Is it possible that each of us will have our own personal conversion moment, when we individually grasp the full reality of climate chaos and begin to fully grapple with the necessity of decisive action to protect the planet and ourselves? For the Pacific Northwest, the quick succession of disastrous fires last summer and the deadly heat dome a few weeks ago, and now the 400,000-acre Bootleg Fire in southern Oregon, currently the largest wildfire in the nation, have been shocking and impossible to ignore for those of us who live here.
But of course the process of personal conversion is more complicated than a lightbulb going off, in part because it happens in a larger societal context of denial and repression of the basic urgency of addressing climate change. When something truly disturbing has occurred, it’s a basic reflex to take cues from people around you when working through your reactions. With climate change having reached the point where its effects are palpable and terrifying, we’re all haunted by this conundrum: fully recognizing that the planet’s environment is increasingly extreme and erratic is to recognize a threat that can feel overwhelming and insurmountable, that makes you as an individual feel akin to an ant scrambling to get out from under a magnifying glass leveled by an indifferent child, or out of the path of thunderbolts hurled by a Olympian god. To acknowledge it feels like acknowledging powerlessness, helplessness, doom.
In other words, there are strong incentives even among well-intentioned people to suppress even the evidence of their senses — who wants to feel terrified and hopeless? I have had friends and acquaintances express the hope that we have seen the last of the extreme heat this year, as if what we had suffered through wasn’t the result of concrete physical forces, and can’t simply be wished away. It’s been as if people were doubling down on hope for normalcy, even as most of us know that the climate is no longer normal; we are still speaking banalities about the weather (something that just happens) when what we should be talking about is the climate (something that humanity has affected and that all of us, each in our own way, have some responsibility to protect). This is why, first, we all have a civic responsibility to share our deeper feelings of fear and danger — to know that we are not alone, and to encourage others to share their feelings — and to acknowledge to each other that what we have witnessed is part of the larger climate change story. And this is why, second, that’s it’s absolutely essential that we are collectively engaged in plans for how, exactly, we will slow, contain, and ultimately roll back climate change.
Recent extreme weather events in Oregon have also reinforced for me how challenging it’s going to be to prioritize between addressing the causes of climate change, and mitigating the effects that are already here and will continue to accelerate to matter how quickly we act in the coming years to address its roots. With the death toll from the Northwest heat dome reaching into the hundreds, there is an obvious and pressing need to ensure that everyone who needs it has access to cooling stations and air-conditioned spaces when then next extreme heat wave inevitably arrives. These requirements inexorably lead into a broader need to address inequality in Oregon and elsewhere; Willamette Week has a must-read story about research by Portland State University Professor Dr. Vivek Shandas that found huge disparities in temperature between leafier, well-to-do Portland neighborhoods, and poorer ones with far less tree coverage and more paved areas (the Portland death toll was disproportionately higher in the latter). Funding efforts to cool hotter neighborhoods and offer cooling stations for those who need them on hot days strike me as non-negotiable — yet, at the state and local level, this may well divert limited resources to protecting us in the here and now rather than long-term investments that address the roots of global warming. For instance, the Portland Clean Energy Fund, funded by a tax on retailers and passed in 2018, has so far raised $115 million. My impression was that some of that money would go to preventing climate change, but in the Willamette Week article Dr. Shandas suggests most of the money would be well-spent for preparing buildings for extreme heat. That may be necessary, but vividly demonstrates that we need more money from other sources (i.e., the federal government) to do the heavy lifting of actually slowing and stopping climate change itself. (Dr. Shandas has an opinion piece in The Oregonian this weekend that elaborates on his recommendations for how Portland can prepare for the next heat wave that combines both immediate and long-term mitigation approaches.)
In the wake of so many preventable deaths, I see an incentive for politicians to shirk responsibility for their roles in allowing our climate to reach this point to begin with; in this instance, to point to the unprecedented nature of wholly predictably temperature extremes to excuse why a greater effort wasn’t made to warn and accommodate vulnerable populations as the heat dome was clearly forecast. Again, in a world of limited state resources and the obvious need for politicians to act in the here and now to protect the lives of their constituents, the incentives may strongly lean toward states protecting themselves from current climate impacts, rather than investing in things like clean energy that will lessen those impacts years down the road (this makes it clear that the federal government has a central role to play in funding solutions like clean energy and the hardening of infrastructure that state governments can’t afford).
But the limits to simply protecting human life as the priority of climate efforts quickly become clear, even at this relatively early point in our collective awakening and mobilization. I noted a couple weeks ago that scientists estimate that over a billion marine animals died in the heat dome up and down the northwestern U.S. and Canadian coasts; beyond this, various fruit crops were spoiled, and climate change-accelerated fires are now burning across Oregon and the western United States (does anyone in Oregon state government, or the U.S. government for that matter, have plans to keep the bulk of our forest from burning over the coming years? The carbon emissions, and loss of so many oxygen-generating trees, would seem to be a catastrophic prospect not just for the region but the nation.). This deeply disturbing article in The New York Times reminds us that the Pacific Northwest faces not just the prospect of future extreme heat events, but an ongoing rise in temperatures that is destabilizing and resetting the ecology of the region. Hunkering down and taking it doesn’t seem like a viable option if that involves being burned out of house and home, having our timber industry crippled, and seeing our ability to grow crops and harvest seafood diminished. This is to say nothing of the utter immorality of destroying vast swathes of the natural world.