINISTRATION/FLICKR/PUBLIC DOMAIN

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Getting It Right, Getting It Wrong

“Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons.” Popular Mechanics (1949).

The wonderful actor, Rutger Hauer, died recently. I’ve loved him in so many movies, but Lady Hawke and Blade Runner are two my friends have been talking about a lot. In Blade Runner (made in 1982), Mr. Hauer plays Roy Batty, a replicant or bio-engineered being. The film takes place in 2019 Los Angeles. Some people are noting Rutger and his character, Roy, died in the same year. The film has flying cars, bio-engineered people and animals, and references to mining operations in outer space. Here in the real 2019, we don’t much have those things. Blade Runner was based on Phillip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, first published in 1968. Dick’s version of Los Angeles was post nuclear war, and the story takes place in 1992, then in later editions, in 2021. So far, we’ve avoided nuclear war, and we still don’t have replicant pets, although cloning is making strides.

Sometimes stories of the future get it wrong, sometimes they get it right. Sinclair Lewis, in his 1938 novel It Can’t Happen Here, was probably thinking about Huey Long when he wrote his story of a potential totalitarian regime in America, but the satire bears an uncanny resemblance to the rise and rule of Donald Trump.  Orwell, Huxley, Wells, and Verne got some things right, perhaps more right than most other science fiction and futurist writers, but predicting the future and how we will live in it is hard. Some things we think will change don’t or do so very slowly, other things change at an unimaginable pace. Dick Tracy’s two way wrist radio, introduced in 1946, is a more accurate description of today’s technology than many science fiction stories of a similar era.

Even near future predictions can be tricky. Throughout the 1950’s, we all expected nuclear war, nuclear accidents, and the results these things would bring. We weren’t expecting global climate change. Now that we’re experiencing it, we may still get things wrong. In my novella, Wasting Water, I was expecting massive droughts throughout the United States. Instead, we seem to be having floods, followed by droughts followed by severe storms, excessive heat, excessive cold, and who knows what next? The droughts may come and stay yet, but it’s hard to predict. It would be nice to be right, but I wouldn’t wish that on my planet.

In 1949, it was hard to predict that computing would become what it is today, not a 1.5 ton machine, but portable, readily available, and ubiquitous. I often wonder what breakthrough will make the next unpredictable leap in technology, the next science fiction moment. It may be decades in the future, or maybe just around the corner. Perhaps we’ll get those flying cars yet. After all, we got our Star Trek communicators.

Image: Even with Abby standing on them, none of my computers weighs 1.5 tons. By Marilyn Evans.