More grim UN news, but 'doom prophet' urges ordinary people to fight on
Welcome to Climate Point, your weekly guide to climate, energy and the environment. I’m Janet Wilson from Palm Springs, California.
Late Tuesday, word came that Mike Davis, who chronicled human folly in the flammable West like none other, has died. Davis, a one-time truck driver who wrote "Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster," among other fine works, pinned down with eviscerating prose the developer-friendly racist politics and methodical destruction of Southern California, across tinder-dry chaparral canyons, flood-prone beach fronts and sweltering tenements.
The best-known chapter in that book is "The Case for Letting Malibu Burn," which in 1998 — before such thinking became accepted wisdom — laid out how decades of erasing natural fire cycles and rewarding often-wealthy wildfire victims had created and accelerated monster blazes and killer mudslides. The pattern occurred repeatedly even as slumlords were allowed to ignore safety codes that led to deadly urban apartment blazes, Davis writes.
If you're not from the Golden State, or even if you are, his voice captured the state's incendiary mix of beauty and greed like none other. And he included tidbits like how Larry Hagman of the TV mega-hit "Dallas" rang up then-Gov. Jerry Brown to get sandbags placed pronto on his Malibu home and the home of Brown's sometime-girlfriend Linda Ronstadt. For more, read Davis's marvelous obituary by Carolina Miranda at the Los Angeles Times.
Davis was sometimes called the "Prophet of Doom," but in one of his final interviews, with Lois Becket in The Guardian, he voiced equal measures of quixotic loss and fighting spirit as climate change takes hold:
"What I think about more often than anything else these days is the death of California. The death of its iconic landscapes. ... No more Joshua trees. No more sequoias.
"I’ve exulted in the beauty of California my entire life. Hiking, mountain running, traveling all over the state. There’s so much I wish my kids could see, could have seen, that they’ll not see. And that, of course, is happening everywhere in the world."
But, he concluded, "despair is useless," and added, "For someone my age who was in the civil rights movement, and in other struggles of the 1960s, I’ve seen miracles happen. I’ve seen ordinary people do the most heroic things. ... What keeps us going, ultimately, is our love for each other, and our refusal to bow our heads, to accept the verdict, however all-powerful it seems. It’s what ordinary people have to do."
On that note, keep your chin up as you read on, including the latest grim news from the United Nations about rapidly accelerating climate change and its disproportionate health impacts on poor communities; the wobbly status of emperor penguins; and an engrossing history of Arizona's climate policy or lack thereof, through the lens of one-time Gov. Janet Napolitano (yes, the one who became Homeland Security director and president of the University of California). Plus, we've got a preview of the climate issues at stake in the midterm elections.
"Bluebirds" of happiness: One bit of good news comes from the U.S. EPA, which on Wednesday announced nearly 400 school districts across the U.S. will receive nearly $1 billion total to help them buy zero-emission school buses. School buses are historically some of the dirtiest vehicles on the road. Check here to see if your district is on the list.
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