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When climate change looms, how are you supposed to fall in love?
Recently I fell into bed with a stranger. In the moments after, tangled up in each other, we pecked away at the awkward small talk of people who still didn’t know each other’s names. When he asked me what I was thinking about, I monologued for 10 uninterrupted minutes about the agronomic insecurities that will mean, one day soon, we will have no ripe tomatoes lining shelves midwinter, and how I therefore always bulk-buy heirlooms I can’t afford. I left soon after, and never saw him again.
How California's emergency plans fail disabled communities
Kelley Coleman was vacationing in Santa Barbara, California, when the evacuation order came. It was New Year’s week, and Kelley’s two sons, third and fifth graders in Los Angeles’ Studio City neighborhood, were enjoying the last of their school holidays. Aaron, 9, Coleman’s youngest — a boisterous, enthusiastic child — relished splashing around for hours in the Pacific’s briny, biting cold. Rain was forecast that week, not unusual for January on that part of California’s central coast. For days, it drizzled. Then, late on the last day of their vacation, Coleman’s cellphone buzzed. It was an emergency notification: Heavier rains were coming, and with them possible flash floods, falling trees and landslides capable of tearing homes from their foundations. Residents across Santa Barbara County were told to evacuate.
Immediately, Coleman called the nearest pharmacist. If they were evacuated, she asked, how would they get Aaron his medication? Aaron had just two days’ worth of medication left.
The Girl in the Gully
Humans have long been a migratory species. Some of us still thrive in an overture of movement that takes on a wider arc than daily migration. Take, for example, my own arrival in the Sonoran Desert, by way of Oregon and California before that, via the tiny hatchback whose trunk I’d made into my home. Take the more than 84 million estimated environmental refugees: As of this decade, climate change has ignited the largest-ever global-scale mass migration—unless you count the millenia that all humans were migrants. There was a time at our species’ inception before we stayed in places, before we built towns and homes and gardens. For 8,000 years, archeologists estimate, we lived in temporary shelters, tracking seasonal hunts or harvests. We crossed valleys and mountains and seas, chasing each other from place to place, following hunger or love or both.
Trust Fall
He has recently moved to Oregon, he has seemingly settled in. Unlike him, I have not learned how to stop my sprinting. I have only just arrived in this new country but already, I am restless. Even before the record-breaking heat, the record-breaking fires, the record-breaking floods, I had already begun to feel suffocated – an island is no place for someone who only knows how to bolt, or else becomes bitter. I still feel like I am on the run, a propensity that increasingly feels pitted up against a wish to be stitched into something, some place sturdy, somewhere that will stick.
The Dignity of Risk
Layered onto these symptoms was my blind fear of them, a vicious cycle of disorientation compounded by panic at my own disorientation. It made me dizzy. It made my vision dilate to a pinhole of light beyond which the world was blurry, jagged, and dark. My mind failed me, and I learned to let it.
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Climate Adaptation's Disability Crisis
Last year was, for many in B.C., the year that climate change whiplashed into the present tense. It is here. It is disproportionately killing disabled people. It is, in part, a lack of anticipation. When the heat dome came, there was no plan to distribute air conditioning units to people whose medical conditions make them heat-sensitive; there was no plan to transport those with mobility limitations to cooling centres, nor any teams deployed to bring batteries or back-up generators to the homes of those whose power was cut.
Where Glaciers Melt, New Ecosystems Emerge
BC’s interior mountains—the Selkirk, the Purcell, the Monashee, and the Cariboo Ranges—are experiencing some of the most rapid melt of any place on Earth. Some models predict a BC landscape with no glaciers at all as early as the 2080s. I had come to the Selkirks expecting to be overcome by a leaden grief. But with every inch a glacier recedes, new habitat emerges for cold-weather species that will be pushed out of the surrounding valleys as they warm.
In the Water-Starved West, Can Ancient Stewardship Practices Save the Soil?
“The drought is just the beginning of whatever is in the next cycle for this place,” Schreiner says. It’s not a conventional climate “solution,” nor is it the one I pitched to write about, but there it is: In the face of insurmountable change, what more can anyone do but cultivate a disposition of gratitude and abundance for all that is still going to fruit and flower?
LA Times
When Climate Change Looms, How Are You Supposed to Fall in Love?
Outside Magazine
In the Water-Starved West, Can Ancient Stewardship Practices Save the Soil?
Alpinist Magazine
Geography of Absence
A Map of the Heart
Undark
Wildfire Anxieties on the Rise
Trail Runner Magazine
Following Trails Through an Unstable Future
Salon
In A California Town, A Recreation Boom Kindles Anxiety
That Which Remains Journal
Fire Season II
Writers on the Range.
Plenty of Food, but not for Farmworkers
Jeffrey Pine Journal
The Places That Humans Can't Go Are Getting Smaller
No Apolitical Land Ethic
High Country News
How California's Emergency Management Plans Fail Disabled Communities
The Threat of Wildfire in the West Arrives Alongside Tourists
Sierra Magazine
Where Glaciers Melt, New Ecosystems Emerge
In These Times
Trail Runner Magazine
Briarpatch Magazine
BC's Climate Adaptation's Disability Crisis
Salon
In A California Town, A Recreation Boom Kindles Anxiety
Climbing Magazine
The Girl in the Gully Needed Help. What Could They Have Done?*
The Long Way Out: A climb, a traumatic brain injury, and death in the Sierra Nevada
* The Girl in the Gully is a finalist for the 2022 Banff Centre's Mountain Book Competition
Fire Season II
Capital Daily.
Advocates and Researchers Say People with Disabilities Left Out of BC COVID Strategy
Police Brutality Escalates at Fairy Creek Blockade
Terra Incognita Media
#Vanlife. When living in a van isn't optional, read Heidegger
So To Speak Journal
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