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Last January, fires raged in Los Angeles. That’s not uncommon. But hurricane-force winds and the driest winter in 150 years contributed to a horrifically rare event, the worst natural disaster in the county’s history. Due to technical glitches, the entire county received evacuation orders. A week or two later, however, the smoke was gone and for the vast majority of residents, life was the same.
Over Christmas, the weather report said it would snow in Park City. Instead, it rained up to ten thousand feet. Responding to the springlike weather, pine trees began to bud. The mountains browned with mud. A few days later, snow returned, only to be washed away by the rain once again. Those moment to moment changes easily masked the momentous shifts we are living through.
In March 2023, brush fires burned in Brooklyn. I used to live there, so that caught my eye. The parade of weird weather headlines is unending. A heat wave in Seattle, where few homes have air conditioning. Similar stories across Europe. Warm winters in Texas. Catastrophic flooding in Vermont. And Libya. Wildfires in Canada blanketing the East Coast in smoke. More fires in Maui and Chile.
Such events blur into the parade of news. A flurry of headlines, then the next new thing. If someone you know is affected, you may gain some perspective, but nothing compares to being close to the actual event. Let alone affected by it. It is a strange time warp in our hyper-connected world to watch people go about normal life while your own world is completely upended.
Recovery takes years, sometimes more than a decade. The town of Paradise was devastated in 2018 and still has not fully rebuilt. At some point, recovery as we know it may not occur at all and people may opt to exit rather than rebuild. Today the fire insurance market in California has broken. The state-run public option, ostensibly the insurer of last resort, has become the default for vast swaths of the state.
I grew up in a town adjacent to Altadena and recently moved back to La Crescenta. That devastation, over ten thousand homes destroyed and eighteen people killed, could easily have happened here. Still, life goes on largely as before. The fire department and other emergency responders hosted a community education and preparedness event at the park. A few dozen people out of a population of roughly thirty-three thousand showed up.
Meanwhile, it is a matter of when, not if, a fire, earthquake, or other disaster overloads emergency services beyond their capacity, when neighbors must help neighbors and communities must provide the first line of response. The decline of community organizations like HOAs, fire safety councils, and other networks of civic connection makes outreach and preparedness more difficult.
Last January, fires raged in Los Angeles. That’s not uncommon. But hurricane-force winds and the driest winter in 150 years contributed to a horrifically rare event, the worst natural disaster in the county’s history. Due to technical glitches, the entire county received evacuation orders. A week or two later, however, the smoke was gone and for the vast majority of residents, life was the same.
Over Christmas, the weather report said it would snow in Park City. Instead, it rained up to ten thousand feet. Responding to the springlike weather, pine trees began to bud. The mountains browned with mud. A few days later, snow returned, only to be washed away by the rain once again. Those moment to moment changes easily masked the momentous shifts we are living through.
In March 2023, brush fires burned in Brooklyn. I used to live there, so that caught my eye. The parade of weird weather headlines is unending. A heat wave in Seattle, where few homes have air conditioning. Similar stories across Europe. Warm winters in Texas. Catastrophic flooding in Vermont. And Libya. Wildfires in Canada blanketing the East Coast in smoke. More fires in Maui and Chile.
Such events blur into the parade of news. A flurry of headlines, then the next new thing. If someone you know is affected, you may gain some perspective, but nothing compares to being close to the actual event. Let alone affected by it. It is a strange time warp in our hyper-connected world to watch people go about normal life while your own world is completely upended.
Recovery takes years, sometimes more than a decade. The town of Paradise was devastated in 2018 and still has not fully rebuilt. At some point, recovery as we know it may not occur at all and people may opt to exit rather than rebuild. Today the fire insurance market in California has broken. The state-run public option, ostensibly the insurer of last resort, has become the default for vast swaths of the state.
I grew up in a town adjacent to Altadena and recently moved back to La Crescenta. That devastation, over ten thousand homes destroyed and eighteen people killed, could easily have happened here. Still, life goes on largely as before. The fire department and other emergency responders hosted a community education and preparedness event at the park. A few dozen people out of a population of roughly thirty-three thousand showed up.
Meanwhile, it is a matter of when, not if, a fire, earthquake, or other disaster overloads emergency services beyond their capacity, when neighbors must help neighbors and communities must provide the first line of response. The decline of community organizations like HOAs, fire safety councils, and other networks of civic connection makes outreach and preparedness more difficult.
Complacency is not limited to my hometown. The expectation that “someone else” will handle the problem is endemic. We seem to have forgotten the possibility of joint effort in the face of shared risk. The loneliness epidemic is real. Participation in civic organizations, church attendance, and membership in all manner of clubs have declined precipitously.
Disasters have a tragic way of reminding us how much we rely on one another and how intertwined our lives truly are. Our digital lives increasingly blur into and supplant the physical world, masking that reality. But ultimately we cannot retreat from fire, flood, or earthquake into cyberspace.
Devices overload our senses with a daily deluge of sights and sounds that would have stunned our ancestors a few generations ago. During the January fires, a friend who had recently moved back from living abroad remarked on how much the quality of diction on television news had declined over the past decade.
Like many others, he found the coverage a parade of hyperbole and exaggeration. That is not entirely wrong and is in many ways a reasonable response to the insane information environment we inhabit. But sensible detachment can devolve into dangerous complacency. I tried in vain to convince him that it was still worth preparing a go-bag. He and his young family lived only a few miles from Altadena, a few flickering embers in the wind away from oblivion.
People develop strange adaptations to a strange world. Another friend grows annoyed at what he sees as biased coverage of weather-related disasters. There are real examples of breathless reporting, hurricanes projected to hit Southern California that miss population centers, tornado warnings that never materialize.
Perspective is hard to maintain. The historical aberration and moral failure of a president politicizing a disaster while flames still burned, and restricting FEMA emergency funds, became just another outrage in an endless stream. Other politicians across the aisle followed suit, breaching what was once a sacred norm: a shared response in the face of natural disaster.
Extreme partisanship blinds us to common needs. Fire, flood, and extreme weather expose the erosion of government capacity to respond, act, and adapt. Yet in places like where I live, daily life largely continues as normal. Meanwhile, the news offers an unending parade of catastrophe. There are also exaggerated attempts to attribute every event to climate change. Causality is a difficult philosophical problem even in controlled environments, let alone within the staggering complexity of land, sea, and atmosphere interacting across the planet.
Trying to understand what is happening, let alone where the world is headed, can feel like following flickering embers floating in hurricane-force winds. What can one even do? Lifestyle changes feel pathetically small relative to planetary-scale forces. Meanwhile, bills must be paid, children raised, jobs done. Food still stocks the shelves. Water flows. Power runs. Houses stand.
So complacency reigns. Political debate, really the escalating and increasingly frantic talking past one another that passes for discourse, masks a deeper desire across the ideological spectrum for a return to normalcy. That is not coming. Instead many grow numb, isolated, and apathetic in their actions.
It wasn’t that long ago yet hard for many to remember a time only a few decades earlier when neighbors caring for neighbors was the obvious first response to calamity. Today the dominant expectation is that professionals — firefighters, insurance adjusters, utility workers, and others — will prepare for disaster and make us whole afterward.
The alternative is unthinkable. Never mind the very possible, even probable, future in which those professionally managed systems, already strained, are unable to meet cascading crises. Just a few generations ago, few would have expected to outsource responsibility for responding to disaster.
Looking to family, friends, and the people around you would have seemed natural. Trusting impersonal bureaucratic systems would have seemed strange. For much of the world, that is still the case. Whether we like it or not, places like my hometown will have to relearn how to rebuild those bonds of community if we are to adapt to the climate crisis.
That phrase, climate crisis. Once it was global warming. A system thrown out of equilibrium produces more extremes on both sides of the ledger: longer droughts and larger blizzards. The language shifted to climate change, then to climate crisis in an effort to convey urgency. But it is not a crisis in the ordinary sense of the word.
The shift in Earth’s energy balance is not an acute moment but a compression of geologic time. Long-term carbon sinks operate on timescales of hundreds of thousands to millions of years. A single year of fossil fuel use today takes millennia to reabsorb through silica weathering.
This change unfolds in the background of all human life on our pale blue dot. From food production to energy use to shelter, the equilibrium that supported human civilization is giving way to something untested and uncertain. This process will far outlast my generation. Seven generations from now, roughly two centuries, Earth may settle into a new equilibrium. What that means for life, human or otherwise, remains unknown. What is certain is that civilization will look profoundly different, if it exists at all.
Earth’s changing energy balance operates globally but manifests locally. Despite frequent invocations of red lines — 1.5 degrees, 2 degrees, specific parts-per-million thresholds — there is no singular now-or-never moment. There is only a gradient of better or worse outcomes. No heroic inventions, no singular acts like rushing into a burning building or halting a bank run.
Just the steady corrosion of the conditions that made human civilization possible.
Normal life continues, until it doesn’t. That has always been true. What has changed is our belief that someone else will make us whole afterward, even as formal systems fall under increasing strain.
Firefighters cannot rebuild communities. Insurance markets cannot restore trust. Federal aid cannot substitute for neighbors who know one another, check on one another, and prepare together.
During the Eaton fires, a young meteorologist sent an evacuation notice to his neighbors as winds whipped embers into nearby communities, well before official alerts arrived. That simple act helped save lives.
The work ahead is not flashy. It is local. It is boring. It is relational. It looks like showing up to the meeting. It looks like knowing who lives next door. It looks like being ready to help and ready to need help.
Human civilization has existed for millennia during an era of climatic stability. That is coming to an end. Whether we face the unknown in isolation or as communities is a choice we are still making, quietly, every day.
Further Reading
Complacency is not limited to my hometown. The expectation that “someone else” will handle the problem is endemic. We seem to have forgotten the possibility of joint effort in the face of shared risk. The loneliness epidemic is real. Participation in civic organizations, church attendance, and membership in all manner of clubs have declined precipitously.
Disasters have a tragic way of reminding us how much we rely on one another and how intertwined our lives truly are. Our digital lives increasingly blur into and supplant the physical world, masking that reality. But ultimately we cannot retreat from fire, flood, or earthquake into cyberspace.
Devices overload our senses with a daily deluge of sights and sounds that would have stunned our ancestors a few generations ago. During the January fires, a friend who had recently moved back from living abroad remarked on how much the quality of diction on television news had declined over the past decade.
Like many others, he found the coverage a parade of hyperbole and exaggeration. That is not entirely wrong and is in many ways a reasonable response to the insane information environment we inhabit. But sensible detachment can devolve into dangerous complacency. I tried in vain to convince him that it was still worth preparing a go-bag. He and his young family lived only a few miles from Altadena, a few flickering embers in the wind away from oblivion.
People develop strange adaptations to a strange world. Another friend grows annoyed at what he sees as biased coverage of weather-related disasters. There are real examples of breathless reporting, hurricanes projected to hit Southern California that miss population centers, tornado warnings that never materialize.
Perspective is hard to maintain. The historical aberration and moral failure of a president politicizing a disaster while flames still burned, and restricting FEMA emergency funds, became just another outrage in an endless stream. Other politicians across the aisle followed suit, breaching what was once a sacred norm: a shared response in the face of natural disaster.
Extreme partisanship blinds us to common needs. Fire, flood, and extreme weather expose the erosion of government capacity to respond, act, and adapt. Yet in places like where I live, daily life largely continues as normal. Meanwhile, the news offers an unending parade of catastrophe. There are also exaggerated attempts to attribute every event to climate change. Causality is a difficult philosophical problem even in controlled environments, let alone within the staggering complexity of land, sea, and atmosphere interacting across the planet.
Trying to understand what is happening, let alone where the world is headed, can feel like following flickering embers floating in hurricane-force winds. What can one even do? Lifestyle changes feel pathetically small relative to planetary-scale forces. Meanwhile, bills must be paid, children raised, jobs done. Food still stocks the shelves. Water flows. Power runs. Houses stand.
So complacency reigns. Political debate, really the escalating and increasingly frantic talking past one another that passes for discourse, masks a deeper desire across the ideological spectrum for a return to normalcy. That is not coming. Instead many grow numb, isolated, and apathetic in their actions.
It wasn’t that long ago yet hard for many to remember a time only a few decades earlier when neighbors caring for neighbors was the obvious first response to calamity. Today the dominant expectation is that professionals — firefighters, insurance adjusters, utility workers, and others — will prepare for disaster and make us whole afterward.
The alternative is unthinkable. Never mind the very possible, even probable, future in which those professionally managed systems, already strained, are unable to meet cascading crises. Just a few generations ago, few would have expected to outsource responsibility for responding to disaster.
Looking to family, friends, and the people around you would have seemed natural. Trusting impersonal bureaucratic systems would have seemed strange. For much of the world, that is still the case. Whether we like it or not, places like my hometown will have to relearn how to rebuild those bonds of community if we are to adapt to the climate crisis.
That phrase, climate crisis. Once it was global warming. A system thrown out of equilibrium produces more extremes on both sides of the ledger: longer droughts and larger blizzards. The language shifted to climate change, then to climate crisis in an effort to convey urgency. But it is not a crisis in the ordinary sense of the word.
The shift in Earth’s energy balance is not an acute moment but a compression of geologic time. Long-term carbon sinks operate on timescales of hundreds of thousands to millions of years. A single year of fossil fuel use today takes millennia to reabsorb through silica weathering.
This change unfolds in the background of all human life on our pale blue dot. From food production to energy use to shelter, the equilibrium that supported human civilization is giving way to something untested and uncertain. This process will far outlast my generation. Seven generations from now, roughly two centuries, Earth may settle into a new equilibrium. What that means for life, human or otherwise, remains unknown. What is certain is that civilization will look profoundly different, if it exists at all.
Earth’s changing energy balance operates globally but manifests locally. Despite frequent invocations of red lines — 1.5 degrees, 2 degrees, specific parts-per-million thresholds — there is no singular now-or-never moment. There is only a gradient of better or worse outcomes. No heroic inventions, no singular acts like rushing into a burning building or halting a bank run.
Just the steady corrosion of the conditions that made human civilization possible.
Normal life continues, until it doesn’t. That has always been true. What has changed is our belief that someone else will make us whole afterward, even as formal systems fall under increasing strain.
Firefighters cannot rebuild communities. Insurance markets cannot restore trust. Federal aid cannot substitute for neighbors who know one another, check on one another, and prepare together.
During the Eaton fires, a young meteorologist sent an evacuation notice to his neighbors as winds whipped embers into nearby communities, well before official alerts arrived. That simple act helped save lives.
The work ahead is not flashy. It is local. It is boring. It is relational. It looks like showing up to the meeting. It looks like knowing who lives next door. It looks like being ready to help and ready to need help.
Human civilization has existed for millennia during an era of climatic stability. That is coming to an end. Whether we face the unknown in isolation or as communities is a choice we are still making, quietly, every day.
Further Reading
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@patwater
@patwater
Great Work, Thank you !!!!!
Normal life still works, which makes it easy to ignore how fragile it has become -- even though today is the anniversary of the horrific fires in LA last January. I wrote a piece about what we build together now, before disaster forces the lesson on us. https://pioneeringspirit.xyz/what-we-build-before-everything-breaks-apart