Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

There are no signs or border crossing guards at the edge of the Goldilocks Zone. If we cross over, no alarms will go off. Depending on where you live, you may cross over sooner than others. But unless we take dramatic action now, we may all discover what it’s like to live outside the zone. The human race-which built the pyramids and the iPhone, wrote epic love poems and invented rock ‘n roll, worshipped ancient gods and now deifies Hollywood stars—will exist in a world beyond the world it grew up in, beyond the place where our hearts were shaped and our genes were forged. We will be, in the deepest sense, on our own.

Heat will be the engine of this transformation.

— Jeff Goodell / The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet

I kiss your mouth while vomitting.
Death must be an exquisite thing.

— Francis Picabia / “Chimney Sperm”

We have known for more than a century about the climate consequences of burning fossil fuels. And it wasn’t just the scientists who knew. In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson was warned, as have been many presidents after him. By 1977, Exxon (now ExxonMobil) not only knew that decades of burning fossil fuels would heat up the atmosphere, but developed in-house climate models that projected those changes with remarkable accuracy. Despite that knowledge, we have not only continued burning fossil fuels, we have continued burning them with reckless abandon. In a sense, you could say we have built a heat-fueled rocketship that is taking us, for better or worse, on a trip beyond the Goldilocks Zone.

— Jeff Goodell / The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet

Suddenly this defeat.
This rain.
The blues gone gray
and yellow
a terrible amber.

— Jack Gilbert / “Rain”

If the Covid-19 pandemic demonstrated anything, it was how quickly and easily people were able to normalize the deaths of others, especially if they were old, sick, or otherwise living on the margins. There were a thousand deaths a day from Covid in the US alone. There were headlines and speeches and heroic doctors and nurses. And if you lost a friend or loved one, you felt the tragedy of it all. But after the initial shock and fear of Covid, the deaths became a part of everyday life. Just as the 43,000 deaths a year in the US in auto accidents no longer trigger public outcry. Or the nine million deaths globally from air pollution each year. Or starvation in Yemen and Haiti. Or casualties of distant wars. It just becomes part of the world we live in.

And so it may be, I fear, with the suffering and deaths from extreme heat. It will become part of what it means to live in the twenty-first century, something we accept and don’t think too much about in our everyday lives.

— Jeff Goodell / The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet

Beneath the pavement,
older pavement.
Beneath that, ruins.
You can’t even afford
the cover charge
to this utopia.

— Joseph Harrington / “The Archeaology of Knowledge”

I’ve met others who believe that our neurological machinery is simply maladapted to the problems of modern life, especially in rich democracies like the US, where partisanship and political dysfunction reign and banning books is discussed with far more urgency than banning fossil fuels or educating people about the dangers of extreme heat. Hurricanes are wiping out cities on the Gulf Coast with ever more muscle, crops are failing, delivery drivers are dropping dead on the job on hot summer days and yet Matthew McConaughey is still doing TV ads for gas-guzzling SUVs. As one social critic puts it: “We are confronted simultaneously with our vulnerability to catastrophe and our profound unseriousness in the face of it. It’s as if the fires are starting to spread through Rome and all we can do is argue about the fiddling.”

— Jeff Goodell / The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet

What I’m Listening To:

They wanted to know why I did what I did
Well, sir, I guess there’s just a meanness in this world

— Bruce Springsteen / “Nebraska”