Poetry does not prevent massacres. It cannot undo bombs, snipers’ bullets, mass starvation, sickness.
— Trish Salah / “about this poem” / poem-a-day
The frequency at which extreme fires occur around the world has more than doubled during the past two decades, according to an analysis of satellite data. The results provide the first solid evidence to support a nagging suspicion that many scientists and others have had as they watch a seemingly endless series of infernos scorch ecosystems and communities: wildfires have increased somehow, and climate change is almost certainly a factor.
— Jeff Tollefson / “You’re not imagining it: extreme wildfires are now more common” / Nature
… So, night after night, we sit in the dark of the Roxy beside grandmothers with their shanks tied up in the tourniquets of rolled stockings and open ourselves, like earth to rain, to the blue fire of the movie screen where love surrenders suddenly to gangsters and their cuties.
— Lynn Emanuel / “Blonde Bombshell”
No amount of adaptation to climate change can fix Miami’s water problems …
“Rain bombs” such as Invest 90L are products of our hotter world; warmer air has more room between its molecules for moisture. That water is coming for greater Miami and the 6 million people who live here. This glittering city was built on a drained swamp and sits atop porous limestone; as the sea keeps rising, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration forecasts that South Florida could see almost 11 extra inches of ocean by 2040. Sunny-day flooding, when high tides gurgle up and soak low-lying ground, has increased 400 percent since 1998, with a significant increase after 2006; a major hurricane strike with a significant storm surge could displace up to 1 million people.
And with every passing year, the region’s infrastructure seems more ill-equipped to deal with these dangers, despite billions of dollars spent on adaptation.
— Mario Alejandro Ariza / “Miami is Entering a State of Unreality” / The Atlantic
After Novocain, pain returns in small surges you might mistake for the life it has replaced.
— Joyce Carol Oates / “Poem for the Poet’s Bithday” / The New Yorker
It is widely accepted that humans have been heating up the planet for over a century by burning coal, oil and gas. Earth has already warmed by almost 1.2 degrees Celsius (2.2 degrees Fahrenheit) since preindustrial times, and the planet is poised to race past the hoped-for limit of 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming.
But fewer people know that burning fossil fuels doesn’t just cause global warming — it also causes global cooling. It is one of the great ironies of climate change that air pollution, which has killed tens of millions, has also curbed some of the worst effects of a warming planet.
— Shannon Osaka / “We’ve been accidentally cooling the planet — and it’s about to stop” / The Washington Post
will anyone make it stop?
— Trish Salah / “without a word”
What I’m Listening To:
Hey, hey Hot sun shines so loud Hot sun Cool shroud Hot sun Mountains melting down Sweet doubt Hot sun
what’s in a bike ride? all of life, if you allow— i’m a wheel … a wheel … syracuse to buffalo buffalo to albany
(a wheel… a wheel… a wheel… a wheel)
What I’m Reading:
Mural mania is sweeping across western New York with an emphasis on canal towns. It got its grassroots beginning in Lyons and the “mania” is tagging the villages along the canal. Generally, the murals depict early life along the canal in the hopes of preserving the history of this period through art.
The mural trail features 75+ murals spanning over 100 miles.
A high concentration of murals is located in Wayne County with 54, each telling a different story.
— The Official Visitor’s Guide To Wayne County / Finger Lakes Lake Ontario The Erie Canal
looka’ tha’ smoke trees — pin cushions in summer air — urchins in the sky
What I’m Reading:
I think we can very confidently now say that every heatwave that is occurring today has been made more intense and more likely because of climate change.
a strange fortune the ministry where they linger— throttle linking (and also separating) belles from godsons (or ankles?) a lovely novitiate that homely workhouse, that most quotidian of sizzles— the portcullis?
what of grandmother porticoes— postage-standing façade of tendons or is it tom-toms? pasted in plaid upon our donkeys arguments, secular aggressors, our spleens, our spelt, wherever they may be, legations sit with them awhile affecting phrase-estimates and the rondos of chants:
there’s no place like home … there’s no place like home … there’s no place like home …
Returning to the very same place, let it be a hilltop with a view of the night city …
— Tadeusz Dąbrowski / “Hilltop”
It is dangerous — extreme heat is the No. 1 weather-related killer, so you need to take it seriously…
— Michelle Grossman / NBC News Meteorologist
Global warming is costing lives, deepening health inequality and driving the spread of diseases across Europe. A review of hundreds of studies has revealed that between 2013 and 2022, there were around 17 more heat-related deaths per 100,000 people per year than during the previous nine years.
— Carissa Wong / “How climate change is hitting Europe” / Nature
… I want to catch your thin neck full bodied breath in the blue
funeral vase, your death masked. this is like that
satanist music where they play it backwards. so I’ve heard.
— Stella Wong / “dramatic monologue as Beatriz Ferreyra”
My experience with high temperatures in the PNW heat dome included misery, anger, and desperation. The longer the heat went on the more obsessively focused on it I became. After three days all I could think about was how to cool down …
— Anonymous / from Bill McKibben’s Substack newsletter
To proceed, carefully and deliberately, from nonsense, with a straight face, often arriving at a new kind of sense. The world keeps opening up, unfolding, and just when we expect it to be closed — to be a sealed, sensible box — it shows us something completely surprising.
— David Byrne / Arboretum
… where once you used to be, when your “whole life” still lay ahead of you, when everything was before.
— Tadeusz Dąbrowski / “Hilltop”
What I’m Listening To:
And the time will come when you see we are all one, and life flows within within you and without you
— George Harrison, Beatles / “Within You Without You”
thee istsfor manity reader 