Heat Is Not a Metaphor
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Heat Is Not a Metaphor
The human psyche naturally rebels against the idea of its end. Likewise, civilizations have throughout history marched blindly toward disaster, because humans are wired to believe that tomorrow will be much like today. . . . Yet the reality of global climate change is going to keep intruding on our fantasies of perpetual growth, permanent innovatio
... See moreWe are burning ancient plants and animals (aka fossil fuels, not renewable) to jet around and wear fast fashion, and build highways and skyscrapers, and heat outdoor swimming pools in autumn, and shiver inside in summer, and convert lush ecosystems into sprawling and unwalkable suburbs with silly lawns, and commute alone in our cars to jobs that do
... See moreThis is what it means to live beyond the “end of nature”—that it is human action that will determine the climate of the future, not systems beyond our control. And it’s why, despite the unmistakable clarity of the predictive science, all of the tentative sketches of climate scenarios that appear in this book are so oppressively caveated with possib
... See more[We must also recognize that climate change is only one symptom of a larger problem. Human beings have fallen out of alignment with life.] Their
Ocean health. They could do nothing about ocean acidification, nor the heating of the ocean that was baked in by the previous century’s carbon burn, nor the deoxygenation. Thus die-offs were happening, and presumably extinctions they didn’t even know about, that might have catastrophic cascading results. Ocean health would be an outstanding problem
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