Jeff Nesbit - This Is the Way the World Ends: How Droughts and Die-offs, Heat Waves and Hurricanes Are Converging on America

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For Micah, who constantly reminds me of the infinite joy of learning

O ur world is in trouble.

While it may not appear that way in America quite yet, the signs are emerging here and there if were willing to look closely enough. Spring planting seasons start just a bit earlier and are slightly more chaotic. Extended droughts in Texas and parts of the Southwest sometimes force cattle farmers to move entire herds north for water. Tiny creatures like the American pika are running out of options in the West because theyve already moved higher up on their mountains. Police cars in South Florida now have to be protected for the first time to keep salt water from rusting them out below.

Each one is a small, barely perceptible change in an America with bigger problems at the moment. More immediate questions stare us in the face when we wake each day. Can I make the rent payment at the end of the month? What if my car breaks down, and I cant get to work? What if I get really sick and cant pay my health-care bills, or I cant visit a free health clinic for advice and treatment because its now hundreds of miles away? Will I ever be able to save any money? Should I be worried that people who arent like me start taking jobs where I work or move into my neighborhood? Should I limit places I visit because I might be attacked? Are my kids getting the kind of education they need?

These are real, immediate concerns. They crowd in on our day, pressing on us from all sides. We dont have time to wonder or even worry about Monarch butterflies that need to keep moving north because their habitats are being disrupted. We have no sympathy for wealthy patrons of exclusive ski resorts whose favorite mountaintop playgrounds teeter on the edge of insolvency because snowpacks are no longer predictable during the winter.

It isnt our problem that serious water resource issues in Californias Central Valley now cause tens of thousands of itinerant migrant workers to walk miles just to get fresh water. Thats someone elses problem and doesnt affect us. If almonds become too expensive because it takes so much water to grow them, we can always buy peanuts. If alfalfa, which also fights for increasingly scarce water resources in Californias Central Valley, doesnt make sense as food for cows, cant they just find something else to grow for the source of the McDonalds hamburgers we buy at the end of the food chain?

These small changes in the American landscape hardly seem worth our time right now. No one can say with absolute certainty whats causing them. Earth is made up of millions of local ecosystems, interconnected in ways that none of us can fathom. It doesnt seem quite logical that massive amounts of industrial air pollution in a country like China halfway around the world would have any real connection to our daily lives in America. Why would it? The terrible smog that envelops Beijing or Shanghai more and more is their problemnot ours. If China buys two-thirds of all the soybeans grown in the world now and may be forced to buy all of them within a decade, whats that to us?

The fact that hundreds of millions of people are forced to burn wood or fossil fuels to heat their homes and cook their meals, and barely manage to live from one day to the next is someone elses problem. The growing haze from coal-fired plants near big cities in dozens of developing nations that blackens the sky even during the day is unfortunate, but not something we have the bandwidth to care about. The fact that their lives are shadowed each day by a black sky seen through the haze of smog, soot, and smoke is something other people will deal with. After all, we can see blue, sunny skies in America anytime we feel like it. Weve forgotten that this blue sky was a freedom we fought for in America for decades. What seems to matter is that we have it nownot what we had to do in order to win the freedom to see that blue sky when we want.

Black carbon rises into the atmosphere from millions of homes, hut stoves, forest fires, tailpipes from trucks burning diesel oil, brick kilns, and elsewhere as soot. This black carbon is nearly as responsible for trapping heat on Earth as its unseen, invisible cousin lingering overhead in the skycarbon dioxidethat is almost entirely a by-product of humankinds efforts to find cheap energy sources from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Black carbon from soot and carbon dioxide from industrial activities have together created what is essentially a black sky above us, trapping heat and causing critical changes in weather patterns, ecosystems, and Earth systems.

While the black-sky effects in America are small and imperceptible right now, that isnt the case in other parts of the world. There are countries in southern Africa where extended, crippling droughts have forever altered the way families fight to live. Mothers in Madagascar are forced to boil cactus, the only plant that will grow now, to feed their children. Since cactus has virtually no nutritional value, those children regularly die of malnutrition. But its all mothers have to give their offspring with deformed, extended belliesthat, and the occasional soup from boiled soot and ashes. Yemen is paralyzed by the worlds first true civil war over access to fresh water. All but two of the countrys aquifers have run dry, prompting armed conflict to protect the sources of water still there.

Farther north in Africa, across the Sahel region that is seeing its desert expand, farmers are abandoning their land in the face of questionable growing seasons and sources of water and becoming part of the flood of refugees fleeing from conflict, violence, and economic uncertainty. These refugees dont distinguish between their existential problems. They simply know they can die of environmental devastation, starvation, military conflicts, or economic collapse. Theyre all part of one very large, threatening landscape forcing them from their homes into refugee camps or cities with no jobs.

A billion people in India and elsewhere who still dont have access to basic things like electricity are beginning to wonder if the monsoon season that provides all of their fresh water might be in trouble. If it is, where will they get their water? Likewise, in China and parts of Asia where thousands of disappearing glaciers at the top of the Third Pole feed into nearly a dozen massive rivers that also provide fresh water for hundreds of millions of people, leaders in those countries are now fully prepared to defend their right to stop, alter, or steer those sources of water to assure that their people can live.

It isnt only people who are affected. Tens of thousands of species who cant tell us about their lives or their habitats are under severe pressure. Routine snapshots of hundreds of species in studies by biodiversity experts are starting to show local extinctionswhen a certain kind of species cant move fast enough to adapt to its changing environment and so simply disappears for good at that place on Earth. One recent snapshot of a thousand species found that half of them were already experiencing local extinctions. Big, iconic species like giraffes and elephants are in trouble as well. Theyre hunted ruthlessly even as their natural habitats are threatened through environmental changes and development. They dont know why theyre in trouble. But we do. Some of the creatures that every child in America has heard of could be gone from their natural homes in just ten or fifteen years. Extinction rates for all manner of species on Earth are a hundred times higher than normal.